Endgame: Inside the Royal Family and the Monarchy's Fight for Survival

Toward the end of her reign, the Queen began to hand over public-facing duties to Charles. His first big moment arrived on May 10, 2022, when he delivered the “Gracious Speech” at the opening of the new parliamentary session. The moment presented Charles as the next in line.

However, Charles was soon involved in a scandal. News broke that he had accepted large sums of money from Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim bin Jaber Al Thani—a member of Qatar’s ruling family—between 2011 and 2015. Charles was also reported to have accepted large sums of cash from members of the Bin Laden family. Although in both instances the cash went to Charles’s charitable fund, and the Bin Laden family members were unconnected to any terrorist activity, Charles’s judgment was severely questioned as a result.

Another cash-related controversy surrounding Charles involved Michael Fawcett, previously the Prince’s senior valet. Fawcett was embroiled in numerous scandals during his time at the Palace, from bullying and racism charges to his selling unwanted gifts from foreign dignitaries and keeping a cut of the proceeds. The latter saw him resign in 2003, but Charles employed him as a freelancer soon after to help with his charitable foundations. In 2021, it emerged that Fawcett had promised a wealthy Saudi tycoon knighthood and a golden visa in exchange for cash. Shortly after a donation was made to Charles’s foundation, Charles knighted Dr. Mahfouz Marei Mubarak bin Mahfouz. After the story broke regarding Fawcett’s involvement, Charles was finally forced to formally end his connection with Fawcett for good.

Alongside these controversies, Charles displays a tendency to vocalize personal opinion, breaking with convention—which doesn’t work well for the role of a sovereign. While he was still Prince, Charles openly stated his opinions on a number of political issues, from Britain’s involvement in Afghanistan to numerous Tory policies and environmental issues.

The split between heart and duty can be traced back to the biggest conflict of Charles’s life: having to choose between the love of his life, Camilla Shand, and Lady Diana Spencer, the woman whom he eventually married. The Firm’s disapproval of the former pushed Charles to marry the latter. When Charles began an affair with Camilla, it damaged his reputation, and he and Camilla have still not entirely recovered, especially since Diana was so well-loved by the public.

Charles and Camilla have established exceptionally friendly relations with the media in an attempt to repair their image. Part of this relationship includes leaking stories and soundbites to the press to ensure the reportage about them remains largely positive. This is a vastly different way to how the Queen operated, who was famously tight-lipped. Gaining public support and acceptance has not been as straightforward for Charles as it was for the Queen.

In January 2022, Andrew, Charles’s younger brother, was officially stripped of his royal titles, military honors, and most of his royal roles because of his involvement with Jeffrey Epstein, the American financier and sex offender who died by suicide in prison in 2019. Andrew had already been asked to step away from royal duties in 2019, when much of the story came to light. However, after Virginia Giuffre née Roberts’s civil case against Andrew claiming sexual assault, Andrew needed his mother’s financial help to settle out of court. The price to pay was being stripped of his titles and honors.

Although the Queen was the one to deliver the news, the actual push came from William. He took the initiative to coax the Queen into action against Andrew. After the Queen informed Charles of her decision, Charles refused to take part in the communication.

Andrew’s punishment was perceived by the public as long overdue. His relationship with Epstein had been in the media for more than a decade. Most of Epstein’s friends fled when the charges first came out in 2008 and Epstein was sentenced to 18 months in prison. Andrew, however, ignored the rumors and continued to stick by him. He even defended this decision in an infamous Newsnight interview in 2019.

It is through Andrew’s friendship with Epstein that he met then-17-year-old Virginia Roberts in 2001. Epstein “employed” her for sex trafficking when she was only 16. Later, she filed a lawsuit against Epstein as “Jane Doe 102” (127), disclosing details of her encounters with both him and Andrew. She also furnished a photograph of herself with Andrew at Ghislaine Maxwell’s house. Ghislaine Maxwell was the British socialite—and a longtime associate of Epstein—who was eventually imprisoned for aiding the commercial sexual exploitation of children.

Despite these allegations and the FBI confirming the authenticity of the picture, Andrew and the Palace have repeatedly denied all of it, especially anything surrounding “impropriety with underage minors” (128), with Andrew denying he ever met Virginia. The Palace, for their part, worked hard at nudging and pressuring the media away from negative stories about Andrew for years. This worked to some degree until the civil lawsuit emerged in 2021. The Firm pressured Andrew into settling, and 12 million pounds was paid into Virginia’s Victims Refuse Silence organization, a nonprofit aimed at helping victims of sexual abuse and sex trafficking. Part of the settlement’s terms involved neither Andrew nor Virginia making any further public comments about the case.

