13 royal family scandals that shocked the world

Over the centuries, royals and scandals seem to go hand in hand. Whether it’s about a queen who never married, rumoured infidelities, or more recently, royals who choose to leave their senior duties, it’s never a dull moment.

In January 2020, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, announced they will be “stepping back” from senior royal duties. “After many months of reflection and internal discussions, we have chosen to make a transition this year in starting to carve out a progressive new role within this institution,” the Duke and Duchess of Sussex said on @sussexroyal, their official Instagram account. “We intend to step back as ‘senior’ members of the Royal Family and work to become financially independent, while continuing to fully support Her Majesty The Queen.”

Not only are the Duke and Duchess of Sussex resigning from many of their duties, but they allegedly didn’t notify the Queen of their stunning announcement beforehand.

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In November 2019, Prince Andrew also announced he would “step back from public duties”, but for very different reasons. Andrew has been plagued by allegations that he had sex with one of the then-underage victims of deceased US sex offender Jeffery Epstein. His situation was made worse when he gave a disastrous interview to the BBC in an attempt to clear his name. He remains under pressure to assist United States authorities who are still investigating the Epstein case.

From the start, the relationship between Prince Charles, the Prince of Wales, and Diana, Princess of Wales had been strained, but after the couple separated in 1992, Charles and Diana began to publicly trade barbs about one another’s infidelities. Diana famously told an astounded global audience that “there were three in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded.” The ugliness ended abruptly in 1997 when Diana was killed in a car crash in Paris. Charles went on to marry Camilla Parker Bowles, the “third” in the marriage of whom Diana spoke.

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The abdication of King Edward VIII, while scandalous, was rooted not in infidelity, but in love. In 1936, the newly crowned King announced his intention to marry Wallis Simpson, an American socialite in the midst of her second divorce. Since a King’s marriage to a divorcee with a living ex-spouse would have violated both civil and religious law at the time, a constitutional crisis ensued. Less than a year into his reign, in an unprecedented and intensely criticised move, the King chose love over power and abdicated the throne, forever changing the course of history.

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Princess Margaret was free to pursue her passions in a way her sister, Queen Elizabeth II, never was. And pursue them she did, starting with an affair with the married Peter Townsend. In 1952, Townsend divorced his wife and asked for Margaret’s hand, but the surrounding scandal was too much for the romance to endure. In 1960, Margaret married Anthony Armstrong Jones, but the couple ultimately divorced, in part due to infidelity of both parties.

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The year 1992 will forever go down in history as Queen Elizabeth II’s “annus horribilis” (horrible year). That year, three of the Queen’s four children (Prince Charles, Prince Andrew, and Princess Anne) took steps towards ending their respective marriages. If that wasn’t bad enough, later that same year, Anne remarried despite that her ex-husband was still alive. Perhaps even more scandalously, this episode marked the first – but not the last – time a British monarch’s child remarried after divorce.

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The world had to have seen it coming, but the world was nevertheless shaken in 2005 when Prince Charles finally wedded the woman whom he’d loved since before he married his ex-wife, Diana. It wasn’t the first time a monarch’s child got remarried after a divorce (that honour goes to Princess Anne), but it was the first time the future King remarried. As a double whammy, Camilla’s ex-husband, Andrew Parker Bowles, was (and is) still very much alive.

Queen Elizabeth I never married, but whether she was actually the “Virgin Queen” has long been in dispute. From the moment she ascended the throne in 1558, rumours circulated of the Queen’s “secret” lovers. The most notable was Robert Dudley. Although in 1560, Dudley’s wife turned up dead at the bottom of a staircase with her neck broken, and the question became not so much whether the Queen was a virgin as whether the Queen was a murderess. Questions persist to this day.

King George III lost the United States in 1776 – and his sanity in 1810. But his most embarrassing scandal may have been his failure to persuade even one of his nine sons to marry a respectable woman in order to produce a legitimate heir. In 1795, he finally strong-armed his eldest son, the future King George IV, into marrying, but the sole child of that loveless marriage died childless in 1817, kicking off a “succession crisis,” which resulted in several of George’s sons dumping their girlfriends to marry European princesses in a race to conceive the next heir. Spoiler alert: the winner was Edward, Duke of Clarence, King George III’s third son, who in 1819 fathered the future Queen Victoria.