There’s a file sitting in a British archive right now that nobody is allowed to open until January 1st, 2073. Whatever’s in it, someone decided the public didn’t need to know. The file is about a plane crash, and the man on that plane was the cousin Prince Charles loved so much that he named his own son after him, William.
You know that William, but you probably have never heard of this one. He was one of seven grandchildren of King George V and Queen Mary who lived their entire lives just outside the frame. They were close enough to the throne to feel its weight, far enough from it that history mostly forgot to look. Some of them made choices the crown couldn’t forgive.
Some of them had choices made for them. One of them did everything right and still disappeared. This is what happened to the grandchildren nobody talks about. We have to start in December of 1936 because that’s where the story actually begins. Most people know the broad strokes. The king who walked away from the throne for the American woman he loved.
Her name was Wallis Simpson, twice divorced, and the palace couldn’t accept her. There’s a romance to it if you came to it through a movie or a mini-series. But for the royal institution, it wasn’t. 14 months as king and Edward VIII was gone. The people left standing made a quiet decision they never wanted to put in writing and never said out loud.
Never again. They would never again allow a scandal that could reach the papers and make the crown look like it couldn’t hold itself together. They would do whatever it costs, and those costs were brutal. Those involved never saw it coming. Prince William of Gloucester was the one they called the golden boy.
Born in 1941 in Eton, Cambridge, he was a diplomat and was posted to Tokyo. He was handsome, athletic, the kind of royal who was good at everything without appearing to try. A young Prince Charles worshipped him. He modeled himself on his older cousin. Years later, Charles would name his firstborn after him, which tells you something about the size of what was lost.
In 1968, William arrived in Japan and met a woman at a party. Her name was Suzy Starkloff. She was Hungarian-born, twice divorced, a former model and air hostess who’d built a life in Tokyo, and was sharp enough to make a prince feel like he’d found something real. She’d heard about him before they met.
She sent her driver to the embassy with a handwritten note the day after. It said, “Dear Prince Charming, I have a slipper missing. Would you like to come to a party?” She signed it Cinderella. He came to the party and they fell completely for each other. Then the wall appeared. Twice divorced, foreign, a different faith, the courtiers saw it immediately and they moved fast.
The comparison they reportedly reached was the worst in living memory. Edward VIII all over again, but this time they would crush the relationship before it blossomed. Princess Margaret was dispatched to Tokyo under the cover of a British trade week to make clear what the institution expected. Of all the people to send on that errand, they chose a woman who had lost her own love to that same rule.
A woman who had been asked to choose between a divorced man and her royal life. To me, that seems beyond cruel. They asked her to not only revisit her own experience, but also to deliver that experience to someone else. You just have to spend a few seconds to William went home in 1970. His father’s health was failing and duty called, as it always had.
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He and Suzy kept writing to each other. He never stopped loving her, but I find myself wondering, did he love her enough? Edward VIII gave up everything for love. Even relatively recently, Prince Harry did the same. He could have, but didn’t, and he chose the duties and the burdens that came with the royal institution.
On August 28th, 1972, he was competing in the Goodyear International Air Trophy at Halfpenny Green near Wolverhampton. He’d been racing planes for years. It was the one thing he was allowed to have, the controlled recklessness that fit inside a royal life. 30,000 people were in the stands. His Piper Cherokee climbed off the runway, banked hard into a left turn, and the port wing caught a tree.
The plane flipped, it hit the ground, and it burned. Three boys in the crowd, they ran towards it. The heat drove them back. One moment, William felt unshackled from duty. The next, fire consumed him and freed him from his duties and burdens permanently. What the official investigation found more than a year later was more complicated than simple pilot error.
Eyewitnesses had said the plane had turned towards open land, away from the crowd and the road beyond. One woman who lived 15 yd from the wreckage said that she was sure he’d been steering away from people. We’ll never know. The crash report that might settle it is sealed until 2073. Susie still wears his ring on a chain around her neck.
His brother, Richard, had been married for exactly 52 days when the phone rang. He was a working architect, a partner in a London firm. Richard had deliberately stepped to the side of royal life and built something on his own. The moment William died, that was over. He closed the practice, took on the duties his brother had been carrying, and inherited the dukedom when their father died 2 years later.
He carried out over 200 official engagements in 2024 alone at 80 years old, and hardly anyone knows his name. So, one plane crash, two lives swallowed. But William at least had a story people would eventually tell. The next grandchildren had a story, too, and spent 40 years refusing to let it be buried.
