Edward and Sophie step up into royal spotlight
They’re seen as the royal family’s safest pair of hands. So how do the monarchy’s most underappreciated troupers feel about a bit more prominence?
Sophie, Countess of Wessex, is advising me on how best to treat my blighted box hedges as her husband, Prince Edward, pours from an elegant black and white china teapot. “Ignore the dogs,” insists the Queen’s youngest son as he fills my matching teacup. “They’re completely mad,” he chuckles as Mole, their exuberant cocker spaniel, jumps on to his lap and Teal, their black Labrador, chews on a ball at my feet.
It is little over a month since Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh died and while the couple are in relaxed form as they host me in their verdant conservatory – overlooking the sprawling grounds of Bagshot House, their 120-room home in Surrey, southern England – their grief is still raw. Sophie’s eyes prick with tears as she recalls a moment during the funeral. “It was when the order was given to the soldiers to invert their weaponry,” she says, referring to the moment when military personnel at Windsor Castle bowed their heads and reversed their rifles in advance of the arrival of the Duke’s coffin in a Land Rover hearse. “Everything went still.”
Seeing her husband of nearly 22 years walking behind his father’s coffin was also “a real, ‘Oh my goodness’ moment,” she adds. “I think the fact that there were so few of us only served to raise the intensity of it.” Edward’s own sharp intake of breath came when the procession entered his father’s final resting place. “It was extraordinarily odd walking into St George’s Chapel and finding the nave completely empty,” he says. Coronavirus guidelines limiting the guest list to just 30 people meant the Queen was forced to sit two metres from her family – and well-wishers, banned from paying their respects in person, had no choice but to watch on television.
“It’s always difficult with these kinds of things because you’re in the middle of it, so you’ve got no idea what it necessarily looks like from the outside. It became really poignant to be there because it was suddenly so very intimate,” says Edward. Although Sophie insists, “You don’t actually think about lots of people watching, because it becomes so personal,” it seems she was as conscious of the face-masked Queen’s sense of isolation as the rest of us. “To see Her Majesty on her own; it was very poignant.”
Edward’s nephew Harry, Duke of Sussex, had flown in from Los Angeles to attend the service. While reluctant to get drawn into the ongoing tensions between him and William, Duke of Cambridge, Sophie is careful to point out how “nice” it was to have a lengthy chat with Harry at Windsor Castle after the service.
I inquire sheepishly, did they watch the Oprah interview? They exchange a glance, as if to dare the other to speak first. “Oprah who?” smiles Edward, feigning ignorance. “Yes, what interview?” chuckles his wife.
I share an anecdote about the Archbishop of Canterbury having a long conversation with Oprah Winfrey at Harry and Meghan’s wedding in 2018 without having a clue who she was. Sophie leaps to the Most Reverend Justin Welby’s defence: “You know, if you’re not into chat shows, there’s no reason why you should know who she is. Certainly not in this country, anyway.”
It soon becomes clear that the couple have not gained a reputation as the royal family’s safest pairs of hands for nothing. As we chat for an hour at their mansion, before they collect their children Louise Windsor, 17, and James, 13, from school, they tell me how they keep expecting to see “Grandpa” arrive in his green Land Rover Freelander. As regular visitors to Windsor Castle, which is just 15 minutes from Bagshot, the Wessexes have spent many weekends whiling away the hours riding through Windsor Great Park under the gimlet eye of its former Ranger.
Edward and Sophie have come together for this interview to pay tribute to the Duke. It is the first time they have done a major interview as a couple and also the first time they have spoken about Prince Philip since two days after his death, when they shared heartfelt memories with the media outside the Royal Chapel of All Saints in Windsor Great Park. In the wake of the Duke’s death – and Harry and Meghan’s departure – much has been made of the Earl and Countess “stepping up”, although as Sophie points out, tongue firmly in cheek, “What did people think we were doing beforehand?”
Having quietly spent the past 22 years serving the public with little fanfare, carrying out more than 500 royal engagements between them a year, talk of Charles, Prince of Wales, leading a “slimmed-down” monarchy when the time comes has unexpectedly shone the spotlight back on the Wessexes. And now, after Edward’s brother Andrew, the Duke of York, stepped back from public life in 2019 over his relationship with convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein, the couple are under more pressure than ever to bridge the gap. In 2019, Edward carried out more public duties than the Queen, while Sophie’s workload was heavier than that of William, his wife Catherine and Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall.
So how do the monarchy’s most underappreciated troupers feel about the prospect of a bit more prominence? “Well, we’re flattered is probably the best way of putting it,” insists Edward, who stood down from Ardent, his television production company, to devote his life to full-time royal duties in 2002, as his wife also agreed to relinquish her career in public relations. “Inevitably the spotlight and the focus falls on younger members as time goes on,” Sophie admits. “We’ve plodded along doing what we’re doing, hopefully doing it well. And then all of a sudden there’s a bit of a hiatus and things have changed a bit. Naturally, the media are looking for people to fill the so-called void. But you know, we have been doing this for what feels like a pretty long time! If people want to pay more attention to what we’re doing then great, because actually, that’s got to be good for our organisations and the work that we are trying to carry out.”
Acknowledging that his mother’s job is “not one you can walk away from”, Edward adds: “It just carries on relentlessly. So yes, the support is important, that we’re there.”
