What’s that they say about history repeating itself? The War of the Roses was also known as the Cousins War, when rival wings of the Plantagenets clobbered each other round the head with broadswords and yelled ‘knave!’ at one another across boggy, corpse-logged fields.
600 years on, the royal cousins are back at it.
The countdown is on to the next royal wedding and on the happy day, there will be ignoring the fact that Queen Elizabeth’s grandchildren have splintered into two factions, the In’s and the Out’s, thanks to some last minute cancellations and key names left entirely off the guest list.
Come June 6 at All Saints Church in Kemble, Cirencester, when public health service nurse Harriet Sperling will wed King Charles’ nephew Peter Phillips and Princess Anne will get to show off her Nutbush moves, it won’t be one big happy royal family on show. It will be an Ozempic-ed one, with only some beaming younger royals on hand to merrily show off best modern British dentistry has to offer and with a number of very awkward gaps in the line up. Imagine what that’s doing to poor Harriet’s seating chart.
Until this weekend all appeared to be locked in for Peter and Harriet’s big day, the RSVPs in, the S Club 7 tribute band booked – when Thames Valley Police made two major announcements concerning Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor.
First came the news that they are widening their investigation into the former Duke of York and are now assessing claims of sexual misconduct. (Andrew was arrested on his 66th birthday in February for misconduct in public office; he has previously denied all wrongdoing.)
Then the following day it emerged that their detectives are examining an allegation Andrew behaved inappropriately towards a woman at Royal Ascot in 2002, as part of this broadened inquiry.
Which is why, don’t expect to see Princess Beatrice and Princess Eugenie outside the church, chucking rice at the bride. The princesses are “mortified” by these latest revelations about Daddy Dearest, according to The Daily Beast and The Royalist’s Tom Sykes, and have decided to not go to the wedding.
The princesses, a source told Sykes, would “never want to overshadow the bride and groom’s happy day.”
They won’t be the only no-shows.
It’s probably very cold comfort for the Yorks to know they won’t be the only royal cousins missing the chance to see what sort of damage Queen Camilla can do to an open bar. What of Prince Harry and Meghan, The Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s?
They were, as the Brits say, NFI. Not flipping invited.
Harry won’t be there on June 6 because, as a close friend of the groom told the Daily Mail, “Peter and Harry haven’t spoken for several years and have simply lost touch.”
“Peter and Harriet’s wedding is an intimate occasion with their close friends and immediate family around them in the Cotswolds.”
Also dealing a cousinly blow to Harry this week is Mike Tindall, who is married to Anne’s daughter Zara, who seemingly mocked the duke over the weekend while appearing at an arts and literature festival in Wales. During a panel he said that he had known “Harry, when he was fun.”
This now joins the ever growing list of instances in which Mike has been decidedly loose-lipped about his former lager-chugging cousin in-law, describing Harry’s behaviour as that of a “bastard” in 2022.
We are now a long way from the days when the Phillips/Tindall wing of the royal family were being sent out to play Sussex PR interference. In 2021 at Prince Philip’s funeral, Peter was strategically placed between Prince William and Harry in the procession. Then in 2022, Mike and Zara saved Harry and Meghan from having no one to talk to and very eggy faces as they waited outside St Paul’s Cathedral in 2022 during celebrations to mark Queen Elizabeth’s Platinum Jubilee.
Those halcyon days of playing nice for the sake of maintaining some limp pretence of unity appear to be over.
So no Bea, no Euge, no Aitch, no M.
Happily for our soon-to-be newlyweds, they will have some cousins on hand and with whom they have a bang-up, top-notch relationship – William along with Kate, The Princess of Wales.
The three families – Tindall, Wales and Phillips – are often seen yukking it up together and a sign of how close the prince and princess are with former England rugby star Mike when they appeared on his rugby podcast in 2023.
Mike, in best indiscreet form, said of the next Queen of Great Britain, “I’ve seen her play beer pong”. (Though I’d bet the Queen Mother, should anyone have taught her, would have been a dab hand.)
Zara is in the same boat and is also clearly on seee-uuuper terms with Uncle Charles, regularly photographed putting on a shockingly unroyal display of hugging him.
Then, ten days after Peter and Harriet’s I Do’s, the whole tableau will play out again at Royal Ascot. Come June 16, expect to see the same wedding contingent course-side ready to put all the scrumped ten pound notes in their pockets on the gee-gees and slug back champers out of view of the press’ lenses trained on the Royal box.
Again, while Beatrice and Eugenie had seemed likely to also attend, that has now been nixed thanks to Andrew.
This comes after months of duelling reports about whether they would be invited at all. First came the claim they were off the guest list, only for Buckingham Palace to push back, because the King has spent too long WhatsApping the Archbishop of Canterbury, and believes in the sins of the father not being visited on their Ascot-loving daughters.
Again, we have another split in the royal family. While Charles might be pushing for his nieces to not bear the price of their parents’ moral bankruptcy, Camilla is among those “leading the anti-York faction”, according to the Daily Mail, with William vehemently bringing up the rear.
The Queen, per the report, believes that Beatrice and Eugenie should voluntarily stop using their titles, while William “is said to be concerned about his cousins’ links to Epstein, a subject on which both have maintained an uncomfortable silence.”
A source pointed out the Mail that the fact that the Prince and Princess of Wales did not publicly congratulate Eugenie after she recently announced her third pregnancy “is a sign of how things have changed.”
What this all means is that there are probably four hats, combined cost, about that of a second hand Suzuki Swift, long ago ordered that will now be left to gather dust in the princesses walk in closets. Bugger.
One person who has kept their sense of humour in all this – the Patron Saint of One Liners, Mike Tindall. When one of his rugby podcast co hosts joked, “he’s got his own bedroom at Buckingham Palace”, he shot back “Opposite end to Andrew, though.”
Daniela Elser is an editor and commentator with more than 15 years’ experience working with Australia’s leading media titles.
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‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.news.com.au ’
