All the young European royals you could be rubbing shoulders with at UK unis right now
Picture yourself going to pres with a literal princess
The Disney to Bridgerton pipeline is strong, and now basically everyone wants to meet royalty at least once. If you go to uni in the UK, your odds might be higher than you think. These are all the European royals who are studying at UK unis right now, or have recently graduated.
Lady Louise Windsor
In case you forgot learning the British royal family tree in Year One, Lady Louise Windsor is the daughter of Prince Edward. She is royal enough to be called a princess, but her parents chose for their children not do have that title (each to their own, I guess).
Lady Louise copied her cousin Prince William and went to the University of St Andrews. She’s in her third year of studying English. According to Hello! magazine, Lady Louise lives in a student house share. In her first year, she stayed in the £8,882 a year St Salvator’s Hall, which looks a lot like the castles she’s used to living in.
Like us mere mortals, Lady Louise had a customer service job in the holidays. She worked on the tills at a garden centre over the summer in 2022.
Princess Alexia of the Netherlands
Princess Alexia is the highest-ranking of all the European royals at UK unis right now. The 19-year-old Dutch royal started studying at University College London (UCL) a week ago. She’s doing a course in Science and Engineering for Social Change.
Princess Alexia is the second child of King Willelm-Alexander and Queen Máxima, which makes her second in line to the Dutch throne.
She also went to sixth form in the UK. She had to endure the International Baccalaureate (IB) at a boarding school in Wales called the United World College of the Atlantic. Lots of the Spanish royal family also went there.
We hope she had a right royal time in Freshers’ Week x
Doña Irene Urdangarin y Borbón, Grandee of Spain
Irene is the 19-year-old niece of King Felipe VI. She started studying Hospitality this year at a uni in the south east of England. Her mother Infanta Cristina helped moved her into her uni accommodation two weeks ago.
The Spanish royal family have hushed up exactly which uni she’s at. According to the Spanish news site Vanitatis, the uni is small, two hours by car from London, 150 years old, and has 2,800 employees. I will leave you to speculate wildly about which uni it is.
According to Vanitatis, Irene wanted to go the prestigious University of Lausanne in Switzerland, but her grades weren’t good enough, so she’s had to slum it with us in the UK instead. Her older brothers Juan and Miguel also went to uni in the UK.
Princess Elisabeth, Duchess of Brabant
Princess Elisabeth is next in line to the Belgian throne. She studied history and politics at Lincoln College, Oxford. Like many posh Oxbridge students, she was on the rowing team.
She graduated with a 2:1 in July 2024, and has just begun a Master’s in public policy at Harvard. I guess you can afford to do a Master’s in the US if your dad is the King of Belgium.
Lady Margarita Armstrong-Jones
View this post on Instagram
In 2020, Princess Margaret’s youngest granddaughter started studying photography at Oxford Brookes University.
Lady Margarita told Tatler that she struggled with doing uni online during the pandemic. Didn’t we all.
She said, “[The teaching] went online and when you are doing a creative subject, it’s really hard. I am so un-techy and I didn’t know how to upload the files.” She swapped courses to event management.
She graduated in 2023, then went to study jewellery design at Haute École de Joaillerie in Paris.
Charles Armstrong-Jones
Lady Margarita’s older brother is 25 years old. He has the title Viscount Linley and used to be Queen Elizabeth II’s page, which is a pretty unusual summer holiday job. He studied product design at Loughborough University from 2020 to 2023, and is now trying to make it as a musician.
Samuel and Arthur Chatto
Two of Princess Margaret’s grandsons went to the Uni of Edinburgh. 28-year-old Sam studied history of art, and 25-year-old Arthur picked geography. Now that they’ve graduated, Sam is trying to make it as a sculptor, and Arthur joined the Royal Marines.
View this post on Instagram