In the labyrinthine lore of royal scandals, where affairs bloom like hothouse orchids and family secrets fester like forgotten tea stains on Buckingham Palace doilies, a fresh bombshell has detonated from the pages of royal chronicler Robert Lacey’s updated opus, Battle of Brothers. Just days ago, on November 4, 2025, the Daily Mail splashed across its front page a revelation so awkwardly intimate it could make even the corgis blush: Princes William and Harry, those ginger-haired scions of the House of Windsor, once affectionately dubbed their mother Princess Diana’s paramour, James Hewitt, with the innocent two-word moniker “Uncle James.” Yes, you read that right—the dashing cavalry officer who galloped into Diana’s heart (and bed) during the nadir of her loveless marriage to Prince Charles was, for a blissful stretch of boyhood summers, the princes’ faux familial favorite. Picture pint-sized Wills and Harry, sticky-fingered from polo ponies and ice lollies, clambering into Hewitt’s battered Land Rover for jaunts to Devon’s rolling hills, oblivious to the adult entanglements unfolding under the same tartan picnic rug. But oh, the irony: what began as avuncular adventures curdled into a cauldron of cringe when the boys tumbled into the “embarrassing intimacies” of Mummy’s extracurricular equestrian escapades. Was this the ultimate Windsor whiplash—a tale of trust turned taboo? Or just another chapter in the endless saga of how Diana’s quest for love left her legacy laced with awkward aftertastes? Pour the Earl Grey; this one’s piping hot with regret.

Let’s saddle up and rewind to the late 1980s, when Kensington Palace was less a fortress of protocol and more a pressure cooker of passion and pathos. Diana, the People’s Princess trapped in a gilded cage with a philandering prince, sought solace in the saddle—literally. Enter James Hewitt, then a strapping 28-year-old captain in the Household Cavalry, all broad shoulders, ginger locks, and a devil-may-care grin that could melt a Guardsman’s bearskin. Recruited in 1986 to teach the novice rider the ropes (and reins), Hewitt didn’t just school Diana in showjumping; he leaped straight into her affections, igniting a five-year affair that scorched the tabloids like a fox hunt gone feral. Their trysts—clandestine weekends at his mother’s Devon riding school, stolen kisses amid the hay bales—were the stuff of breathless headlines, especially as Charles’s own dalliance with Camilla Parker Bowles simmered in parallel. Diana confessed it all in her seismic 1995 Panorama interview: “Yes, I was in love with him. But I was very let down.” Hewitt, ever the chivalrous cad, later spilled the beans in Anna Pasternak’s 1994 tell-all Princess in Love, painting their romance as a whirlwind of whispered vows and whispered regrets.

But amid the scandal’s sting, there was a silver lining for the boys—or so it seemed. William, then a tousle-haired seven-year-old with a penchant for toy soldiers, and Harry, his rambunctious four-year-old shadow with a mop of curls that foreshadowed the Hewitt hairline rumors, adored the man their mother brought home. Lacey’s tome, refreshed for 2025 with fresh archival digs, recounts how Diana orchestrated these idylls with the precision of a state banquet planner. “They called him ‘Uncle James,’ and drove down with him and Diana quite regularly to stay in Devon for breaks with his approachable and natural mother Shirley, who ran a riding school,” Lacey writes, evoking scenes straight from a Swallows and Amazons reboot gone royally rogue. Shirley Hewitt’s thatched cottage became a sanctuary: lazy afternoons mucking out stables, bonfires crackling with ghost stories, and Hewitt regaling the lads with tales of tank maneuvers in the Gulf (he’d deploy there in ‘91, putting a pin in the passion). Harry, in particular, lapped it up—Lacey notes the youngster “was engrossed by Hewitt’s military stories,” a fascination that arguably steered both princes toward their army arcs. William, the steadier soul, found in “Uncle James” a surrogate for the father figure often absent on organic farm jaunts or polo pitches. Diana, ever the doting diva, encouraged the sobriquet, extending it to her subsequent suitors like a verbal velvet rope: “Mummy’s friend” evolved to “Uncle” with the ease of a curtsy.