Andrew has been embroiled in multiple controversies throughout his life, including his associations with a string of famous women after his separation from Sarah, the Duchess of York; his lavish lifestyle, which has led to immense debt; and his poor judgment in meeting and engaging with leaders of oppressive regimes. Andrew once dined with Kazakhstan’s autocratic president, Nursultan Nazarbayev, who later bought one of Andrew’s properties at 5 million pounds over the asking price. Similarly, after socializing with convicted gun smuggler Tarek Kaituni, the latter gifted Andrew’s daughter, Princess Beatrice, a necklace worth $37,000 for her 18th birthday.

Despite being cut out from these duties and out of the related allowance, Charles has continued to provide his brother with financial support, including for private security—even though he refused to do the same for his own son. However, the gag order in Virginia’s settlement will expire, and since Virginia signed a deal with a publisher in 2023 to write her memoir, more details will undoubtedly emerge. In the meantime, Andrew’s lawyers are focusing on clearing up his name once and for all. While Charles shows no inclination to stop supporting his brother, it is unlikely that William will continue to do so when he is king.

Racism in Britain differs from that in the United States; it is not as overt or explicit. In Britain, racism finds its roots within the monarchy, with the royal family legalizing the slave trade in the 16th century. Even after it was abolished in 1807, reparations were made to the slave owners, rather than to those once enslaved. These colonial origins explain some of the British attitudes toward immigrants, especially non-white foreigners, as colonialism at its heart was built on the idea that the barbaric, non-Western world needed saving.

There have also been numerous instances where members of the present royal family have employed racist language, from the Queen Mother right down to Prince Harry himself. Employees within the Palace have admitted to Scobie that the space can be a “difficult environment” for people of color to work in; while there is no explicit racism, micro-aggressions and prejudicial behavior are aplenty.

The royal family has refused to engage with the issue of race despite recent opportunities, including the Lady Hussey incident. Racist imagery and evidence of colonial loot are present throughout spaces connected to the royal family, such as the Blackamoor statues and sconces in palaces and the diamonds taken from India and South Africa, which are set into royal artifacts. One of Britain’s highest honor medals, presented for distinguished service, even has the image of “St. Michael, a blue-eyed white angel, standing on the neck of Satan, portrayed as a chained Black man” (148). The British mainstream print media supports the Palace’s silence, as it is equally silent and evasive about racial matters.

This kind of environment led Scobie to believe that Meghan would struggle to thrive in the royal family. There were signs from the very beginning, with reporting about her relationship with Harry constantly featuring phrases like “narcissistic, social climber, exotic DNA, and straight out of Compton” (150). As racist reportage about Meghan increased over time, the Palace did little to counter or acknowledge it. Little thought was given to anything about race, especially surrounding the Sussexes.

The increasing vitriol had damaging effects on Meghan’s mental health, as she contemplated suicide in 2019. Though she reached out for help, she did not receive anything concrete; instead, people insinuated that she should not get upset or offended by such commentary. They argued that other members of the family had experienced similar trolling, and there was no acknowledgment of how Meghan’s experience was different because of the race element. Additionally, the Palace machinery had been employed in the past to protect other women in the family, including Kate and Camilla.

Scobie had been covering the royal family for half a decade before Meghan’s arrival. Meghan’s situation particularly piqued Scobie’s interest, being a “younger, U.K.-born mixed-race journalist” (160) himself. He recognized her arrival as a significant moment in the history of the country and its monarchy. As he witnessed her experiences, he decided to cover them more closely and objectively; as a result, he was often on the receiving end of racist vitriol himself, with people frequently stressing his British-Iranian heritage.

In their famous interview with Oprah Winfrey, Harry and Meghan discussed a conversation about the color of their unborn child’s skin. When the Palace commented on it, their statement included the phrase “recollections may vary” (165). This laid the necessary seed of doubt regarding Harry and Meghan’s credibility to ensure the Firm against the proposition that they were racist, and any subsequent need for self-examination or acknowledgment.

Change is not impossible, and in 2023, King Charles took a small step forward by supporting a research project investigating the family’s historical links with transatlantic slavery. Charles has generally had a history of supporting minority groups in Britain, mainly through the grants given out by his charity. However, as of 2023, staff in both Buckingham Palace and Kensington Palace are still predominantly white. Less than 10 percent of non-white staff in each place hold hierarchically lower roles, such as cleaning or housekeeping.

Scobie opines that all of these instances display the Firm’s inability and lack of desire to make any real changes. Meghan’s presence was an opportunity for transformation, but rather than welcome her, the Firm shut her out and discounted her story. Especially in a more diverse and progressive world, it will become increasingly difficult for a monarchy that “relies on tradition, mystery, and memories of the grand old times for its survival” (170) to do so meaningfully.