Is Cressida breaking her Prince's heart? Smitten Harry wrote to her endlessly from the desert, but the blue-blooded butterfly refuses to be pinned down
- The elfin dance student has been acting aloof since Harry's return
- Prince has hoped they could reignite romance that blossomed in May
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After almost five teetotal months of active service in the arid desert of Afghanistan, savouring that first beer was bound to have been pretty near the top of Prince Harry’s priorities.
But as he stood patiently in the raucous queue at the bar of The Brown Cow, the West London gastro-pub where he and his friends congregated for his first night home after his Army tour, it was obvious Harry had something on his mind.
His blue baseball cap pulled down low on his forehead, his shoulders hunched, the previously party-loving Prince seemed preoccupied and distant. As he waited patiently to be served his favourite tipple – a pint and a shot of Jägermeister – a stream of well-spoken girls vied for a few words with the Prince. Harry hardly seemed to notice.
The One? Harry is said to be bewitched by pretty young dance student Cressida Bonas
The moment he had walked into the popular Sloaney haunt that evening, he had surreptitiously scanned the room. Among the wall-to-wall willowy blondes there was only one he was seeking out: and she, to his bitter disappointment, wasn’t there. She, of course, was Cressida Bonas, the beguiling young ski instructor, now dance student, who had bewitched Harry over the summer and for whom he carried a torch throughout his arduous tour as an Apache helicopter pilot at Camp Bastion.
Harry’s hopeful wait in The Brown Cow, was, however, in vain. By 9pm, the despondent Prince had had enough and he and his posse headed for a house party at the nearby smart, Munster Road terrace home of the man who has become his closest confidant, Mark Dyer. It has been to Dyer, 47, a former Welsh Guards officer who is also close to Prince William, and who owns The Brown Cow, that Harry had, in the summer, confessed his deep and growing liking for the impossibly aloof and elfin Miss Bonas.
Dyer thoroughly approves of Cressida. He is keen to see Harry settled and happy and believes she has all the credentials and breeding to become the next Royal bride. And thus it was to Dyer and a close circle of friends that Harry entrusted the vital task of fanning the flames of his new romance while he was in Afghanistan.
Dyer has become something of a mentor to Harry – as he was to William before he married Kate – and indeed so close are the pair that Harry made a detour to meet up with his affable pal before travelling to Highgrove to be reunited with his father on his return to Britain.
Confidant: Harry has told Mark Dyer how he feels and the former Welsh Guards officer thoroughly approves
While in Afghanistan, Harry wrote to Cressida constantly and it has been his fervent hope that they could reignite the passionate romance that blossomed when they both attended a music festival in May.
But despite the best efforts of Dyer & Co to make soothing noises about the downsides of a Royal romance, Cressida has remained coolly elusive since Harry’s return, serving only to intensify the Prince’s passion.
Her remoteness has been especially confusing for Harry as Dyer and his circle have worked strenuously to welcome Cressida into the tightly knit group in Harry’s absence. When rumours circulated that Harry Wentworth-Stanley, Cressida’s boyfriend while at Leeds university – whose stepfather, George Milford Haven, is a cousin of the Queen – was determined to win her back while his love rival was out of the way, Dyer and Harry’s coterie stepped in. Suddenly, Cressida’s name topped the list of must-have invitations to intimate house parties and exclusive get-togethers.
Even Chelsy Davy’s best friend, Missy Percy, buddied up, extending a gracious hand of friendship.
Playing it cool: The blonde 23-year-old has remained elusive since the Prince's return from Afghanistan
As one of Harry’s circle revealed: ‘The rallying round was at times campaign-like. Cress was even introduced to Prince William once. To say that she felt caught off-guard on that occasion would be a fair assessment. She was desperately nervous about meeting Harry’s older brother.’
By contrast, Cressida’s large family – especially her mother, former Sixties It Girl Lady Mary-Gaye Curzon, daughter of the 6th Earl Howe – found the whole situation deeply amusing.
‘When Cressida’s mother was first visited by reporters early in the summer, she was in hysterics,’ the friend continued. ‘She finds it all very funny. While many parents would be pushing their daughters to pursue the relationship, Mary is putting zero pressure on her daughter.’
Cressida may feel apprehensive about Harry’s family, but she is, in turn, one of the few people who can make Prince Harry nervous. The Prince was so worried about telling her he was to be posted to Afghanistan that he left it until the last minute.
It is easy to see how Harry became smitten, as their relationship blossomed over an idyllic summer. Though they had known each other for a while, he and Cressida – half-sister to Isabella Anstruther-Gough-Calthorpe, who once rebuffed the attentions of Prince William – first got together at The Valley festival in the grounds of a mutual friend’s Hampshire estate.
