All being well, the third calendar year of King Charles III’s reign will finish with the usual scheduled programming: a family parade to church on Christmas Day, the monarch’s pre-recorded speech broadcast at 3 o’clock and, if they’re keeping up Queen Elizabeth’s traditions, a game of “lucky dip” on New Year’s Eve, where everyone reaches into a tub and pulls out predictions for the year to come.
And while it’s been a less chaotic and frightening year for the Royal Family than 2024 — a fever-dream of serious illness for two of its top figures, made more dramatic by absurd internet conspiracies — 2025 has been eventful in its own way. From the scandalous: a disgraced prince stripped of all his titles; to the celebratory: the Princess of Wales’s remission (and the King’s cancer now requiring reduced treatment, announced this month); to the only-in-Hollywood: a duchess fronting a Netflix show for the first time in royal history, here are the seven biggest moments that marked 2025 for the Royal Family.
This year, King Charles formally stripped his younger brother of all of his royal titles. This means that the person formally styled as His Royal Highness Prince Andrew, Duke of York is now known as just plain old Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor. He was also ordered to leave Royal Lodge, the lavish family property where he’s lived practically rent-free for decades.
While Andrew has been plagued by scandal and bad headlines for years (recently published “Entitled: The Rise and Fall of the House of York” by Andrew Lownie is an exhaustive/exhausting catalogue of this, ranging from questionable business dealings to an endemic arrogance and self-importance), the catalyst for this public censure was Virginia Giuffre’s posthumous memoir. Published after she died by suicide earlier this year, the book added fresh detail about Andrew’s alleged sexual assaults when she was a teenager who had been trafficked by convicted sex offender — and friend of Andrew — Jeffrey Epstein. It was “as if he believed having sex with me was his birthright,” she wrote.
While he settled a civil case brought by Giuffre for an undisclosed amount in 2022, Andrew continues to assert his innocence.
2. Kate Middleton announced her remission, returned to working royal life
After the absurdity of the #KateMiddletonIsMissing era, The Princess of Wales is probably delighted that her most viral moment this year was when the internet briefly thought she’d gone blond. Otherwise, it’s been a slow-and-steady return to public royal life for the Kate, following her announcement in January that she was officially in remission.
“As anyone who has experienced a cancer diagnosis will know, it takes time to adjust to a new normal,” she wrote on Instagram at the time. “You think the treatment has finished and you can crack on and get back to normal, but that’s still a real challenge,” she said at an engagement at a cancer treatment centre that same day.
In finding that new normal, she seemed to keep a quieter, less public schedule than previous years, although that picked up toward the end of the year, which saw her play starring roles in two state visits, plus launching a new campaign for her early childhood foundation.
3. Meghan Markle launched a Netflix lifestyle show and a tie-in product line
What felt like far-fetched speculation when they left the Royal Family in 2020 became reality in 2025: Not only did former lifestyle blogger and actor Markle return to television with a Netflix show about cooking and entertaining, she followed it up by launching a tie-in product line, As Ever.
Two seasons and a holiday special later, ”With Love, Meghan” — which premiered this spring, swiftly followed by a second instalment filmed at the same time — was one of the year’s most talked about shows. Whether that chatter equated to actual success is debatable. Yes, season 1 was in the Netflix Top 10 the weekend it premiered, but it also spawned endless memes, many predicated on moments like repackaging store bought peanut snacks as gifts or correcting Mindy Kaling that “I’m Sussex now” when Kaling called her by her maiden name, seemingly tailor-made to be mocked by the internet.
As Ever, her product line, was equally adored and panned: Its first few drops sold out quickly, even if some of the offering (notably edible flower confetti) was catnip to people looking for ways to ridicule her attempts to earn a living now that she and her husband don’t have the Royal Family’s financial (and security) backing.
And, while As Ever still seems to be a going concern, her Netflix show’s future is less certain. There’s no news of a third season, and she was recently spotted making a cameo in a Prime production, suggesting she may have changed streaming alliance.
4. Prince William tells Eugene Levy he has changes in mind for the monarchy
It’s hard to say what was more newsworthy: the fact that Prince William appeared on Eugene Levy’s travel show, “The Reluctant Traveler,” and gave him a tour of Windsor Castle, or the fact that he told the Canadian comedian that his vision for the future of the monarchy involves change. “I think it’s safe to say that change is on my agenda. Change for good,” he told Levy. It also apparently involves a softening of the stiff upper lip and sharing real feelings, as when he told Levy about how hard he’d found dealing with both his wife and his father’s illness and a candidness about how even royals are human, as when he told him that “sleep” was his favourite thing to do.
5. Prince Harry got in hot water for wearing the wrong team’s merch
For someone who lives in California, the Duke of Sussex sure spent a lot of time in Canada in the last quarter of this year. First, he was here for a few days of military-related events, including hanging out with Canadian veterans, to mark Remembrance Day. A few weeks later, he was back in town for a paid speaking gig at a real estate conference, after which he was spotted eating sushi at Nobu with Ontario premier Doug Ford.
It’s actually something that happened back in Los Angeles, however, that made the biggest waves when Prince Harry was in The Six. That’s because, despite being in line for Canada’s throne, he was seen sporting a Dodger’s hat while at a World Series game between the Toronto Blue Jays and the Los Angeles team.
He was quick to admit the error of his ways, however, and beg the nation’s forgiveness.
“I was under duress. There wasn’t much choice,” he told CTV News. “I was invited to the Dodgers dugout by the owner. I was doing what I thought was the polite thing to do.”
He claimed, having donned a Jays cap, that he was a true fan. “Truthfully and jokes aside, this city will always mean a great deal to me,” he added.
6. The royals hosted Donald Trump for a state visit
One of the key ways that royals earn their keep is hosting foreign dignitaries — always at the invitation of the government of the day, not their own personal leanings — for state visits. And while the pomp and pageantry is always a feature, Donald Trump’s trip across the pond in September was a particularly notable exercise in wheeling out the ol’ royal razzle dazzle for the greater good of the realm. For starters, the U.S. president was extended the rare compliment of a second state visit, the invite from King Charles hand-delivered by Prime Minister Keir Starmer when he was in Washington to work out a post-tariff trade deal for the U.K.
Their assignment was to charm, and by all accounts it seemed the royals succeeded. “What a place,” he said while touring St George’s Chapel, high praise from the real-estate-minded Trump. The Princess of Wales played a starring turn in the visit: Not only did she host the first lady on her own for an engagement with some Scouts, but she received particular attention from the president, who sat next to her at the State banquet and said she looked “so radiant and so healthy and so beautiful” in his speech.
7. Prince Harry and King Charles possibly tiptoed toward reconciliation
In September, the King and his younger son saw each other face-to-face for the first time in more than 18 months. Much like Prince Harry’s visit in February 2024, when he jetted across the Atlantic after hearing about his father’s cancer diagnosis, it was not a long visit: just 50 minutes and a private tea, but it was interpreted as some sign that reconciliation might be underway — or, at the very least, active hostilities might have ceased. An improvement over Harry’s disclosure in a BBC interview in May that he and his dad were not speaking: “He won’t speak to me because of this security stuff,” he told the news outlet, after losing his appeal to get his publicly funded security detail reinstated.
