Today is Halloween and soon the streets will be crawling with excited children dressed in their most ghoulish outfits as they trawl for treats and threaten tricks in their neighbourhoods.
Whether you love Halloween or not, it is wonderful to see the children out and about but Prince George, Princess Charlotte and Prince Louis will have to celebrate privately because of their great-great-great-great-great-grandmother Queen Victoria’s rule about how the royal family should conduct themselves in public.
As reported by the Daily Express, the monarch who reigned from 1837 to 1901, ruled that all members of the royal family should constantly “uphold total class and sophistication”. This despite the fact that the then queen enjoyed Halloween herself.
Royal expert Christina Reeves says that this meant the Royal Family must conduct themselves with “complete self-respect and good behaviour when in front of the general public”, and unfortunately for the royals, this included not dressing up for Halloween.
But times have changed and Prince William and his wife Kate Middleton , parents to the princes and princess, are noticeably making an effort to ensure their royal children have the most normal an upbringing as possible.
In 2019 Hello Magazine reported that the royal children were spotted trick or treating and knocked on the door of their Kensington neighbours , Jay Rutland and billionaire heiress Tamara Ecclestone.
Rutland posted a candid photo of the three ringing at their gate with the captions, “For anyone doubting how down to earth William and Kate are… This is Kate with their kids knocking on our door in London trick-or-treating at Halloween,” alongside a pumpkin emoji.
Other royals have been known to celebrate the grisly holiday with Meghan Markle confessing in the Netflix documentary about her and husband Prince Harry that in 2016 the pair, alongside the Prince’s cousin Eugenie and her then boyfriend now husband, Jack Brooksbank, snuck out to enjoy a Halloween dress up party.
Speaking to talk show host Ellen Degeneres at the time, Markle said, “”He [Harry] came to see me in Toronto and our friends and his cousin Princess Eugenie and now her husband Jack, they came as well.
“And the four of us snuck out in Halloween costumes to just have one fun night on the town before it was out in the world that we were a couple.”
It was soon after this that the pair went public with their relationship, setting in motion a new chapter in the royal family marked by their dramatic exit from life as senior working royals in 2020.