Princess Eugenie: ‘I couldn't get out of bed or do anything for myself'

Telegraph

18-05-2025

On one of the hottest spring days on record, a small group of patients and hospital staff gather in the garden of the Duke of Cornwall Spinal Treatment Centre in Salisbury. Their eyes are trained on the gate, where in a matter of moments Her Royal Highness Princess Eugenie is expected to appear. Volunteers have been weeding for weeks in preparation and tea and Victoria sponge have been laid out in the shade in anticipation.
Bang on time, a car pulls up, and the Princess and her private secretary, Libby Horsley, hurry into the garden. No policemen. No publicists. Just two young women in summer dresses, apologising profusely that they need to run straight to the loo.
Princess Eugenie, 35, is 12th in line to the throne but does not seem to care for curtseying or photo calls. Today, as patron of the charity Horatio's Garden, which created this garden at Salisbury District Hospital, she's dressed for work rather than a garden party in a simple sleeveless olive green dress and flat shoes.
Although she requested that this should be an informal visit, where she gets the opportunity to meet as many patients and staff members as possible, she has agreed to sit down with me later in a rare interview, to talk about her work with the charity. It's a cause close to her heart – she underwent surgery for scoliosis at the age of 12. 'Horatio's Garden's mission is to reach every spinal injuries unit in the UK,' she says. 'I'm happy to be on that journey with them. It needs to happen.'
The Princess first learnt about Horatio's Garden at Chelsea Flower Show in 2016, where she met Dr Olivia Chapple, a GP who had founded the charity four years earlier in memory of her eldest son, Horatio. Before his death in 2011 aged 17, Horatio was, according to friends, 'a doctor in waiting'. During summer work experience at Salisbury, where his father, David, worked as a spinal surgeon, Horatio conducted a survey to discover how patients' lives could be improved – they typically spend six months in hospital.
The answer was clear: they lacked somewhere quiet to escape to, a garden away from noise and routine of hospital wards. Dr Chapple tells me that Horatio was so excited by the idea that he pointed out the plot that he had earmarked to the chairman of the NHS Foundation Trust. Yet Horatio never lived to see this garden, opened in 2012, and designed by Cleve West or the six others created by the charity at spinal centres around the country. Later that same summer Horatio was killed in a polar bear attack while on an expedition with the British Exploring Society to the Arctic.
'To go through something like that as a family is tragic but to create something so beautiful out of it is beyond anything you can do for the legacy of a child,' the Princess says. 'I think it's incredible that Horatio has got something that lives on.'
Since becoming patron of the charity in 2019, she has visited four of the gardens and, while the Princess never got to see Horatio's Garden gold medal-winning garden at Chelsea Flower Show in 2023 as she was in the final stages of pregnancy, her thumb print cast in clay featured in the design by Harris Bugg Studio. Dr Chapple, who received an OBE from the King last year for her exceptional services to charity, maintains that the Princess is the ideal modern patron. 'She gets it,' she tells me. 'She's not just a figurehead; she wants to help in a really meaningful way.'
Rather than wasting time with stilted introductions, the Princess chats to the staff and garden volunteers as if they're colleagues, putting in a tea request –weak Earl Grey, no milk, and a slice of orange and almond cake – before sitting down at a table to talk to Tony, 63, who broke his neck in a car accident in Italy, two days into retirement. He becomes emotional as he describes the feeling of fresh air on his face after three weeks on his back in a white-painted hospital room. 'I wouldn't have survived without this garden,' he tells her. 'Hospitals are not peaceful places. Being outside brings your spirit back.'
Each garden is designed and planted to be enjoyed from different vantages, all year round and to appeal to the senses. There is a statuesque Libertia grandiflora – donated by a school friend of Horatio's – and an arch of white wisteria, which patients in hospital beds can lie beneath. Coming on in the greenhouse are blackcurrant-scented salvias and pelargonium cola bottles, which smell of holidays and sunshine, Olivia says.
The Princess navigates her way around the garden, chatting to doctors about complications patients have to deal with following spinal surgery, and joins a horticultural therapy class therapy with Bob, a 71-year-old war veteran who has been at the Salisbury centre for seven months following a polo accident. He delightedly tells her that he also met the late Queen and the Queen Mother.
She seems perfectly at ease and yet this isn't a typical day for the Princess. She's taken time off from her full-time job to be here – visits like this she does on the side.
For the past decade the Princess has worked for the gallery Hauser & Wirth, where she's an associate director across their outposts in London, Somerset and New York, and has built close relationships including with the American visual artist and writer, Roni Horn.
