Why Zara had to persuade Eugenie to share her baby news with the King – and Andrew only found out from hideaway Fergie. And what the intriguing anti-York alliance led by Camilla and William could mean for the succession

Before Buckingham Palace’s announcement last week of an impending royal birth, rumours were beginning to circulate that Princess Eugenie was expecting her third child with husband Jack Brooksbank.

The 36-year-old was already cradling a sizeable bump when she circulated among guests at the glamorous Sicilian wedding two weeks ago of her friend Charles Forte, son of hotelier Sir Rocco Forte, and handbag designer Georgie Wright.

And those who spotted the younger daughter of the erstwhile Duke and Duchess of York lunching with older sister Beatrice in Mayfair recently couldn’t fail to notice her burgeoning belly half-hidden behind an over-sized tote.

But if Eugenie has been somewhat slow about sharing news of her pregnancy, then the mother-of-two is said to have been apprehensive about how it might be received by other members of the Royal Family in light of her parents’ vertiginous fall from grace and a seeming desire to keep the York branch of the family out of the spotlight.

Indeed, The Mail on Sunday can exclusively reveal that the Palace became involved in issuing a formal proclamation only after Eugenie’s cousin Zara Tindall, one of the few to have been entrusted with the news, persuaded her to write to the King.

A royal source has told me that Eugenie did so via an Easter card accompanied by a carefully written letter sent to her uncle.

‘She and Jack were quite surprised by the warmth of the Palace response,’ says the well-placed source, who claims that while the King is reported to feel protectively towards his nieces, they have seen little real sign of it in recent months.

They added: ‘The couple had feared a frostier reception and had been contemplating making a media announcement of their own without the Palace being involved, but the King made contact and asked his officials to make a formal announcement.’

That proclamation, the MoS has learned, was purposefully delayed to ensure it didn’t overshadow the King and Queen’s recent overseas trip to the US and Bermuda.

‘His Majesty The King has been informed and is delighted with the news,’ read the statement issued by the Palace, written up on a document embossed with the ‘Royal Communications’ stamp.

But if the King’s kind-hearted response was something of a surprise then so too was the absence of Queen Camilla’s name from the congratulatory missive.

More, in a moment, of mixed reactions to Eugenie’s happy news. Because, as we shall see, there’s nothing like a pregnancy – even a royal one – to lay bare the tensions at the heart of a family.

The way Eugenie’s has been handled speaks volumes about behind-the-scenes friction, not to mention divided opinions about the royal status that should be accorded to the York princesses and their offspring in the years ahead.

Closer to home, Eugenie is said to have left it to her scandal-ridden mother to share news of a new Baby Brooksbank by phone with her 66-year-old father, the erstwhile Duke of York.

While Fergie was one of the first to hear of the pregnancy, I am told that Eugenie has not been in touch with Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor since he was stripped of his titles and kicked out of Royal Lodge in Windsor.

‘Andrew found out that he was to be a grandpa again via Sarah,’ says the source.

The pair keep in contact despite the fact he is holed up in exile in Marsh Farm Cottage on the Sandringham Estate while Sarah, 66, is thousands of miles away, hiding from public disapprobation and nursing her sorrows in a £2,000-a-night chalet in the salubrious environs of the Austrian Alps.

Neither has said a word in public about the arrival of this new grandchild – a far cry from five years ago when Sarah appeared on the cover of Hello! magazine to mark the arrival of Eugenie’s first child, son August, posing next to a horse in the grounds of a five-star Berkshire hotel and, predictably, seizing the opportunity to plug her debut novel.

This time around the former duchess has, for once, kept her feelings to herself. She hasn’t been seen in public since she was snapped, by arrangement, in Austria last month, wearing a baseball cap branded with the motif of the Mayrlife clinic where she was staying.

‘Sarah is in hiding, so it wouldn’t have been appropriate for her to talk about the expected baby publicly,’ one of her old friends said last week. ‘But of course she was one of the first to hear the news, directly from Eugenie. They spoke at length. This is what mothers and daughters do.’

As for Andrew, who suffered further ignominy when he was arrested in February on suspicion of misconduct in public office and is still the subject of a police investigation. ‘It’s difficult to know how he will be feeling about it,’ the royal source told me. ‘He was never a hands-on father, was away a lot and took little interest in their private lives.

‘He only took a real interest in Eugenie’s wedding when he wanted to take centre stage, demanding it be as grand as Harry and Meghan’s six months earlier. He harangued broadcasters until one of them agreed to televise it.’

Eugenie’s pregnancy might explain why she has been keeping such a low profile in recent months, remaining largely out of sight at the £3.6million ocean-side home she shares with 40-year-old marketing executive Jack and their sons, August, five, and Ernest, two, in Portugal while the House of York has unravelled in the global spotlight.

Unlike ‘Daddy’s Girl’ Beatrice, who has always been close to her father, Eugenie has done her best to distance herself from the scandal which has all but destroyed her family.

But it has proved impossible to avoid the drip-drip of revelations from the Epstein Files, not least the news that, as adults, both Eugenie and Beatrice lunched with their mother and the late paedophile financier in Miami just days after his 2009 release from prison for prostituting minors.

Concern about the impact the scandal has had on the reputation of the Royal Family is still high among its most senior members.

Queen Camilla, the MoS has been told, is among those ‘leading the anti-York faction’, closely followed by Prince William, who remains furious at the way his uncle’s misdemeanours have cast a shadow across the monarchy he will one day inherit.

According to the source: ‘She took a back seat on the scandal for quite a while out of deference to the King’s familial loyalties and to his health. But as the King’s health has improved she was instrumental in pushing him to act.’

More recently, she is said to have formed the opinion that Eugenie, who is a director of Mayfair art gallery Hauser & Wirth, and Beatrice should stop using their titles, albeit on a voluntary basis.

Prince William, too, is said to be concerned about his cousins’ links to Epstein, a subject on which both have maintained an uncomfortable silence.

According to the source: ‘William was keen to keep the girls close and not let them be tainted by the sins of their father and the stupidity of both parents, but the Epstein revelations mean he has abandoned that plan. The way he and Kate have pointedly not publicly welcomed the baby news is a sign of how things have changed.’

The impending arrival of Eugenie’s third child has also heaped further pressure on the ongoing debate about Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s place in the line of succession. Calls for him to be removed have extended to suggestions that the entire House of York, including Beatrice, Eugenie and their descendants, should suffer the same brutal fate.

While Eugenie is currently 12th in line to the throne, her new baby will be 15th, displacing Prince Edward who, unlike his nieces, is a working royal, clocking up 313 official engagements in 2025.

The Queen has apparently concluded that all of the Yorks, including Beatrice, Eugenie and their children, should be excluded from the royal line. ‘Her attitude is that they are all a stain on the monarchy,’ says the source.

However, when it comes to his younger brother, the King is said to be caught between a rock and a hard place.

After Andrew’s arrest in February amid allegations – which he denied – that while serving as the UK’s trade envoy he shared confidential government information with his old friend Epstein, Charles declared that ‘the law must take its course’.

But family ties run deep, and following concerns expressed by his siblings Princess Anne and Prince Edward about Andrew’s state of mind, behind the scenes 77-year-old Charles is said to be softening his stance, despite the fact that he gave him the cold shoulder while staying half a mile away at Sandringham last week.

Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor remains largely contained behind the fence that surrounds Marsh Farm on the monarch’s private estate in Norfolk, but after being told to manage without the coterie of servants he enjoyed at Royal Lodge, he has been allowed some extra staff.

Among them is a secretary tasked with fielding his mail. Most of it, according to the source, is ‘not very nice’, but ‘he has been persuaded to see a selection of supportive letters each day, to try to buck his spirits up’.

News that he is to be a grandfather again might also be expected to put a smile on his usually thunderous face, but whether or not this child will help heal the rift between father and daughter remains to be seen.

With Eugenie, Jack and their sons dividing their time between homes in Portugal, at the Costa Terra Golf And Ocean Club, and west London, where they enjoy the run of grace-and-favour Ivy Cottage in the grounds of Kensington Palace, neither Andrew nor Fergie are likely to play hands-on roles in the life of their fifth grandchild.

Eugenie’s new son or daughter is more likely to spend time with former bartender Jack’s close-knit family. While his 72-year-old father George died in 2021, just days before the christening of the Brooksbanks’ first son August, Jack – who once managed the trendy London nightclub Mahiki and worked as an ambassador for George Clooney’s tequila brand – remains close to his mother, Nicola, who lives in south London and is on hand for babysitting when the nanny has the night off.

Like both of Eugenie’s sons, the new baby is likely to be born, later this summer, at London’s private Portland Hospital, where fees for antenatal and delivery care add up to around £12,000.

When it comes to the child’s baptism, however, the Brooksbanks will want to avoid turning the event into a spectacle – a risk if Eugenie’s disgraced parents are included on the guest list.

Both Andrew and Fergie, who have so far attended the christenings of all their grandchildren, managed to avoid being photographed at the most recent – the baptism of Beatrice’s younger daughter, Athena, in December last year at the Chapel Royal in St James’s Palace, in what was their last public appearance together.

According to a friend of the duchess, they will find a way to do the same with Eugenie’s new baby: ‘Yes, of course, they will definitely attend but that doesn’t mean they’ll be publicly acknowledged or even pictured.’

Clearly, navigating the birth of her third child is not going to be plain sailing for Eugenie, who stepped down as patron of UK charity Anti-Slavery International in March after the release by the US Justice Department of millions of documents relating to Epstein’s role in sexual abuse and trafficking women around the world.

She and Beatrice are undoubtedly still languishing in the shadow of their own links to ‘Uncle Jeffrey’ and their failure to speak out in support of his victims.

Their links to the Middle East, where both have forged lucrative careers on the back of their royal status and their father’s connections to mega-wealthy autocrats, are also seen as cause for concern.

And while the nation loves nothing more than a royal birth, it seems too much to hope that the arrival of a new baby will fix all these problems and blot out the unresolved tensions that remain in what’s left of the House of York.