Youngest Daughter of Prince Andrew Announces Pregnancy; Nation Confirms It Has Not Memorised the Current Succession Order
Bohiney Magazine | The London Prat
By Isla Campbell | Central London | prat.uk/author/isla-campbell/
The Happy News and the Administrative Consequence
Princess Eugenie, youngest daughter of Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson, is expecting her third child with husband Jack Brooksbank, adding to the family that already includes two children and adding to the line of succession the specific administrative complexity that each new royal birth produces: an update to the official succession order, a brief moment of public interest in exactly where the new arrival will sit in the sequence, and a collective acknowledgment that the line of succession is longer and more complicated than anyone without a specific professional interest in tracking it can comfortably maintain in working memory.
For reference, and because someone is always asking: Princess Eugenie is currently eleventh in line to the throne. Her children rank after her and before her aunt Princess Anne’s children, which puts them in a portion of the succession that is more theoretical than operational but which is maintained with appropriate formality nonetheless. The new arrival will join that portion. The portion will be updated in official records. The portion will then be ignored by approximately 99.7% of the population until the next birth or death in the relevant tier requires another update.
The Eugenie-Brooksbank Family
Eugenie and Jack Brooksbank present, within the Royal family’s considerable range of public personas, a version of royal life that is identifiably normal in its domestic contours: they have children, they live in a house, they attend events, and Eugenie’s public role is defined more by her private life and personal interests — including her work in anti-trafficking advocacy — than by the formal royal duties that the “working royal” designation entails. She is not a working royal in the formal sense since that category was specifically defined when the “slimmed-down monarchy” was formalized. She is a member of the royal family who lives her life in public without the full institutional apparatus of official engagements and the associated public funding.
This position — royal without being a working royal, famous without being formally deployed by the institution — is a relatively new configuration that the current version of the Monarchy has produced. It has advantages for Eugenie (more privacy than working royals receive, more flexibility in how she engages publicly) and disadvantages (less institutional support, the specific difficulty of being famous without the resources that official royal status provides). She navigates it. The pregnancy will be documented with appropriate warmth. The succession spreadsheet will be updated. Both will proceed.
The Highgrove Meghan Photograph
In what observers are calling “a small but legible gesture,” a photograph of Meghan Markle that had been displayed at Highgrove, King Charles’s private residence in Gloucestershire, has reportedly been removed. The removal was noted through a “new snap from inside” that revealed the absence where the photograph had been. This is the kind of detail that Royal Family coverage assigns enormous significance to and that, read generously, might be a staffing decision, and that, read less generously, is a deliberate signal about the ongoing relationship between the King’s household and the Duke and Duchess of Sussex.
The Sussex situation — Harry and Meghan’s departure from working royal duties, their relocation to California, their subsequent public commentary on the Royal family, and the various ongoing legal and personal dimensions of a relationship between an institution and a family member who has written about it extensively and critically — continues to produce news without producing resolution. The photograph is gone. The story is not over. Both things are true simultaneously, and are expected to remain simultaneously true for some time.
Mother’s Day Royal Round-Up
Today is Mother’s Day. The Royal Family has posted the appropriate content. The Princess of Wales’s children have presumably presented her with handmade cards that will be photographed and released at some point. Camilla has received tributes from her children. Princess Anne, who manages to attend approximately 600 official engagements per year while remaining the working royal who receives the least gossip column coverage and the most genuine public respect, has probably been doing something useful today. Eugenie is expecting her third child. Lady Louise Windsor has a part-time job at the Royal Windsor Horse Show, which is charming. The Monarchy is being a family today, on the day designated for families. Happy Mother’s Day. The line of succession spreadsheet has been updated. Everything is in order, including the order.
More at https://newsthump.com
London continues to fascinate and frustrate in equal measure. The city’s ability to contain multitudes — the ancient and the brand-new, the absurdly expensive and the surprisingly accessible, the deeply traditional and the constantly self-reinventing — is what makes it inexhaustible as a subject. Every week produces new material: new events, new controversies, new moments of unexpected beauty or institutional comedy. The writers at The London Prat are paying attention to all of it, and this column attempts to add one small North London — or Central London, or Shoreditch, or tourist-facing — perspective to the larger conversation about what this city is and what it is becoming. The conversation is ongoing. London is always becoming. This is either its great charm or its great exhaustion, depending on the week and the weather and whether the tube is running. Happy reading, and do come back next week.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
