The King has made it clear that his nieces Princess Beatrice and Princess Eugenie will have their status “preserved” despite their parents’ fall from grace.
Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson will cease to be known as the Duke and Duchess of York and Andrew’s HRH title is in abeyance. However, the royal status of their daughters is unchanged. They will still be known as the York sisters — a “happy outcome of [their] father’s titles being extant but inactive”, as a royal source put it.
Although the King has banned Andrew and Sarah from family Christmas celebrations, he will continue to invite their daughters. Charles is said to be fond of both women, as is the Prince of Wales, their cousin.
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The princesses are not working members of the royal family and are employed in civilian jobs, but they will retain invitations to official gatherings.
Beatrice and Eugenie have endured years of revelations about their parents. An email published in The Sun this year showed that Ferguson had emailed the sex offender Jeffrey Epstein several weeks after publicly denouncing him.
Despite saying in public that he was “rightly jailed” and that she abhorred paedophilia, her personal missive described Epstein, who had by then been jailed after pleading guilty for procuring under-age girls, as “a supreme friend”.
The fact that the King has protected their daughters from their disgrace will provide some comfort for Andrew and Sarah despite their reduced status.
The princesses and their mother at the Teenage Cancer Trust unit, University College Hospital, London, in April
AARON CHOWN/AP
Ingrid Seward, author of My Mother and I: The Inside Story of the King and our Late Queen, said Andrew had “always been keen for his daughters, who are the only of the late Queen’s grandchildren to be princesses and use the HRH style, to be involved in official royal engagements”.
The sisters have attended a number of royal family events recently, including accompanying William at a Buckingham Palace garden party. However, they do not receive public money or carry out official duties full-time.
Beatrice married Edoardo Mapelli Mozzi, an Italian property developer, in a slimmed-down celebration in July 2020 during the pandemic. In a sign of the affection shown to her by her grandmother, she wore a dress that previously belonged to the late Queen.
The ceremony was conducted at the Royal Chapel, within the estate at Royal Lodge. Now, however, it is understood that neither Beatrice nor Eugenie is particularly fond of Royal Lodge, preferring to spend their time elsewhere.
When their parents were advised to stay away from the royal family’s Christmas celebrations last year, after Andrew was linked to an alleged Chinese spy, neither of the daughters spent Christmas Day with their parents.