The British Royal Nobody Talks About | James Ogilvy – ht
September 14th, 2022, London. The coffin of Queen Elizabeth II is carried in procession from Buckingham Palace to Westminster Hall, where she will lie in state. Among the mourners walking behind it, Princess Alexandra, her daughter Marina, her son James, his wife Julia. A photographer files a caption.
Princess Alexandra, James Ogilvy, Marina Ogilvy, Julia Ogilvy, and Christian Moe. Queen Elizabeth II is taken in procession from Buckingham Palace to Westminster Hall. Most people who saw that photograph could identify exactly one person in it. That’s the whole story, really. But let’s tell it properly. James Robert Bruce Ogilvy is a great-grandson of King George V, a second cousin of King Charles III, and the godson of Queen Elizabeth II.
At birth, he ranked 13th in line to the British throne. He was educated inside Buckingham Palace alongside a future Duke of Edinburgh. He has stood on the Buckingham Palace balcony at Trooping the Colour more times than most people attend a formal dinner. He is a godfather to Princess Eugenie. At the 2018 Trooping the Colour, Town & Country magazine documented him at position 44 on the balcony.
Counted, assigned a spot, archived. And still, he remained invisible to virtually everyone watching. He carries no title. He performs no official duties. And outside specialist royal circles, almost nobody knows his name. This isn’t a scandal. It isn’t a fall from grace. It’s the perfectly logical downstream consequence of a single decision made on a single afternoon in April 1963 by a man who at that moment wasn’t even a father yet.
To understand James Ogilvy, you have to start 60 years before him with a wedding at Westminster Abbey. April 24th, 1963, Westminster Abbey. An estimated 200 million people watching on television worldwide, a number that makes it one of the most viewed broadcasts of the decade.
The bride is Princess Alexandra of Kent, first cousin to Queen Elizabeth II, granddaughter of King George V. She is wearing a gown of Valenciennes lace designed by John Cavanagh with a 20-ft train and a diamond-fringed tiara that her mother received from the city of London as a wedding gift in 1934. Her brother, the Duke of Kent, walks her down the aisle.
The groom is the Honorable Angus James Bruce Ogilvy, 34 years old, second son of the 12th Earl of Airlie, educated at Eton and Trinity College, Oxford. A city career already well underway. He’d been a director of the Drayton Group since 1956 with boards across more than 50 companies. Television commentators noted at the time that he was visibly more nervous than the bride as he walked to the altar.
The Archbishop of Canterbury, Michael Ramsey, conducted the service. Afterwards, the couple rode through London in the glass coach to St. James’s Palace for the wedding breakfast. Before the day ended, Queen Elizabeth II made Angus Ogilvy an offer. She offered him an earldom. Context matters here. Three years earlier, Princess Margaret had married photographer Anthony Armstrong Jones, and the Queen had created him Earl of Snowdon.
The pattern was established. You marry a princess, you get a title. Everyone at Westminster Abbey that April day assumed the same thing would happen with Angus. He said no. Royal Central called it that shocked royal observers at the time. The Peerage’s published obituary of Angus described it bluntly as unorthodox.
The Independent, decades later, gave the clearest account of his stated reasoning. He declined, believing that marrying a member of the royal family wasn’t reason enough to accept one. Not strategy, not commercial calculation, not a desire to keep his board seats unencumbered by aristocratic obligation. That explanation circulates in popular accounts, but isn’t supported by any documented source.
His Lonrho involvement, which would eventually shatter his city career, came 13 years later and was never linked to the earldom refusal. The reason, per every documented source, was philosophical. He felt the mere fact of the marriage didn’t justify the title. He was proud of being a commoner and intended to remain one.
He also declined the grace and favor apartment that typically accompanied the offer. Instead, in the first year of his marriage, Angus took out a mortgage of approximately 150,000 pounds, a significant sum in early 1963 terms, to purchase the lease of Thatched House Lodge in Richmond Park from the Crown Estate.
A Grade II listed building dating from the 17th century, set inside a royal park, 12 bedrooms. He didn’t want what the palace was giving away. He’d pay for his own. For a time, this read as principled and even romantic. A man who loved a princess and married her on his own terms without using her name as a mechanism for advancement.
