Kate and William are linked to home on Windsor estate - so will they scupper Prince Andrew’s plan for Eugenie to move in?

 

It was once as soon as mooted as a home for newlyweds Harry and Meghan.

Now it is stated to be the first desire of properties on the Queen’s Windsor estate for the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and their boisterous young family.

But could there be a rival to take over Adelaide Cottage, simply a few minutes’ walk from the Queen’s private apartments at Windsor Castle?

For the Mail is aware that Prince Andrew, who lives close by at Royal Lodge, has long had his eye on it for his younger daughter, Princess Eugenie, 32. She has been living with her husband, Jack Brooksbank, and their toddler son August in Frogmore Cottage, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s home on the Queen’s estate.

Harry and Meghan stored it on notwithstanding transferring to the US, after coming to an undisclosed financial association with the Crown Estate.

In November 2020, a yr after they quit the UK, they allowed cousin Eugenie and her husband to pass in. The Yorks had vacated their first domestic together – Ivy Cottage at Kensington Palace – for a life in the country shut to the princess’ parents.

But whilst Harry and Meghan’s gesture is certainly a generous one, the couple know it might not be long-term, specifically if the Sussexes start to return to the UK extra regularly.

When they flew to see the Queen simply earlier than Easter, Harry and Meghan stayed at Frogmore in a single day with Eugenie and her family. But that absolutely wouldn’t be very sensible for a longer stay, in particular if the Sussexes have kids Archie and Lilibet in tow.

Yesterday, sources close to the Yorks advised the Daily Mail that Eugenie ‘had been attempting to impenetrable Adelaide Cottage for a whilst [ready] for when she moves out of Frogmore.’ They added: ‘Before Andrew’s most latest scandal it used to be absolutely a property he used to be [also] trying to tightly closed for his daughter.’

It is not clear whether they nonetheless have an activity in it. And there is no doubt that if push comes to shove, the Cambridges and their teens – all direct heirs to the throne – would get first refusal.

As first printed by way of the Mail, the couple have been planning a move to Berkshire considering ultimate 12 months and have enrolled Prince George in a new college there, the place he is predicted to be joined this September with the aid of his siblings Charlotte and Louis.

William, 39, and Kate, 40, are eager for the children to have a country upbringing and favor to be nearer to the duchess’s parents, Michael and Carole Middleton, who play a hands-on position in their upbringing.

The couple have appeared at countless homes on the Windsor estate including Frogmore House, which is now used for royal functions but would want a high-quality deal of work and cash to flip into a household home, and Fort Belvedere.

Both are believed to have been deemed unsuitable. They have additionally been searching at private residences in the area as well.

But Adelaide Cottage, which has been used as a grace-and-favour domestic for royal personnel and household pals in latest years, may want to be the one. The news that the Cambridges had been first eyeing up the property used to be published in the Mail on Sunday closing month.

Yesterday it used to be in addition claimed that the couple, who want to be in their new domestic via the summer, are viewing it as their ‘first choice’.

Nestled at the coronary heart of the Crown Estate’s non-public 655-acre royal park, Adelaide Cottage used to be built in 1831 as a retreat for William IV’s spouse Queen Adelaide of Saxe-Meiningen.

It was also acknowledged to be a favored home of Queen Victoria, as she frequently loved taking her breakfast there.

However, the most famous former resident has to be the late Princess Margaret’s ex-beau, Group Captain Peter Townsend, whose affair with the Queen’s sister brought on a country wide scandal.

The cottage underwent major renovations in 2015, which ability the Cambridges would now not have to shell out millions in remodelling the house.

After all they still have a 20-plus room home, Apartment 1A at Kensington Palace, and Anmer Hall on the Queen’s Sandringham estate.

And Adelaide Cottage nevertheless boasts original elements which include a marble Graeco-Egyptian furnace and a main bedroom with a coved ceiling providing gilded dolphins and rope decoration reused from the Royal yacht Royal George.

It additionally has seven gated entrances and exits to Windsor Castle so the household can come and go in relative privacy.

Kensington Palace declined to comment remaining night.

But the Mail knows an announcement about the Cambridges’ plans is anticipated in the coming weeks.

As royal residences go, Adelaide Cottage has neither the proportions nor grandeur of its larger, greater illustrious neighbour.

But what it lacks in stature, this picture-postcard cottage standing in the shadows of Windsor Castle more than makes up for in its intriguing role in one of the best-known love affairs of the 20th century.

For returned in the years following the Second World War, Adelaide Cottage used to be the grace-and-favour home of Group Captain Peter Townsend.

He, of course, was once the dashing RAF pilot and later equerry to King George VI who would precipitate a scandal, turning into the divorced lover of Princess Margaret.

Back when it was constructed in 1831 by using King William IV for his wife Queen Adelaide, the cottage used to be a day recoil for the royal couple.

Although it seemingly fell out of favour with the queen after the dying of her husband in 1837, it remained a popular destination for breakfast or tea with his successor, the younger Queen Victoria.

So popular, in fact, that a new personal carriageway used to be created for her. Not solely that, her loved King Charles spaniel, Dash, was buried in the grounds.

