Prince Harry recently addressed the longstanding rumour that King Charles III is not his real father, adding that the claim caused him great pain over the years. In a court testimony on June 6, The Duke of Sussex said he feared British tabloid journalists wanted to prove his father was Major James Hewitt so he could be ''ousted'' from the royal family, Newsweek reported.
Notably, the Duke of Sussex is suing Mirror Group Newspapers for allegedly using unethical methods, such as phone hacking, to obtain information to produce dozens of news articles on him. One of these was an article published in 2002 in The People headlined: ''Plot to Rob the DNA of Harry.''
Prince Harry noted that several newspapers had reported a rumour that his biological father was James Hewitt after his mother admitted to having an affair with him.
In the witness statement, Prince Harry reiterated the false nature of the rumours , citing the fact that his mother's affair with James Hewitt didn't start until years after he was born.
“Never mind that my mother didn't meet Major Hewitt until long after I was born, the story was simply too good to drop," he said in the written statement.
''At the time, when I was 18 years old and had lost my mother [Princess Diana] just six years earlier, stories such as this felt very damaging and very real to me,'' Harry said.
''They were hurtful, mean, and cruel. I was always left questioning the motives behind the stories. Were the newspapers keen to put doubt into the minds of the public so that I might be ousted from the Royal Family?”, he added.
Notably, Prince Harry had also addressed the rumour in his memoir 'Spare'. He mentioned that King Charles would often make cruel and unfunny jokes about not being his biological father.
"Pa liked telling stories, and this was one of the best in his repertoire. He'd always end with a burst of philosophizing ... Who knows if I'm really the Prince of Wales? Who knows if I'm even your real father?" Harry wrote in an excerpt of his memoir released on January 10.
He continued, ''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. Tabloid readers were delighted by the idea that the younger child of Prince Charles wasn't the child of Prince Charles.''
According to the Independent, Mr. Hewitt, a former cavalry officer in the British Army, famously had an affair with Prince Harry's mother, Princess Diana, in the mid-nineties. The affair lasted five years, from 1986 to 1991, and took place while she was still married to King Charles. Prince Harry was born in 1984, 2 years before she met Mr. Hewitt.
In 2017, Mr. Hewitt had also blasted such rumours, simply saying, ''No, I'm not.''