But Angus Ogilvy came to regret the decision. Not immediately, and not for himself. According to a 1988 profile by the Daily Express journalist Compton Miller, the most specific documented source on this, Angus acknowledged that he regretted turning down the earldom because he thought it had set a terrible precedent.
His reasoning? Grandchildren of a monarch should have titles. He hadn’t thought through the consequence for any children they might have. He was right about the precedent, at least. 10 years after his own wedding in 1973, Captain Mark Phillips married Princess Anne. He also declined an earldom. Commentators at the time noted the Ogilvy precedent had made this refusal available and easier to execute.
One man’s private philosophical position had become a repeatable template in the royal handbook. James, as the eldest son of the man who refused, inherited the consequences of all of it. To understand what was lost or set aside requires a moment on how the British title system actually works. George V’s 1917 Letters Patent established the formal rules governing who holds royal styles.
Children and grandchildren of the sovereign in the male line hold HRH and prince or princess automatically. Everyone beyond that boundary does not. James Ogilvy, as the son of a daughter of a son of the sovereign, was always going to be outside that boundary regardless of what his father did. He was never going to be styled His Royal Highness.
That was predetermined by rules made before his parents were born. What was not predetermined by those rules was whether he would have a peerage courtesy title. Had Angus accepted the offered earldom, James, as the eldest son of an earl, would have carried a viscountcy as a courtesy title. Not an HRH, not a prince, but something.
A designation that, in the language the British aristocracy has spoken for centuries, says, “This person has a documented relationship to the Crown.” Without it, James Ogilvy was born plain Mr. James Ogilvy. The same form of address given to school teachers and solicitors and people who have never been within 50 miles of a royal palace.
He was a great-grandson of King George V. He would be Mr. Now, the mother. Because you can’t understand James without her. Princess Alexandra was born on Christmas Day 1936 at number 3 Belgrave Square, Belgravia, London. Her father was Prince George, Duke of Kent, fourth son of King George V and Queen Mary, the royal brother most associated with glamour and unconventionality, married to the extraordinary Princess Marina of Greece and Denmark.
Marina was the daughter of Prince Nicholas of Greece and Grand Duchess Elena Vladimirovna of Russia. She was widely regarded as the most stylish royal woman of her generation. When Marina and Prince George married in 1934, it was one of the first royal weddings broadcast by the BBC, watched by millions. Prince George was killed on August 25th, 1942, when an RAF Sunderland flying boat crashed in Caithness, Scotland, while he was on active duty.
Alexandra was 5 years old. She grew up with her widowed mother and two brothers, Edward, Duke of Kent, and the newly orphaned Prince Michael, born just 6 weeks before their father’s death, at Coppins, the family’s country home in Buckinghamshire. By the late 1950s, Alexandra was one of the most active working royals in Britain, undertaking roughly 120 engagements per year.
She represented the Queen at Nigeria’s independence ceremony in 1960. She launched warships, opened hospitals named in her honor across three countries, served as Chancellor of Lancaster University for 40 years. Town & Country has described her as one of the most beloved members of the royal family. Her father’s death when she was five, her family’s relative modesty compared to the senior royals, her years of consistent quiet work, all of it gave her a public affection that outlasted most of her contemporaries.
She was also at birth sixth in line to the throne, a full HRH, a princess, the daughter of a senior prince. And on April 24th, 1963, she married a man who had just declined to become one. February 29th, 1964. Thatched House Lodge, Richmond Park, Surrey. Not a palace, not a royal residence in any official sense, just the house Angus Ogilvy had mortgaged into existence the previous year.
Princess Alexandra had once said, with timing that suggests she’d been waiting to use the line, “It’s bad enough me having my birthday on Christmas. I didn’t want my poor child only to have birthdays every four years.” She had not successfully avoided this outcome. Her son arrived on leap day. He is the only member of the British royal family in the documented record ever born on February 29th.
