In just a few weeks, Prince George will see his life turn upside down, catapulted into the rarefied world of Britain’s most internationally famous boarding school, responsible for producing 20 British prime ministers, three Nobel laureates and a few Oscar winners to boot.
The future king will no longer have “teachers,” they will instead be known as “beaks.” Drama classes will be in a professional-grade theater and uniforms will consist of a tailcoat and waistcoat, unless you’re one of the smartest scholars, who wear their credentials in the form of an academic gown.
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George is walking in his father Prince William’s footsteps and at age 13 will begin boarding at Eton College, the boys-only school near Windsor, in September—or Michaelmas, as the fall semester is called there. A semester is called a half, yet there are three halves in a whole school year, such is the peculiar tradition at Eton. It all sounds a bit like Hogwarts, the fictional boarding school Harry Potter attended in the J.K. Rowling novels.
The move, announced in June, was expected among royal commentators but is striking for its departure from William’s carefully crafted image as the British royal family’s resident normal guy. School fees are $85,000 a year, more than double what an average American first-time buyer puts down as a deposit on a home.
“I can see the problem. It does slightly dent William’s image as being the sort of everyman prince because it is elitist,” royal biographer Ingrid Seward, author of My Mother and I, told Newsweek. “There’s a very small percentage of England that can afford to send their sons there.”
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Far fewer than one percent of British children attend any boarding school. Eton admits around 250 boys aged 13-plus from around the world each year. It is truly for the elite.
This, coupled with his estranged brother Harry returning to live in the U.K. with his wife, Meghan, and their children, Archie and Lilibet, presents a challenge for Prince William, who is preparing to lead a monarchy with a popularity problem. Other polls are more favorable, but according to a June Ipsos survey, just 33 percent of 18- to 34-year-olds want to keep the crown, compared with 45 percent who would abolish it, though older generations are more positive. While an April YouGov poll found William and Catherine to be the most-liked living royals, Harry and Meghan were the second and third least liked of the choices, just above disgraced Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor. Having his brother and sister-in-law in closer proximity risks taking the shine off William’s popularity.
The Prince of Wales has long operated a novel solution to counter any negative perceptions in the form of aggressive relatability. He enjoys a drink in the pub—cider is his tipple—and he loves soccer. He supports Aston Villa, not a team for glory hunters, though they did recently win the Europa League, Europe’s second-tier club competition. He does the school run and enjoys a visit to the English seaside, often with the media in tow.
His Instagram account regularly resembles a J.Crew catalog, featuring pictures of him, Catherine, George and their other children, Charlotte and Louis, in preppy clothes out in nature—a far cry from the pomp and ceremony associated with royalty, such as the coronation of his father, King Charles III, in 2023.
According to U.K. newspaper The Times, William will aim for a more modern and relevant service when his own coronation day arrives. While Charles was known for airing his political opinions to government ministers via his “black spider memos,” named for his handwriting, William is more likely to be found on a podcast sharing his emotions and enthusiasm for sports, as he did recently on NFL stars Travis and Jason Kelce’s New Heights show.
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“Did your dad get you into Aston Villa or is this your own doing?” Travis Kelce asked the prince.
“Absolutely not. My father hates football,” William replied. The sport has deep working-class roots in Britain that aristocrats and royals would historically distance themselves from.
In November 2024, when asked about being a modern royal, William talked about “doing it with maybe a smaller ‘r’ in the royal.” The elder millennial said he was “trying to do it differently, and I’m trying to do it for my generation,” adding that it’s more about “impact, philanthropy, collaboration, convening and helping people.”
But there is only so far he and his family can go in their attempts to form a connection with ordinary people, as the choice of where to send George to school shows. William, and George after him, will become king, the head of church and state in Britain. Can William’s everyman charm offensive be enough to keep his subjects from calling for an end to the monarchy?
Seward said William’s relatability was fundamental to his vision for the future: “It’s hugely important. I think he sees this as the only way forward for the monarchy. I feel that a lot of things will change when—and if—he becomes king because they have to.
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“An institution like the monarchy has to change in order to survive. And it’s changed a bit but it hasn’t really changed, and I think William’s going to have some fairly radical ideas.”
‘I Know How You Feel’
William is indeed affable, and that appeal was on show during a July visit to the seaside town of Hastings, East Sussex, about 60 miles southeast of London. There, he met local fishermen and spoke to youth-led community organizations, even finding time for a round of mini golf. “You could have softened it slightly,” he told his competitor with a laugh after losing his round. Photographs show the prince relaxed and engaged, as well as more dressed up than others in a blazer and button-up shirt.
A mother introduced him to her baby, Sebastian, who burst into tears, the BBC reported. William crouched down and joked: “I know how you feel.”
While this all plays well for the cameras, make no mistake: William has a very unrelatable income. It is derived from a historic property portfolio, the Duchy of Cornwall, which has existed for hundreds of years to finance the heir to the throne, whoever that may be. It is worth around $1.6 billion and generates an annual income of a little under $30 million for the Prince of Wales.
