The award-winning actress Ruthie Henshall has finally given her account of the five years she spent dating Prince Edward, King Charles’s youngest brother.
Henshall’s story, published in The Daily Mail, is studded with the kind of detail no biographer would dare invent.
The tale begins backstage during the 1988 London run of the musical Cats. Henshall, then 20 and making her West End debut as Jemima at the New London Theatre, heard a rumor that a new production assistant called Edward Windsor was joining.
She innocently asked who he was. The answer: Queen Elizabeth II’s youngest son, 23, who had just walked out of the Royal Marines (to the horror of his father Prince Philip) to work for Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Really Useful Theatre Company.
Rumors that Edward was gay started immediately, she notes, for no better reason than that he worked in theater. His mother, meanwhile, is said to have voiced a different worry: that he might come home with a chorus girl.
Enter Henshall, who greeted him at the stage door with a Cats in-joke about “joining the litter.”
She describes making a beeline for him whenever he was in the building, mainly, she says, because she enjoyed watching his reaction to her filthy backstage humor.
When he mentioned spending a weekend at Windsor, she told him that if he ever wanted company, she was available. There was also, she confesses, the strategic deployment of a very short ra-ra skirt.
In May 1988 he finally asked whether she fancied coming to his place to watch a Judy Garland film (those gay rumors wouldn’t go away) and have a bite to eat.
Wearing a leotard and dungarees, Henshall drove her battered Vauxhall Nova car through central London, gave her name to the policeman at the gates of Buckingham Palace, and was waved through to an apartment with a bathroom the size of her flat, and where name tags reading “HRH Edward” were sewn into every piece of his underwear.
Edward slowly—very slowly—pitches woo to Henshall, and it’s all rather adorable.
He sent freesias to her flat because he knew they were her favorite, he left loving notes by the bed when he slipped out early, and wrote letters on Buckingham Palace note paper, signed with three kisses rather than his name (for security), delivered under a stamp bearing his mother’s head.
The Royal family welcomed her, and she spent time with them at their homes in Windsor, Sandringham, and Balmoral.
There is a great set-piece scene in Balmoral. Three martinis in, with the queen and Princess Margaret singing hymns, Diana tapped her on the shoulder and asked her to rescue everyone with a proper song.
Margaret requests “I Dreamed A Dream.” Henshall belts it out to royal applause. Edward later relayed his mother’s verdict: “Now, that’s a pair of lungs!”
Princes William and Harry, then aged 10 and 8, tell her ghost stories and then lie in wait outside the bathroom to jump-scare her. Charles is described as chasing his squealing sons through the Balmoral corridors at breakfast. Diana is not as warm as Fergie, who at one point offers Henshall the most prescient advice in the piece: leave while you still can.
Darker currents emerge too. Henshall writes candidly about pulling out her eyelashes, a compulsion rooted in childhood sexual abuse, and about confiding in Edward, who was kind but breezily assured her it would pass.
She wonders whether the confession made him retreat a little, knowing the scrutiny she would face if the relationship ever became official.
The ending, when it comes, is very grown-up. By 1993, Crazy For You had made Henshall a genuine star of the stage. Front-page reviews and comparisons to Ethel Merman and Ginger Rogers ensue, and the whole royal family came trooping in to watch, the queen and queen mother included.
That summer Edward began seeing Sophie Rhys-Jones, a young PR at Capital Radio, while Henshall took up with the actor John Gordon Sinclair.
Edward suggested the four of them meet up, so he and Sophie came to see her in She Loves Me and they all went on to dinner at the Savoy. All four, she writes, understood the significance of the evening without saying it: the right thing had happened. She felt no jealousy, being besotted herself, only the poignancy of knowing that she and Edward would never again come first for each other.
Thirty years on, she says, she still sometimes dreams about Edward—and texts him whenever it happens.
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