Harry’s difficult ‘divorce’ - from Hugh Grosvenor’s society wedding of the year

As the Duke of Westminster – formerly ‘Britain’s most eligible bachelor’ – gets married, all eyes are on the biggest name missing from the grandest guest list. Polly Dunbar charts Prince Harry’s sorrowful separation from the ‘sustainable Saltburn set’ he was once so happily at the heart of...

A ‘civilised agreement’ has been made between the two friends to avoid overshadowing the couple’s big day, insiders say (PA/Getty)

Ahead of the wedding taking place at Chester Cathedral on Friday between the Duke of Westminster, Hugh Grosvenor, and Olivia Henson, the billionaire groom paid for the Cheshire city to be decorated with 100,000 flowers, planted in vibrant displays which will remain for the rest of the summer. 

The gesture has made one of Britain’s most picturesque cities even more spectacular, befitting the nuptials of Britain’s richest man under 40 and the society event of the year.

The Prince of Wales, one of “Hughie’s” closest friends, will act as usher, and other guests are expected to be a who’s who of the aristocracy, including everyone from Princess Eugenie – a friend of the bride’s from Marlborough College – to the Van Cutsems (William van Cutsem is Prince William’s best friend; his elder brother Edward is married to Lady Tamara Grosvenor, Hugh’s sister. In this world, most people are related somehow.)

Fellow Cheshire yahs the Marquess of Cholmondeley and his wife Rose, whose ancestral seat Cholmondeley Castle is down the road, are likely to be there, too, along with historian Dan Snow (whose wife is Hugh’s sister Lady Edwina) and It-boy about town Galen Crawley, a cousin and one of the King’s many godchildren. 

No matter how dazzling the occasion or how grand the guest list, however, it’s an absence which will inevitably draw the most attention. Prince Harry, a lifelong pal of the Duke, who is godfather to his firstborn, Prince Archie, won’t be present.

Sources close to him briefed People magazine in the US that he pulled out after realising “the challenges of his attendance” – including the unbelievably awkward prospect of his brother, from whom he has been estranged for at least two years, having to show him to his seat.

The “civilised agreement” was taken out of respect to avoid overshadowing the couple’s big day, yet there’s no escaping the fact that Harry will be the ghost at the feast. The entire occasion can’t help but highlight the rift between the prince and the set at the beating heart of his formative years.

Harry’s former closest friends will be at the wedding, many of whom no longer speak to him following his attacks on the Royal Family. The Van Cutsems are just one example, as Harry himself admits. In his book Spare, he stated that among “several close mates and beloved figures in my life” who chastised him for his Oprah interview were “one of Hugh and Emilie van Cutsem’s sons”, as well as Emilie herself. 

Prince Harry and Hugh Grosvenor in 2015 (Care For Wild)

That he’s cut himself so resolutely adrift is sad, regardless of whether you sympathise with his reasons. After losing his mother at the age of 12, these people were a de facto family, throwing a protective circle around the troubled prince during his most difficult times and loyally keeping his secrets.

But what Harry saw as “speaking his truth”, his former crew regarded as a betrayal. Even if Hugh ostensibly remains his friend, his loyalties are inextricably linked to the other side. The ties between the Grosvenors and the royals go back generations: Hugh is one of the King’s godsons and formed part of the King and Queen’s procession during the Coronation.

As a source who knows the Grosvenors said last year: “They don’t like it when people criticise their way of life in public, which is exactly what Harry and Meghan have been doing for the last few years.”

And although it’s tempting to regard Harry’s move to Montecito as a shedding of a stuffy, outdated way of life in favour of a more dynamic, forward-thinking, American approach, the Grosvenor wedding actually reveals that the younger generation of aristocrats are far more aligned with Harry’s values than we might think.

Grosvenor (third from left) and Prince William, pictured in 2018 (Getty)

Hugh Grosvenor typifies a new type of toff: the woke Millennial aristo. Think the fabulous wealth, glorious stately homes and epic parties of the Saltburn Set (Hugh’s “splendiferous” 21st, held at his 11,000-acre family estate, Eaton Hall, cost a rumoured £5m), but with renewable energy projects, green building codes and biodiversity conservation efforts in place of the Class As and scandals of Emerald Fennell’s film.

Take those wedding flowers freshly planted all over Chester. Not only intended to be decorative, they were also specially selected to be “vibrant pollinators – benefiting biodiversity as well as the amenity of the city”.

Sustainability has long been a passion for Hugh, who graduated with a degree in countryside management from Newcastle University before working at Bio-bean, which turns waste coffee grounds into biofuels.

Since becoming the 7th Duke of Westminster when his father Gerald died in 2016, inheriting an estimated £10bn fortune and the Grosvenor property company, which owns 50 per cent of Mayfair and 300 acres of Belgravia, he has pushed the family firm in an ever-greener direction.

The young princes with William Van Cutsem (right) as they leave the wedding of Lady Tamara Grosvenor to Edward van Cutsem at Chester Cathedral in 2004 (PA)

Projects on Grosvenor Estate lands include creating the country’s largest continuous area of wildflowers and recycling manure into organic fertilisers to replenish soils.

Hugh is also president of The Country Trust, a charity which encourages less advantaged children to visit farms – including his – across Britain, and oversees his family’s Westminster Foundation, the charitable organisation which helps vulnerable youth. It is all very in keeping with the work that Harry and Meghan have strived to be known for.

Olivia, his bride, who is also of aristocratic stock, descended from the Hoare banking family, the Marquesses of Bristol and the Dukes of Rutland, works at a sustainable food company called Belazu. Together, they intend to live in Cheshire and become full-time land managers.

Their focus on burnishing their eco-friendly credentials is part of a growing trend among the landed gentry which led Tatler to declare “sustainability is the new status symbol”. At Goodwood, there’s an offsetting programme in action which will see 78,000 trees planted around the estate.

Holkham is in the process of becoming an entirely carbon-negative estate. At Daylesford, the smart set’s favourite luxury food firm, there are now 2,000 solar panels on the estate and the farm is 75 per cent energy self-sufficient.  

The Sussexes pictured in 2022 during the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee celebrations (Getty)

Prince William’s Earthshot Prize is by far the most ambitious project of this movement. The sweeping global environmental award for innovations which could help repair the planet became a standalone charity last year, pulling in an impressive £22.4m in its first nine months.

It was a gift to critics of Harry and Meghan, whose Archewell Foundation’s donations fell last year to £1.6m from £10.3m the previous year.

The launch of Meghan’s lifestyle brand, American Riviera Orchard, has made it even more difficult to view the couple’s claims to be “global philanthropists” as much more than hyperbole.

All of which begs the question: could Harry actually have achieved more by staying in Britain and getting stuck into some of the pressing issues here? And, when he sees everyone he used to know celebrating the marriage of a friend he’s known the whole of the Duke’s life, might he wonder if they’re still his people, after all?

A separation from his family will have been hard enough, but a divorce from those friends who know him most and are more like him than anyone else in the world will be heartbreaking.