THE ROYALS’ SECRET WEAPON
Meet Sophie, Duchess of Wessex
In the not-too-distant past, Kate, the Duchess of Cambridge, might have been teaming up with Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, as she made a series of video calls to nurses in seven countries across the world. Instead, joining Kate on May 12 was Sophie, Countess of Wessex. The two royal mums put their fellow callers at ease, chatting about homeschooling with a military nurse in Cyprus who mentioned a family member was a teacher back home in the UK. “Be careful,” Sophie said. “She’s about to be recruited!”
She may as well have been talking about herself. Although Sophie, 55, has been a working royal for more than 20 years since marrying the Queen’s youngest son, Prince Edward, 56, in 1999, she has recently been stepping up to fill the very public gap left by the departure of Prince Harry and Meghan. Exceptionally discreet and quietly dependable, Sophie has proved to be “a royal key worker”, says Joe Little, managing editor of Majesty. “She is making a difference in a very understated, very ‘Sophie’ way.”
It’s being grounded that has earned her the allegiance of her 94-year-old mother-inlaw, Queen Elizabeth, who insiders say considers Sophie her favourite daughter-inlaw. “They are very close,” says a royal source. Sophie, who is mother to daughter Lady Louise Windsor, 16, and son James, Viscount
Severn, 12, “is very family-orientated, and the Queen appreciates that”.
Regulars in the school pickup line and at Scout meetings near the family’s home in Surrey, Sophie and Edward have tried to maintain a sense of normalcy for their kids –and fellow parents often don’t realise they’ve been casually chatting with a royal until after the fact. “They go to friends for sleepovers and parties,” Sophie told the Sunday Times on June 7. “I guess not everyone’s grandparents live in a castle, but where you are going is not the important part, or who they are. When they are with the Queen, she is their grandmother.”
Despite that pedigree, Louise and James are poised to lead working
lives outside the royal family when they grow up and are “unlikely” to use their His/Her Royal Highness (HRH) titles, Sophie told the Times: “We try to bring them up with the understanding that they are very likely to have to work for a living.”
Raised in a middle-class town in Kent some 65km south-east of London – the daughter of the director of a tyre company and a home-maker – Sophie “was brought up by her parents [with the idea] that there was going to be no free ride in her family”, says a friend.
She was working in public relations when she met her prince at a sporting event in 1993. In the wake of the turmoil surrounding the marriages of Prince Charles, Prince Andrew and Princess Anne, the Queen was determined to ensure that any new marriage would not fail, so Sophie had a gradual immersion into the royal world over more than five years. Since then “she has made Edward more downto-earth,” says his biographer Ingrid Seward. “His royal reserve has been slowly whittled away.”
Although today Edward and Sophie’s family is flourishing, it began with intense trauma.
After suffering an ectopic pregnancy in 2001, Sophie gave birth to Louise in November
2003, a month prematurely, while Edward was away on a royal tour in Mauritius. In the emergency, Sophie lost a reported four litres of blood. She then faced the agony of seeing Louise, who weighed just 2kg at birth, being whisked to an incubator 56km away in a London hospital. Today that experience informs her personal connection to Britain’s National Health Service (NHS) workers amid the coronavirus pandemic. “When she had Louise, she had first-hand experience of the amazing NHS,” says another friend.
Louise was born with esotropia, a condition in which one or both eyes point inward, which has mostly been corrected.
“It’s still not perfect, but none of us are,” Sophie told the Sunday Times. That experience inspired Sophie’s work supporting children with eyesight issues, many of which are avoidable.
During the pandemic Sophie has shifted her focus to front-line workers. Once a week she has been rolling up her sleeves to prepare meals for healthcare workers and hospital staff with Meal Force.
“When she leaves our kitchens, she generally then goes on to do more projects in different hospitals,” says her friend Peregrine Armstrong-Jones. “She pops up in different places and just does things.”
Adds a former staffer who worked alongside her on tours highlighting eyesight issues: “She has a simple connection with people when she meets patients and families. I think of it as scattering magic dust.”
“She has a simple connection with people” FORMER STAFFER, ON SOPHIE