It isn’t a secret that King Charles, long before he took the throne in September 2022, desired what he called a “slimmed-down monarchy,” with far fewer royal family members working for the Firm than his mother, Queen Elizabeth, once had.
But this—where the working core of the royal family is slimmed down to the absolute bone—is never what the King intended, royal author Gareth Russell told Us Weekly. In addition to King Charles and the Princess of Wales sidelined with their shocking respective cancer diagnoses—the type and stage of which are unknown for both—their spouses, in particular Prince William, have frequently elected to put royal duty aside to care for them. (In William and Kate’s case, there are also three young children involved that need to be looked after as Kate receives treatment.) Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip are gone, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle stepped back from their roles as working members of the royal family to forge a new life for themselves in the U.S. four years ago, and Prince Andrew’s association with Jeffrey Epstein cost him his royal career in 2019.
Outside of the four most senior working royals—Charles, Camilla, William, and Kate—Princess Anne, Prince Edward, and Sophie, Duchess of Edinburgh all work for the Firm full-time. The youngest of those three, Sophie, is 59 years old.
Russell said Charles’ view for a slimmed-down monarchy may not be “a mistake,” but the way it has all played out is “not what was intended,” he said.
“If you are to use the metaphor [of “slimmed-down monarchy”], the royal family is underweight at this stage,” Russell said. “It was never intended to reach the levels that it did. It was always anticipated that you would have [King] Charles III with three working siblings [Anne, Andrew, and Edward] and two working children [William and Harry] and their wives [Kate and Meghan], and that would be a sustainable footing for the monarchy going forward.”
But that’s not how it worked out. “So, at the minute, we’re looking at a monarchy that really was just holding it together in terms of the number of functions they had to attend and events, overseas visits, and particularly their charitable and military obligations,” Russell said, adding that Charles and Kate’s aligning cancer battles shows “the cracks turning into craters.” (In addition to Charles and Kate’s health scares, Andrew’s ex-wife Sarah Ferguson, Duchess of York, is also battling skin cancer after beating breast cancer just last year.)
Russell said that if the Firm doesn’t move Andrew and Fergie’s daughters Princess Beatrice and Princess Eugenie into full-time roles within the royal family and prepare for Edward and Sophie’s daughter Lady Louise to be a full-time working royal as well after she graduates from college, the current setup will prove “unsustainable,” Russell said. (Beatrice and Eugenie have always held careers outside of the Firm, and Louise is in college at the University of St. Andrews, where William and Kate met and fell in love in the early aughts.)
“At the minute, Prince William is the only senior working royal man under the age of 60 and above the age of 16,” Russell said, adding that only two women fall into that age bracket—Kate, who is 42, and Sophie, who will turn 60 in January 2025.
He added that when the time comes that when Charles, Camilla, Anne, Edward, and Sophie begin to scale back their duties as they age, “there is going to be a seriously underweight monarchy when potentially you would just have King William and Queen Catherine dealing with it, doing all of it until their children come of age,” Russell said. “The slim-down monarchy sounded a very good idea when there were so many working royals back in 2000, 2001, but, through a variety of factors, it is now something that needs to be rethought.”
