The King's youngest brother, Prince Edward, reportedly once expressed his wish to have two wives "in a perfect world". Opening up in her memoir, The Showgirl and the Prince, which reflects on the pair’s relationship between 1988 and 1993, his ex-partner Ruthie Henshall described his confession and detailed the reason for it.
According to the West End star, Edward said he’d have two wives - "one for the job, and one for the woman you loved". Ruthie added that this was "because you wouldn’t want the woman you love [to go] through the job", alluding to the harsh reality behind the idea of a fairytale-esque royal romance.
The Duke of Edinburgh is a working royal and putting duties first is something this job often demands.
Speaking to HELLO’s A Right Royal Podcast, Ruthie stated she knew that she couldn’t be Prince Edward’s wife and continue to be a West End star. Explaining she "was born to sing, dance and act", she went on, "if I'd have given it up, I would have been miserable. It's not my kind of life."
Prince Edward began dating his now-wife, Sophie, not long after he and Ruthie split up in 1993. At the time Sophie worked in PR and their romance perhaps proves Ruthie’s point, as the Duchess of Edinburgh stepped down from her PR firm in 2001.
She and Edward then both permanently gave up their private business roles to become full-time working royals in 2002.
Edward isn’t the only royal to have a keen awareness of the demands that marrying into his family brings. His nephew Prince William revealed that he waited to propose to Kate so that she still had a chance to "back out" of royal life before it "got too much".
During the Prince and Princess of Wales’s engagement interview in 2010, William shared, "Her and her family, I really want to make sure that they have the best guidance and chance to see what life has been like - or what life is like - in the family.
"That’s kind of almost why I’ve been waiting this long is that I wanted to give her a chance to see and to back out if she needed to before it all got too much… I just wanted to give her the best chance to settle in and see what happens the other side."
Prince Harry and Meghan Markle made similar statements in their own engagement interview with the BBC in 2017. The Duke of Sussex revealed, "I tried to warn [her] as much as possible. But I think both of us were totally surprised by the reaction after the first five or six months that we had to ourselves, of what actually happened from then."
Meghan added, "There's a misconception that because I've worked in the entertainment industry that this would be something I'm familiar with… But I've never been part of tabloid culture, I've never been in pop culture to that degree, and lived a relatively quiet life.
"So that was a really stark difference out of the gate. And I think we were just hit so hard at the beginning with a lot of mistruths that I made the choice to not read anything - positive or negative, it just didn't make sense."
