Royal hen and stag dos – from Princess Diana being ‘arrested’ to Meghan Markle’s Soho House party

It is difficult to imagine members of the Royal Family conforming to the wild traditions of the stag and hen do, with their obscene costumes and heavy drinking.

But royals have enjoyed their last days of freedom with as many antics as any other bride or groom-to-be.

Some young royals have been spotted partying at London’s most exclusive clubs while others have even been thrown in the back of a police van.

Despite trying to keep the plans under wraps, even the most secret gatherings have been discovered, including Prince Philip’s unofficial bash which was revealed 70 years after his marriage to the Queen.

Prince William 

Before he married his long-term girlfriend Kate Middleton, Prince William headed off for a weekend away with the boys in Devon.

The boozy stag do took place at the historic Hartland Abbey, where the group shot at clay pigeons, went surfing and downed expensive, vintage port.

The antics saw Prince William forced to wear a chest wig, hairpiece and a sticker on his forehead with the Queen’s name on it, which he took ‘all in good spirits’, according to a source at the time.

Those who attended were William’s nearest and dearest – his brother Prince Harry, Thomas van Straubenzee, Guy Pelly, Ed and Hugh van Cutsem, and Tom Inskip.

In the lead up to the much anticipated stag do, the original plans, which involved a similar trip but on the other side of the county in Exmouth, were leaked, causing a last minute change of location.

The future King told press at the time that the event had been organised with ‘military precision’ to keep the plans as secret as possible.

All attendees were also told there was a strict ‘what goes on tour, stays on tour’ policy. 

The stags were at the former monastery, that dates back to the 12th century, for the whole weekend, enjoying the sprawling grounds and private coastline.

It is owned by the Stucley family, whose son George is a close friend of William and joined in the weekend antics.   

Speaking after the stag, the source added: ‘It was a relatively tame stag weekend by a lot of people’s standards. It was just about a group of lads having a good time without their other halves.’

Kate Middleton

Kate Middleton’s hen do at the time was described as a ‘low key’ event, in line with her fiancé’s relaxed stag do.

The hen do was organised by her sister Pippa Middleton, who went to extreme lengths to make sure the event location stayed a secret, even booking four different bars in London to maintain some secrecy.

In the end, however, the event was said to have been held at a mutual friend’s house.

More than a decade later, Cheryl revealed that Kate told her she had dressed up as the singer at her hen do.

The Princess was said to have performed her own rendition of Cole’s Fight for This Love, wearing a similar racy bodysuit with split flared trousers.

Backstage at the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee concert in 2012, William asked Cheryl: ‘Did you know you’ve got a bit of competition?’

He and Kate then began giggling as the Princess of Wales admitted performing Fight For This Love, Cheryl’s No.1 from 2009.

Cheryl revealed in her tell-all book My Story: ‘Kate confessed that she dressed up as me on her hen night, in a bodysuit and split trousers, and sang Fight For This Love.

‘She even learnt the dance routine and was step-perfect by all accounts.’

Meanwhile, the guest list at the event was kept to a minimum, with just a few of Kate’s closest friends, including classmates from Marlborough College and teammates from The Sisterhood dragon boat crew she was part of at St Andrew’s University.

Other notable members included Hugh Van Custem’s wife Rose Astor and Alice Hadden-Paton who is married to his younger brother Nicholas.

Olivia Beasdale, who shared a flat with Kate and William at university along with Astrid Harbord were also there. 

The event was unlikely to have focused on heavy drinking, as the Princess is known among her nearest and dearest to avoid alcohol.  

Prince Harry

Prince Harry managed to keep the details of his stag do ahead of his wedding to Meghan Markle largely under wraps.

The location at the time was kept top secret but there was suggestion it was held either in the Swiss ski town of Verbier or tucked away in the Scottish Highlands.

One report suggested Prince Andrew offered his £13million Chalet Helora to Harry and his friends. 

Once source told the Daily Star in the weeks leading up to the wedding: ‘I have just seen Harry’s advance close-protection team come into La Vache for lunch. They are clearly on a recce.

‘Quite a few of the staff recognised the Royal Protection Officers who skied with Harry in 2016.’

But in his bombshell tell-all memoir Spare, the Duke of Sussex revealed that the weekend had actually taken place at a friend’s home in Hampshire.

His brother and around 15 friends were said to be attendance, where there was drinking games, a mechanical bull and games of tennis.

Prince Harry wrote in his book: ‘When everyone was bored of firing rifles, they dressed me as a giant yellow-feathered chicken and sent me downrange to shoot fireworks at me.’

He also claimed in the autobiography that he spent much of his stag night fearing Prince William would shave off his beard.

‘I showed up to my stag ready to party. To laugh, to have a good time, to get clear of all this stress,’ Harry wrote, referring to his bachelor party in 2018. 

