The Biggest Revelations From Prince Harry's Memoir Spare

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Prince Harry's explosive memoir, Spare, is set to come out on Tuesday, January 10, 2023—but leaks of the book are already breaking, and the stories buried within Harry's memoir are coming out fast and furious.

Here, the 9 biggest revelations from Spare—we'll be updating this as more stories come out.

1. Prince William's alleged assault

Harry, who calls William his "beloved brother" and his "archnemesis" in the book, writes of a physical assault that took place in 2019. In a leaked extract published by The Guardian, Prince Harry says his brother called Meghan "difficult," "rude," and "abrasive," and then the confrontation escalated.

"He set down the water, called me another name, then came at me. It all happened so fast," Harry writes, "So very fast. He grabbed me by the collar, ripping my necklace, and he knocked me to the floor. I landed on the dog’s bowl, which cracked under my back, the pieces cutting into me. I lay there for a moment, dazed, then got to my feet and told him to get out."

When he left, Harry says, he "turned and called back: 'You don’t need to tell Meg about this.'" Harry replies, "'You mean that you attacked me?" To which William reportedly said,
"I didn’t attack you, Harold."

2. King Charles reportedly tried to mediate between his sons

At Prince Philip's funeral in 2021, Charles tried to mend fences between William and Harry. Harry quotes his father as saying, "Please, boys, don’t make my final years a misery."

3. Harry shares new details behind his choice to wear a Nazi costume

While Prince Harry opened up about wearing a Nazi costume in his Netflix docuseries Harry & Meghan as "one of the biggest mistakes of my life," Spare offers further details surrounding the infamous 2005 incident.

In the memoir, the Duke of Sussex reportedly writes about choosing between a Nazi costume or a pilot costume. "I phoned Willy and Kate, asked what they thought. Nazi uniform, they said," Harry writes. When he tried it on for him, he says, "They both howled. Worse than Willy’s leotard outfit! Way more ridiculous! Which, again, was the point."

4. Prince Harry details losing his virginity to an "older woman"

In the memoir, he writes of losing his virginity to an "older lady" who "loved horses very much," per Sky. He calls it a "humiliating moment," writing, "I mounted her quickly, after which she spanked my ass and held me back… one of my mistakes was letting it happen in a field, just behind a busy pub. No doubt someone had seen us."

5. King Charles joked about Harry's parentage

Rumors have long swirled around James Hewitt, who had an affair with Princess Diana, being Prince Harry's father. According to Spare, Charles himself even made these jokes, which Harry calls "sadistic."

"Pa liked telling stories, and this was one of the best in his repertoire. He’d always end with a burst of philosophizing," Harry writes, according to a leak obtained by Page Six. "Who knows if I’m really the Prince of Wales? Who knows if I’m even your real father?"

Harry continues, "He’d laugh and laugh, though it was a remarkably unfunny joke, given the rumor circulating just then that my actual father was one of Mummy’s former lovers: Major James Hewitt. One cause of this rumor was Major Hewitt’s flaming ginger hair, but another cause was sadism."

King Charles never spoke to him about the Hewitt rumors, Prince Harry writes, though the tabloids covered it constantly. Of the tabloids, he says, "Maybe it made them feel better about their lives that a young prince’s life was laughable. Never mind that my mother didn’t meet Major Hewitt until long after I was born."

6. Prince Harry says he killed 25 "enemy combatants" in Afghanistan

Prince Harry served in the army for a decade, which included two tours of Afghanistan. He writes of warfare: "Most soldiers don't know exactly how many kills they have to their credit. Under battle conditions, you often fire indiscriminately. However, in the age of Apaches and laptops, everything I did in the course of two tours of duty was recorded and time-stamped."

He continues, "I could always tell exactly how many enemy combatants I had killed. And it seemed essential for me not to be afraid of that figure. Among the many things I learned in the Armed Forces, one of the most important was to be accountable for my own actions. So my number: twenty-five. It was not something that filled me with satisfaction, but I was not ashamed either. Naturally, I would have preferred not to have that figure on my military resume, or in my head, but I would also have preferred to live in a world without the Taliban, a world without war."

He ends the passage: "However, even for a casual practitioner of wishful thinking like myself, there are realities that cannot be changed."

7. Prince Harry and Prince William urged their father not to marry Camilla

Apparently, both of Charles's sons were against him marrying Camilla.

"That's why when the question came, Willy and I promised our father that we would welcome Camilla to the family. The only thing we asked for in return was that he didn't marry her," Harry writes. "'You don't need to get married again,' we asked him."

King Charles and Camilla married in April 2005. Yet, when the wedding happened, "We pumped his hand, wished him well. No hard feelings. We recognized that he was finally going to be with the woman he loved, the woman he’d always loved. Fate might’ve intended for him in the first place. Whatever bitterness or sorrow we felt over the closing of another loop in Mummy’s story, we understood that it was besides the point."

8. Harry admits to taking cocaine at age 17

"Of course I had been taking cocaine at that time. At someone's house, during a hunting weekend, I was offered a line, and since then I had consumed some more," Harry recalls. "It wasn't very fun, and it didn't make me feel especially happy as seemed to happen to others, but it did make me feel different, and that was my main objective. To feel. To be different. I was a seventeen-year-old willing to try almost anything that would alter the pre-established order. At least, that's what I was trying to convince myself of."

9. He watched Meghan Markle's sex scenes on Suits

When they started dating, Harry writes, he made "the mistake of Googling and watching some of her love scenes online." He continues, "I'd witnessed her and a castmate mauling each other in some sort of office or conference room. I didn’t need to see such things live."

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