In February 2003, an outstanding 21-year-old junior equestrian named Zara Phillips announced that spread-betting company Cantor Index would sponsor her first senior season on the riding circuit. The arrangement wasn’t unusual for her peers, but it made national news outside of the trades. At the time, Phillips, Princess Anne’s second child, happened to be 10th in line to the throne. By signing the deal, she became the first British royal ever with a corporate sponsorship for a sport. Eventually, Phillips would marry rugby star Mike Tindall, compete in the 2012 London Olympics, and become a sports influencer, securing many more sponsorships along the way.
In hindsight, Zara Tindall’s career can be seen as the rumbling that predicted the seismic identity shift she and her millennial cousins—including Prince William and Prince Harry—have navigated throughout their young adulthoods. For the queen and Prince Philip, the greatest generation incarnate, being royal meant foregrounding duty, tradition, and sacrifice, while their four children, the royal baby boomers, have doggedly pursued individuality under the dual pressures of the crown and tabloid scrutiny. The state of the monarchy that the elders are leaving behind—as popular and well resourced as ever, yet still so scandal-prone—ensured that the next generation of Windsors would have no choice but to improvise.
Though they differ in title, formal relationship to the palace, and proximity to the throne, the millennial royals—five cousins born between 1981 and 1991—all grew up in the shadows of their parents’ very public divorces. Tindall, William, Harry, Princess Beatrice, and Princess Eugenie all bear the scars of the era but have responded with their age cohort’s quintessential can-do attitude and hustle. (The three cousins in their generation who are not technically millennials, Peter Phillips, born 1977, Lady Louise Windsor, born 2003, and James, Viscount Severn, born 2007, aren’t too far away in age or approach.) With a bit of social media savvy, the royal millennials have sought to balance financial stability, respect for the queen, and desire to wield their influence.
Their ranks are also, officially at least, growing smaller. Thanks in part to social change and the queen’s and Prince Charles’s own shifting interpretations of the institution, the monarchy has spent a generation contracting in ways that probably will be irreversible. With the mindset of a neoliberal CEO, Charles has long been sensitive to the fact that government support for his extended family is an unpopular proposition. “Would it not be better to sit down and examine how many members of the family you need to fulfill the monarchy’s objectives?” he rhetorically asked in 1992, according to his biographer Jonathan Dimbleby, before suggesting they bring in a team of consultants to think strategically about the issue.
As veteran royal expert Sally Bedell Smith recently told me, Charles has already drafted the royal team for his reign, and none of the royal cousins is on it. “He said some years ago that he really wanted it to be himself and Camilla, William and Kate, and Harry, and that was it. I think of the balcony appearance after the diamond jubilee. Prince Philip was in the hospital, but his siblings were annoyed that they weren’t included,” she said. “Harry and Meghan are out of the picture.” (She added that Charles will in fact rely on Anne, Prince Edward, and Countess Sophie more than he had originally intended as the older generation of minor royals retires from public life.)
Though the plans for a slimmed-down monarchy are often discussed in the context of what we can expect when Charles becomes king, these ideas have already had an effect on the family’s day-to-day life. Of the eight grandchildren, only William and Harry have ever been working royals, a far cry from the years when the future monarch’s cousins could secure a plum position and a grace-and-favor living space.
During the queen’s reign, the monarchy transformed from an auxiliary unit melding the aristocracy and the government into a business with annual reporting requirements and a mandate to be self-sufficient. Royal commentators have predicted that Charles will be a transitional king. Part of that means clearing liabilities from the balance sheet in order to leave his own successor with as few potential headaches as possible.
With his taxpayer-funded office, William, the millennial future king, is the only grandchild left in the palace establishment. From a purely structural perspective, Harry’s 2020 departure for Los Angeles might have been inevitable. For years, Harry had been living in limbo. He wasn’t quite important enough to become a core decision maker in the family or even take part in William’s childhood lessons in kingship at Windsor Castle. Still, until his wedding, he shared an office with his older brother and kept a schedule similar to his. When Meghan Markle married into the family, she shared her husband’s lofty charitable ambitions, but they chafed against the limits the palace places on the minor royals—especially the financial ones.
For the rest of the grandchildren, exit planning began much earlier. The British system was designed to give automatic financial support to a monarch and their heir through private wealth, but the extended family has received funding at the discretion of the government since the 18th century. For generations, the minor royals did play an important purpose in the family and the country’s future, because an heir’s siblings functioned a bit like diplomatic bargaining chips when they were married off to fellow royal families across the Continent.