‘And yet I also feared that if I got too clear, got too drunk and passed out, Willy and his mates would hold me down and shave me.’

Among a string of allegations made in the book, Prince Harry said the heir to the throne told him he needed to shave before he walked down the aisle and was ‘livid’ when he didn’t. 

Meghan Markle

Prince Harry’s bride-to-be Meghan Markle opted to keep her hen do low key hosting it at the private member’s club Soho House.

Ahead of the May wedding in 2018, Meghan was whisked off to the A-list favourite Soho Farmhouse, in Oxfordshire, for a two-night stay with her closest friends and family.

Organising the weekend was Markus Anderson, a consultant at Soho House Group.

On the guest list were two of Meghan’s closest friends, Pilates instructor Heather Dorak and New York TV producer Lindsay Jill Ross, who both flew over from the US for the weekend. 

Meghan described Lindsay, who she met at Northwestern University, as her ‘sister’ and was maid of honour at her wedding in Greece in 2016.

At the time, Kate was very heavily pregnant and her mother was living in Los Angeles, so a smaller, bridal shower ahead of the day.

There was a strict no social media policy for the weekend, which focused on a ‘celebration of friendship’ where guests spent time catching up.

OK! magazine said at the time the Hen party were planning to stay up for an Oscar viewing party on the Sunday night but scrapped this when they realised it would not begin until midnight UK time.

The guests most likely took advantage of the spa facilities, cooking classes, and perhaps the Electric Barn Cinema.  

Zara Tindall

Zara Tindall decided to take her celebrations abroad before she married Mike Tindall in 2011.

Accompanied by 19 girlfriends, Princess Anne’s daughter was seen sporting a pink tutu and wig abroad in Portugal. 

Those on the rowdy trip included Sky Sports presenters Kirsty Gallacher and Di Dougherty, Prince Harry’s ex-girlfriend Natalie Pinkham and Kenny Dalglish’s daughter Lynsey.

All were said to take part in ‘rowdy drinking games’ as they stayed at the Campo Real Golf Resort and Spa, a 200-acre gated development being built by a friend of her father’s, Eduardo Netto de Almeida.

Mike Tindall

Inspired by the hit film The Hangover, former Rugby Union player Mike Tindall jetted off to Florida for an alcohol-drenched stag weekend seven weeks before his wedding to Zara in 2011.

The groom-to-be was seen trawling up and down South Beach with ten friends, including fellow international and best man Iain Balshaw, with the group splashing £12,000 on alcohol in just five hours at one nightclub. 

The gang got VIP treatment at the club LIV, where they opened by ordering a bottle of vintage Perrier-Jouët Brut Millésime at a cost of £508 to their table.

The tab also included a Dom Perignon Rose ’96 costing £859, ten bottles of vodka, ten bottles of Patron tequila, a bottle of sambuca and 34 cans of Red Bull, all delivered by scantily-clad waitresses.

The drinking sessions over the course of the weekend extended to the hotel pools, with some of the men pictured swapping phone numbers with girls in bikinis, and the groom was even spotted wearing a waitress’s tutu.

They also dined at Meat Market, one of the most expensive steak restaurants in the city, where Mike seemed to accept a dare to down a carafe of expensive red wine.

Speaking more than a decade after the wild weekend, he told Alex Payne on JOE UK’s House of Rugby about his royal relatives’ reaction to his boozy weekend.

He said: ‘I got ripped – they got stuck into me after I got back from my stag do when it was the Duke’s 90th. All of them. It was in the papers. “Had a good time did you?”‘

Princess Eugenie 

Ahead of her wedding in 2018, Princess Eugenie reportedly left her sister Princess Beatrice in charge of the antics.

It was suggested at the time that the party weekend would be held on the Spanish island of Ibiza, but no details were ever leaked about the event, so no one knows for certain where it took place. 

Princess Beatrice 

There are no reports of what happened for Princess Beatrice’s hen do, perhaps because she got married in July 2020, during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Leading up to her nuptials, restrictions on group gatherings would have been in place, with a number of months spent under a full blown country-wide lockdown, where everyone was limited to their household. 

Sarah Ferguson

Royal rebel Fergie is claimed to have had the first royal ‘hen do’ before her wedding to Prince Andrew in 1986.

The duchess’ old friend Princess Diana was part of the antics as the entourage dressed up as police officers for a night out in London.

Donning grey wigs, they pretended to arrest one of their friends outside Buckingham Palace but ended up getting caught by the real police and driven away in a police van.

Sarah Bradford previously revealed to the Mail: ‘There was always trouble afoot when the two women got together, like on Fergie’s hen night when she and Diana wore grey wigs, dressed up as policewomen and pretended to arrest a “prostitute” outside Buckingham Palace. 

‘They were put in a police van and driven down The Mall until one of the policemen recognised Diana. He was so shocked he couldn’t believe it and said, “Oh my heavens, it’s the Princess of Wales!”’