Fast-forward to the frosty fallout, and the fairy tale fractures like fine bone china. By 1992, the affair was outed—first in whispers, then in Hewitt’s own kiss-and-tell cash-in. The princes, now tweens navigating the treacherous terrain of tabloid torment, pieced together the puzzle from playground snickers and parental pillow talk. The “Uncle James” who’d taught them to trot a pony now loomed as the lover who’d trotted into Mummy’s bed, a revelation that Lacey describes as landing “like a gut punch wrapped in ginger hair dye.” For Harry, the blow was doubly barbed: Hewitt’s flaming thatch and freckled facade fueled a vicious rumor mill churning out headlines like “Is Hewitt Harry’s Hidden Dad?” (Spoiler: No. Harry was born in ‘84; the affair kicked off in ‘86. Hewitt himself debunked it in 2002: “There really is no possibility whatsoever.”) In his 2023 memoir Spare, Harry dissects the sadism of the speculation—“He’d laugh and laugh, though it was a remarkably unfunny joke”—a barb aimed at Charles’s ill-timed japes but laced with the Hewitt hangover. William, ever the protector, reportedly shielded his brother from the worst, but the duo’s dynamic shifted: what was once a shared secret Santa became a scarlet letter of sorts, etching embarrassment into their brotherly bond.

The 2025 resurgence of this relic couldn’t be timelier—or more torturously topical. With William and Harry’s rift rivaling the Grand Canyon (think frosty funeral faces at the 2021 joint vigil for Philip, or Harry’s transatlantic truths in Spare), Lacey’s leak lands like a grenade in the reconciliation trenches. Hewitt himself, now a silver-fox septuagenarian peddling polo clinics in posh pastures, weighed in last February on Good Morning Britain: Diana would be “concerned” about the sibling schism, he opined, her maternal magic the mortar to mend it. “She’d do her best to try and get them together,” the ex-paramour pondered, perhaps projecting his own pangs of exclusion. Royal watchers, those tea-leaf-reading tea-leaf traders, speculate the “Uncle James” anecdote is no accident in Lacey’s revision: it’s a subtle salve, reminding the warring Windsors of a time when love’s leftovers knit rather than knotted the family fabric. After all, in a house where Charles once quipped about tampons and tiaras, a little faux-uncle awkwardness feels like par for the course.

Yet beneath the blushes lurks a deeper dirge for Diana’s dashed dreams. She craved connection—a knight in shining spurs to counter the crown’s cold calculus—but her Hewitt heartstrings hoisted her heirs into the headlines’ harsh glare. The boys’ boyhood bliss in Devon’s dales, pony rides punctuating parental passion, underscores her genius for guerrilla glamour: smuggling normalcy into nobility’s nightmare. But the “embarrassing intimacies” unearthed? They’re the monarchy’s eternal Achilles’ heel—proof that even princesses’ playbooks can backfire into blush-inducing biographies. As William shoulders the throne’s weight (with Kate’s cancer comeback casting long shadows) and Harry hunkers in Hollywood’s hills, this two-word time capsule—“Uncle James”—serves as a spectral summons: remember the man who was family before he was fodder? In Windsor’s whisper chambers, where grudges germinate like heirloom roses, perhaps it’s the nudge needed to thaw the frost. Or maybe it’s just another exhibit in the Museum of Monarchical Messes, where nicknames nick at nerves and nostalgia’s the only noble pursuit.

One final footnote from the folly: Hewitt’s enduring echo in Harry’s hue persists, a punchline that punches below the belt. But as Lacey’s latest lays bare, the real redhead in the room was always Diana—fierce, flawed, and forever the flame that lit her sons’ path, even as it singed the edges. “Uncle James” may fade to footnote, but the family fractures? They’re the fractures that fascinate, ensuring the Windsors’ winds of war never truly whistle down. Raise a stirrup cup to the ghosts of getaways past; in royal reckonings, the past is prologue—and it’s always packing a punchline.