He was more than a week overdue. He weighed 9 lb 6 oz. The Sunday Times headlines it, “A 9 lb 6 oz leap year son for Alexandra.” Angus was present for the delivery, something noted at the time as historically unusual for royal fathers, more often misattributed in later accounts to Prince Philip. And afterwards, presented Alexandra with flowers before going to make calls.
The first person he informed was the Queen. Then the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret at Royal Lodge. Cables were sent to his parents, the Earl and Countess of Airlie, who were sailing from Cape Town to England. According to the account compiled by royal genealogist Marlene Eilers Koenig, Alexandra’s mother, Princess Marina, arrived at Thatched House Lodge that same morning and told staff that the baby looked just like his father.
Then, Angus called for champagne. The New York Times covered the birth on March 1st, 1964, with a dateline from the previous day. “A son was born today to Princess Alexandra, 27-year-old cousin of Queen Elizabeth II. He is 13th in line of succession to the throne, but his place will drop to 16th after three other royal births expected later this year.
” The piece notes, without ceremony in its final sentence, “He will have no title.” Three words, factual, brief, and as consequential as anything in the story. Debrett’s editor, Cyril Hankinson, told the Sunday Times this was the first time in history a British princess had given birth to an untitled son. This was technically wrong.
Princess Patricia of Connaught’s son, Alexander Ramsay, had preceded James by 45 years. But the fact that even the editor of Debrett’s was surprised captures something real. Something had happened that felt, even to the experts, like a departure. The 1964 royal baby boom placed James first in a remarkable sequence.
Prince Edward was born to the Queen on March 10th, 10 days after James. Lady Helen Windsor arrived on April 28th. Lady Sarah Armstrong-Jones on May 1st. Four children born to royalty within 62 days. Three of them carried titles. One didn’t. The baby was christened James Robert Bruce Ogilvy on May 11th, 1964, in the private chapel at Buckingham Palace.
The Archbishop of Canterbury, Michael Ramsey, officiated. Seven godparents were named. The first was Queen Elizabeth II. Six others joined her. The Duchess of Kent, representing her mother-in-law, Princess Marina, by proxy. Prince Michael of Kent, represented by the Duke of Gloucester. Sir Robert Menzies, Prime Minister of Australia, represented by the Earl of Airlie. Lord Ogilvy.
The Honorable Peregrine Fairfax. And the Honorable Lady Rowley. The full weight of that first name takes a moment to settle. Queen Elizabeth II, monarch of the United Kingdom, head of the Commonwealth, the woman who had just watched her first cousin marry a man who declined the title she offered him, stood in the private chapel at Buckingham Palace and personally accepted spiritual responsibility for their son.
The same son who carried no title, who would never be an HRH, who would go to school and university and get a regular job and build a regular career, because that was the deal his father had made before he existed. She had, by 2002, 30 godchildren, according to palace figures. Not all of them public knowledge.
James was among the quieter ones. But the willingness, the desire, even, to stand up for this particular child says something clear about how the family regarded him, despite the absence of official designation. He was theirs, fully, privately, intimately theirs. He just wasn’t styled so. His earliest education happened inside the building where his godmother lived and worked.
James Ogilvy began school in an informal private arrangement held at Buckingham Palace alongside three of his 1964 cousins, Prince Edward, Lady Helen Windsor, and Lady Sarah Armstrong-Jones. Four children born within nine weeks of each other, educated together in the same room inside one of the most recognizable buildings on Earth.
A future Duke of Edinburgh. The daughter of the Duke of Kent. The daughter of Princess Margaret. And James. Three carried titles. James didn’t. A photograph from December 12th, 1969, Christmas morning at Windsor Castle, after a service at St. George’s Chapel, captures this cohort in frame. The Alamy caption reads, “James Ogilvy, five-year-old son of Princess Alexandra and the Honorable Angus Ogilvy.
Lady Sarah Armstrong-Jones, five-year-old daughter of Princess Margaret and the Earl of Snowdon.” He is in the group, indistinguishable from the rest of them, a five-year-old boy who has no title and is photographed in the royal archive. James spoke about those early years to the Daily Telegraph in October 1996.
