The welfare and status of the York princesses isn’t the highest concern for anyone, honestly. Prince Andrew spent much of the past fifteen years trying to convince everyone that Princess Beatrice and Princess Eugenie should be full-time working royals, with royal lodgings and royal staff and royal status and royal protection. It was one of the areas where Andrew and Charles had beef: Charles has been hellbent on streamlining the monarchy, and the York princesses didn’t fit with his image of a smaller, more efficient royal family. Now that Andrew has been royally neutered, what happens to Bea and Eugenie? No one really knows. But I found this Daily Mail article kind of interesting because it got into some stuff I was wondering about, mainly about where the princesses live and who pays for it and what will happen with Beatrice’s wedding next year. Some highlights:

The palace wants to ‘protect the princesses’: A royal aide yesterday confirmed that Beatrice and Eugenie will continue with a limited number of royal duties as before. ‘The Princesses do undertake a small number of royal engagements each year, as and when asked, and that will continue,’ a Buckingham Palace spokesman said. So we will see them on the Palace balcony after Trooping The Colour, at a couple of garden parties and the occasional evening reception.

Andrew will never see his daughters ‘promoted’ now: Now that he has been retired — be it temporarily or permanently — Andrew will not be able to promote his girls in quite the same way any more. ‘The promotion which Andrew had hoped for in terms of his daughters taking on more duties will now never happen,’ a royal source told the Mail yesterday. ‘They will have to focus on the day job.’

The princesses do have day jobs: Eugenie, 29, has a role at the Hauser & Wirth Art Gallery in Mayfair. She starts at 9am and leaves at 5pm sharp. According to a recruitment website, she can expect to be paid in the region of £32,000 to £34,000. Beatrice, 31, is vice-president of partnerships and strategy at Afiniti, an American software company where she focuses on ‘client development’. Her salary is unknown. Certainly, these jobs are not enough to keep them in the manner to which they have become accustomed, and Andrew has long subsidised their lifestyles.

The Queen is fond of the princesses: A Palace source said: ‘. . . there was a sense of everyone circling the wagons around the girls. There is a feeling that they must not be made to pay for the sins of the father. The Queen is particularly fond of Beatrice and Eugenie, and she respects the way that Andrew and Sarah have brought them up. Even though you may feel that they made such a mess of their own lives, they have been loving co-parents. The Queen will continue to invite Beatrice and Eugenie to Balmoral over the summer and she sees quite a lot of them at Windsor. They, in turn, are fond of ‘Super Gran’, as they call her. The feeling is that everyone wants to protect them from this hurt and from further hurt, rather than dance on their father’s ‘grave’.’

Beatrice’s wedding: High on the agenda is the immediate dilemma over Beatrice’s wedding. Planning is understood to be well underway for her 2020 nuptials and there was an expectation that details would be announced early in the New Year. In the light of what has happened this week, any re-run of Eugenie’s ostentatious Windsor Castle wedding last October can be ruled out. To be fair to Beatrice, nuptials to rival her sister’s were not something she desired, not least because her fiance, property tycoon Edoardo Mapelli Mozzi, 35, was in a previous relationship from which he has a young child. So her wedding was always going to be less of a public spectacle, say sources. In addition, ‘[her mother Sarah] has got the big wedding out of her system and so [Beatrice] will have it in another much smaller royal chapel or else privately at St George’s Chapel in Windsor’.

Where the princesses live: Beatrice lives — at least part of the time — in a taxpayer-funded apartment at St James’s Palace, while Eugenie and her husband Jack Brooksbank, a wine merchant and ambassador for a tequila brand, live in Ivy Cottage, a three- bedroom house in the grounds of Kensington Palace. That is being rented to them at a ‘commercial rate’, which is said to be around £182,000 a year. It has always been assumed that Prince Andrew covers this cost. At weekends, Beatrice and Eugenie go home to the 30-room Royal Lodge in Windsor, leased at a peppercorn sum to Andrew, where their divorced parents live together.

[From The Daily Mail]

I find that interesting about the residences and who pays for what. My guess – and I’m really just talking out of my ass here – is that there will be a quiet move to separate the princesses from Andrew financially, and basically allow Beatrice and Eugenie to continue to live in SJP and KP the same way other “minor royals” have apartments there, by favor of the Queen. But yeah, the princesses will never be “working royals” in any kind of sense from here on out. And Bea’s wedding is going to be SUPER quiet. If Edo is even sticking around, because who knows.

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