With the Andrew formerly known as a prince divested of his title, ejected from Royal Lodge and banished to his Norfolk estate, now is a moment of seismic change for the Royals.
The tone was set back in February by the release of a stark statement by the King, following his brother Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s arrest, pledging full co-operation with the police. It appeared to finally signal an acknowledgement by the royals that character matters as much as status.
Even more interesting is the suggestion that driving this shift behind the scenes are not the Windsors themselves but the women who married into the family: Queen Camilla and Princess Kate. Over the past six months, these matriarchs have been portrayed in various media outlets, some more gossipy than others, as the quiet architects of Andrew’s downfall.
Katie Nicholl, co-host of the Royals Uncensored podcast, believes the two women played a key role in the royals’ handling of Mountbatten-Windsor. “It’s very likely that Kate and Camilla wielded a quiet but incredibly powerful influence over both the King and Prince of Wales when it came to their response,” Nicholl says. “Some describe them as the real power behind the throne.”
“They never wish to eclipse William or Charles but they do have a lot of influence and when it comes to Andrew their guidance will have been sought,” Nicholl continues, describing their motives as a shared sense of “integrity and a desire to protect the monarchy and its reputation. Being outsiders they also will have had a more objective perspective on the situation with Andrew than a brother or nephew perhaps can.”
The Queen has long championed campaigns against domestic violence and sexual abuse, vowing to make ending violence against women and girls a lifetime’s work.
“Camilla has been very vocal about the abuse of women,” Nicholl says, “so these allegations against Andrew (which he continues to deny) will have conflicted strongly with her views.”
Kate and Camilla are ‘change-makers’
This is a view supported by Simon Vigar, Channel 5’s royal correspondent, in his new book The Four Wives of Windsor, in which he examines female power in the monarchy. He describes Diana, Meghan, Camilla and Kate as “women who didn’t just marry into the Royal Family, but transformed it forever”.
“Andrew was a Charles and William decision, but I’m convinced behind-the-scenes Camilla and Catherine had a role,” he says.
Andrew Lownie, author of Entitled – the controversial book charting the rise and fall of the House of York – also believes it was the family’s outsiders, “such as the Queen and Princess of Wales”, who recognised earlier than other Royal Family members “the huge reputational damage caused by the former Prince Andrew’s behaviour”.
Lownie suggests that, unbound by blood ties, they have the most to lose from the harm Mountbatten-Windsor – who denies all the allegations against him – has inflicted on the institution. They are also probably frustrated at seeing their own work overshadowed by his conduct.
“Quite separately, there is no love lost on a personal level,” Lownie adds. “He represents much they despise.”
Pictured here alongside their husbands at Westminster Abbey in March, Camilla and Kate have worked hard to earn the public’s respect (Photo: Arthur Edwards – WPA Pool/Getty)Catherine Mayer, author of Divide and Rule: Royal Women and their Battles, considers that while the late Queen protected Mountbatten-Windsor, “other women in the family have been clear for a long time about their opinion on him”.
She notes that as president of the Women of the World foundation, Camilla gave a speech in 2021 speaking of “the need to get the men in our lives involved in this [anti-violence] movement”. Last International Women’s Day, she repeated Gisèle Pelicot’s adage that shame must change sides, just before leaving for the US with Charles (although she did not meet Epstein’s victims).
“[Camilla] continues to spotlight male violence and domestic violence, going as close to the bone as she can,” says Mayer.
Norman Baker, former Lib Dem MP and author of several books on the royals, has a more cynical take on any potential intervention: “There are those who have been very slow dealing with Andrew as they see him as Part of the Firm, and those who saw at an earlier stage he had to be cut adrift. William and Kate were allegedly in the second category, and Charles allegedly in the first category.”
To Baker, however, this is less a case of female solidarity than the Princess of Wales’s understanding that as the popularity of the Royal Family has declined, “presumably Kate’s motivation is to make sure the monarchy survives”.
Once commentators wrote off Camilla and Kate. The late-Man Booker Prize-winning novelist Hilary Mantel sparked outrage when she described the Princess as “gloss-varnished” and said she was “selected for her role of princess because she was irreproachable; as painfully thin as anyone could wish, without quirks, oddities, without the risk of emergence of character”.
