The Unofficial British Royal Family Pages

Sunday 8 October 2006

The Queen's Cousins

One of my readers suggested recently that I should write columns on the Queen�s younger cousins, the Kents and the Gloucesters. Since the deaths of Princess Margaret and the Queen Mother, the Royal Family (meaning the family members who hold the rank of royal highness and perform royal duties) has consisted of only the Queen�s immediate family and her Kent and Gloucester cousins. They are the descendants of George VI�s younger brothers, George, Duke of Kent, and Harry, Duke of Gloucester. (George VI was actually named Albert and called Bertie; in the family it was the Duke of Kent who was called George.)

This is something of a historical accident. George V�s six children and their spouses might have been expected to handle the royal round for a few decades in the mid-twentieth century, but they all left the scene relatively early � George VI and his brothers Prince John and the Duke of Kent died young, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor were exiled, the Duke and Duchess of Gloucester were very shy, and the widowed Duchess of Kent and George V�s only daughter Princess Mary both died relatively young during the 1960s. With only a few of her aunts and uncles active during the first half of the Queen�s reign, she needed help in carrying out royal duties. For one thing, the royal family was working harder than in the past, knowing that their position was precarious in a modern democracy. Also, there may have been more work to be done � the late Princess Alice, Duchess of Gloucester observed to author Theo Aronson that in the past, �The local lord of the manor took care of many of the things we have to attend to now.� (Theo Aronson, Royal Subjects, Macmillan 2001, p. 105.) The result was that the Queen encouraged her younger cousins to take up full-time royal duties during the 1950s and 1960s, and having given them the job, she could not expect them to retire into private life after her children grew up and married. If more of her aunts and uncles had been available early in her reign, the younger Kents and Gloucesters might never have taken up royal duties.

So now we have a monarch with four children and six adult grandchildren, but the Royal Family�s web site still omits the grandchildren and includes the Duke and Duchess of Gloucester, the Duke and Duchess of Kent, Prince and Princess Michael of Kent, and Princess Alexandra. This online list makes it appear as though Princess Alexandra is eighth in line to the throne. She�s not. She�s thirty-second in line to the throne! The children and grandchildren of her cousins and siblings are all ahead of her (except for Princess Mary�s descendants), and while many of them are still minors, there are several adults who are not working royals who are much closer to the throne. The denial of the rank of royal highness to Prince Edward�s daughter Lady Louise Windsor may be an effort to prevent this situation in the future, so that grandchildren of the monarch who will be far from the throne later in life will not hold the rank of royal highness.

Prince Harry, Duke of Gloucester, was the model of the hearty, sporty, unintellectual Englishman. Despite many years of royal duties, he is remarkably little remembered, even though he lived until 1974, the last survivor of George V�s children. He was a career soldier and was Governor-General of Australia during World War II. He and his wife, formerly Lady Alice Montagu-Douglas-Scott, had two sons, Princes William and Richard. Alice survived him for thirty years, and I wrote a column about her at the time of her death in 2004. The Gloucesters preferred life in the country, but they also worked hard in public life for many years.

The Duke of Gloucester�s heir, Prince William, is never mentioned as a possible namesake for the current Prince William, any more than his father is for Prince Harry. (Incidentally, I think Prince William of Wales was named for William the Conqueror because he will probably be king in 2066, and I think that 2066 may be seen in the future as an appropriate time to dissolve the monarchy.) Prince William of Gloucester was something of a royal rebel � he lived with an Asian woman while he was posted in Asia as a member of the Foreign Office. He left the Foreign Office in 1970 to take on his ailing father�s duties on his Barnwell Estate in Gloucestershire. He was killed in 1972 when he crashed the plane he was piloting during an air show. His father had a stroke soon afterward and died in 1974.

Not expecting to inherit a title, Prince Richard earned a degree from Cambridge University and became an architect in 1969. After his brother�s death, he quit his job to take on their ailing father�s royal and estate management duties. Less than three months before his brother�s death, he had married a Danish woman named Birgitte van Deurs (her mother�s maiden name, which she took when her parents separated). They had met while he was an undergraduate and she was in boarding school in Cambridge, and after she finished her studies in Denmark, she got a job at the Danish Embassy in London in 1971. Their engagement was announced in February 1972. They seem to have had a happy marriage, and are such a low-key couple that they get very little media attention. Princess Alice lived with them until her death less than two years ago. The Queen appointed the Duke of Gloucester a Knight of the Garter in 1997. The Duchess just turned sixty, and the Gloucesters are likely to retire at about the time that the Queen�s grandchildren begin to take on royal duties.

They have three children: Alexander, Earl of Ulster; Lady Davina Lewis; and Lady Rose Windsor. The Earl of Ulster will be 32 this month. He married a physician, Dr. Claire Booth, in 2002. (The wife of the Duke of Kent�s heir is a history professor at Cambridge � George V�s family is getting more intellectual.) The Earl of Ulster is an Army officer, despite the fact that his title makes him an obvious IRA target. Perhaps partly for this reason, he keeps a very low profile. Lady Davina briefly emerged from obscurity at the time of her wedding in 2004 because she married a builder from New Zealand who is part Maori and who had a son out of wedlock. Lady Rose gets remarkably little media attention for a pretty 26-year-old royal; in fact I can�t find out anything about her except that she went to St. George�s School in Ascot.

I�ve gone on too long and will have to discuss the Kents next month. I�ll have to decide how many of the rumors to include...

- Margaret Weatherford

Previous columns can be found in the archive