We recently passed the two-year anniversary of King Charles’s cancer diagnosis. Charles has never disclosed what kind of cancer he has, but late last year, he announced that his treatments have been so successful that he was cutting back on the treatments and adding more to his schedule. That announcement really shook up the British tabloids’ death-watch industry, and it also hampered Prince William’s gleeful and macabre “I’m going to be king SOON” briefings. Nowadays, the only royalists still forecasting Charles’s “imminent death” are people like Tom Sykes on his Royalist Substack. Speaking of, Sykes’ latest is about how Princess Beatrice and Eugenie will not attend church with the Windsors on Easter Sunday, and how that happened. An excerpt from Sykes’ column “The Looming Death of King Charles is Why British Newspapers Can’t Tell The Truth About Why Beatrice and Eugenie’s Banishment is Permanent.” Yeesh.
A Palace briefing to the British press on Monday said Princess Beatrice and Princess Eugenie will not attend the royal family’s Easter church appearance this year. I’m fascinated by aides insisting the move is a one-off and that the sisters will attend future family occasions.
According to The Times and other royal rota outlets, it’s the princesses decision and one that has been met with the King’s “agreement and understanding,” which rather reminds me of the King generously agreeing to Prince Andrew deciding to stop using his titles.
Whatever the official line, the absence is a clear sign of three things: 1, that the sisters are out and 2, that Prince William is in charge now, 3, Nobody in the British media can risk saying that. Yet.
…When Andrew was formally stripped of his titles, styles, and honors last autumn, Charles made clear that the action was directed at him alone, and said Beatrice and Eugenie were “entirely unaffected.” But the fudge of the constitutional position of the princesses and their practical place within the public-facing family is now over. They are out.
What is really going on here, of course, is the thing the UK newspapers and the outlets around the world that recycle their copy can’t tell you: power is bleeding from King Charles to Prince William because Charles is dying. This always happens when a monarch is terminally ill: the heir’s instincts start to shape outcomes long before the formal transfer of authority arrives.
The change of direction is a humiliation for the King, who went to great efforts to show that the daughters would not pay for their father’s disgrace. That remains the official position in theory. Yet the public evidence increasingly suggests a different reality. The York princesses no longer will get to stand in the frame when the monarchy presents itself to the country.
For that reason, the Palace’s insistence that this is temporary is clearly just a face-saving bit of politesse. Once royals stop appearing at the set-piece occasions that define membership of the public family, return becomes harder, not easier.
Beatrice and Eugenie will never again, I predict, be photographed in the same scene as William.
In my earlier coverage of Beatrice & Eugenie skipping Easter, I also made it about William. My interpretation was that William threw a tantrum until Charles disinvited B&E from Easter, and William likely made his own attendance contingent upon B&E’s exclusion. “William is a brat who obsesses over shunning and excluding his family” is far more likely than “Charles is almost dead and William’s in charge.” Absolutely nothing about William and Kate’s behavior in the past year says “we’re going to be in charge any day now,” despite William’s briefings to the contrary. Just the fact that William is trying, in his typically haphazard, childish way, to take credit for B&E’s exclusion tells you everything you need to know about William’s lack of preparation to be king. He honestly thinks this makes him look regal, you know?
Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Cover Images.
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