Playing the long-game
Yet both have executed a quiet feminist triumph by playing the long-game – embodying deference, discretion, waiting out their critics. That patience has bought them serious influence, among an institution they worked so incredibly hard to join.
Mayer considers: “What Camilla and Kate have in common is that women who manage to navigate the patrimonarchy as I call it (a specific form of patriarchy) and find ways to survive within that brutal system are the ones who understand you can’t change a narrative with one story or photo opportunity…
“Meghan or Diana weren’t women who accepted the many strictures; they were impatient about making an impact now, not tomorrow.”
By contrast, she notes: “What Kate and Camilla have in common is that they had extraordinarily long apprenticeships,” which helped them understand how to act.
Queen Camilla and the Princess of Wales have shown themselves adept at exerting soft power on occasions such as President Trump’s state visit to the UK in September 2025. (Photo: Aaron Chown – WPA Pool/Getty)“Camilla’s is the most unlikely arc in history from public enemy to stalwart of the monarchy”, considers Mayer. She was the “mistress” in the “Tampongate” scandal – where a private and intimate phone conversation between her and the-then Prince of Wales was recorded and later published – and faced a cruel public, incredulous that Charles could choose her over Diana, to Queen.
Prince Harry claimed in his memoir Spare that the public rehabilitation of Camilla was orchestrated by “the new spin doctor Camilla had talked Pa into hiring” (rumoured to be Mark Bolland) prior to her marriage to Charles. A campaign Harry saw himself as collateral damage to fuel.
‘A master strategist’
Mayer also considers, “Camilla is unbelievably robust” and a “master strategist… who has amassed a huge amount of influence”.
Kate’s entry to the royal family was marked by assaults on both misogynistic and class fronts, cast first as descended from working-class coal miners (her great-great-great-great-grandfather worked the County Durham mines) then teased for her mother’s “doors to manual” past (Carole was once an air hostess), amid sniggering about her parents’ Party Pieces mail-order company and snide commentary on her Ibiza-living Uncle Gary.
She was castigated as “Waitey Katie” with her and sister Pippa cast as “The Wisteria Sisters”, “a classic trope of women as gold diggers”, Mayer notes.
In her book, Mayer compares Kate to Elizabeth I, The Virgin Queen who set the precedent for royal women taking control of their public image and understanding the need to become an “extraordinary mistress of image making”.
Otherwise, as Anna Pasternak wrote in a 2020 Tatler cover story titled Catherine The Great, “Kate has barely put an LK Bennett-shod foot out of place in the nine years she has been William’s wife”, quoting royal courtiers’ approval that “Kate understands that the only credo of the Royal Family is duty, duty, duty”.
Mayer cites Kate’s “hyper-homespun” videos “that initially felt uncomfortably artificial but… hit home for their target demographic, creating an image of family and normality while not giving anything away about who she is”.
Carole Middleton and Queen Camilla pictured having a warm moment at Royal Ascot in June. (Photo: Max Mumby/Indigo/Getty)Vigar adds: “Kate was already finding her own voice but her cancer turbocharged that. In the early days, the public speaking was what she seemed to dread, but with her nature series and messages about [her illness], people’s perception of her has changed. ‘Authentic’ is an overused word but that is her, she is strong and knows what to do.”
The Middleton influence
Kate’s recent hike of the National Three Peaks Challenge this June offered a powerful image of independence, vulnerability and strength. Notably, her brother, James Middleton, joined her on that endeavour.
The Middletons have become society royalty, appearing immaculately presented at Wimbledon, Christmas at Sandringham and the Trooping the Colour (after Carole’s early faux pas caught chewing nicotine gum at Prince William’s military graduation parade at Sandhurst).
“Catherine over the decades will have the biggest influence on the Royal Family,” says Vigar. “The late Queen understood the Middletons were the backbone of this. How Kate and William’s children are raised is very much a Middleton childhood.”
Vigar considers her rise marks a key shift. “The British were class-obsessed, Diana was an aristocrat, Camilla was posh, but with Kate and Meghan that’s been a generation change for The Royal Family”.
Perhaps it is fitting, then, that in the reckoning over Mountbatten-Windsor, the two women who spent years seeking acceptance find themselves aligned. Camilla, once the most reviled woman in Britain, and Kate, dismissed as irreproachably bland, have spent decades learning the same lesson: patience, in this family, is power.
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