Princess Diana’s Mom ‘Snapped’ at King Charles After Comment About Baby Prince Harry
King Charles III upset Princess Diana’s mother at Prince Harry’s christening. How? By remarking on his own disappointment at becoming a father to another son. Ahead, what Diana recalled her husband saying at the Duke of Sussex’s christening. Plus, how her mom “snapped” the king’s “head off” for the remark.
King Charles said they were ‘disappointed’ to get Harry instead of a baby girl
Diana and King Charles became parents for the second time on Sept. 15, 1984. They welcomed Harry, formally known as Henry Charles Albert David Mountbatten-Windsor, at London, England’s St. Mary’s Hospital.
Like Prince William before him, Harry made his debut on the steps of the Lindo Wing in the arms of his parents. His christening took place on Dec. 21, 1984, at St. George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle.
(Sound familiar? St. George’s Chapel is the setting of many royal family events, including Harry’s 2019 wedding to Meghan Markle.) Diana reflected on Harry’s christening during secret tape recordings for Andrew Morton’s 1992 biography, Diana: Her True Story.
At one point, Diana shared how King Charles said something to her mother, Frances Shand Kydd, that made for a tense moment.
“Charles went to talk to my mother at Harry’s christening and said: ‘We were so disappointed—we thought it would be a girl,’” (via Newsweek). “Mummy [sic] snapped his head off, saying: ‘You should realize how lucky you are to have a child that’s normal.’”
“Ever since that day, the shutters have come down,” Diana added. “And that’s what he does when he gets somebody answering back at him.”
He said the same thing immediately after Diana gave birth to Harry
Elsewhere in Morton’s book, Diana revealed how her husband, who’d “desperately” wanted a daughter, reacted to discovering they were parents to another son.
(The news wasn’t a surprise to Diana. She’d known it for some time, learning she’d been carrying a boy months earlier and keeping it a secret.)
King Charles, she recalled, made his “dismay” known when he went to the hospital to see Diana and their newborn baby in the hospital.
“Charles always wanted a girl,” she said. “Harry was a boy. His first comment was, ‘Oh God, it’s a boy.’ His second: ‘And he’s even got red hair.’”
Harry remembered his dad joking about being his ‘real father’ in ‘Spare’
In his 2023 Spare memoir, Harry shared that one of his dad’s “best” jokes happened to be about him and whether or not they were really related. “Pa liked telling stories, and this was one of the best in his repertoire,” he wrote.
“‘Who knows if I’m really the Prince of Wales? Who knows if I’m even your real father?” he recalled King Charles joking. “Maybe your real father is in Broadmoor, darling boy!’”
Sharing how his father would “laugh and laugh,” Harry called it “a remarkably unfunny joke, given the rumor circulating just then that my actual father was one of Mummy’s [sic] former lovers: Major James Hewitt.”
“One cause of this rumor was Major Hewitt’s flaming ginger hair, but another cause was sadism,” Harry wrote. “Tabloid readers were delighted by the idea that the younger child of Prince Charles wasn’t the child of Prince Charles.”
“They couldn’t get enough of this ‘joke,’ for some reason. 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, the story was simply too good to drop.”
