Why Princess Charlotte Will Never Be Your Average Spare Heir

Princess Charlotte and Cousin Mia Tindall’s Viral Sweet Moment

Not all that long ago, Princess Charlotte wouldn’t have even been a spare heir. She would’ve just been a plain ol’ princess.

But with the 2013 Succession to the Crown Act retroactively applying to all those born after Oct. 28, 2011, her late gan-gan Queen Elizabeth II and British Parliament made it so that the line of succession would stop skipping over girls in favor of younger brothers. It also meant that a daughter of the heir to the throne would remain in line according to her place in the birth order, rather than get booted down the line by male first cousins.

Though she will be booted by her older sibling’s children.

Still, Charlotte—who will descend the ladder when her currently 10-year-old brother Prince George starts his own family one day, as Prince Harry (born third in line) did when Prince William and Kate Middleton started theirs—was already destined to be so much more than a spare heir, a term that dates back to the late 1800s, when American Consuelo Vanderbilt described her two children with the 9th Duke of Marlborough as “the heir and the spare.”

When Charlotte was born in 2015, in a post-Succession to the Crown Act world, much was made of her spare-heir status.

Commentary flooded in as to how she could avoid being too much like, well… like her Uncle Harry, who had a famously rocky young-adulthood, being “too much army, not enough prince,” as he himself characterized his behavior years before he aired his grievances in his 2023 memoir Spare.

By the time his niece arrived, Harry’s wildest days were behind him and he had carved out an estimable niche for himself as a humanitarian and full-time working royal, often joining forces with William and Kate but also distinguishing himself with his work on behalf of military veterans and families affected by HIV/AIDS in Africa.

Charles long envisioned a slimmed-down monarchy, one in which fewer members of his family were considered full-timers (and therefore partaking of the public money that helps keep the Firm up and running), but by all accounts his smaller troop of senior royals would have included his younger son, who was historically very popular in Britain and beyond but has since ended up on the opposing side of a public opinion divide.

It’s been long apparent, though, that William and Kate have put a priority on filling their children’s lives with normal activities—maintaining the kids’ routine has been paramount for the couple while Kate has been away from public life undergoing treatment following her cancer diagnosis—while also readying them for, if not their future not-quite-normal lives just yet, then lives of gratitude and public service.

Amid the coronavirus pandemic, George, Charlotte and Prince Louis, now 6, joined in the nightly applause for the National Health Service and other frontline workers keeping society running during all the shutdowns. In April 2020, at the queen’s Sandringham estate, Charlotte and George joined William and Kate in packing up food to be delivered to isolated seniors in the area.

Diana strove to strike the right balance between honoring her eldest son William’s destiny and making Harry feel just as special, and that was just on the royal front. She also famously wanted her sons to experience life outside the literal and proverbial palace walls, taking them with her to visit homeless shelters and hospital patients.

And apparently she saw a sparkle in Harry that made him more of a natural people person than his brother. Diana privately called Harry “GKH”—for “Good King Harry”—”because she thought he’d probably be better equipped for the role in the future than William,” royals correspondent Robert Jobson said in 2019 on the Channel 5 special William & Harry: Princes At War?

Birth order, however, made the decision for them.

At the same time, like her uncle, Charlotte simply won’t have the expectations foisted upon her that will be foisted upon her older brother—other than the general expectation that she lead an honorable life and try not to embarrass the family too much.

That being said, no one, future king or not, has managed to not embarrass the family at all, so she shouldn’t feel pressured to be perfect.

So far, Charlotte has distinguished herself in the normal, best-case-scenario ways—as a smart, spirited child with a thousand-watt smile; a devoted big sister who dotes on her little brother, whom she happily shared her official 3rd-birthday portrait with in 2018; and a charmer with a spot-on royal wave. She’s known in casual circles as Lottie Wales. She loves olives and the color pink. She does ballet. She attends Lambrook School in Berkshire with her brothers.

And, according to Nicholl, the kids at her previous school called her “warrior princess.”

“She earned that nickname because obviously she is a princess but she is quite a tomboy,” the Vanity Fair editor told Entertainment Tonight in 2019. “She loves climbing trees and she’s very much an adventurer.”

Right away, Charlotte drew physical comparisons to the queen as a little girl, and she too may be a natural-born leader.

“[Kate] said that Charlotte is growing up really fast. She is the one in charge,” the wife of a Royal Marine officer, who had a mum-to-mum chat with the duchess at the opening of a war memorial, told reporters in 2017. 

Going by how Princess Charlotte has been raised these last nine years and the women in her family she has to look up to, we’re picturing a combination of familial devotion, pragmatism, service and spunkiness, with some inevitable trailblazing thrown into the mix as well.

There will always be heightened interest in what Charlotte is up to, as Kate and William’s only daughter, and everything from her fashion (the “Charlotte Effect” has already pumped many dollars into the U.K. retail economy), to her education and extracurriculars, to her eventual choice of mate will the get the once- (and twice-, and third-) over.

But the possibilities are endless, especially considering she has modernity and birth order on her side. As the first girl in her storied family who will keep her place in the line of succession over her younger brother, the role of spare heir will be whatever she makes of it.

Keep reading for a roundup of all the news that has touched Charlotte’s family so far in 2024: