What Princess Diana Noticed Right Away About Baby Princess Beatrice and Put in a Letter
Princess Diana had six words to describe Princess Beatrice as a baby in a letter to her former housekeeper. What the late royal said about her now-35-year-old niece, ahead. Plus, how Diana once banned her sons, Prince William and Prince Harry, from seeing their cousins.
Beatrice is the oldest daughter of Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson
First up, who is Beatrice? She’s the oldest daughter of Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson, the Duke and Duchess of York.
Beatrice was born on Aug. 8, 1988. Her parents, who divorced in 1996 after 10 years of marriage but have remained close, announced her arrival through a Buckingham Palace decree. Today, she’s no. 9 in the royal family’s line of succession.
Similar to Diana before her, Ferguson gave birth in a hospital before introducing newborn Beatrice to the public and making their way home.
Beatrice was born at Portland Hospital, the same place where her younger sister, Princess Eugenie, 34, was born in 1990, and where Meghan Markle gave birth to her and the Duke of Sussex’s son, 5-year-old Prince Archie, in 2019.
Diana’s comments about baby Beatrice to former housekeeper
Diana wrote about baby Beatrice in a letter to former Spencer family housekeeper Maud Pendrey, auctioned off as a part of a collection by Julien’s Auctions.
So, what did Diana say about her niece? “The family seems to be constantly expanding, and Sarah’s baby is very sweet with extremely long fingers.”
Indeed, the royal family did expand quite a lot in the ‘80s. Diana and King Charles became parents—first to the now-Prince of Wales in 1982 and then Harry in 1984. Meanwhile, Princess Anne gave birth to her daughter, now 43-year-old Zara Tindall, in 1981.
The collection, which went to auction on June 27, 2024, also featured 14 Christmas cards, a signed photograph, and an invitation to Diana and King Charles III’s 1981 royal wedding, as well as clothes and accessories.
Of Diana’s handwritten letters, one about her pregnancy with Prince Harry sold for the most— nearly $45,000.
Diana later banned Prince William and Prince Harry from seeing their cousins
Years later, the vacations and playdates with cousins for young Prince William, 42, and Prince Harry, 39, were gone. Diana, per Tina Brown’s The Palace Papers, forbade her sons from seeing Beatrice and Eugenie after getting angry with their mom.
In Brown’s book, the former Vanity Fair editor claimed that Ferguson and Diana had a falling out when the now-64-year-old Duchess of York “reveal[ed] she had developed verrucae after borrowing Diana’s shoes” in her autobiography.
In turn, Diana cut off William and Harry’s contact with Beatrice and Eugenie. This, the author claimed, exemplified the late royal’s “pattern of cutting out people in the boys’ lives. Not just any people, but people they cared about—like the York sisters.”
She noted that the pattern continued “throughout their childhood” until Diana’s death in August 1997, when William and Harry were 15 and 12, respectively.
10 years after Diana’s death, Ferguson admitted she and Diana had been on the outs. “The saddest thing, at the end, we hadn’t spoken for a year,” she told Harper’s Bazaar. “Though I never knew the reason, except that once Diana got something in her head.”
Today, William and Harry maintain close relationships with their cousins. Eugenie is, to date, the only British royal to visit Harry and Meghan in Montecito, California. Meanwhile, Beatrice and Eugenie have attended royal events alongside William in recent months.
