The Queen, her grandkids, and the incredible shrinking royal family
Erin Vanderhoof
In February 2003, an outstanding 21-year-old junior equestrian named Zara Phillips announced that spread-betting company Cantor Index would sponsor her first senior season on the riding circuit. The arrangement wasn’t unusual for her peers, but it made national news outside of the trades. At the time, Phillips, Princess Anne’s second child, happened to be 10th in line to the throne. By signing the deal, she became the first British royal ever with a corporate sponsorship for a sport. Eventually, Phillips would marry rugby star Mike Tindall, compete in the 2012 London Olympics, and become a sports influencer, securing many more sponsorships along the way.
In hindsight, Zara Tindall’s career can be seen as the rumbling that predicted the seismic identity shift she and her millennial cousins—including Prince William and Prince Harry—have navigated throughout their young adulthoods. For the queen and Prince Philip, the greatest generation incarnate, being royal meant foregrounding duty, tradition, and sacrifice, while their four children, the royal baby boomers, have doggedly pursued individuality under the dual pressures of the crown and tabloid scrutiny. The state of the monarchy that the elders are leaving behind—as popular and well resourced as ever, yet still so scandal-prone—ensured that the next generation of Windsors would have no choice but to improvise.
Though they differ in title, formal relationship to the palace, and proximity to the throne, the millennial royals—five cousins born between 1981 and 1991—all grew up in the shadows of their parents’ very public divorces. Tindall, William, Harry, Princess Beatrice, and Princess Eugenie all bear the scars of the era but have responded with their age cohort’s quintessential can-do attitude and hustle. (The three cousins in their generation who are not technically millennials, Peter Phillips, born 1977, Lady Louise Windsor, born 2003, and James, Viscount Severn, born 2007, aren’t too far away in age or approach.) With a bit of social media savvy, the royal millennials have sought to balance financial stability, respect for the queen, and desire to wield their influence.
Their ranks are also, officially at least, growing smaller. Thanks in part to social change and the queen’s and Prince Charles’s own shifting interpretations of the institution, the monarchy has spent a generation contracting in ways that probably will be irreversible. With the mindset of a neoliberal CEO, Charles has long been sensitive to the fact that government support for his extended family is an unpopular proposition. “Would it not be better to sit down and examine how many members of the family you need to fulfill the monarchy’s objectives?” he rhetorically asked in 1992, according to his biographer Jonathan Dimbleby, before suggesting they bring in a team of consultants to think strategically about the issue.
As veteran royal expert Sally Bedell Smith recently told me, Charles has already drafted the royal team for his reign, and none of the royal cousins is on it. “He said some years ago that he really wanted it to be himself and Camilla, William and Kate, and Harry, and that was it. I think of the balcony appearance after the diamond jubilee. Prince Philip was in the hospital, but his siblings were annoyed that they weren’t included,” she said. “Harry and Meghan are out of the picture.” (She added that Charles will in fact rely on Anne, Prince Edward, and Countess Sophie more than he had originally intended as the older generation of minor royals retires from public life.)
Though the plans for a slimmed-down monarchy are often discussed in the context of what we can expect when Charles becomes king, these ideas have already had an effect on the family’s day-to-day life. Of the eight grandchildren, only William and Harry have ever been working royals, a far cry from the years when the future monarch’s cousins could secure a plum position and a grace-and-favor living space.
During the queen’s reign, the monarchy transformed from an auxiliary unit melding the aristocracy and the government into a business with annual reporting requirements and a mandate to be self-sufficient. Royal commentators have predicted that Charles will be a transitional king. Part of that means clearing liabilities from the balance sheet in order to leave his own successor with as few potential headaches as possible.
With his taxpayer-funded office, William, the millennial future king, is the only grandchild left in the palace establishment. From a purely structural perspective, Harry’s 2020 departure for Los Angeles might have been inevitable. For years, Harry had been living in limbo. He wasn’t quite important enough to become a core decision maker in the family or even take part in William’s childhood lessons in kingship at Windsor Castle. Still, until his wedding, he shared an office with his older brother and kept a schedule similar to his. When Meghan Markle married into the family, she shared her husband’s lofty charitable ambitions, but they chafed against the limits the palace places on the minor royals—especially the financial ones.
For the rest of the grandchildren, exit planning began much earlier. The British system was designed to give automatic financial support to a monarch and their heir through private wealth, but the extended family has received funding at the discretion of the government since the 18th century. For generations, the minor royals did play an important purpose in the family and the country’s future, because an heir’s siblings functioned a bit like diplomatic bargaining chips when they were married off to fellow royal families across the Continent.
They were essentially made redundant as the dynasties of Europe fell in the 20th century. By the 1920s, the royal children were encouraged to marry British aristocrats instead of foreign royalty. The minor royals, like the queen’s cousins the Duke of Kent and Princess Alexandra of Kent, instead became charity patrons and people who could appear at independence days or church ceremonies on behalf of the queen. In fact, history had already done such a good job of eliminating the purpose of the minor royal that Charles’s enthusiasm might have been unnecessary. The millennials might be the first royal generation who are not only encouraged but demanded to work real jobs—of course, their gold-plated education and instruction in the ways of the Windsors have given them a distinct advantage.