As a non-working Royal, who is not funded by the taxpayer, the Princess, it seems, is carving out a new way of being a Royal patron. There is no photo call or press release. The Telegraph photographer is the only person taking pictures, unless you include those Horsley is taking on her phone for social media, which the Princess oversees herself.
Horsley, an accountant, who has been the Princess's private secretary for five years and is shared with her sister, Beatrice, and mother Sarah Ferguson, the Duchess of York, is the only staff member assisting her in her charity work. And unlike most of the Royal Family, the Princess has no team of people in the background curating her public image, no one overseeing her hair and make-up.
This morning, she left her two sons, August, four and Ernest, one, with her husband, Jack Brooksbank, a marketing executive, to catch the early train from London Waterloo with Horsley. Eugenie and her older sister, Beatrice, had their police protection removed in 2011. Although they do still have security when they're performing official Royal duties and pay for their own when necessary, security expectations are more modest than those of Prince Harry, who a fortnight ago lost the latest round of his legal battle regarding the levels of security he and his family are entitled to while in the UK. Horsley is an army reservist at weekends but insists this doesn't mean she's a self-defence expert.
Given that the Princess is also patron of the Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital (RNOH) and the Teenage Cancer Trust, a position she shares with her sister, Beatrice, it seems a punishing workload, pushing the juggle of working motherhood to almost impossible levels. Since 2012, she has also been campaigning against modern slavery, co-founding The Anti-Slavery Collective; earlier this year, at the charity's inaugural Force for Freedom Gala, the Princess raised £1 million.
Meanwhile, Brooksbank, whom she met through mutual friends in Verbier, is currently working for Mike Meldman's Discovery Land Company, which has been developing the luxurious CostaTerra Golf and Ocean Club, tucked between the trendy villages of Comporta and Melides. Her husband's work has meant that the couple divide their time between London and Portugal.
Yet when I catch up with Princess Eugenie privately in the physiotherapy room in the far corner of the garden, she makes it clear that she wouldn't have it any other way. 'I think I've got a good balance. I've got an amazing husband and team and projects I'm passionate about. I'd feel uneasy if I wasn't doing my charity work, looking after my family and doing my job. I love what I do,' she says.
'My mum always taught me that giving back to others is the most important thing in life. Bea and I feel very strongly about this. My grandmother's sense of duty was also instilled from a young age; we watched my parents, my granny and other family members working very hard.'
Prince Andrew and the Duchess divorced when Eugenie was six but have remained close. Since the end of their marriage they have cohabited at the family home, Royal Lodge in Windsor Great Park and holidayed together, ensuring the two girls had as 'normal' an upbringing as possible, whilst gently introducing them to the formalities of Royal life.
Princess Eugenie performed her first solo public engagement when she was 18, opening a Teenager Cancer Trust unit for young patients in Leeds. Today though she is not here to talk about her family or any of the challenges following Prince Andrew's departure from official Royal duties, but clearly her parents did something right as the sisters have remained extremely close. The pair regularly appear together at Royal events – often with their mother, who also devotes herself to charity work and has recently been treated for malignant melanoma, a form of skin cancer, just months after she was treated for breast cancer.
In person the Princess bears a striking resemblance to her grandmother the late Queen. She has similar posture and those dancing blue eyes. And she seems more 'real' than other senior Royals– a member of our world, rather than gilded royalty. As we talk, she helps herself to strawberries from an enormous bowl in the centre of the table. 'Have one before I eat them all,' she urges. A friend describes her as a go-getter, who makes the best of any situation. She achieved two As and a B in her A-levels at Marlborough College in Wiltshire and has a degree in English literature and history of art from Newcastle University.
She tells me that she loved studying art at school. 'I wanted to be an artist – I wasn't very good at that – so now I like communicating about art,' she says. Prior to joining Hauser & Wirth, she worked for Paddle8, an auctioneer in New York; at weekends she does art with her children. 'It's a focussed activity; they might actually sit still for a few minutes,' she laughs.
Her favourite weeks, she says, are when she's at home every night and can be in her pyjamas by 7pm – she and Brooksbank are currently binge-watching The White Lotus.
'I get home from work and put the boys in the bath and don't have to go anywhere else. It's so relaxing.' On summer evenings she'll throw open the back doors and watch her sons play joyfully in the garden.
She says she empathises with parents with spinal injuries, who can only see their children in a cramped hospital environment.
'Patients' children need to have space to run around and the patients themselves need to have space to be alone. The incapacity that comes with a spinal injury – it's so hard to come to grips with it.'
The Princess, whose surgery was performed at the RNOH in Stanmore, north-west London, had to spend 10 days lying on her back in a hospital room; it was four months before she could go back to school.
