With the British tabloids intent on parading Meghan Markle's numerous embarrassing relatives across their front pages, I thought we might visit some of the royal family's own less-than-highbrow moments through the years.
I have only included incidents involving currently-living members of the royal family, and I've rated these scandals on a scale of one to four Shocked Queens*:
1963: The Queen's first cousin, Princess Alexandra, is caught by a freelance photographer getting royally plowed up against a fence in a field by her new husband. The Palace is shocked at the audacity of the photographer to not only take pictures, but try to sell them to the tabloids; they promptly get an injunction to stop the publication of the photos. The photographer quietly slinks off to a new life in America.
1984: The Queen's son-in-law, Mark Phillips, cheats on his wife, Princess Anne, in a one-night stand with an art teacher that results in the birth of a daughter. Phillips and Princess Anne separate not long after. While they are separated (but still married), Anne begins a relationship with a member of her mother's household staff, equerry Timothy Laurence. She marries him in 1992.
1985: Princess Michael (known as "Princess Pushy" to the tabloids and privately called "Our Val" - a reference to the strident Valkyries of Norse myth - by the Queen) is married to the Queen's first cousin, Prince Michael of Kent. She
is caught by paparazzi donning a red wig to sneak in and out of the London home of her lover, Texas oilman John Ward Hunt (amid suspicions that someone in the Palace tipped the paps off). This comes just a year after the embarrassing revelation that the Princess' father had been a Nazi SS officer during WWII. Nor does the Princess' husband remain faithful: in
2006, American artist Lucy Weber publicly claims to have carried on an eight-year-affair with Prince Michael.1986: During a state visit to China, the Queen's husband
Prince Philip calls Beijing "ghastly" and tells a group of British students studying there: "If you stay here much longer you will all be slitty-eyed". While visiting a hospital
in 1999, he says a fuse box is so crude that "it looks as though it was put in by an Indian".In 2002, he asks a Scottish driving instructor, "How do you keep the natives off the booze long enough to pass the test?" and the same year, asks a group of indigenous Australians if they "still throw spears at each other?"1992: Princess Alexandra's daughter, Lady Marina Ogilvy, poses for a fetish magazine wearing a rubber suit, a crown and surrounded by corgis (the Queen's favorite dog breed). By the next year,
Marina is pregnant out of wedlock and sells her story to a tabloid: she says her father is a drunk and her "snarling" mother is cold, and they pressured her to get an abortion. Lady Marina later marries the baby's father but by the early 2000s is divorced and living on welfare. She has finally reconciled with her mother and the royals in the past couple of years, however.
1992: Audiotapes from 1989 of Princess Diana exchanging sweet nothings over the phone with her reported lover, James Gilbey, are released by a tabloid. He tells her he loves her and calls her "Squidgy" 53 times, while she expresses a fear that she might be pregnant.
Not to be outdone,
Prince Charles is caught three months later in his own phone-wiretapping scandal telling his mistress (now his wife) Camilla Parker-Bowles that he wishes he could be her tampon.Before the end of the year, the couple officially separates. They divorce in 1996, only one year before Diana's death in a Paris car crash.
1992: Sarah Ferguson ("Fergie"), having only just separated from the Queen's son Prince Andrew but still married, is photographed sunbathing topless while her American boyfriend, John Bryan, fondles and kisses her toes as her two young daughters with Andrew look on.
2004: Princess Michael, while visiting New York City, reportedly tells a group of noisy African-American diners to "go back to the colonies". She claims that she actually told them they should "remember the colonies" and assures the media that she couldn't possibly be a racist because she once visited Africa and just loved the "adorable" people there, and also she once dyed her hair black and tried to pretend she was a "half-caste African" herself. So there.
2008: Andrew and Fergie's 18-year-old daughter, Princess Eugenie, is found dancing naked on the lawn of her boarding school with other girls.
2010: Fergie is caught in a sting operation by the tabloid News of the World, offering to sell access to her ex-husband Prince Andrew and the royal family to an undercover reporter posing as an Indian businessman, in exchange for £500,000. She later claims she was drunk, but her former in-laws have had it and although Prince Andrew still supports her (even letting her live in a cottage on his estate for years when she was broke), she is excluded from most royal gatherings.
2011: Prince Andrew is caught up in his own scandal when a former "sex slave" of his friend, American tycoon (and now-convicted sex offender) Jeffrey Epstein, alleges that Epstein ordered her to have sex with the prince several times when she was only 16. The Palace denies it, but photos of Andrew with his arm around the underage girl don't help.
2017: Princess Michael wears a "blackamoor" brooch (blackamoor imagery typically depicts people of African origin in subservient, exoticized forms) to meet Meghan Markle (the first person of known African descent to marry into the British royal family) for the first time.
I've saved the scandals of Ms. Markle's intended himself, Prince Harry, for last:
2002: 17-year-old Prince Harry is sent to rehab for one whole day so he can learn about the evils of weed after he admits to his father that he has tried it.2005: Photos of Harry, now 20, dressed as a Nazi soldier at a costume party are splashed all over the front pages of the tabloids. The Palace issues an apology and Prince Charles reportedly makes Harry visit the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz to get some perspective.
2012: Tabloids get ahold of photos of Harry completely naked (but covering the royal jewels with his hands) while playing a game of strip billiards in Las Vegas with a similarly-nude young woman. He later says “At the end of the day I probably let myself down, I let my family down, I let other people down. But it was probably a classic example of me probably being too much army, and not enough prince. It’s a simple case of that.”
source /
source / me
* The "Shocked Queen" photo comes from that time Her Majesty apparently saw a cheeseburger for the first time and mistook it for a live cobra: