Prince Edward, Princess Anne, and Sophie Fill in For the King During a Busy Week of Engagements

After a busy three-day tour of France last week, King Charles III and Queen Camilla, who are still in residence at Balmoral Castle, have not been making any appearances on the Court Circular. Since the beginning of the king’s “slimmed-down” reign, there has been some concern about whether the family has enough working members in order to fulfill national and international obligations. Still, a flurry of royal events has proven that even if the number of senior royals has shrunk dramatically since 2019, there are still enough Windsors to keep up appearances. In addition to Princess Kate’s lengthy slate of engagements, Princess Anne held court at Windsor, Prince Edward carried on a family legacy on a trip to Turkey, and Sophie, Duchess of Edinburgh, served as the king’s representative at an Italian state funeral. 

The week’s headline event was Prince Edward’s trip to Turkey to attend an award ceremony for the Duke of Edinburgh Award, the outdoor achievement prize founded by his father in 1956. During a celebration at the British Consulate in Istanbul, Edward gave gold awards to 38 participants from the country and celebrated the winners with a garden party afterward. The prince also traveled to Ankara, where he met with President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and laid a wreath at the mausoleum of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the nation’s modern founder.

On Monday, Sophie boarded a plane at Heathrow headed for Rome to serve as the king’s representative at the state funeral for Giorgio Napolitano, the former president who died last week at age 98. During Tuesday’s funeral, which took place at the Chamber of Deputies of the Italian Parliament, she was photographed wearing a set of headphones so she could follow along with a translation of the service. The trip was short, and by Wednesday, she was back in the UK, where she made a visit to Collingwood College in Surrey and sat for a meeting with Hala Al-Tuwaijri, the president of the Saudi Human Rights Commission.

Meanwhile, back at Windsor Castle, Anne led a slate of investitures on behalf of her brother, including a series of gallantry awards that the late queen signed off on one week before her death, according to the BBC. The awards went to Lukasz Koczocik and Steven Gallant, two bystanders who intervened during a 2019 stabbing attack on the London Bridge that left two Cambridge University students dead. 

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