A Tale of Two Edwards

The trouble with minor royals is that they are so hard to tell apart. I never quite know which one is Anne or Margaret, which one is Edward or Andrew, and which one is Elizabeth or Philip. They all seem to blur into one. So when somebody says “prince so-and-so” to me, I always have to stop and think for a moment to work out which one they are talking about. Anyway, this problem has presented itself to me again here in Bulgaria when I heard the news this afternoon that Prince Edward was in town.

Now, it might be argued that (ignorant fools such as myself apart) everybody knows who Prince Edward is. He’s the Prince, the not particularly successful media mogul Prince, the Master of the Worshipful Company of Gardeners Prince (I admit I cheated and looked the last one up)…

Or is he? Because after hearing about this unexpected Royal visit — which is connected with the centenary commemorations of the start of World War One — I went online to find out more. And it seemed that the Bulgarian media were not entirely clear who it is that they were getting. So on the one hand Novinite, the Sofia News Agency, reported that the Earl of Wessex (the aforementioned gardening and game-show Prince) was in town to meet President Plevneliev and to lay a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier; but meanwhile, the Sofia Globe were reporting that a wholly other Prince Edward had flown into Bulgaria. This other Edward was not the Earl of Wessex, but was instead the Duke of Kent, and he too had apparently been laying wreaths at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and meeting President Plevneliev.

At this point, I got a little confused. I don’t know my Edwards very well, so I had to look up the Duke of Kent to find out more about him and to make sure that he wasn’t also Earl of Wessex. It turns out that he is not. He is not, that is to say, Master of the Worshipful Company of Gardeners, or to my knowledge in any way associated with It’s a Royal Knockout. Instead he is First Grand Principal of the Supreme Grand Chapter of Royal Arch Masons of England, whatever that is supposed to mean, and he is also President of the Scout Association — which at least goes some way to proving my long-held thesis that the Scout Association is more or less an organisation designed for mini-Freemasons or for Freemasons-in-training.

Just in case I had my facts muddled, I decided to turn to photographic evidence, to make sure that I knew where I stood. Here are the two photographs that I found on Wikipedia.

 

 

Now, Wikipedia cannot always be trusted; but if I am not mistaken, these are not the same person. This is something of a revelation to me, as I had assumed that there was only one Prince Edward (the first of these), and now I find out that there are two.

Of course, it probably doesn’t matter too much: at the end of the day one prince is probably good as another. And nobody should be expected to keep track of all these princes running around and doing princely things in their funny headgear, and with their funny handshakes. Certainly nobody in Bulgaria should be expected to tell one British Prince Edward from another (how many people in Britain can distinguish the members of the Bulgarian royal family? I rest my case…). But for the sake of clarity, if anybody spots either of these dubious individuals wandering the streets of Sofia, it would be good to know which one is here, laying wreaths and shaking the hands of presidents.

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