On September 19, 2022, the funeral of Queen Elizabeth II, who passed away at the age of 96, will take place. It was his son, the Crown Prince, Charles, who therefore became the new sovereign of the United Kingdom. A role that he will carry out until his last breath, he who waited several decades to access the throne.
During her lifetime, her mother Elizabeth II gave the image of a queen who was very surrounded and very pampered by all the members of the royal family. The list of those around him was long. There were obviously his children, Charles, Andrew, Anne and Edward as well as their respective children: princes Harry and William but also princesses Eugenie and Béatrice. In addition to the active members of the “Firme”, dukes and duchesses, linked to King George V, gravitated around the crown: the Duke and Duchess of Gloucester, the Duke and Duchess of Kent (cousin of Elizabeth II) or even Alexandra de Kent, the first cousin of Queen Elizabeth II.
What will happen to the latter when the king takes up his duties definitively after his coronation? Christophe Gillissen, professor of British and Irish civilization at the University of Caen, confided his hypotheses to Planet.
“We can make a connection with what happened in the wake of Diana’s death in 1997. The royal family, the one that was subsidized by public money, was quite numerous. There were people (in the royal family Editor’s note) who did not do much for the country, who lived “at the expense of the princess”, who went on vacation, who were involved in all kinds of scandals and therefore what had been proposed in 1997-1998 by Tony Blair was to restrict this group”, he explains to us.
As a result “some members of the royal family have been excluded from these public grants to avoid scandals in the press. This could be a strategy that would be pursued, in order to restrict further. Having only a small core present in the ceremonies , acting officially on behalf of the Palace and the Royal Family”.
