There has been a lot of hilarious focus on just how many aristocrats were snubbed for coronation invitations, but did you also know that King Charles snubbed his extended family? It’s true. Not just Pamela Hicks and India Hicks (the daughter and granddaughter of Charles’s mentor Lord Mountbatten), but it looks like the second-cousins and third-cousins haven’t been invited either. It looks like these names were left off the invite list: Lord Nicholas Windsor, son of the Duke of Kent, Lady Amelia Windsor, granddaughter of the Duke of Kent, and Kenouska Mowatt, Princess Alexandra’s granddaughter. I bet Prince Michael of Kent’s children, Lady Gabriella Kingston and Lord Frederick Windsor, are also not invited.
They have been welcome guests at every major royal occasion throughout their lives, but a generation of Windsors have been surprised to discover that they are not invited to King Charles and Queen Camilla’s Coronation. I can disclose that the grandchildren of Queen Elizabeth’s cousins – including Lady Amelia Windsor, who was named as the ‘most beautiful member of the Royal Family’ by Tatler magazine, and the King’s godson Lord Nicholas Windsor – will not be at Westminster Abbey on Saturday.
And friends claim some of them are ‘furious’ at the snub. ‘They can’t understand why they haven’t been invited when they were invited to every other state occasion,’ one pal tells me.
In a reference to Prince Harry’s attacks on the Royal Family, the friend adds: ‘They have never put a foot wrong and been the souls of discretion yet have been cast out. It’s not right.’
Zenouska Mowatt, granddaughter of Queen Elizabeth’s cousin Princess Alexandra, confirms that she is one of those not invited. ‘I’m not going to the Coronation, but I’m really looking forward to watching it [on television],’ she tells me. She was on the balcony of Buckingham Palace on the last occasion that Meghan Markle was, at Trooping the Colour in 2019. Zenouska, 32, was so close to the Queen that Her Majesty made a point of being photographed with her at Windsor Castle in March last year when she was in failing health, six months before her death.
The Queen was pictured inspecting a collection of china made by the luxury goods business Halcyon Days, for which Zenouska works. ‘It was a really lovely event,’ she tells me at a Coronation celebration at the Garrison Chapel in Chelsea, West London. ‘Everyone had very fond memories [of the Queen]. She was a very kind individual. Any time anyone spoke to her, she would make them feel like one in a million.’
She says her mother, Marina Mowatt, 56, who became known as the ‘royal rebel’ in the Eighties when she became pregnant outside marriage, is invited tomorrow, as well as her grandmother. Zenouska insists that she holds no grudges about not being invited herself. ‘It’s going to be fantastic and everyone is so excited,’ she says.
Some of the royals not invited are attending their own party. ‘I’ll be with family anyway,’ she says. ‘My street is doing a street party.’
She will be in good company. Last month, I disclosed that most of Britain’s 24 non-royal dukes had not been invited to the Coronation, as well as lower ranks of the nobility. The Duke of Rutland was one of the many left dismayed and bewildered. ‘I have not been asked,’ he told me, saying he did ‘not really understand’ why. ‘It has been families like mine that have supported the Royal Family over 1,000 years or thereabouts.’
[From The Daily Mail]
I feel like this will become more of a slow-burning issue once we see all of the people who were invited and where they’ll be seated. Like, those dukes, earls, viscounts, lords and royal-adjacent second cousins are going to be massively pissed when they see the extended Middleton and Parker-Bowles clans featured prominently. I bet there will also be some salty tears shed when they see how King Charles has prioritized diversity window-dressing – God knows, Charles despises his mixed-race relatives (including two of his grandchildren), but he’s going to make an effort to put a few Black people in the second row, I’m sure.
Photos courtesy of Avalon Red.
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