Before I tell you about it, like this video and subscribe because one click keeps these kind of stories coming. George Lascelles, 7th Earl of Harewood, had survived worse things than his own family’s disapproval. That’s what made him difficult. In June 1944, at Monte Cassino in Italy, his unit was overrun and Harewood was captured. He spent the rest of the war in German hands, transferred eventually to Colditz, the castle in the Reich reserved for prisoners it considered valuable.
As a nephew to the King of England, Harewood was one of them, a bargaining chip if it came to that. In March 1945, with Germany collapsing and the war weeks away from ending, Adolf Hitler personally signed a death warrant with Harewood’s name on it. The SS general in command of the POW camps read that order, looked at the calendar, and refused.
He released Harewood to the Swiss instead. He came home and built a career at opera. He became director of the Royal Opera House, then managing director of the English National Opera. The man spent 30 years making classical music something an ordinary person in Britain could actually walk into and afford.
That was the life that he built out of Colditz. He left the theater of war for a theater of entertainment. Very excellent trade-off, if you ask me. I mean, one, a theater wouldn’t try to kill him. In the 1960s, he fell in love with a woman and the institution that had done nothing while Hitler signed his death warrant drew a very firm line.
Some lines are easier to draw than others, I guess. Her name was Patricia Tuckwell. She was an Australian violinist. The problem wasn’t who she was. It was that Harewood was already married and the son Patricia had with him in 1964, was registered under her maiden name because there was no other way to do it.
His first wife, Marion, wouldn’t grant a divorce for years. And honestly, I don’t blame her. The Earl cheated on her and her grief and fury demanded that she would not grant him a divorce. Eventually though, the divorce finally came through in 1967, but it had a cost. To the royal family, the Earl didn’t only cross the line they drew, he kicked dirt all over it.
And so, they made him pay. He wasn’t invited to the Duke of Windsor’s funeral, he wasn’t invited to Princess Anne’s wedding. The palace that had sent a princess to Tokyo to police his cousin’s love life now simply stopped setting a place for him at formal occasions. The man the Nazis couldn’t finish off with a signed order was frozen out by his own cousin with a guest list.
After 10 years, the thaw came at the 1977 Silver Jubilee. Relations resumed, but the decade was gone. George and Patricia stayed together for the rest of their lives. He died in 2011 at 87. His brother Gerald had been dead for about 13 years by then, gone so quietly that most people covering Harwood’s obituary didn’t even think to mention him, which is exactly, I think, how Gerald would have wanted it.
George Harwood spent a decade being punished for crossing the line. His younger brother Gerald spent his whole life pretending the line wasn’t there. And it almost worked. Born in 1924, the second son of Princess Mary, the only daughter of George V and Queen Mary. After the 1936 abdication reshuffled the succession, he was briefly eighth in line to the throne, but that number meant the palace watched him, managed him, and had opinions about what he did with himself.
What he wanted to do was race. Fast cars, circuits, the straightforward physics of going faster than you should. After his brother George was taken prisoner in the war, Gerald wasn’t allowed to serve abroad. The palace wouldn’t risk losing two grandchildren at once. So, he waited. He had to play the stand-in, not because he wanted to, but because duty demanded it.
A man in his 20s watching a war happen from a distance because his grandfather had been the king. To the royal family, he wasn’t an individual, but a part of an institution that demanded complete subservience. When the war ended, he tried to race, but he was stopped again. This time, they said it was not suitable for a man of his position.
He wasn’t allowed to compete until the early 1950s, by which point the succession had reshuffled so many times that it no longer much mattered who his grandfather was. The institution didn’t forbid him from racing forever, but just wanted to be the ones to tell him when to race and when not to.
His personal life followed the same pattern as his brothers, without even the decade-long public drama. He left his wife in 1978 for a woman he’d known for 20 years, a former actress who had already given him a son. He moved to France, died in Bergerac in 1998 in a country with no particular use for his grandfather’s name. He had outlasted all the rules and spent his last years in a farmhouse in Dordogne.
Both of Cecil’s brothers had walked into the same wall and found their own way in through, but there was a grandchild who never got to choose at all, whose story started with a loss before he was even old enough to understand what loss was. Prince Michael of Kent never got to meet his father.
