Prince Harry’s ex Chelsy Davy is famously said to have dumped the royal because she wanted her ‘freedom’, and now she’s given fans a rare insight into exactly what went on
Chelsy Davy has opened up on her former life(Image: REX/Shutterstock)
Chelsy Davy was famously the one to pull the plug on her relationship with Prince Harry, ruling that royalty was not for her.
The jewellery designer, 40, dated the Duke of Sussex on and off for around seven years before their relationship finally came to an end in 2011. Unlike the then-Kate Middleton, who was dating his brother Prince William and by all accounts gearing up for life as a royal wife, free-spirited Chelsy had other ideas.
Now, reflecting on the decade before her 41st birthday, the married mother-of-three admitted that despite the long and seemingly serious nature of her relationship with Harry, she spent her twenties and thirties “only committed to having fun”.
“Looking back… commitment wasn’t exactly my strong suit,” Chelsy wrote on her Aya jewellery website this week. “I wanted the next trip, the next adventure, the next group of people I hadn’t met yet. I lived in Istanbul. I travelled around South America. I went to Bali, the Amazon, Moscow.
Chelsy Davy and Prince Harry dated on and off for seven years(Image: PA)
“I wasn’t remotely interested in staying in one place, following a conventional career path or committing to anything that might interfere with whatever sounded most exciting.”
In his bombshell autobiography, Spare, Harry admitted that while he was enamoured by his girlfriend’s untamable ways, he feared his grandmother, the late Queen Elizabeth, might not have such an open-minded attitude.
“She wore short skirts and high boots, danced with abandon, drank as much tequila as I did, and I cherished all those things about her… but I couldn’t help worrying how Granny might feel about them. Or the British public. And the last thing I wanted was for Chels to change to accommodate them,” he wrote on the subject of marriage.
“Unlike so many people I knew, she seemed wholly unconcerned with appearances, with propriety, with royalty. Unlike so many girls I met, she wasn’t visibly fitting herself for a crown the moment she shook my hand. She seemed immune to that common affliction sometimes called throne syndrome.”
Chelsy Davy and Kate Middleton watch Prince Harry and Prince William play in a charity polo match at the Beaufort Polo Club on July 29, 2006(Image: Getty Images)
Indeed, it seems that a life of royalty couldn’t have been further from the future that Chelsy wanted. “I was fiercely protective of my freedom. I didn’t expect anybody to change their plans for me, and I certainly didn’t want anybody expecting me to change mine for them,” she continued.
“Marriage and motherhood had never been particularly high on my to-do list. Both seemed to represent exactly the things I had spent my adult life avoiding: permanence, responsibility, roots and having to take somebody else’s plans into account.”
It was when lockdown struck in 2020 that she met her hotelier husband Sam Cutmore-Scott and realised that she wanted to settle down, but only “specifically with him”.
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“It wasn’t that I suddenly developed some great romantic vision of settling down. It was much more instinctive than that,” she said. “I met Sam and, for the first time, I knew I wanted a family, specifically with him.”
Chelsy and Harry remained on friendly terms following their split and she was among the guests at Harry’s 2018 wedding to Meghan Markle at St George’s Chapel in Windsor, alongside another of the prince’s former girlfriends, actress Cressida Bonas.
Chelsy and Sam went on to marry in a private ceremony in Mauritius in 2022. They now have three children together – four-year-old Leo, three-year-old Chloe and six-month-old Finn.
Chelsy Davy attended Prince Harry’s wedding to Meghan Markle
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And Chelsy says motherhood has transformed her life in ways she could never have predicted. “By the time I met Sam, I had travelled endlessly, lived abroad, met extraordinary people, stayed out far too late far too many times and lived life to the full… and then some,” she wrote.
“I sometimes say my children saved me from myself. Not because I think I was a terrible person before them. I wasn’t,” she said. “And I certainly don’t look back at my twenties and early thirties with regret. Quite the opposite. I had an extraordinary amount of fun.
“Realistically, there was probably a limit to how long I could have continued on that trajectory. My children have restricted my freedom in almost every possible sense. They ruin plans, interrupt phone calls, make spontaneity almost impossible and are an absolutely astonishing financial drain on my existence. And I am completely and utterly obsessed with them.”
The reality of having three young children has also brought an unexpected level of anxiety. Chelsy revealed she had not anticipated the “constant worry” that comes with motherhood, describing an “endless low-level anxiety that something might happen to them”.
That fear became particularly real when her youngest son Finn contracted meningitis at just two weeks old. Chelsy said she has spent only nine days away from her eldest child Leo in almost five years – five of those days coming while she was in hospital with Finn.
Now, she admits that even the thought of spending a single night away from her children “fills me with dread”. Chelsy and Sam have since moved to Mauritius with their family, where she continues to run her jewellery business Aya while raising their three children.
And although she admits there are moments when she misses the spontaneity of her old life, she has no desire to return to it.
“I loved that life, and I’m very glad I had it,” Chelsy said. “I just wouldn’t swap this one for it.”