Duke of Windsor (formally Edward VIII)
Prince Edward was the eldest child of King George V and his wife Queen Mary of Teck. Born on 23 June 1894 at White Lodge in Richmond Park, Surrey, he was baptized three weeks later, on 16 July, by the Archbishop of Canterbury. His given names were Edward Albert Christian George Andrew Patrick David - but he was known to his family simply as ‘David’.
Edward VIII (Bundesarchiv, Bild 102-13538 / CC-BY-SA)
Edward was educated at home until he was thirteen, and then spent two years at Osborne Naval College on the Isle of Wight, before progressing to Dartmouth Naval College. He did not, however, complete his two-year course at Dartmouth – he left in 1910 when he became Duke of Cornwall and Duke of Rothesay after his father’s ascension to the throne (although his official investiture as Prince of Wales did not take place until 13 July 1911). He served as a staff officer in the Grenadier Guards during the First World War, and was the first in a long line of royals to become a qualified pilot.
As Prince of Wales, he enjoyed widespread popularity, thanks in large part to his numerous visits to economically deprived areas of the country and his successful trips overseas. However, he had little patience for protocol and the formality of royal occasions greatly bored him, a fact which greatly upset his father. He first met Wallis Simpson, who was already on her second marriage, in 1930 and they began an affair soon after. He succeeded to the throne as Edward VIII on 20 January 1936, following the death of his father. However, when it became clear that his position as Supreme Governor of the Church of England made it impossible for him to marry Mrs Simpson, he chose to give up the Crown in favour of the woman he loved.
Edward VIII signed his Instrument of Abdication on 10 December 1936, and was succeeded by his younger brother, Bertie, who chose the regnal name, George VI. Edward’s reign had lasted for 325 days and ended before he was officially crowned.
Many within his family, including his mother, viewed David’s actions as an irresponsible and serious dereliction of duty. He would never be fully forgiven. The former King married Wallis Simpson in June 1937 following her divorce from her second husband. The pair took on the titles of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. They spent the rest of their lives living abroad, with the Duke only returning to England to attend certain family occasions, including the funerals of his brother George VI in 1952 and his mother in 1953.
During the Second World War, the Duke – who, along with his wife, was suspected by some of harbouring Nazi sympathies – was appointed Governor of the Bahamas, a position he retained until 1945. The later years of his life were spent living in Paris, where he died of throat cancer in 1972, aged seventy-seven. He is buried at Frogmore in the grounds of Home Park in Windsor. The Duke of Windsor title became extinct upon Edward’s death.
Duke of Edinburgh (Prince Philip)
Born on the kitchen table of his family’s residence on the island of Corfu, on 10 June 1921, Prince Philip of Greece was the fifth child and only son of Prince Andrew of Greece (younger brother of King Constantine I) and Princess Alice of Battenberg (granddaughter of Queen Victoria).
Duke of Edinburgh
Aside from his Greek and British connections, Philip was also related to the Danish, German and Russian royal families, being as he was a scion of the dynastic house of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg. Despite this impressive pedigree, his early life was far from secure. With his father being held responsible for Greece’s military defeats during the Greco–Turkish War, Philip’s family were forced to flee their native country in December 1922. Philip was smuggled out of the country in a makeshift crib made from an orange box, to safety on a British battleship.
Exiled, Philip spent the remainder of his childhood dependant on the goodwill of various wealthy relations in France and England. At the age of nine, he was sent to Cheam, a prep school in Surrey, England – a venture financed by his mother’s English relations, who had by then adopted the Anglicized surname of ‘Mountbatten’. After Cheam, he was sent to Schloss Salem, a progressive school in the foothills of the German Alps, and from there, he advanced to Gordonstoun in Scotland, where he became ‘Guardian’ (or head boy) in his final year. He saw little of his parents during this time – while his mother was committed, on grounds of mental illness and against her will, to an institution in Switzerland in 1930, his father absconded to the French Riviera with his mistress.
Upon leaving Gordonstoun in 1939, Philip entered the Royal Navy as a Cadet, training at the Naval College in Dartmouth. It was at Dartmouth that he met his future wife, Princess Elizabeth (the pair had met briefly on two previous occasions). Philip served with distinction during the Second World War, aboard the battleship HMS Valiant and the naval destroyers HMS Wallace and HMS Whelp.
Philip and Elizabeth corresponded regularly throughout the war, and by 1944, the pair had fallen in love. Despite significant resistance from her father, George VI, Philip proposed to Elizabeth in August 1946, but the engagement was not made official until July 1947. The pair married in Westminster Abbey on 20 November the same year, after Philip had become a naturalized British subject.
