Why do we love to hate Eugenie and Beatrice?
Post royal wedding, The Kit’s Sarah Laing considers the challenges faced by the lesser royals
There’s a line from “The Great Gatsby” that feels apropos in the aftermath of Princess Eugenie’s wedding.
It’s not, weirdly, the passage about Jay Gatsby (and how the notorious con artist skilfully manipulated the people around him) that was read at her ceremony on Oct. 12. Rather, it’s that famous closing line to Fitzgerald’s masterpiece: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
This wedding, you see, was supposed to be Eugenie’s big moment in the royal spotlight — her chance to be the centre of attention, instead of half a duo on the fringes of the Windsor clan. And it was all going so well until Princess Beatrice delivered that reading. Eugenie looked so properly princess-y in her Peter Pilotto gown. Prince Philip attended, so he must not hate her like he hates her mom. British modelactress Cara Delevingne was there, lending an aura of cool to the proceedings. Even Beatrice’s decision to give a reading was a triumph of sorts, since the maid of honour had once struggled with dyslexia. All in all, it had the makings to be a great step off the royal sidelines for both sisters.
Until, with one poorly selected lectern moment, the siblings were back to what they’ve so often been in the public eye: objects of fun, targets of ridicule, and stand-ins for everything that’s mockable about a modern monarchy: “spoiled, rich, empty fools,” as one Twitter user remarked when drawing a comparison to these Windsors and the Fitzgerald characters they chose to conjure up on their wedding morning.
Beatrice and Eugenie have always occupied an uneasy spot within the popular imagination. They are not technically “working”
royals, and hold no official role in the family business, so we only really see them on the red letter occasions — Trooping the Colour, church on Christmas Day, other royal weddings — travelling together and wearing ever more improbable head gear. When they happen to get some attention, it’s generally negative. Examples: the major eye rolls to an interview they gave to British Vogue this year, protesting how “normal” they are; the thorough roasting their over-the-top fascinator choices at Will and Kate’s wedding earned them, and the way they manage to be characterized as the silliest of an incredibly silly bunch on the satire The Windsors. (Eugenie also only had 36 hours in the public spotlight until Meghan Markle dropped the media bomb of her impending royal baby. It’s rumoured
that the soon-to-be parents actually shared the news with family at Eugenie’s wedding, which is the ultimate thunder-stealing play.)
Mostly though, we understand Beatrice and Eugenie in contrast to the other Windsor sibling duo: William and Harry. These royal cousins are all players in the same sagas, but their public casting could not be more different. The brothers are the main characters in a sweeping drama, full of tragedy and redemption, and
the sisters are well … the comic relief, the Yorick to their Hamlet, as it were. If this were a Disney film, Harry and Wills always get to be the honourable princes, Meghan and Kate are their beautiful princesses. Beatrice and Eugenie? They’re the ugly stepsisters.
That they’re treated this way has, as most fairy tales do, everything to do with what happened once upon a time. Both sets of siblings are the products of very public divorces, but whereas Charles and Diana’s was all very tragic, full of pathos and “there were three of us in that marriage,” Fergie and Andrew’s was a tabloid-y farce best remembered as The One Where She Was Photographed Sucking Some Guy’s Toes. Post-divorce, both Fergie and Andrew have bumbled from sensational scandal to embarrassing fracas.
Diana’s untimely death, on the other hand, put her on a fast track to sainthood, and her sons live in the glow of that halo.
Beatrice and Eugenie, however, live in the shadows of Daily Mail stories about how their father is a close friend of a convicted sex offender and their mother tried to make money by selling access to the Royal Family. The result? Both Harry and Beatrice, for example, are memes: but while his is a GIF of a heart-melting lip bite, hers is for a fascinator the internet thinks looked like a toilet seat. Hearing the announcement of William’s wedding felt like getting happy news about your oldest and dearest friend, while learning that Eugenie was having a public royal wedding felt more like getting a save the date from that girl who lived on your floor in first year and who you haven’t seen in 10 years.
All of which brings us to last week’s royal wedding, and whether it’s done anything at all to change the way that we, the public, think about Eugenie … and Beatrice. If anything, it’s helped us see them as two separate people, rather than one entity topped off with controversial headgear. Putting their various vulnerabilities on display — Eugenie choosing to highlight her scoliosis scar, Beatrice tackling reading in front of 3 million people, collectively letting their messy parental situation play out for an international audience — may go a long way toward endearing us to them.
It also helps us to remember that, much like the evil stepsisters of Cinderella fame, there is always more to the story, and that with time, they’ll hopefully be allowed to develop into women of substance and purpose of their own.