Sophie Wessex reveals she was decided ‘to not tread on toes’ as she joined the Royal Family – and shares ‘shifting’ reminiscence about vigil at late Queen’s coffin

The Duchess of Edinburgh has revealed that she was determined ‘not to tread on toes’ when she first joined the Royal Family.

On Wednesday, Sophie visited L’Arche, a south London community of people with learning disabilities and their supporters and Community Shop Lambeth, a ‘social supermarket’ tackling food poverty. 

It marked her last day of royal engagements as a 59-year-old, as Sophie celebrates her 60th birthday on Monday. 

Sophie spoke to the Telegraph about why she was drawn to organisations that focus on disability and said: ‘It goes back to when I first started to get involved with taking on patronages and engagements.  I was trying to find, not a unique thing for myself, but a direction of travel I suppose. 

‘And, of course, inevitably every time I went down a route, I found a member of the family working very hard doing something and I retreated a bit and thought, “No not there, treading on toes.” 

‘And I suddenly thought, “What have I been doing up until this point and could shape what potentially could be the next move?”

The Duchess said because she had a background of working in public relations before marrying Prince Edward and entering The Firm, she thought she would be best placed engaging with people directly. 

Sophie said that the concept of how people engage with each other differently and the issues surrounding how to raise awareness of this led her to championing this cause.

She said that just because individuals are ‘different’ doesn’t mean they don’t have something to ‘bring to the party’.

After speaking about how the world can adapt to help those with disabilities, Mr Keagan-Bull asked the royal about the moment she saw her children, Lady Louise Windsor and James, Earl of Wessex, alongside their cousins, Princes William and Harry standing vigil in Westminster Hall around the late Queen coffin. 

Sophie said she was ‘so proud’ of all the cousins for following protocol and the instructions well, adding: ‘It was incredibly moving, and lovely to see her surrounded by them.’

She also said she wondered whether it would be ‘appropriate’ for James to do it, given that he was the youngest, and around 14 years old when Queen Elizabeth passed away. 

However, Sophie said he was ‘really keen’ to get involved in his grandmother’s send-off, along with Lady Louise. 

But the Duchess could only recount what happened to a certain point before she appeared emotional and said she couldn’t speak about it further. 

Sophie is regularly hailed as the late Queen’s ‘favourite daughter-in-law’, along with the monarchy’s ‘secret weapon’ due to her ‘down to earth’ personality. 

Royal biographer Ingrid Seward previously told Ok! magazine: ‘With the exception of her daughter Anne, the Queen was closer to Sophie than any of the other royal women,’ says biographer Ingrid Seward.

‘It really was a genuine closeness, and Elizabeth was always Sophie’s biggest confidante. 

‘The Queen found her very down to earth, because she refused to have expensive security and things like that, and she loved her lack of airs and graces. I think she saw Sophie as a bit of a surrogate daughter, too.’

Sophie will spend her actual birthday at her house located in Bagshot Park alongside her husband, the Duke of Edinburgh and her children Lady Louise and James, Earl of Wessex, along with their cocker spaniel, Mole, black labradors, Teal and Teasel, and tortoise named Marmite. 

However, the Duchess won’t spend much time off celebrating her milestone birthday, as she is back to work the following day to visit charity Dogs for Autism and a school for children with physical disabilities. 

On Saturday evening, a new photograph of the Duchess of Edinburgh looking happy and relaxed was released to mark her 60th birthday.

The image was captured by London-based portrait, fashion and commercial photographer Christina Ebenezer at Bagshot Park this month.

The Duchess, wearing a cream pleated skirt and dark long-sleeved knit, is perched on a window seat in the image.

She appears to have been snapped mid-laugh in the casual portrait by Ebenezer, who is said to find inspiration in classic portraiture and cinema.

Buckingham Palace said Sophie was interested in Ebenezer’s creative style of photography and wanted to support a rising female photographer.

Ebenezer was born in Nigeria, spending her early years in Lagos, before moving to join her immediate family in London.