Describing lessons at the palace with Edward and Lady Sarah, he said there was no pecking order or sense of being special. “At that age, you don’t understand that your situation is different. They were always totally equal.” He noted Edward was just a normal friend, not grand, and that within the family, things were very relaxed.
After the palace school, James and Prince Edward both moved to Gibbs Pre-Preparatory School in Kensington, then Heatherdown Preparatory School near Ascot. Two boys who’d sat in the same palace classroom now at the same prep school in Berkshire. Then their paths split. Edward went to Gordonstoun, following his father and brothers, and then Cambridge. James went to Eton.
He left Eton a year early wanting to improve his A levels with a London crammer course, then the University of St. Andrews, where he earned a Scottish Master of Arts in History of Art. He served a short service commission in the Scots Guards after St. Andrews, deployed to Malaysia. One account describes him as found digging trenches, which isn’t what most people expect of a great-grandson of George but seems entirely consistent with who James Ogilvy appears to be.
He left the Guards deliberately open-ended, keeping options available. He enrolled for a full-time MBA at Cranfield University in 1990, completing it in 1991. Then, he got a job. Not a directorship passed down through family connection, a trainee position in the pension department at Barclays de Zoete Wedd, BZW, the investment banking arm of Barclays in the late 1980s.
After that, a shipping agency in Edinburgh. Routine, institutional, unglamorous work. The arc of his father’s career was never far from his mind. Angus Ogilvy had built a city career and watched it collapse after the 1976 Department of Trade report on Lonrho found him negligent in his director’s duties. He resigned from 16 boardroom appointments in a single statement, calling it the only honorable thing to do.
The Times obituary of Angus said his business career was shattered. Some companies refused to accept his resignation. The Rank Organization and MEPC both declined. It made no practical difference. He rebuilt around charity work and the public duties that supported Alexandra. And the Queen eventually recognized him with a KCVO in 1988.
Exactly 25 years after the wedding where he’d refused the earldom she offered. And membership of the Privy Council in 1997. James watched all of this from a close distance. He told the Daily Telegraph in 1996, “There was no luxury. I was kept on a healthily short budget string. I used to love making things, so I would spend my pocket money on paper and paint.
I was always aware of the value of money.” At St. Andrews, he met Julia Rawlinson, eldest daughter of a merchant banker who was vice chairman of Morgan Grenfell. They dated for 5 years. They announced their engagement on February 2nd, 1988, 11 days before James’s 24th birthday, if you count actual birthdays, which in his case means February 29th, 1988 was his sixth.
They married on July 30th, 1988 at St. Mary’s Church in Saffron Walden, Essex. Among those present, the Queen, Prince Edward, the Princess of Wales, Princess Margaret, Viscount Linley, Lady Sarah Armstrong-Jones, the Duke and Duchess of Kent, Lady Helen Windsor, Prince and Princess Michael of Kent, Lord Frederick Windsor, and the Duke and Duchess of Gloucester.
Half the working royal family attended the wedding of a man with no royal title. That headcount might be the most precise measurement of James Ogilvy’s actual position in the family. The newlyweds settled first in Fulham. Julia took a public relations post at Garrard, the Crown Jewelers. After 4 years, they sold the London house and moved to Coats House in Fife.
During the week, they lived in Edinburgh, where James was hired by a shipping firm, and Julia was appointed managing director of Hamilton and Inches, a leading Edinburgh jeweler. She told Hello magazine in December, 1992, “We love the country. We were always determined to return to Scotland as James has Scottish roots.
We don’t have an estate, just a nice garden, and we walk and fish a lot. We really don’t miss London a lot.” Flora was born on December 15th, 1994 at Eastern General Hospital in Edinburgh. Alexander Charles on November 12th, 1996, same hospital. Both untitled, both commoners. The Peerage’s published obituary of Angus noted, with the dry efficiency the publication is known for, that the birth of their two children briefly ignited the old discussion about Ogilvy’s decision to refuse a title, since both the children were commoners.
