Prince Harry had to get permission from the Queen to keep his beard
9 January 2023, 10:56 | Updated: 9 January 2023, 11:36
Prince Harry had to ask the Queen to keep his beard for his 2018 wedding
Prince Harry says he had to ask for permission to keep facial hair on his wedding day, which caused an argument with Prince William.
Prince Harry revealed he had to ask the Queen whether he was allowed to keep his beard.
Royal fans across the UK were gripped to their seats on Sunday evening when Prince Harry gave a no hold barred interview about his fallout with the royal family.
Harry: The Interview aired on ITV on Sunday, with the Duke of Sussex going into depth about his new book Spare, which is released in the UK on Tuesday.
But during one moment, the prince revealed how he had to ask Queen Elizabeth II for permission to keep his beard when he married Meghan Markle.
"The argument about the beard is one of the most puzzling in the book," Tom told viewers.
"Harry claims he went to see his granny, the Queen, to ask, as required, for permission to keep his beard for his own wedding. She was amenable, William was not."
Opening up about the unusual disagreement, Harry said: "I think...there’s a level of competition there. I remembered that William had a beard himself and that granny and other people, the ones to tell – told him that he had to shave it off.
"Um, the difference for me, if there was a difference, but the difference for me was, as I explained to my grandmother, that this beard I'm still – that I'm still wearing, felt to me at the time like the new Harry. Right?"
Harry became the first royal in 125 years to get married with a beard when he tied the knot with Meghan in 2018.
He said when William confronted him over it, he told his brother that Meghan wouldn’t recognise him if he was clean shaven.
“I think William found it hard that other people told him to shave it off," he said.
"And yet here I was on my wedding day wearing military uniform, no longer in the military, but thinking as though I – believing as though I should shave it off before my wedding day.
“And I said ‘well I don’t believe that Meghan’s gonna recognise me if she comes up the aisle and sees me beardless’.”
He added: "I would feel very, very different without my beard, and that’s hard for people to understand who’ve never grown a beard, um, but hopefully those beard people out there will go 'Yeah, no, I fully get that, I can understand'."
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