This December is the first time since 2022 that my far-flung family (England, California, and Connecticut) will be home for Christmas, and I look forward to savoring every moment with them in the weeks ahead. I’ll be thinking about the Royals Extra community as well, nearly 21,000 of you who have signed on since I started in March 2023. I’m not sure what I expected back then, but I quickly found myself working full-time to bring you previously untold stories and rare photographs.
I hope I have fulfilled my pledge to offer you something unique and untethered from the hurly burly of news about the royal family, and I’ve tried to respond to unfolding events with a fresh perspective. After the shock of the double cancer diagnoses for King Charles III and Catherine, The Princess of Wales in February 2024, this past year saw the King continue his weekly treatments and the princess announce last January that she was in remission and focusing on remaining “cancer free.” It has been heartening to see her re-engage with her royal role. She has been dazzling in her appearances at state occasions, and she has energetically resumed her marquee project on emotional, mental, and physical development in early childhood.
It was reassuring only days ago to watch Charles announce in a video on British television that he has made enough progress that he can reduce the frequency of his cancer treatments in 2026. He was sufficiently hopeful to say this “milestone” is a “personal blessing.” Between the Christmas celebrations at his Sandringham estate in Norfolk, and his customary weeks in the New Year at Birkhall, his home on the Balmoral estate in Scotland, (Please see my January 13, 2024 Royals Extra: Charles and Camilla’s Scottish Love Nest), he and Queen Camilla can regroup after his busy year of almost 470 public engagements in Britain and overseas (Poland, Canada, Italy, Vatican City) including 97 joint appearances with Camilla.
In 2026 he will doubtless keep up his brisk pace at home and abroad. The biennial Commonwealth Heads of Government meeting will take place in Antigua and Barbuda next November, and as Head of the Commonwealth, Charles is expected to preside over the opening and meet with leaders about important issues. He may also travel to the United States in the spring before the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence on the 4th of July.
It is possible that the Prince and Princess of Wales will visit the United States around the Semiquincentennial as well. With three young children—twelve-year-old Prince George, ten-year-old Princess Charlotte, and seven-year-old Prince Louis—William and Catherine are more mindful of their parenting responsibilities than previous generations and have taken fewer foreign royal tours as a result. But as the heir to the throne, William has been assuming a higher profile and more royal duties.
The positives of the past year have been overshadowed by the shame of the former Prince Andrew. Because of his close association with convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein and other serious lapses of judgment, sixty-five-year-old Andrew was stripped of his royal titles by the King—chief among them Prince and Duke of York—and is now known as Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor. In the coming year, Andrew will relocate to a home on the Sandringham estate, stay away from royal occasions, and, if he is wise, perform meaningful service in a private way.
Prince Harry and his wife Meghan have continued to aggravate the King and Prince William, from whom they have been estranged since they left royal duties in 2020 and criticized the royal family in television interviews and Harry’s spiteful memoir. Meghan made a Netflix lifestyle series and a second podcast, but neither was judged a success. She and Harry also blundered with ill-timed public appearances. Their most recent embarrassment was attending the 70th birthday party for the Kardashian matriarch, Kris Jenner, that occurred on the eve of the Remembrance Sunday commemorations led by the King in London.
My Substack column has drawn deeply from my research for four royal biographies in order to give Royals Extra readers a better understanding of the institution and its key figures. An Insider’s View of the Royal Family, my three-part series about my conversations with Lady Elizabeth Anson, the late Queen’s cousin and confidante, provided shrewd assessments of Meghan, Harry, Diana, Charles, and other royal family members that were widely read. Additional columns that proved popular included The Iron Lady and the Queen, York Cottage at Sandringham: The Ugliest Royal Residence, When King Charles was Lord of the Isles, The King and His Wartime Commander, and It’s All About Meghan.
Those of you who are paid subscribers can see the Royals Extra archive of 163 columns, and I am enormously grateful for your support and interest. I hope that in the spirit of the holiday season more free subscribers will upgrade and pay by the month ($6) or the year ($60) to read my columns in full. This might also be a good moment to give a Royals Extra subscription to friends and family who follow the British royal family.
While I’m spending time with my family during this holiday season, I’ll also be thinking about Royals Extra for 2026. I’m planning a trip to England in April and will write about the 100th anniversary of Queen Elizabeth II’s birth, including the anticipated ceremony to reveal the final design for the magnificent memorial by Lord Foster in St. James’s Park to honor her life and seventy-year reign. (I wrote about it twice last spring: The Queen Elizabeth II Memorial in London Begins to Take Shape and My Pick for the Queen Elizabeth II Memorial in London) There will be many more stories, planned and unexpected, that I’ll be eager to share with my Royals Extra subscribers after the turn of the year. In the meantime, you have my very best wishes for a merry Christmas and a happy and healthy new year.
Sally Bedell Smith
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