Why Did Prince William Have Blood Wiped On His Face in The Crown?

Halfway into episode three of the new season of The Crown, a teenaged Prince William goes hunting on the grounds of Balmoral. Walking across a grassy section of the massive Scottish estate with a gamekeeper, he spots a stag in the distance and drops to the ground. William aims the rifle and with a little encouragement from his companion shoots the deer.

The next scene shows William kneeling next to the deer while the guide dresses the carcass. The man reaches inside the animal and then takes his bloody hand and wipes it first on William’s left cheek and then his right and says, “Congratulations, sir.”

Spreading blood on a person’s face is an ancient ritual performed to celebrate a hunter’s first successful kill. In England, the tradition is closely tied to fox hunting, where the youngest person or novice in a hunting party would be “blooded,” with a brush of a hand or the fox’s severed tail. The term “blooding” has taken on broader meaning, which Cambridge Dictionary defines as “to give someone their first experience of something.”

The Crown, as its creators frequently point out, is a fictionalized account of the British royal family, and therefore William’s first kill and blooding may or may not have taken place in real life. But Prince Harry described in his memoir Spare a similar, albeit more gruesome, event in his own childhood.

In a 1910 photograph, the future Duke of Windsor (right) and future King George VI check their shots during target practice at Balmoral.

He, too, was hunting at Balmoral at age 15 with a guide named Sandy who helped him find and shoot a red deer. Sandy cut open the carcass, preparing it to be transported and then, “He motioned for me to kneel. I knelt. I thought we were going to pray,” wrote the prince. Sandy instructed him to get closer to the dead deer and then, “he pushed my head inside the carcass” and held it there. When Sandy finally released him, the young prince tried to wipe the blood from his face, but the guide said, “Let it dry, lad. Let it dry.”

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Norman Vanamee is the articles director of Town & Country.