While you might think of the royal family as being prim and proper, it turns out that the British royals can actually be quite messy.
From a shockingly racy phone call to an incredibly inappropriate costume, here are 13 secrets, scandals, and stories from the past 100 years of British royal family history:
1. In 1931, Edward VIII met Wallis Simpson, an American socialite through mutual friends. At the time, Wallis was married to Ernest Simpson, while Edward was next in line for the throne. By 1934, people close to the royal family began gossiping that Wallis and Edward’s friendship had turned to a romance. On January 20, 1936, King George died and Edward took the throne. Less than a year later, Wallis filed for divorce from her husband.
As the news of Wallis’s divorce became public, speculation that Edward caused the split started to swirl. People close to the palace allegedly urged Edward to prevent the divorce, because they didn’t want people to think it was caused by Edward. Just a few weeks later, Edward invited Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin to the palace, where he told him that he was preparing to abdicate the throne in order to marry Wallis. The queen reportedly told him to forget about Wallis and remain king, but Edward insisted that he could not properly rule without Wallis in his life. He signed the Instrument of Abdication on December 10, 1936.
Edward wasted no time proposing to Wallis, and they were engaged before the abdication was finalized. On December 11, Edward’s brother Albert took the throne. In May 1937, Wallis’s divorce was finalized, and the pair married on June 3, 1937. They stayed together until Edward’s death in 1972. Their relationship was a massive scandal: some even said that Prime Minister Baldwin urged Edward to keep Wallis a mistress instead of soiling the royal family’s name with their relationship. No members of the royal family attended their wedding, although Edward retained a royal title for the rest of his life.
2. The year 1992 has gone down in history as Queen Elizabeth II‘s self-proclaimed “annus horribilis,” or “horrible year.” Three of her four children’s marriages all ended and the proceedings all played out in the British press. Charles and Diana’s separation dominated headlines, Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson split, and Princess Anne divorced her husband, only to start dating a royal employee shortly after (we’ll get into alllll of those details soon!). To make matters worse, a fire at Windsor Castle destroyed 100 rooms. In a speech marking the 40th year of her reign as queen, Elizabeth said, “1992 is not a year on which I shall look back with undiluted pleasure. In the words of one of my more sympathetic correspondents, it has turned out to be an ‘Annus Horribilis.'”
3. Charles and Diana’s marriage was plagued by infidelity. In 1993, just three months after King Charles and Princess Diana separated, a transcript of an intimate phone call between Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles was published in a tabloid. In the call, Charles tells Camilla that things would be “much easier” if he “just live[d] inside your trousers or something.” Camilla responded, “What are you going to turn into, a pair of knickers? Oh, you’re going to come back as a pair of knickers.” To that, Charles replied, “Or, God forbid, a Tampax. Just my luck!” The phone call was instantly dubbed “Tampongate” by the media.
The scandal had people reconsidering if Charles was fit to someday be king. After all, the call had been recorded in 1989, which further confirmed that he had been cheating on Princess Diana during their marriage. “The backlash was savage,” Ken Wharfe, Princess Diana’s former personal protection officer, said. “Establishment figures normally loyal to the future King and country were appalled, and some questioned the Prince’s suitability to rule.” He also recalled that Princess Diana found the phone call “just sick.”
4. In 1995, Princess Diana agreed to sit down with the BBC’s Martin Bashir for an exclusive interview. In the interview, Diana opened up about her marriage to Charles and her experiences with the royal family and admitted that she had also had an affair during her marriage. She revealed that Charles’s long affair with Camilla Parker Bowles made her feel worthless. “There were three of us in this marriage, so it was a bit crowded,” she said. Diana said that she suspected Charles’s staff was waging a campaign against her. In addition to her revelations about the royals, Diana also spoke about her struggles with bulimia, postpartum depression, and self-harm.
After the interview aired, Queen Elizabeth II wrote to the couple, who at that point had been separated since 1992, and told them to proceed with their divorce. In the years following the release of the interview, it’s been alleged that the BBC showed Diana’s brother, Charles, fake bank statements that they claimed were proof that the media had been paying the royal family for information about Diana, in order to convince her to tell her side of the story in the interview. While a 1996 investigation proved inconclusive, in 2021, the BBC revealed that they found interviewer Martin Bashir had acted in a “deceitful” way to ensure the interview would happen. The BBC returned all awards the interview special won, formally apologized for their actions, and vowed to never air the footage again.
5. In 2010, Prince Andrew was photographed walking in Central Park with Jeffrey Epstein, the businessman who was charged with sex trafficking in 2019. It was soon revealed that Andrew had reportedly turned to Epstein to help him pay off debts that his ex-wife, Sarah Ferguson, owed to her former assistant. Epstein was recently free after being under house arrest for sexual abuse charges. Sources close to Epstein said that he was looking to rehabilitate his image, and thought that being involved with the royal family was the perfect way to do so. As the photos of the pair began to circulate, the press began poking into their friendship. They found that Andrew and Epstein had been spotted together at a party at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in 2000, and attempted to link them together at other parties and visits to Epstein’s island.
Before seeing the photos of Andrew and Epstein in the park, Virginia Roberts Giuffre had anonymously filed claims against Epstein, but after seeing the photo of him and Andrew together in the park, decided that she wanted to go public with her identity. Giuffre claimed that she was taken to London on Epstein’s plane, dubbed the “Lolita Express,” where she was told that she was going to “dance with a prince.” She was 17 years old. In 2015, she claimed that she had been forced to have sex with Andrew. The documents were sealed until 2019, when it was revealed that Giuffre said she had sex with Andrew three times. Buckingham Palace has denied the claims.
As more allegations about Andrew came out, Andrew decided that he wanted to share his side of the story during a BBC interview. In the interview, Andrew claimed that the only interactions he had with Epstein were to learn about business, as he had become the family’s special representative for international trade and investment after finishing his military service. Andrew also said that there was no indication of Epstein’s trafficking during any time they had spent together, and claimed that he had intended to end their friendship during the walk in Central Park. When asked about Giffure, he said, “I have no recollection of ever meeting her… I can absolutely categorically tell you it never happened.”
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