After their marriage, Philip (who had been bestowed with the title ‘His Royal Highness, the Duke of Edinburgh) continued with his naval career, eventually gaining a promotion to the rank of Commander of HMS Magpie. Unfortunately, with the death of George VI and his wife’s subsequent accession to the throne, Philip was forced to abandon his naval career in 1952. In the months following Elizabeth’s succession, Philip was aggrieved to discover that his children would be known by his wife’s surname of ‘Windsor’ as opposed to his own surname of ‘Mountbatten’. This situation was partly rectified in 1960, when it was decided that those male descendents without a royal title would be known by the combined name of Mountbatten-Windsor.
Since leaving the Navy, Philip has devoted his life to carrying out his duties as companion to Queen Elizabeth II. He accompanies his wife on all State visits and overseas trips, as well as taking an active role in the running of the royal estates. He is also patron or president of over 800 charitable organizations. Having recently celebrated his ninetieth birthday, it is widely acknowledged that, despite his habit of committing unfortunate verbal blunders in public, he has been an asset both to the Queen and to his adopted country.
Princess Margaret, Countess of Snowdon
Princess Margaret Rose, the second and youngest daughter of Prince Albert, the Duke of York (later George VI) and his wife, Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, was born around 9 p.m. on 21 August 1930. The Princess’ birthplace was Glamis Castle in Scotland, the ancestral home of the Bowes-Lyon family – which is also famous for being the fictional home of the eponymous character in Shakespeare’s Macbeth.
Princess Margaret
Margaret did not receive any formal education, but was instead instructed at home by governesses. She had a particular aptitude for music, and began receiving regular piano lessons from the age of four. She was just six years old at the time of her uncle’s abdication, an event which precipitated her father’s ascension to the throne. During the Second World War, she lived at Windsor Castle with her elder sister, the future Queen Elizabeth II, and in 1947, having reached the age of sixteen, she relinquished her much-hated second name of ‘Rose’, becoming known simply as ‘the Princess Margaret’.
Upon her father’s premature death in 1952, Princess Margaret moved out of Buckingham Palace, which had been her home since 1936, and settled with her newly widowed mother in Clarence House. Her first great love was Group Captain Peter Townsend, who had been her father’s equerry. Unfortunately, the couple were forced to abandon plans to marry in 1955 when it became clear that Townsend’s status as a divorcé was an insurmountable obstacle. Five years later, in February 1960, Margaret announced her engagement to the society photographer, Antony Armstrong-Jones, later Earl Snowdon, and the pair were married on 6 May the same year at Westminster Abbey. The marriage produced two children, David and Sarah, before ending in divorce in May 1978, amid rumours of infidelity on both sides.
Throughout her life, Margaret supported many causes, particularly those concerned with the welfare of young children. She was patron or president to over eighty charitable organizations, including the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC). In addition to her philanthropic work, she also provided support to the Queen, representing her on many foreign visits.
In later years, Margaret spent much of her time on the Caribbean island of Mustique, where she had a holiday home. But, in the last two decades of her life, her health steadily deteriorated. A heavy smoker since the age of fifteen, she was forced to undergo an operation to remove part of her lung in 1985. In February 1998, she suffered a mild stroke, and a year later a bathroom accident caused severe burns to her feet. A number of mini-strokes followed, which left the Princess confined to a wheelchair, all but paralysed on her left side.
Princess Margaret’s last public appearance was in December 2001, when she joined the 100th birthday celebrations for her aunt, Princess Alice of Gloucester. She died in her sleep at 6.30 am on 9 February 2002, at King Edward VII’s Hospital for Officers, aged seventy-one. Her body was cremated and her ashes interred next to the bodies of her father and mother (who died less than two months later) at St George’s Chapel in the grounds of Windsor Castle.
George V
Grandson of Queen Victoria and second son of Edward VII, Prince George Frederick Ernest Albert was born on 3 June 1865. At the age of eighteen, George entered the Royal Navy, an occupation he retained until the unexpected death of his elder brother, Albert, from pneumonia in 1892. With Albert’s passing, George became second-in-line to the throne.
George V
In 1893, George became engaged to his dead brother’s fiancée, Mary of Teck, and the couple went on to have six children. George ascended to the throne, as George V, in 1910 upon his father’s death.
During the First World War, in an attempt to disassociate himself from Germany, George abandoned his family’s dynastic surname of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, adopting instead an altogether more English name – he created the House of Windsor by Royal Proclamation on 17 July 1917. He died on 20 January 1936, aged seventy.
