Prince Harry was high on laughing gas and ate Nando’s chicken at the birth of his son Archie

Prince Harry ate Nando’s chicken and got high on laughing gas to calm his nerves when his son Archie was born.

Meghan ‘bounced into a giant purple ball’ as she went into labor and then slipped into a bath and rattled off ‘soulful hymns’ as Harry lit the room with electric candles and placed a photograph of his late mother, Princess Diana, on a table in the delivery room.

Harry described the extraordinary scene at London’s Portland Hospital in May 2019 when he admitted he “improved” his mood with nitrous oxide, or laughing gas, a common pain reliever.

‘Meg was so calm. I was calm too,’ she writes in her memoir.

But I saw two ways to increase my calm. One: Nando’s chicken (brought by our bodyguards). Two: a can of laughing gas at Meg’s bedside. I received several slow penetrating blows.

‘Meg, bouncing around on a giant purple ball, a proven way to give Nature a lift, laughed and rolled her eyes. I took several more hits and now I was bouncing too.

She says that when a nurse tried to give Meghan laughing gas from the pain, nothing was left. She describes how the nurse looked at the empty tank and then back at him:

‘I could see the thought slowly dawning. Thank you, the husband has had it all. “Sorry,” I said meekly.

Harry writes that the mood changed when doctors decided to give his wife an epidural to ease her pain: ‘The anesthetist rushed in. The music turned off, the lights came on. Wow, change of scenery.

After a last minute concern that the baby might be entangled in his umbilical cord, Archie was unharmed and both parents wept with joy.

Later, describing the birth of her daughter Lilibet in June 2021, she quips, “I didn’t touch the laughing gas this time (because there wasn’t).”