Even in the face of such historical trends, a cold war has raged inside the family for decades. For the queen’s grandchildren, the most visible side of this has been through the dissemination of titles. When Anne married her first husband, Captain Mark Phillips, he declined to take a courtesy title, and when their first child, Peter, was born, he became the first legitimate commoner grandson of a monarch in more than 500 years. In 2003, Edward and Sophie had their first child, Louise, and announced that she should be styled as the daughter of an earl though she was entitled to be a princess. When James was born, he became Viscount Severn, one of Edward’s subsidiary titles, instead of Prince James. In a 2020 interview with The Sunday Times, Sophie said she has always told her children that they would need to find careers and life paths of their own.
For years, Prince Andrew was Charles’s main adversary in the debate over titles and the size of the royal family. He and ex-wife Sarah Ferguson decided to give their daughters, Beatrice and Eugenie, HRH titles upon their birth, and palace courtiers have said that their status as “blood princesses” is important for him. In 2011, Andrew was reportedly upset when the palace cut off the security afforded to his daughters. Later that year, Andrew was criticized for bringing Eugenie on an official visit even though she isn’t a working royal. (When Andrew lost his royal role over his connections to Jeffrey Epstein in 2021, the prince himself might have really ensured that his daughters wouldn’t have one either.)
Indeed, the 21st century’s royal scandals have come disproportionately from the family members who have public titles and private business interests. From Prince Michael of Kent’s increasingly problematic ties with Russian oligarchs to Andrew’s time on Epstein’s plane, it’s been trouble at times to have too many family members floating around with a history of drawing taxpayer support or even an HRH. So the next generation of royals who de-emphasize their titles to pursue careers and celebrity could be thought of as a clever bit of rebranding. The minor royals are increasingly able to contribute to the Windsor brand’s salience while giving the palace license to call any misbehaviors a “private matter.” It’s also a hedge. If the public wants more royal appearances, there is a whole roster of 30- and 40-somethings who might come off the bench.
The shrinking rolls might beg an obvious question about the necessity of any monarchy at all. But current data suggests no great rush in Britain to flush all the Windsor brand equity—in 2017, a consultancy estimated the intangibles are worth about 42 billion pounds—down the drain by becoming a republic.
“Those who are 65 plus…they’re really strong on their attitudes when they say that the monarchy is a good thing for Britain, compared to the 18- to 24-year-olds, where opinion is slightly more divided,” said Tanya Abraham, research director of polling agency YouGov UK. “Current polling is showing that around a third of 18- to 24-year-olds don’t really have an opinion of whether it’s good or bad for the country.”
Last spring, there was an anomalous result from the youngest respondents: A plurality said they would prefer an elected head of state—and they rated Harry higher in popularity than William and Kate. “That shift was quite a new thing compared to recent years, but it’s something that we’ll need to keep asking,” Abraham said.
The royal millennials are dealing with the transition at least somewhat gracefully, if only because the world is much more comfortable with people who are semifamous for their proximity to fame than ever before. Beatrice and Eugenie might be the most successful at maintaining the air of royalty while also snagging some of the freedoms that the working members of the family have given up. Eugenie’s Instagram handle is @princesseugenie, but neither royal uses her title in professional contexts. Beatrice is on LinkedIn as “Beatrice York,” which lists her role at the Boston-based tech company Afiniti as vice president for partnerships and strategy. On the website of art gallery Hauser & Wirth, you’ll note that the name of one of the directors is given as “Eugenie York.”
Still, they’ve been able to take advantage of that royal affiliation in other arenas. Both princesses’ weddings were paid for privately, but because Eugenie’s had a public component, the British government contributed 2 million pounds for security. By the time Beatrice was married two years later, Andrew had already stepped back from public life due to his association with Epstein and no public component was planned. However, she did borrow a dress from her grandmother—along with the Queen Mary fringe tiara that the queen wore at her own wedding—and announcements about both women’s weddings and pregnancies have been routed through the palace offices.
They both give public support to charities using their HRH titles, but unlike the royal patronages that are distributed among working family members with direction from the queen, Eugenie and Beatrice are affiliated with a limited number of charities that reflect their own experiences. Beatrice was diagnosed with dyslexia as a seven-year-old, and she has since become a patron of the Helen Arkell Dyslexia charity, speaking openly about the support the charity gave her while she was in high school. Eugenie had scoliosis, which was corrected by surgery at the Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital when she was 12. As an adult, she has become a patron for the NHS hospital’s auxiliary foundation, and the charity says it has raised 3 million pounds in the decade she has been in the position.
Meghan and Harry reportedly had Beatrice and Eugenie in mind when they mentioned a desire to have a hybrid “working model” like “other current members of the Royal Family” in one of the statements explaining their royal exit. But the queen has rules on these sorts of things—you’re either in or you’re out. From the Chinese commercials where Peter Phillips talks up the milk from Jersey cows to the details about Zara you can pick up in Mike Tindall’s podcast, the royals seem to have a lot more fun when they’re not living under palace supervision. And so Harry and Meghan went the way of their generation, becoming, in their singular way, content creators in the gig economy.
Yet there is still something royal about them. In 2013, Harry, Beatrice, and Eugenie all signed on as ambassadors for GREAT Britain, a tourism campaign promoting the country as a destination and trade partner. For the launch event, Harry traveled to New York City with then prime minister David Cameron before touring New Jersey with Chris Christie. Beatrice and Eugenie, on the other hand, toured Berlin in a Mini Cooper. As Harry travels the United States in the 2020s, commemorating 9/11 with Bill de Blasio, riding a double-decker bus with James Corden, or popping up in unexpected places like the Stockyards Championship Rodeo in Fort Worth, it’s easy enough to see him as a new type of goodwill ambassador for the motherland—at no cost to the taxpayer.