After realising it was the Princess of Wales and the royal bride-to-be, the police released the women who then headed to the exclusive Mayfair club Annabel’s where Prince Andrew was also reportedly partying.

According to The Express, the manager of the club, Lewis Louis, thought they were kiss-o-grams – people paid to dress up and kiss someone.

He said: ‘For a moment it must have seemed like a police raid, then guests obviously decided they were ‘kiss-o-gram’ girls.

‘One of the staff told them that one or even two ‘kiss-o-gram’ girls might be alright but four of them was a bit of an embarrassment to others.’

Failing to bump into Prince Andrew at the club, the gang later played a trick on him by shutting the Buckingham Palace gates as he approached in his car, making him fear an ambush.

Fergie wrote in her autobiography that she recounted the evening to the Queen who found it ‘reasonably amusing’.

Prince Andrew 

In contrast to his bride-to-be Sarah Ferguson, Prince Andrew’s stag do was a much more private affair.

The event however did have a star-studded guest list as the likes of Elton John and Sir David Frost joined the prince at his cousin Lord Lascelle’s Aubrey House in Notting Hill.

Fergie claimed she wanted to gatecrash the evening but guards were watching over the single entrance to the house, which has the second largest private garden in London after Buckingham Palace, over the course of the night.

King Charles

Six days before his wedding to Princess Diana in 1981, the future King organised a dinner at Whites, the oldest and most exclusive gentleman’s club in London.

He surrounded himself with his closest friends, including Nicholas Soames, the grandson of Winston Churchill, for a simple dinner of cold meats, potatoes, peas and beans washed down with plenty of champagne.

Leaving after midnight, Charles was reportedly outraged when he emerged to the sight of rows of photographers, despite the details of the event being kept secret.

Speaking on Channel 5, royal expert Ingrid Seward said: ‘Obviously everyone was sworn to secrecy.

‘They had a lot of fine wines and some wonderful champagne which was Charles’ favourite.’

She added: ‘Somebody leaked it and then there were loads of press outside. Obviously Prince Charles was furious.’

Diana reportedly confessed at the Buckingham Palace garden party the following day that the couple had rowed upon Charles’ return after his party.

Journalist John Edwards recalled the event saying: ‘She stopped right in front of me, we were only a few foot apart, and somebody said to her “good luck darling”.

‘”Thank you very much”, she said, and then she put her hand over her mouth and she said “there was a terrible row last night between Charles and me. It had been his stag party”.

‘In that girly way of hers she repeated it. What the row was about she didn’t go on,’ he said on Channel 5’s Charles and Di: The Truth Behind Their Wedding. 

Princess Diana 

Opting for another exclusive London location, Diana held her hen do at Annabel’s where she was snapped by English society photographer Richard Young.

Speaking to the BBC from the club, he said: ‘I knew that she had to go somewhere for her hen night and I knew that there was only one place where she would come – and it’d be here.’

While hen dos were still in their infancy at the time of Diana’s wedding, she would return to the same club five years later for Fergie’s pre-wedding bash dressed up as a police officer.

Prince Philip

The late Queen’s husband-to-be had two stag parties before marrying the future monarch in 1947.

One was an official party held at The Dorchester Hotel in London the night before the wedding, where cameras were invited to photograph the occasion.

In an effort to keep the rest of the evening private once the official photographs had been taken, royal expert Victoria Howard explained on Channel 5 how the prince and his friends tricked the photographers into handing over their cameras and smashed the bulbs.

However, in 2018 – nearly 70 years after the wedding – details of a secret stag do held at the Belfry Club a few days earlier were revealed, showing how the prince partied in style with his closest friends.

A bespoke menu, designed by artist Feliks Topolski, showed the group dined on foie gras, turtle soup, mixed grill and crepes suzette.

Many of the guests were members of the Thursday club, which Philip belonged to and would meet for lunch at Wheeler’s fish restaurant in Soho every week.

Notable guests included the Marquess of Milford Haven – who would be Philip’s best man six days later, Baron Nahum and journalist Philip Youngman Carter, who would go on to edit the high-society magazine Tatler.

The Queen

A lavish party was held at Buckingham Palace the night before the Elizabeth’s wedding as a celebration of the nuptials.

The event was recounted by American journalist Cobina Wright writing in the Journal-American in 1947 that the ‘magnificent reception’ hosted by the bride’s parents was ‘one of the most gorgeous sights I have ever seen in my life’.

The description via the New Yorker noted that Princess Elizabeth had worn a gown of ‘oyster white satin with a very bouffant skirt in which panels or paillettes were set in’.

Queen Mary is said to have worn a grey-blue dress with the ribbon of the Order of the Garter and the writer was astounded by the array of jewels worn by the guests.

She concluded that Elizabeth ‘looked fresh and dewy as ever last night despite the great burden of royal wedding preparations’.