Serious Health Problems The Royal Family Tried To Hide

The British royals occupy a tricky position when it comes to disclosing health issues. On one hand, they are individuals who don't necessarily need or want to explain every sniffle. Yet, there's no denying that modern royals are public figures. In 2013, novelist Hilary Mantel gave a now-infamous speech (published by the London Review of Books) that examined this odd tension experienced by British royals, in which we seemingly expect them to maintain perfect images while also allowing for intense, intrusive interest in their most personal matters. To Mantel, it resulted in an emotionally flattened effect, even on the widely beloved Queen Elizabeth II.

The long-held informal motto of Elizabeth — "never complain, never explain" – complicates things even further. This stiff-upper-lip ethos meant that she and many of her family members kept things quiet, even if the behind-the-scenes reality was chaotic. It worked fairly well to maintain the royal image over the years, apart from the upset caused by Elizabeth's initial non-response to the widely beloved Princess Diana's death in 1997.

Since the queen's 2022 death, however, royals have become more open about their health and other personal matters — perhaps the better move in a more connected age. Yet this also opens them up to more speculation over health conditions, whether those are questions about Charles III's swollen fingers or wild speculation surrounding Kate Middleton's mysterious 2024 abdominal surgery. Here are some of the most notorious cases where the British royal family tried to hide some serious health issues.

The story of Elizabeth II's cousins, Katherine and Nerissa, is a supremely sad one. The sisters, who were born to Fenella Bowes-Lyon and John Herbert Bowes-Lyon (Elizabeth II's maternal uncle), were born with intellectual and developmental delays that left them largely nonverbal. In 1941, they were sent to the Royal Earlswood Hospital (pictured), where Nerissa died in 1986 and Katherine in 2014.

The Bowes-Lyon family seemed to do all they could to ignore the existence of Katherine and Nerissa. Their mother reportedly visited them for the rest of her life (she died in 1966), but there are no confirmed visits from other family members, much less Christmas gifts or even a hastily scribbled card. In fact, by the 1960s, Burke's Peerage, an aristocracy-focused publisher, was reporting that Katherine and Nerissa were dead (their mother seems to have failed to fill out the part of the form that admitted their whereabouts). Still, family money came in to pay for their care.

The truth came out when an April 1987 story in The Sun broke the news of the two sisters, including the still-living Katherine. Later, it came out that three more disabled family members had been subjected to similar treatment, bringing the number of known institutionalized cousins of Queen Elizabeth to five. Supposedly, the Queen Mother had believed that her nieces were dead until 1982. After The Sun's report, she sent them money, but appears to have never visited Katherine.

Though she was born into a life of stupendous privilege, it's hard to deny that Princess Margaret had a difficult life that seemed to be the focus of every tabloid. Yet, Margaret's health issues were often far more concealed.

It didn't help that Margaret had a considerable smoking habit that reportedly saw her smoke up to 60 cigarettes daily. Her addictions eventually grew to include alcohol, which often began with a vodka-laced breakfast. Her marriage to photographer Anthony Armstrong-Jones deteriorated through the '60s and '70s, and caused serious personal upset. Margaret often retreated to the private Caribbean island of Mustique, but she still allegedly had a nervous breakdown in 1974.

While her physical ailments became widely known — at the time of her 2002 death, the public was well aware of her three strokes, a lung biopsy, pulmonary issues, and hepatitis, among other maladies — Margaret's mental health struggles were kept quiet. There was some talk of her breakdown, but it took more time for the public to learn that Margaret sought treatment for depression, as well as her attempts at self-harm. That was in part due to her family's penchant for ignoring inconvenient issues. During one party, Margaret reportedly threatened to throw herself out of her bedroom window. When her sister was called, Elizabeth shrugged it off, saying, "Her bedroom is on the ground floor" (via Woman & Home).

Even before the reality of her failing marriage and complicated relationship with her in-laws came to light, Princess Diana appeared to have been suffering from the pressure of a royal life. After her marriage to Prince Charles in 1981, Diana reportedly suffered from bouts of crying, insomnia, paranoia, and the signs of an eating disorder. As some have since claimed, Diana also showed a tendency towards suicidal ideation and self-harm. Charles was reportedly confused and upset by his new wife's troubles. Eventually, their relationship crumbled.

Privately, the royal family attempted to address Diana's mental health, though she was reportedly resistant to taking medication or speaking to a therapist. Queen Elizabeth even asked Harry Herbert, a family friend and royal racing manager, to check in with the princess. Yet, as far as the public was concerned, the details of Diana's mental health were obscure even as her marriage was clearly on its way out.

It wasn't until after Charles and Diana separated in December 1992 that Diana began to more openly discuss her mental health. That resulted in an increased number of people seeking help for eating disorders and mental illness, though the effect eventually waned. Decades later, the royal family reportedly attempted to conceal another member's similar struggles, as Meghan Markle claimed that her depression after her 2018 marriage to Prince Harry was practically ignored as getting help was reportedly deemed to be too potentially damaging for the family's image.

On November 10, 2003, the public was informed that Prince Edward and his wife Sophie, then the Earl and Countess of Wessex, had welcomed a baby girl. The official royal announcement noted that Sophie had undergone an emergency c-section, Edward had to rush back from an overseas engagement, and the premature girl, Louise, was in the NICU. However, the announcement made it seem that all was well, calling the NICU stay precautionary and claiming that both mother and newborn were doing well.

Yet Sophie's childbirth experience was genuinely dire. She went into labor about four weeks early and, at the hospital, medical staff determined that she had a placental abruption, in which the placenta begins to separate from the uterus. This is a potential emergency in which the gestating parent can experience dangerously heavy bleeding and the fetus may be deprived of oxygen. Louise was safely delivered, though Sophie required a large blood transfusion and reportedly came dangerously close to death. Even after she became stable, she was unable to see her daughter and faced a long physical and mental recovery.

Of course, it's not as if Sophie was morally obligated to make her traumatic birth experience public knowledge in what must have been an incredibly vulnerable time. Still, when the reality of her first birth became more widely known over a decade later, it may have shocked people who had read the rather sedate royal announcement.

At the time of Queen Elizabeth II's heart-wrenching death on September 8, 2022, it had been obvious that her health was declining. Previously, she had been put under medical supervision, but details as to why never emerged. Even when her death certificate was released later that month, the listed cause of death — old age — did little to explain what contributed to her passing.

Whether or not someone can really die of old age is a matter of debate amongst medical professionals. Some argue that advanced age is a legitimate cause of death on its own. After all, it is one of the top causes of death in Japan (where, as of 2023, 10% of the nation's population is 80 or older). Yet others argue that a senior's declining body and failing immune system opens them up to any number of complications, which should then be deemed the cause of death. If you ascribe to the latter point of view, Queen Elizabeth's death certificate is frustratingly vague.

Some sources claim that Elizabeth was perhaps in far worse health than many outsiders suspected. As one told The Daily Beast, by the end of her life, the queen was often in a wheelchair and suffered from a variety of pains, declining senses, and cognitive issues, though her death reportedly still caught close family members off guard. A more specific cause of death could clear this up, but we may never learn the full truth of Elizabeth's death.

[Featured image by National Records of Scotland via Wikimedia Commons | Cropped and scaled | OGL v1.0]