Duchess Sophie once shared a touching comment about King Charles’ character
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Duchess Sophie once shared a touching comment about King Charles’ character during an overseas trip to Asia. As the Royal Family’s “secret weapon” and “saviour”, it stands to reason that the Duchess of Edinburgh, who celebrates her 61st birthday today (January 20), would have a strong relationship with the King.
In fact, Sophie appears to be rising up to her royal nicknames, travelling “tens of thousands of miles” and engaging with war survivors and refugees as part of her duties, according to recent reports.
Her globetrotting exploits aren’t a new feature of her role; the Duchess has embarked on overseas visits before, including to Nepal, a landlocked nation in South Asia known for its imposing mountains.
It was on this trip that Sophie, while visiting Maiti Nepal, a non-profit organisation that helps victims of human trafficking (which Charles had also visited in 1998), reportedly shared her views on her famous brother-in-law.
Roya Nikkhah, royal editor of The Sunday Times, who had been travelling with Sophie at the time, spoke on The Royals with Roya and Kate podcast about a “wonderful” woman named Anita who’d lived at the site since she was young.
Speaking in February 2025, Roya said: “It’s an extraordinary place and she now works in the sort of textiles area and she’d made this handmade cushion for the King and she explained to Sophie that she’d met him.
“And she showed the photo when he came all those years ago and she was much younger and she’d made this cushion and gave it to Sophie, who said, ‘I’ll be absolutely sure he gets it’.
“And it had a very sweet card written in it, saying, you know, ‘I want you to know how much your visit all those years ago meant’. Apparently, she told people, that people were saying, ‘What’s the King like now?’ And she said, ‘ Oh, he’s still the same’, hasn’t changed.”
Among the nations that Sophie has visited are Ukraine, Kosovo and Sierra Leone, having met with peacekeeping forces in the DR Congo and commemorating the 30th Anniversary of the Srebrenica Genocide.
Earlier this month, the Telegraph’s Hannah Furness weighed in on Sophie’s choice of causes, dubbing them “bold”. Indeed, she even described how it was “far removed from the soap opera of royal headlines”.
Hannah wrote: “It is difficult work: vivid, traumatic, and often far, far removed from the soap opera of royal headlines back in Britain.
“Not for nothing is Sophie regularly called the Royal Family’s ‘secret weapon’; the quiet ‘saviour’ of the monarchy which has been rather lacking in active members of late through little fault of its own.”
In further comments about the Duchess, she added: “The causes she has chosen to champion are bold, and she is unflinching in talking about the crimes that others might hide in euphemism.”