To Harry’s delight, its fancy dress meant he could party incognito. And it was the perfect backdrop for the artistic Cressida to flaunt her ‘uninhibited, floaty, hippy’ style which so entranced the young Prince. Blonde, beautiful but intensely self-possessed, Cressida – often compared to supermodel Cara Delevingne for her laid-back ability to turn heads with little more than a lick of mascara and a plait in her hair – entranced Harry with her bohemian and relaxed manner. This was a cool, confident girl who was not going to do the running.
New friends: Harry's circle have worked strenuously to welcome Cressida into the group in his absence
Hers is one of the most beautiful, glamorous and fun-loving of aristocratic families. Cressida is a younger image of her mother, who has divorced four times and rules her brood from her Chelsea home. Cressida’s siblings, five in all, are all blessed with blonde good looks.
After her parents divorced when she was five, her early years were spent between the pretty National Trust pile Hinton Ampner in Hampshire and the Norfolk home of her father, businessman Jeffrey Bonas. In her teens, she spent three years at the Royal Ballet School, then a spell at Bath’s Prior Park College on a sports scholarship.
A Leeds university graduate like Harry’s former flame Chelsy Davy, Cressida is disdainful of the South-West London haunts Harry favours. She likens the Chelsea nightclub scene so beloved of the Middleton clan (it was there that Kate cemented her relationship with William) as ‘poncy’ and prefers festivals and gigs where she and her friends can dance up a frenzy and let their hair down. The sort of venues where cliques cluster around tables topped with ice buckets of Grey Goose vodka are abhorred by Cressida’s crew, culled from her university and dance days and her time at Stowe, the £10,000-a-term public school where she was educated.
As one close friend disclosed: ‘She hangs out with her brothers and sisters. They are extremely close. She and her friends spend their time going to the Sadler’s Wells dance theatre. Commuting means she gets home late to West London from her dance studies at the Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance in Greenwich, so she rarely goes out midweek. At weekends, she will go partying or travel to Norfolk to see her dad.’
When Cressida does spend a weekend in London, she will go anywhere she can dance. Favoured haunts include The Supper Club, a multi-storey concrete rabbit-warren in West London’s Ladbroke Grove, and The Loft, a warehouse conversion which once played host to Jade Jagger’s Ibiza-inspired club nights, a stone’s throw from Wormwood Scrubs prison.
Pedigree: Miss Bonas, left, with mother Lady Mary Gaye, sister Isabella and Isabella's father
Harry and Cressida’s relationship truly blossomed over their blissful summer together. He was riding high after the success of his tour of Jamaica and told friends privately he had never felt so relaxed about his celebrity. With the Diamond Jubilee in full swing, the public perception of the Royals was at an all-time high and Harry was getting away with a degree of relative normality – he had Facebook and Twitter accounts which he used to update friends about his activities, without leaks appearing in the press.
He and Cressida were invited as a couple to Sir Richard Branson’s Necker Island in the Caribbean to celebrate Sam Branson’s birthday. And Harry even had a blowout in Vegas, away from Cressida, planned. The Duke of Cambridge may well have envied the summer his kid brother was enjoying and Cressida, by all accounts, felt she had found a Prince with whom life wouldn’t be so restricted after all.
When reality hit home, it happened in Vegas. Cressida was said to have reeled at the ferocity of the storm that surrounded Harry’s naked antics in a game of strip billiards. Cool as ever, she was not fazed by the nudity nor the girls. What got to her was the sudden realisation of just how much their relationship was under the spotlight.
So by the time Harry set off for Afghanistan, things were very much up in the air between them. Cressida was happy to ‘play things by ear’ until his return, while Harry was keen to do as much as he could to keep her interested. He sent her ‘blueys’ (letters penned on Army-issue blue paper) and he called her more frequently than he called his own father, according to reports. It was a romantic time for them both and, despite the distance, Harry spent a lot of time soul-searching.
But now, Harry has returned to find Cressida more unsure than ever about her future. Approaching her 24th birthday on February 18, she, unlike Harry, is under no time-pressure to make important life decisions. She is said to be considering moving abroad when she finishes studying.
Another close friend added: ‘If Cressida didn’t eventually work somewhere in theatre, then she would be involved with skiing in some way. But Cressida’s closest friends don’t even know what she’s doing at school or what she wants to do. If all else fails, perhaps she will continue to go to school. She is passionate about what she’s learning.’
Meanwhile, Harry is aware he is now approaching his 30s. When he rather soulfully remarked, on his return from Afghanistan, that finding a lifelong partner was a difficult business, one can only speculate that it was of the enigmatic Cressida that he was thinking. And very much hoping that she might be the woman who could fulfil that role.
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