She has been named both a British Fashion Council New Wave Creative, and a Forbes 30 Under 30 Arts & Culture Leader.

Two of her portraits were unveiled at the National Portrait Gallery in partnership with Chanel last January.

The Palace said that as the Duchess looks ahead to turning 60, she has a renewed sense of excitement and commitment to her work around gender equality and looks forward to further embracing and championing this issue in the future.

Sophie, a favourite of the late Queen’s, has risen in public prominence over the past year.

She has been hailed as a dependable figure in the slimmed down working monarchy, which was left further stretched in the wake of the King and the Princess of Wales’s major health troubles.

Sophie was pictured placing a reassuring hand on Kate’s back as the princess, now in remission from cancer, made a rare public appearance on Remembrance Day at the Cenotaph at the end of a traumatic year.

The Duchess also became the first member of the royal family to visit Ukraine since the start of the Russian invasion.

She travelled to Kyiv in April to meet President Volodymyr Zelensky and First Lady Olena Zelenska to discuss how to support survivors of conflict-related sexual violence.

On a trip to Chad in October, Sophie was moved to tears after she met refugees fleeing to escape the civil war in Sudan and heard their ‘devastating’ experiences of sexual assault.

PR executive Sophie married Edward at St George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle, in June 1999, in a continental-style evening service where guests were told not to wear hats.

The couple became the Earl and Countess of Wessex, and last year celebrated their silver wedding anniversary.

Edward is the only one of the Queen’s four children not to have got divorced.

In March 2024, Sophie surprised Edward with a tearful tribute ahead of his 60th birthday, taking to the stage in Leeds to call him ‘the best of fathers, the most loving of husbands’ and ‘still my best friend’.

In a television interview, Edward described his wife as his ‘rock’, adding: ‘I’m incredibly lucky that I found Sophie and that she found me.’

Romance blossomed when Edward and Sophie, who once had a job at Capital Radio, met at a real tennis event in the early 1990s.

But Sophie’s journey to motherhood was incredibly dangerous as her daughter, Lady Louise, was born four weeks prematurely, weighing 4lb 9oz, with Sophie rushed by ambulance for an emergency caesarean, during which she lost nine pints of blood and is said to have nearly died.

As the daughter of the son of a then-sovereign, Lady Louise was entitled to be known as Princess Louise, while James, born in 2007, is actually a prince.

But Edward and Sophie decided against this, with it announced on their wedding day that any children would not use the HRH style, and instead adopt the courtesy titles of the child of an earl.

Sophie had a close relationship with the late Queen, who had great affection for her daughter-in-law.

She also shared a love of carriage driving with father-in-law Philip, and was devastated when both the Queen and the duke died just over a year apart.

Charles handed his youngest brother his late father’s Duke of Edinburgh title on his 59th birthday in 2023 in keeping with his parents’ wishes and in recognition of Edward’s commitment to the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award youth scheme.

It meant Sophie became the Duchess of Edinburgh, a title which last belonged to Elizabeth II.

The Duchess has been lauded for her royal fashion style, swapping safe options in recent years for sleek glamour and floaty florals, wearing brands such as Emilia Wickstead, Erdem, Beulah and Suzannah London.

Sophie, patron of the Wellbeing of Women charity, became the first member of the royal family to discuss their own experience of going through the menopause, recounting hot flushes, memory loss and brain fog, and calling for franker conversations on the subject.

She has also called for tampons and sanitary pads to be kept ‘out of the closet’ to end the taboo over menstrual health.

Sophie, a champion of the UN’s Women, Peace and Security Agenda, has focused her charity work on raising awareness of the devastation of conflict-related sexual violence.

She has also long campaigned on preventing avoidable sight loss, after Lady Louise was born with an eye condition for which she had surgery.

In 2016, Sophie cycled 445 miles from the Palace of Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh to Buckingham Palace, as part of her Duke of Edinburgh’s Award Diamond Challenge.

The Edinburghs travelled to Malta in October to visit the villa where the Queen and Philip lived in the early days of their marriage, recreating a photo of the couple on the roof of the home decades ago.