George VI
Prince Albert Frederick Arthur George, the second son of George V and Queen Mary of Teck, was born on 14 December 1895. As a child, he suffered from crippling shyness and developed a debilitating stammer which affected him for a large part of his life. He also was forced to wear painful leg braces to correct a condition that is commonly known as ‘knock knees’.
George VI
The Prince, who was known as Bertie, married Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon in 1923, and the couple would go on to have two daughters, Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret. Bertie became King George VI in 1936, after the unexpected abdication of his older brother, Edward VIII.
A heavy drinker and smoker, George VI suffered ill-health for a number of years, and had a lung removed in 1951. He died on 6 February 1952, aged fifty-six, and is buried in St George’s Chapel in Windsor.
Queen Elizabeth, The Queen Mother
Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother was born the Honourable Elizabeth Angela Marguerite Bowes-Lyon on 4 August 1900. She was the fourth daughter of the Lord Glamis, and a descendent of the Royal House of Scotland. She became Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon in 1904 when her father became the 14th Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne.
The Queen Mother, photograph by Allan Warren
In 1922, Elizabeth was bridesmaid at the wedding of George V’s daughter, Princess Mary, to Viscount Henry Lascelles. In January of the following year, Elizabeth accepted a marriage proposal from Princess Mary’s older brother, Prince Albert, the Duke of York. The pair married in Westminster Abbey 26 April 1923.
In 1926, Elizabeth gave birth to her first child, also called Elizabeth, and her second daughter, Princess Margaret Rose, arrived in 1930. When her husband unexpectedly ascended to the throne in 1936, following the abdication of his older brother David (Edward VIII), Elizabeth became Queen Consort.
Following her husband’s early death in 1952, she styled herself ‘Her Majesty, Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother’. She remained a widow for fifty years, until her death on 30 March 2002, at the age of 101.
The Prince of Wales (Prince Charles)
Prince Charles Philip Arthur George, Queen Elizabeth II’s heir apparent, was born on 14 November 1948. During the first three years of his life, his parents spent a lot of time in Malta, where Philip was serving with the Royal Navy, leaving Charles behind in the care of his maternal grandmother and nannies. Charles was just three years old when his mother ascended to the throne to become Queen Elizabeth II.
The Prince of Wales
Unlike previous kings-in-waiting, Charles was educated at school, rather than receiving private tutoring. In 1956, he went to a pre-preparatory school in London, before following in his father’s footsteps at Cheam in Surrey, and then Gordonstoun in Scotland, a place where he was very unhappy. He spent three years at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he read archaeology, anthropology and history, before graduating with a second-class honours degree.
Charles married Lady Diana Spencer on 29 July 1981, and the couple had two sons, Prince William (born in 1982) and Prince Harry (born in 1984). The marriage foundered in the late 1980s, with the pair separated in 1992, and finally divorcing in 1996.
In his capacity as Prince of Wales, Charles has devoted his considerable energies to the support of many charitable organizations. In particular, he is known for his tireless work on behalf of The Prince’s Trust, a charity which provides help and support to disadvantaged young people throughout the country. He is also an advocate of organic farming and has used his knowledge in this area to establish a profitable commercial enterprise from the sale organic of produce from the Duchy of Cornwall, one of his private estates.
The Prince of Wales has often been an outspoken critic of modernist architecture. In the early 1980s, he brought himself into direct conflict with members of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) by describing the proposed new extension of the National Gallery as a ‘monstrous carbuncle on the fact of a much-loved and elegant friend.’
Charles married his current wife, Camilla (formerly Parker-Bowles) on 9 April 2005.
Diana, Princess of Wales
Lady Diana Frances Spencer was born on 1 July 1961, the third child and youngest daughter of Edward John Spencer, Viscount of Althorp and Frances Ruth Burke Roche (who later became known as the Honourable Frances Shand-Kidd following her second marriage). She grew up in Park House, near the Queen’s Sandringham Estate in Norfolk, and as a child socialized with Queen Elizabeth’s younger children, Prince Andrew and Prince Edward.
Diana, Princess of Wales
Her parents’ marriage was an unhappy one, and ended in divorce in 1969, an event which greatly affected the eight-year-old girl. Diana received a typical aristocratic education: she attended Riddlesworth Hall preparatory school in Norfolk until 1974, when she went to West Heath Girls’ School, a boarding school in Kent.
Diana married Prince Charles on 29 July 1981 at St Paul’s Cathedral. The couple had two children – Prince William (born in 1982) and Prince Harry (born in 1984), before divorcing in 1996. On 31 August 1997, Diana was involved in a car accident in the Alma Tunnel in Paris while fleeing from the paparazzi. She died a little time later in Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital. She was just thirty-six years old.