William took control of the duchy in 2022 when Charles became king and is making some changes. Recent criticism included the duchy’s £1.5 million-a-year ($2 million) lease of the land on which Dartmoor Prison sat. Britain’s Ministry of Justice continued paying rent even after the prison closed in 2024. In June this year, the duchy responded by pledging to reinvest the money into the community.
It is not just the prison. The Royal National Lifeboat Institution has been paying fees to use duchy-owned beaches for launching lifeboats. A fire station and recreation grounds were also among community facilities reported to have incurred charges payable to the estate. William has put a stop to many of the contentious payments since they were exposed in an investigation in November 2024 by journalists at The Times, The Sunday Times and Channel 4’s Dispatches. He also revealed his tax bill in the interests of transparency, showing he paid a little less than $10 million a year in tax, putting him in the top 0.002 percent of taxpayers in the country.
Graham Smith, chief executive of anti-monarchy campaign group Republic, was not convinced.
“The notion of him being relatable is somewhat questionable,” he told Newsweek. “It’s good PR, but on the whole he wants to keep the hoi polloi away from him. He puts on a reasonable show of it but Eton gives the game away.”
Smith pointed to a drama over the security cordon around the Wales family’s new home, Forest Lodge, in Windsor. So big was the perimeter that locals were forced to take a one-mile detour to buy their Christmas trees last year. It is also not William’s only residence, sitting alongside his apartment at Kensington Palace and Anmer Hall, his house on the Sandringham Estate in Norfolk.
“His life is completely detached from the lives of ordinary people,” Smith said. “There’s no way he can be relatable. He can’t understand the lives of ordinary people any more than we can understand his life or what we know of it.”
‘Privilege, Entitlement and Omniscience’
When it comes to schools, though, parents do not compromise on their children’s futures, at least not unless they have to. And there are many reasons why the Wales family, who live around a 15-minute drive away, may have seen Eton as preferable.
Royal biographer Robert Jobson, author of The Windsor Legacy, told Newsweek: “It’s great for the royals because they can see him playing rugby, or whatever; it’s all very close by. It also benefited William when he was at Eton because he could go and have tea with the queen [Elizabeth II], who was very close by. George will be able to do that with the king.”
William revealed recently that George had experimented with boarding overnight at his current school, Lambrook, in Berkshire. The problem with Eton, though, is that it has, in recent years, been a cultural lightning rod in Britain for those who argue the country should not be run by a privately educated elite.
Allegations of privilege have dogged prominent politicians educated at the college, including former Prime Minister Boris Johnson of the Conservative Party. A former Eton school master said in a 2023 letter to The Times that the school’s “most important mission will be to ensure that its pupils are saved from the sense of privilege, entitlement and omniscience that can produce alumni such as Boris Johnson” and other Conservative Party politicians and “thereby damage a country’s very fabric.”
“Sadly, I failed in that purpose,” he concluded.
In 2020, at the height of the Johnson era, British actor Danny Dyer, who currently stars in Disney+ and Hulu show Rivals, told the BBC: “We must learn now that the people who went to Eton can’t run this country. They’ve done it, they’ve tried to do it and this little small group who all went to the same school, in the same class… it doesn’t work.”
They say a picture tells a thousand words, and Eton boys are immediately distinguishable from ordinary British school pupils by their uniform. Tom Sykes, behind the The Royalist podcast and Substack, and European editor-at-large of the Daily Beast, spent three years there and told Newsweek: “You arrive on the first day and get into your uniform, a tailcoat and a little paper tie, which folds over the stud, and you go along to the chapel. You sit there and the headmaster comes out and says, ‘Where you’re sitting, [poet] Percy Bysshe Shelley sat there, 20 prime ministers…
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“From the very beginning there is this message, which in my day was much more, ‘You’re special,’ but now, from what I understand, it’s much more, ‘You’re unbelievably privileged, don’t mess this up.’”
Eton is a place of rituals. Some are passed down by the school itself, including the wall game, a mixture of soccer and rugby which is not played anywhere else. It is easy to see why. There are three ways to score but it doesn’t happen often. A 2021 article on the school’s website read: “A goal is a particularly rare phenomenon, with only three having been scored in a St Andrew’s Day match in the entire history of wall game and none for more than one hundred years.” Almost half of matches end in ties and “no point has been scored by any team in a major match since 2016.”
Other rituals are passed on by the boys. “The beds folded up into the wall,” Sykes said. “You had to put your bed up in the morning. In your early years you would be ‘lampposted,’ which is where the older boys would slam everybody up into the wall while you were still lying in your bed. I’m not sure whether Prince George will be lampposted or not. I hadn’t been to a boarding school before so it came as a massive culture shock to me.”
There are perks, of course. Tap is the school pub where the kids can drink weak beer and cider from age 16 onward, with written permission from their parents, skirting the age limit of 18 applied to the rest of the country because it is a private club.
“You weren’t supposed to drink more than two pints,” Sykes said, “but in my day, in practice, you could drink as much as you wanted as long as you could stand up at the bar.”