Today, there's a Horatio's Garden at RNOH but back in 2002 when the Princess was treated, patients had to stay indoors following spinal surgery. She was in intensive care for three days, spent a week on a ward and six days in a wheelchair. 'I had a corner room in the hospital with two windows looking out over a car park. I was too young to notice I couldn't get outside; all I cared about was where my parents and sister were. But I do remember watching someone waving to my incredible red-haired nurse through the window and having this feeling that I couldn't reach them,' she says. 'I couldn't get out of bed or do anything for myself.'
She recalls feeling apprehensive ahead of the eight-hour operation, during which surgeons inserted eight-inch titanium rods into each side of her spine and one-and-a-half screws at the top of her neck. At the time, she says, it was more than she could put into words. Now she's older, she recognises that feeling as shame.
'I felt very embarrassed about the whole thing. I don't know why or where it came from. I remember being woken up really early before my surgery – I pulled my blanket over my head. I said: 'I don't want to see anyone and I don't want them to see me.'' Her parents must have been 'absolutely terrified', she says, although she can't remember exactly how they presented the operation to her. 'With my own children, I panic if one of them bumps their heads in case we have to take them to A&E, or even if they just want to cut paper with art scissors.'
After the operation, the sense of shame intensified when she couldn't wash or dress herself and was shown the scar snaking down her back. Her mother did her utmost to change Eugenie's outlook. 'She was amazing. She'd ask me if she could show it to people, then she'd turn me around and say, 'my daughter is superhuman, you've got to check out her scar'. All of sudden it was a badge of honour – a cool thing I had. It trained my brain that it's ok, scars are cool. It became a positive memory, a part of me, that I could do something with in the future. I could help heal other people.'
At her wedding to Jack Brooksbank in October 2018 at St George's Chapel, Windsor Castle, the Princess wore a dress by designer Peter Pilotto that purposefully revealed her scar, to honour those who had helped her and inspire others with the condition of scoliosis.
Anxious parents often write to her or message her on social media asking questions ahead of spinal surgery, and she's always happy to give their child a pep talk. 'A little voice comes on the phone and they don't know what questions to ask. I tell them not to feel ashamed – not just of the scar but of the whole experience; bed pans, the lot,' she explains.
'The people looking after you in this situation are literally angels; I tell them, 'don't feel nervous about letting them look after you''. Last year she returned to RNOH to see the Horatio's Garden, designed by Tom Stuart-Smith. 'I loved going back there and seeing all the nurses; they know me there,' she says. 'When you're in a bed for as long as I was, not being able to walk to a shower, and having to be rolled around by nurses, you can't really think past how you're going to get out of bed. But now, having worked with Horatio's Garden, I've seen how the garden is so transformative for patients. Nature is so healing; hearing the sound of the birds and running water.'
One day soon she hopes to start introducing her children to her working life, paving the way for them to understand what she does. 'I really want them to come to my gallery and to come here on visits like this and see what I do. It must start when they're young,' she says, adding that they are obsessed with planting.
A recent photo on her Instagram shows the garden at her London home, enclosed by a white picket fence, with a pink rose by the front door. Gardening wasn't part of her family culture when she was growing up but for August's fourth birthday, she gave him seeds and a belt with gardening tools attached.
'It's such a fun activity. We went outside and did some digging. That's been the extent of it so far, although we have been growing cress in the kitchen,' she says.
'When it started to sprout, neither of us could believe it. It was so satisfying. Not only had we grown it, but now we could eat it. Next we're going to do strawberries and tomatoes. I love gardens. I'd like to understand them more. I've got an enormous purple tree outside my house but I wouldn't know how to look after it.'
Horsley is pointing to her watch – they have meetings to get to back in London – but the Princess is busy strategising with Dr Chapple. She is keen to connect some of her art world clients with the fundraising team for the next Horatio's Garden at the Golden Jubilee Regional Spinal Cord Injuries Centre at the James Cook University Hospital in Middlesbrough; the charity is hosting an art auction in October, supported by artists including Sarah Armstrong-Jones. And there's a vine to be planted. This has become a tradition on each of her visits – she first planted one at the Glasgow garden in 2017 and planted others taken from cuttings at Stoke Mandeville, London and now Salisbury. 'We joke that one day we will have Chateau Horatio wine,' Dr Chapple says.
'I love meeting people,' the Princess says. 'I love chatting to Bob who has tears in his eyes when he thinks about what this garden means to him – he says it makes him feel free.'
For Bob, whose family live in Scotland, making it difficult for them to visit regularly, the feeling is mutual. 'You're just like us aren't you?' he tells her. 'Every day, you're just trying to do your best. Which is all we can do.'