King Charles III has one royal relative who’s kept themselves well under the radar.
Lord Nicholas Windsor, 53, the youngest of the Duke of Kent’s three children, has previously made quite a few headlines with his controversial views over abortion.
His father, Prince Edward, 88, is the late Queen’s oldest surviving first cousin, while his mother, Katharine, 90, who has long withdrawn from public life, is the oldest living member of the British royal family after the monarch’s death.
But whilst his siblings, George, Earl of St Andrews and Lady Helen Taylor, Georgio Armani’s former muse for 17 years, have been pretty active throughout their royal careers, Lord Nicholas, has been spending much of his time on charity work and anti-abortion groups.
Nicholas, like his mother in 1994, converted to Catholicism in 2001, thus forfeiting his right of succession to the throne.
In 2010, he made headlines when he claimed that abortion is “worse than al-Qaeda” and a greater threat to Europe.
Writing a controversial article for the American religious journal First Things, he described abortion as “the single most grievous moral deficit in contemporary life” and called for a “new abolitionism for Europe” in which abortion, like the slave trade, can be abolished.
He added that, while the threat of terrorist groups such as al-Qaeda calls for “robust and, where necessary, lethal response”, he claimed “these are not threats that appear existential and have not as yet provoked a real sense of public crisis”.
Lord Nicholas was born on July 25, 1970, and was baptised the same year at Windsor Castle, with his godparents being King Charles and the late Dr Donald Coggan, former Archbishop of York and later Archbishop of Canterbury.
The young royal was educated at Westminster Under School and then Harrow School before attending Harris Manchester College, Oxford, where he studied theology.
He met his future wife Paola Doimi de Lupis Frankopan Šubić Zrinski at a party in New York in 1999 to mark the Millennium and then went on to get engaged to her in July 2006.
After a civil ceremony at a London registry office in October 2006, the pair had a religious marriage on 4 November 2006 in the Church of St Stephen of the Abyssinians in the Vatican, thus making the bride Lady Nicholas Windsor.
As required by the Royal Marriages Act 1772, the Queen of the United Kingdom consented to the marriage.
The royal pair welcomed their first child, Albert Louis Philip Edward Windsor, on 22 September 2007.
Albert became the first Windsor to carry the name Albert since King George VI and the first royal to be baptised a Catholic since 1688.
Nicholas’s second son, Leopold Ernest Augustus Guelph Windsor, was born on 8 September 2009 and his third, Louis Arthur Nicholas Felix Windsor, on 27 May 2014.