George will likely have the freedom to explore Eton, with his police protection officers close by at all times, and some Eton boys sneak off to London for nights out, scurrying home on the train in time for morning register. “William and [his brother Prince] Harry, their police guards said ‘our only job is to keep you safe,’” Sykes said, “not to enforce the school rules.”
‘Old Etonian Is a Stigma’
Prince Harry, who also attended Eton, described the school’s distinctive culture—and nicknames—in his memoir, Spare.
“Classes were no longer classes: they were divs,” he wrote. Teachers were beaks and “cigarettes were tabbage…. Chambers was the mid-morning meeting of the beaks, when they discussed the students, especially the problem students. I often felt my ears burning during Chambers.”
Charles had a similarly tough time at his boarding school, Gordonstoun, in northeast Scotland. Notorious for cold showers and sending pupils on early morning runs, he has likened it to a World War II prisoner-of-war camp, calling it “Colditz in kilts.”
Sykes, however, believes the Wales family has made the right choice to send George to Eton and that the public would be understanding about the elitist associations. “I think it’s a brilliant choice of school for George because, among his peers and school, he will have a level of normality that he could not have anywhere else,” he said. Normality is, of course, a relative concept and being surrounded by an elite used to brushing shoulders with princes means royals can experience not being treated as special at Eton. The facilities, though, are very special.
“They don’t have a school auditorium,” Sykes said, “they have the Farrer Theatre, which is literally a professional-level theater with lighting where people like Dominic West and Damian Lewis performed.”
The actor Eddie Redmayne was in the same year as William and went on to win the Best Actor Oscar for his portrayal of physicist Stephen Hawking in the film The Theory of Everything in 2015. Tom Hiddleston, who plays Loki in Marvel films and a Disney+ series, also attended the school, as did James Bond creator Ian Fleming and Brave New World author Aldous Huxley.
West, who would later play Charles in The Crown, was not wholly positive about Eton during a 2012 appearance on The Graham Norton Show. “Old Etonian is a stigma that is slightly above ‘pedophile’ in the media in a gallery of infamy,” he said.
Eton is a case study in understanding the challenges of modern monarchy. Like the royal family, it was once an institution built on birthright and privilege. The rich and powerful signed up their children at birth in the belief an education there would turn them into the best and brightest, whatever their starting point.
Nowadays, Sykes says, Eton offers financial discounts to some of the brightest pupils in the country, eager no doubt to ensure its classrooms remain full of the leaders of the future. In other words, it dealt with the assault on privilege by attempting to become more meritocratic, a sidestep that the monarchy cannot take without sacrificing the very concept of birthright on which it is based.
“You could get in if you were a bit thick,” Sykes said, “as long as you went to the right school. Now it’s an incredibly academic school. Something incredible like 20 percent of the kids are on some form of financial assistance.”
That makes sending a child there a bigger decision than perhaps it was in the past. Harry, for example, felt a little out of his depth.
“The finest school in the world for boys, Eton was meant to be a shock, I think,” Harry wrote in Spare. “Heaven for brilliant boys, it could thus only be purgatory for one very unbrilliant boy.”
Sibling Rivalry Returns
Now it is William who faces a form of purgatory with the return of Harry, six years after he and Meghan quit the palace for a new life in the U.S. The Duke and Duchess of Sussex left under a cloud, as their relationship with William and Catherine deteriorated badly before “Megxit” happened.
Upon learning of his brother’s imminent return, William was said to have been “apoplectic.”
For months now, the British media will be wall-to-wall Harry and Meghan. We still have no idea where they are living, where the children will go to school—Archie is too young for Eton, although there have been rumors in the press that Harry has expressed an interest in the school—how much they will be seen in public or whether they’ll get police protection. But people will expect answers to all these questions.
And that will push William’s more tame charity visits and trips to seaside towns to the back pages as the royal soap opera takes center stage.
Clearly, the reason for their return has something, if not everything, to do with the big Sussex implosion, when their U.S. popularity crashed, the American media began to shrug its shoulders at their story of royal rejection and the public failed to tune in to their shows, like Netflix’s With Love, Meghan.
The Sussexes will want to rehabilitate their image in the U.K., so competition for the limelight will become more intense and William’s ability to shape the royal narrative will get more difficult.
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Jobson said: “This puts William in a bit of an invidious position. I think he’ll probably rise above it for the time being and see how the dust settles and what exactly this actually means in the long term before getting involved or committing himself.
“But it’s not great for William because, ultimately, they’re allowed to do commercial things in this country. It’s going to muddy the waters for William and what William is trying to achieve as he prepares for the throne.”
To the average member of the public, any charity visits Harry makes in Britain will look very much the same as William’s, despite the fact that Harry will not be a working royal. Harry may well also try over the years to persuade Charles to budge on that issue too, though William will be steadfast in the no, never camp.
The biggest trump card William holds over Harry is that it is he who will be king. But projecting that power over his brother, as Harry has accused him of doing before, belies the everyman image William has so carefully crafted.
Illustration by Mona Eing and Michael Meißner for Newsweek