Prince Harry’s former girlfriend Chelsy Davy says becoming a mother “saved me from myself” after years of resisting marriage and family life. The jewellery designer said meeting her now-husband, Sam Cutmore-Scott, was the first time she could imagine settling down.
Davy, 40, dated the Duke of Sussex on and off for roughly seven years before their relationship ended in 2011. Looking back, she acknowledged that throughout her twenties and early thirties she had been “only committed to having fun.”
That changed when she met hotelier Sam, now 42, at the age of 35. For the first time, Davy said, she felt certain she wanted children—and specifically wanted to build a family with him.
The couple now live in Mauritius and have three children: four-year-old Leo, three-year-old Chloe and six-month-old Finn.
“Looking back… commitment wasn’t exactly my strong suit,” Davy wrote in a new blog post on Tuesday. “If I’m completely honest, the only thing I was committed to was having fun.”
She described a life shaped by constant movement and fresh experiences. “I wanted the next trip, the next adventure, the next group of people I hadn’t met yet,” she wrote. “I lived in Istanbul. I travelled around South America. I went to Bali, the Amazon, Moscow.”
Chelsy Davy married Sam Cutmore-Scott in Mauritius in 2022, where they now raise their three children. Before meeting the hotelier, the 40-year-old jewellery designer was unsure whether marriage would ever be part of her future (Source: Instagram/Chelsy Davy)
This week, Davy reflected on Instagram on the transformation motherhood has brought to her life. She dated Prince Harry on and off for approximately seven years from 2004 (Source: Instagram/Chelsy Davy)
“I wasn’t remotely interested in staying in one place, following a conventional career path or committing to anything that might interfere with whatever sounded most exciting,” she added.
In the candid post, published on her Aya jewellery website as she looked back on the decade before turning 41 next week, Davy said she had been determined to preserve her independence. “I was fiercely protective of my freedom,” she wrote. “I didn’t expect anybody to change their plans for me, and I certainly didn’t want anybody expecting me to change mine for them.”
Her perspective began to shift after the Covid pandemic brought her international lifestyle to a standstill. It was also around that time, in 2020, that she met Sam.
“Marriage and motherhood had never been particularly high on my to-do list,” she explained. “Both seemed to represent exactly the things I had spent my adult life avoiding: permanence, responsibility, roots and having to take somebody else’s plans into account.”
Davy said her decision was not driven by a sudden romantic ideal of domestic life. “It wasn’t that I suddenly developed some great romantic vision of settling down,” she wrote. “It was much more instinctive than that. I met Sam and, for the first time, I knew I wanted a family, specifically with him.”
She also offered a light-hearted qualification: “I was also 35 by then, so I can’t give Sam all the credit. Timing, and possibly biology, may have played their part.”
In a frank post shared this week, Davy said she had once been “fiercely protective of my freedom” before meeting her husband. She is pictured with Prince Harry and Charles in 2010 at the Army Aviation Centre in Hampshire
Davy and Harry began their relationship in 2004, remaining together on and off for about seven years before splitting permanently in 2011.
Their romance unfolded beneath intense media attention, which Davy later described as “so full-on: crazy and scary and uncomfortable.”
“I found it very difficult when it was bad. I couldn’t cope,” she said in 2016. “I was young, I was trying to be a normal kid and it was horrible.”
Davy, who previously worked as a lawyer, has remained on friendly terms with Harry. She attended his 2018 wedding to Meghan Markle at St George’s Chapel in Windsor.
Cressida Bonas, another of Harry’s former partners, was also present at the ceremony. The actress and model dated the prince from 2012 until 2014.
Chelsy went on to marry Sam in a private ceremony in Mauritius in 2022.
The then young couple’s romance faced untold scrutiny, with Chelsy describing that period of her life with Harry as difficult, saying ‘I was trying to be a normal kid and it was horrible’ (Prince Harry and Chelsy pictured at Mahiki nightclub in 2007)
Reflecting on how motherhood has changed her, Chelsy said: ‘By the time I met Sam, I had travelled endlessly, lived abroad, met extraordinary people, stayed out far too late far too many times and lived life to the full… and then some.
‘I sometimes say my children saved me from myself. Not because I think I was a terrible person before them. I wasn’t. And I certainly don’t look back at my twenties and early thirties with regret. Quite the opposite.
‘I had an extraordinary amount of fun. But realistically, there was probably a limit to how long I could have continued on that trajectory.’
She continued: ‘My children have restricted my freedom in almost every possible sense. They ruin plans, interrupt phone calls, make spontaneity almost impossible and are an absolutely astonishing financial drain on my existence.
‘And I am completely and utterly obsessed with them.’
Chelsy, who turns 41 this month, now runs her successful jewellery brand Aya from her home on the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius
She also revealed that the anxiety motherhood brought was something she had not anticipated, describing the ‘constant worry’ over whether her children are safe and happy and the ‘endless low-level anxiety that something might happen to them’.
In one frightening episode, her youngest son Finn contracted meningitis when he was just two weeks old.
Chelsy revealed she has spent just nine days away from her oldest child, Leo, in nearly five years, five of them while she was in hospital with Finn.
She admitted the thought of spending even a night away from her children now ‘fills me with dread’ – something she said her friends find ‘fairly entertaining’.
Chelsy and Sam have since moved with their family to Mauritius, where she continues to run Aya while juggling life with three small children.
Yet despite occasionally missing the freedom and spontaneity of her old life, she said: ‘I loved that life, and I’m very glad I had it. I just wouldn’t swap this one for it.’