It is a burden he does not carry lightly – not least because he’s the one who will inherit his father’s title, Duke of Edinburgh, when his eldest brother takes the throne. Sophie recalls the time when, two days after their engagement, Philip popped round to ask his youngest (and, some say, favourite) son if he would be willing to become the next Duke of Edinburgh. “We sat there slightly stunned. He literally came straight in and said, ‘Right. I’d like it very much if you would consider that.’”
Edward is almost apologetic as he admits that “theoretically” the title should go to the Duke of York. “It’s a very bittersweet role to take on because the only way the title can come to me is after both my parents have actually passed away,” he explains. It has to go back to the Crown first. “My father was very keen that the title should continue, but he didn’t quite move quickly enough with Andrew, so it was us who he eventually had the conversation with. It was a lovely idea; a lovely thought.”
Philip was absent for the birth of his first three children but for the fourth, the Queen insisted he be at her bedside – and hold her hand throughout the delivery. Little wonder, then, that Edward, the “baby” of the Royal family, has always shared a special bond with both his mother and father.
According to Ingrid Seward’s 2017 book My Husband and I: The Inside Story of 70 Years of Royal Marriage, the Duke was the most sympathetic when Edward left the Royal Marines in 1987 – contrary to media reports that he had reduced his son to prolonged tears. She wrote: “He understood his son’s decision, which he considered a brave one, and supported him fully. Many in their circle know that each has a personal preference for one son over the others. For the Queen, Andrew will always be her favourite, while for the Duke it is Edward.”
When the Prince started dating Sophie Rhys-Jones, then a PR executive with her own firm, in 1993, his parents were delighted. The Queen took an immediate shine to the sales director’s daughter from Kent, who won plaudits in the press for her down-to-earth “girl next door” image and work ethic. Despite often being compared to the late Diana, Princess of Wales, who died two years before they married, Sophie largely kept her head down and quickly became the Queen’s go-to girl. Yet she has not shied away from gritty subject matters over the years, such as her work on gender-based violence and trips to difficult areas such as South Sudan and Sierra Leone.
I once asked a royal aide why the Queen was so fond of her daughter-in-law. “I think it’s because she never makes any demands of HM,” they replied. “When the Queen appears, even for private family gatherings, she’ll quickly find a crowd gathered around her. The Countess always stands back and I think the Queen appreciates that.”
Her Majesty must also see some of herself in her daughter-in-law. Listing all the volunteering she has done during lockdown, from batch-cooking for NHS staff to helping out at the local vaccination centre, which is ongoing, Sophie declares: “I’m no good at sitting still and doing nothing – I’m useless.”
Both have taken great comfort from the fact that the Queen remains similarly occupied, which, as Edward points out, “Doesn’t really give her very much time to dwell on anything for too long.” He says the pandemic was “staggeringly difficult” for his parents, who were locked down for months together at Windsor Castle. “For them, life is so much about contact, it’s so much about people – and then suddenly that all stops.”
The Wessexes had socially distanced meetings with the Queen and the Duke in the castle grounds. “We used to see them stand on the balcony, which was about 20 feet up in the air,” Sophie recalls. “We’d see them waving. We’d shout at them and they’d shout back at us. It always seemed to be windy, so we could barely hear each other.”
As the last of the restrictions are gradually lifted, the couple’s main focus will be on the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award. Both are UK trustees of the charity founded by the Duke in 1956 to help young people to develop skills for life and work. Edward completed his gold award in 1986, while Sophie went one stage further in 2016 by cycling 716km from the Palace of Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh to Buckingham Palace, as part of the scheme’s Diamond Challenge. Louise will complete her gold-award expedition next year, while James will embark on his bronze award.
Although their children embody the stereotype that the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award is for “white, middle-class achievers” (in Sophie’s words), the couple agree that the beauty of the scheme is that it has actually always been “for everyone”. Edward is equally untroubled by suggestions that youngsters only do it to put it on their university and job applications. “So many people used to get aggravated when young people used to say… [he mimics a stroppy teenager]: ‘I did it because it looks good on the CV.’ But if that’s what they think, that’s what we ought to try to do. If we can make it look good then employers will recognise it better. So we’ve turned what appeared to be a sort of backhanded compliment into something positive. Continuing to make sure it is open to all is by far the biggest challenge my father has left, and something I spend an awful lot of time trying to reinforce. We’ve got to provide the resources to make sure that it is affordable and it is accessible to anyone who wants to do it.”
I put it to the couple that, being much younger than the likes of Princes William and Harry, who grew up at a time when the Queen and the Duke would spend months overseas, Louise and James got to spend the most time with Granny and Grandpa of all the grandchildren. “The poor Queen has had to put up with us staying on much longer than anybody else in Scotland and Norfolk,” Sophie concedes.
It was while holidaying in the Scottish Highlands in 2003 that she took a remarkable photograph of the Queen and the Duke relaxing on the grass at the Coyles of Muick, a beauty spot in Aberdeenshire, which was published on the morning of his funeral. Edward roars with laughter as his wife admits, “I think I must have been the only photographer that His Royal Highness didn’t tell to get a bloody move on!”
Reflecting on happy times spent together, Sophie says: “Proximity certainly helped. Windsor is 15 minutes down the road, and of course because the children were interested in ponies and things, it was a natural draw for us to be there.” She smiles at her husband and says with genuine sincerity: “We were very lucky that the children did have so much contact.”
After a pause and with a hint of sadness, seemingly reflecting on one of the most difficult years the House of Windsor has ever had to endure, she adds: “We are still a family no matter what happens, we always will be.”
The Telegraph
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