But the most fascinating interlude in the cottage’s records came with the appointment of Peter Townsend to the King’s staff.

The Battle of Britain pilot was married to Rosemary and had a little one son, Giles, and another, Hugo, on the way, when he was made the King’s equerry in February 1944 and granted the use of a grace-and-favour property, tucked behind a ten-foot privet hedge, within walking distance of the ‘office’.

Adelaide Cottage grew to be the first suited marital domestic for Townsend and his spouse after three years of wartime marriage – even though returned then it used to be far from a glamorous proposition.

Power was delivered along cables jogging from Windsor Castle, but the modern was once so negative it ought to solely guide a vacuum cleaner and a small electric powered heater at any one time.

The interior of the cottage was once apparently a gloomy affair, embellished with Victorian wallpaper and heavy furniture, which would possibly give an explanation for why one Fifties commentator described it as ‘poky and unattractive’. Not that it deterred a sure younger princess – and her family – from visiting.

When Townsend’s 2nd son used to be born, King George VI was named the boy’s godfather and the christening tea, with two princesses in attendance, used to be held at Adelaide.

As a Fifties file from this newspaper would later remark: ‘It used to be the first of many Sunday visits. Princess Elizabeth appreciated to chat with Rosemary, whilst Princess Margaret played with the teenagers on the garden and Peter Townsend, off duty, sat again in a deckchair.

‘Sometimes the King and Queen arrived to collect their daughters, extra regularly Peter ran them home himself. Princess Margaret in no way got here to Adelaide Cottage unless she was once accompanied via Princess Elizabeth or the Queen.

A schoolgirl when Townsend first moved in to the cottage, Margaret was once largely overlooked by means of Townsend at first. Although he made pretty an affect on her. Years later the princess, who was thirteen at the time of his appointment, would admit: ‘When he first appeared, I had a terrific crush on him.’

How exciting then to assume of the visits the young princess, together with her older sister, made to Adelaide Cottage in those post-war years and how that crush developed into the passionate affair that rocked the monarchy. Quite when the spark was once lit is unknown.

It wasn’t till after the Townsends divorced in 1952 – and a famous moment at some point of the Queen’s Coronation the following yr when Margaret was viewed tenderly getting rid of a piece of fluff from Townsend’s lapel – that the affair would grow to be public knowledge.

But it is now broadly believed it started out years earlier, all through that time when the two sisters had been occasional site visitors to Adelaide Cottage – a time when, significantly, Townsend used to be never far from the Royal Family in his work for the King.

It was once a three-month State tour of South Africa, from February 1947 – on which the two princesses accompanied the King and Queen – that pitched Townsend, 32, and Margaret, then nearly 17, into near-constant company. Part of the equerry’s position was once to chaperone the youngster – the two have been in every other’s employer each and every day, riding out and taking in the sights.

She would later tell a confidante: ‘We rode together each and every morning in that extremely good country, in marvellous weather. That’s when I in reality fell in love with him.’

In 2017 Daily Mail columnist Craig Brown published how a reader of his e book about Margaret — Ma’am Darling: 99 Glimpses Of Princess Margaret – had unearthed clean data which some may view as startling.

What it cautioned was that the affair started years in the past than is popularly accepted. Indeed, it looks that when the Princess launched the ship the Edinburgh Castle on October 16, 1947, she used to be already in a relationship with Townsend, who was then 32 and the father of two younger sons.

While there is no proof they have been intimate at that stage, the reader had uncovered notes among reputable paper showing that on the visit to the shipyard, on which Townsend accompanied her, a request used to be made for them to have adjoining bedrooms at Hillsborough Castle, the then governor’s respectable dwelling in Belfast.

Was this request spurred on with the aid of an intimacy already set up at Adelaide Cottage?

Further evidence of the closeness of the pair when Townsend lived in the Windsor house got here in Sarah Bradford’s 2002 biography of the Queen. She recounted how courtiers observed Townsend spending greater time with Margaret as his marriage faltered.

One courtier recalled being at the cottage for the birthday celebration of one of the Townsend children. ‘The smartphone rang and it used to be someone pronouncing “would Peter go riding with Princess Margaret?” He was once now not on duty. And he went.’

Townsend and his family cease Adelaide Cottage in 1952, when he divorced Rosemary.

The affair, however, would be doomed by way of the Royal Marriages Act which cited no member of the Royal Family was once authorized to marry a divorcee whilst the ex-partner was once nonetheless living. On October 31, 1955, the Princess announced she and Townsend would no longer marry.

Since then the cottage has been home to a host of well-connected dignitaries and courtiers, along with most currently Simon Rhodes, son of the Queen’s cousin and pleasant buddy Margaret Rhodes, who died in 2016.

But for the most part, Adelaide Cottage had sunk lower back into its backdrop underneath the shadow of Windsor Castle’s gray walls.

Will it now be thrust into the highlight again?

Tags: Queen, Prince Charles, Camilla, Prince Andrew’s, Prince William and Kate Middleton, Prince Charles, Prince Harry, Meghan

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