He was 7 weeks old on August 25th, 1942 when Prince George, his father, the Duke of Kent, the younger brother of the king, boarded a Sunderland flying boat at an RAF base in the Scottish Highlands. The plane was headed to Iceland, but it never got there. 30 minutes after takeoff, it plunged into a hillside at Eagles Rock in Caithness, killing 13 of the 15 men on board.
Prince George was the only member of the British royal family to die on active service in the Second World War. The court of inquiry into the crash couldn’t be found in Britain. It had to be recovered from Australian archives. Witness statements and technical assessments had disappeared entirely, and they haven’t resurfaced since.
One surviving crew member reportedly told his family years later that there had been an unidentified passenger on board, one that the official record never accounted for. So, none of that has been resolved. Michael grew up with a ghost of a father and a story that didn’t quite hold together. Some questions about that plane have never been answered and at this point they probably never will be.
Michael grew up and became the 15th in line at the time. He fell in love, but not in the way the royal institution wanted. Her name was Marie-Christine von Reibnitz, a baroness, twice married, and Catholic. And he married her in 1978 despite knowing what it would cost him. Marrying a Catholic cost Michael his place in the line of succession.
He wasn’t reinstated until 2015, 37 years later, when Parliament finally updated the law. And by then his children were grown. So, for years, Michael lost his station because of love only to regain it at a time when it didn’t matter anymore. But he did have a five-bedroom apartment at Kensington Palace and in 2002 it was revealed that the Queen had been paying his rent herself from her own private funds.
That’s a strange kind of trade. The palace couldn’t give back what the law had taken, so it paid his rent instead. Protection and exclusion in the same envelope. Poison and a cure. And Michael drank both all because of love. But I do wonder why he didn’t break away from the family though, build his own thing.
You know, he wouldn’t have been the first grandchild to do so. Prince Michael lost his place in the succession for 37 years and got back an apartment. His wife’s cousin-in-law watched the whole thing and decided she needed entirely different guidelines. Katharine, Duchess of Kent, married Edward, the Queen’s first cousin, a man so reliably present at official occasions that most people have seen his face without ever learning his name.
York Minster in 1961, this was the first royal wedding at York Minster since 1328. She came from Yorkshire. She was 29 years old. She gave the marriage everything it asked for. Three children, decades of engagements, and in 1977, a stillborn son named Patrick. Then the depression that followed, and she spoke about publicly years later at a time when no one in the world spoke about such things.
She was honest about it in a way that the institution almost never was about anything. And I personally find that daring and impressive. For an institution that prides itself on tradition, the family is full of royals who break it. In 1994, she became the first member of the royal family to publicly convert to Roman Catholicism in over 300 years.
She wasn’t staging a protest or taking a political position. I do love guidelines, she told the BBC afterward. The Catholic Church offers you guidelines. I like to know what’s expected of me. Yet she didn’t follow the family’s guidelines because Edward had been Anglican when they married, her conversion didn’t cost him his succession rights.
The rule that had stripped Prince Michael of his place in line didn’t apply here. She had found the one door that opened, and then she walked through a different one. In 2002, she stepped back from royal duties, and for the next 13 years, Katherine, Duchess of Kent, drove herself to Wanstead Primary School in Hull every week and taught music to 7-year-olds as Mrs. Kent.
Parents didn’t know, children didn’t know. She taught until 2015, and then she stopped. She died in September of 2025 at 92 at Kensington Palace. The cardinal who had received her into the church 30 years earlier offered his condolences. The flag over Buckingham Palace came to half-mast. The first royal to cross the Catholic line in three centuries, and she also spent 13 years making make nobody in Hull knew who she was.
There is one more grandchild we’re going to talk about today. Princess Alexandra was born on Christmas Day 1936, the year of the abdication itself, the year the decision was made. She did everything right. No divorce, no wrong church, no scandal that reached the papers. She served. She had 67 public engagements in 2018, and she’s in her 80s.
She had 30 in 2021, three in 2023, and then one. She never announced that she was stepping back, and she has never retired. She simply got quieter one year at a time until she was barely there and nobody noticed because she had never been loud enough to miss. The ones who broke the rules were frozen out or had their succession stripped away for marriage that they chose freely.
The one who kept every rule, gave the institution everything it asked for, faded out one engagement at a time. The crown got what it needed in 1936. The people standing near it paid the bill for the rest of their lives.
