Prior to his marriage to Meghan Markle in 2018, Prince Harry dated Zimbabwean businesswoman Chelsy Davy off and on for seven years. Now, royal expert Julie Montagu, Viscountess Hinchingbrooke, is speaking out to say that Chelsy and Harry broke up because she “absolutely didn’t want to be in the public eye.”

“Harry had two big relationships before Meghan so Chelsy Davy and of course Cressida Bonas,” Montagu told The Express. “Chelsy was like ‘absolutely not. I don’t want to be in the public eye, I don’t want to be written about in the papers,’ and the same thing with Cressida.”

“We know that both girls ended that relationship because they did not want that public life of being married into the Royal Family,” she added.

Harry and Chelsy met in Cape Town during his gap year back in 2004. They would go on to have a “turbulent” relationship and finally broke up for good in 2011. After the split, Davy described being chased down by photographers as “full on, crazy, scary and uncomfortable.” She added that when her situation became “bad,” she found it “difficult to cope.”

Royal expert Richard Kay once said that despite Chelsy and Harry’s “volatile relationship,” it still had “passion” and “sparks flying everywhere.”

“It is a real love match,” Kay said before the breakup. “The passion is there, the tension is visible, there is electricity and sparks flying everywhere.”

“You can tell that they have a very volatile relationship, horrendous shouting matches, screaming rows but then, they get back together again and I would say out of all of the royal romances going on theirs’ was the real true thing,” he continued. “It is the real deal and I suspect that unless something catastrophic happens they will marry – but it will be a very tempestuous marriage.”

Chelsy remained on good terms with Harry, and even attended his wedding to Meghan in 2018.

“You sort of get the feeling that neither of them were quite ever willing to completely let go of that love affair,” royal expert Katie Nicholl said at the time of the wedding. “They’d carved their names into one of the tree trunks on the family estate. It was such a love affair, it really was.”