Prince Harry and Cressida Bonas dated for roughly two years, between 2012 to 2014. It was during this time that Cressida, according to The Palace Papers by Tina Brown, encouraged the prince to seek help for mental therapy.
“His outbursts were ever more frequent and childlike,” Brown writes. “He took up boxing because, as he later said, he was always ‘on the verge of punching somebody.’ Cressida began to have serious worries about his mental health. It is not widely known that it was she who first persuaded Harry to see a therapist.”
One anonymous family friend told Brown that Cressida “got him to accept he had problems, and see a psychoanalyst.”
GLYN KIRK//GETTY IMAGES
A mutual friend of Cressida and Harry’s also told Brown that when the two broke up, Harry wrote her a letter thanking her for pushing him towards therapy. The friend recalls, “he wrote her a sweet letter saying I admire you, I wish you well and above all thank you for helping me to address my demons and seek help.”
According to the BBC, Harry and Cressida split up because she wanted to focus on her acting career, though it was also speculated that the media scrutiny led to the end of their relationship.
MAX MUMBY/INDIGO//GETTY IMAGES
The split was amicable. Cressida and Harry stayed friends, and she was even in attendance at his 2018 wedding to Meghan Markle. “Last weekend I attended the royal wedding,” she wrote in a blog about the day. “The invitation clearly stated that guests must wear hats. Yikes. I opted for a minimal feathered number—and can only hope I got it right.”
Cressida married another Harry, Harry Wentworth-Stanley, in 2020, but her famous ex was not in attendance, perhaps due to the pandemic.
“I had a lockdown wedding,” Cressida wrote in the Spectator. “A 30-person, socially-distanced, sanitised church service was organised in under two weeks. Restrictions meant no hymns, no wind instruments and no speaking too loudly. A disappointment for a musical family. Not what we’d envisaged, but a more intimate and special day than we could ever have imagined. Imperfect yet perfect—a day we will never forget.”