Queen's strict Buckingham Palace rule broken by senior royal – with hilarious result
With their hands intertwined, the smiling Duke and Duchess of Edinburgh looked blissfully happy in two glorious portraits to mark their silver wedding anniversary. Publicly released in June 2024, the photos not only celebrated 25 years of a remarkable marriage, but also a union that is often held up as an example of enduring love, friendship and quiet commitment.
“There’s clearly a lovely partnership there,” says royal author and commentator, Katie Nicholl. “You can see from the way Edward looks at his wife that he adores her and is very much in love with her. I think he has huge amounts of admiration for her, and what they’ve got is clearly something very special.” In one of the anniversary pictures, which were taken in the grounds of their Bagshot Park home, Edward stood with his arms around Sophie’s waist, while the other saw them sitting on the garden steps, looking affectionately into each other’s eyes.
As the Duke himself said just weeks earlier, in a rare TV interview to mark his 60th birthday in March, the success of their marriage owes much to Sophie’s unwavering support. Speaking on ITV’s Love Your Weekend with Alan Titchmarsh, he described his wife as being “critical, absolutely critical” in his life, and expressed deep gratitude for their rock-solid partnership. “She’s been an absolutely brilliant rock and I’m incredibly lucky that I found Sophie and that she found me,” he said. “Hopefully we’ve been a really brilliant partnership.”
The candour of the interview surprised many, including royal author Ingrid Seward. “I thought, ‘Goodness me, how did I not know they were so together?’” she says. “With the track record of the other royal marriages, it’s particularly impressive. The two of them seem so happy.”
Sophie gave her own tearful tribute to “my darling Edward” ahead of his landmark birthday, calling him “the best of fathers, the most loving of husbands” and stressing that he was “still my best friend”. During the speech at the Sport and Recreation Awards in Leeds, Sophie told the audience, “He has been my guide and shown me the way over the years. He has given me much help and advice (not always taken, I admit), and his knowledge and instincts that have been honed over decades of service are invaluable.” As Edward wiped his eyes during her unusually frank address, Sophie added, “I am so proud of the man he is” – and also playfully revealed her attraction to him, saying, “He wears a uniform extremely well.”
The couple first met in 1987 when a young Edward, then 23, met 22-year-old Sophie Rhys-Jones at Capital Radio, where she was working in public relations. At the time, Edward was dating one of Sophie’s friends. They only became an item six years later, in 1993, when Sophie was handling the publicity for Edward’s Real Tennis Challenge event. When former tennis champion and Question Of Sport presenter Sue Barker backed out of a photo shoot, Sophie stepped in, posing with Edward for publicity snaps. And according to Sophie’s boss at the time, Brian MacLaurin, the attraction was immediate. “There was no mistaking the chemistry that was between them right from the word go,” he said. When Edward finally asked her out, their first date was a game of tennis, followed by dinner at Buckingham Palace.
Before meeting Sophie, the Prince had several romances. One of his first girlfriends was called Alison Bell, who he met in 1983 when teaching in New Zealand. At Cambridge University in the mid-1980s, he was linked to fellow student Eleanor Weightman, and in 1986 Georgia May, the daughter of a millionaire boatbuilder, was tipped as his royal bride.
Prior to falling for Sophie, Edward’s longest relationship was with West End actress Ruthie Henshall, who revealed details of their five-year, on-off romance on I’m A Celebrity… in 2020. They met in 1990 while Edward was working as a production assistant for Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Really Useful Group and she was in the cast of the musical Cats. During their time together, Ruthie, 57, joined the royals at Balmoral several times. He is also said to have had brief flings with TV reporter Anastasia Cooke and presenter Ulrika Jonsson. Sophie previously enjoyed a few romances of her own, including one with an Australian ski instructor she met while working at a Swiss resort.
Edward and Sophie bonded over a shared love of sports, the arts and the outdoors, but despite their blossoming relationship, they remained under the radar in the beginning. “Edward didn’t really fit the royal mould in many ways,” Katie says. “He was quite creative and modern, and he thought outside the box. He pushed the parameters of what was expected of a prince, sometimes successfully and sometimes less so. It was unsurprising he chose Sophie, because she was also modern and different from what people expected of a royal bride.”
After they began dating, Sophie struck up a close bond with the late Queen, and she was given rare permission to stay at Buckingham Palace well before her and Edward’s engagement in 1998. Legend has it that one night, the Prince crept down a corridor to her bedroom and tripped over a Corgi, causing it to squeal, before quickly returning to his own room. Though the arrangement was unconventional, Ingrid tells us, “By then, the Queen knew of Charles’ and Andrew’s marriage troubles, so she decided it would be a good idea if Sophie was given a passkey to the palace. I think she saw how long she and Edward had been going out, and thought, ‘I’ve got to help this along.’ She also wanted Sophie to know what she was getting into.”
Edward eventually proposed to Sophie during a holiday in the Bahamas, just before Christmas in 1998, later explaining why he had waited several years. “It’s impossible to understand why it has taken me this long, but I don’t think it would have been right before, and I don’t think she would have said yes,” he told reporters at the announcement of their engagement in January 1999. During the press call, held in the grounds of St James’ Palace, Edward also revealed, “I managed to take her completely by surprise. She had no idea that it was coming, which is what I really wanted.”
The blushing bride-to-be showed off her beautiful Asprey and Garrard engagement ring, which was worth over £100,000 and boasted a two-carat central diamond and two smaller heart-shaped diamonds. “I was slightly stunned for a minute,” Sophie revealed. “And then I realised I should actually answer the question, so then I said yes. I said, ‘Yes please.’”