The pattern was now two generations deep and still deepening. In the autumn of 1996, James launched Luxury Briefing, a magazine targeted at senior management in the global luxury sector. No advertising, subscription-based, business-to-business, and unapologetically specialist. CEO Leonard Lauder of Estee Lauder described it as “an indispensable publication for anyone interested in the prestige and travel markets.
” A Springer Nature academic textbook on luxury fashion branding credits James as the founder and describes it as “created by James Ogilvy in 1996, when the management aspect of the luxury sector was growing.” He ran the magazine from an L-shaped office space at the back of his home. He told the Daily Telegraph about the experience in a 1996 interview, “This is a serious business-to-business publication for the people at the top of the industry.
” And later, “Working at home and getting to see so much of the children at this stage of their lives is a wonderful thing. I love it, and my advice to anyone who can do it, do it.” He was asked if they were living a life of luxury. His answer was precise. “If you define it in terms of gold taps and marble baths, then probably not.
But if it’s a luxury to have created a wonderful bit of space for our children and ourselves, and to have a bit of time to enjoy it, then yes.” He sold the magazine several years later to FMS Global Media. He retrained in landscape design, completing a course at the Inchbald School of Design in 2014, and built a client base operating from his home in Fife, with additional work in the United States, particularly on Nantucket Island, where the family has owned a summer home for more than 20 years.
Julia, meanwhile, pursued an entirely different arc. After stepping back from Hamilton and Inches in 2003, she eventually enrolled at Harvard Divinity School, completed a master’s degree in religion, ethics, and politics in 2018, and wrote several books on faith, including Women in Waiting, on women and the church.
She became a founder of a new church in St. Andrews called Cornerstone. None of this appears in royal coverage. None of it’s supposed to. In December, 1990, Prince Andrew, the Duke of York, asked James to serve as a godfather at the christening of his younger daughter. Princess Eugenie was christened on December 23rd, 1990.
James accepted. He is, therefore, the godfather of a princess. The man with no title is the spiritual guardian of someone who holds one. This isn’t unusual by the internal logic of the family. It’s exactly how these relationships work in the extended Windsor world. Intimate, cross-generational, deeply interwoven, and almost entirely invisible to general audiences.
James exists inside a network of obligation and connection that the family clearly maintains with care. Even when the wider public has no idea the network includes him. He was present at the wedding of Prince William and Catherine Middleton on April 29th, 2011 at Westminster Abbey. His name appears on the official guest list published by the palace and confirmed in Associated Press coverage.
James Ogilvy and Julia, listed, present, accounted for. Town and Country published a comprehensive guide to the 2018 Trooping the Colour balcony. Position 43, Julia Ogilvy. Position 44, James Ogilvy. The Royal Collection Trust holds a historical photograph from an earlier Trooping ceremony.
Captioned in the archive, Trooping the Colour, balcony, Buckingham Palace, L to R, Sarah Armstrong-Jones, James Ogilvy, Queen, Coldstream, Duke of Kent, Marina Ogilvy, Philip, Welsh. He is in the Royal Collection, captioned, archived. His presence documented by the institution of the monarchy itself. Getty Images, searched for James Ogilvy pictures, returns 481 results.
He is at Ascot. He is at the Order of the Garter. He is at the Christmas lunch at Buckingham Palace. He is at family weddings. He is at family funerals. He is standing on the same balcony that features in every significant public broadcast the royal family has made for 60 years. On September 14th, 2022, as the Queen’s coffin was carried from Buckingham Palace to Westminster Hall, he walked in the procession.
The photograph is filed. The caption is clear. And for most people who saw it, the only face they recognized was the elderly woman in the hat to his left. One more detail, because it completes the picture of who James Ogilvy actually is as a human being, as opposed to a genealogical footnote. In 1997, he was on a family holiday in Florida.
Julia and the children were there. It was a break from running Luxury Briefing out of a home office in Fife. He went swimming in the ocean. A shark bit him. Multiple wounds to his leg, 30 stitches. The Times ran it on November 5th, 1997. Princess’s son bitten by shark. For approximately 72 hours, James Ogilvy was the most discussed member of the extended British royal family in the press.
Not because of a title, not because of estate duty, not because of anything connected to the crown. Because of a shark. In Florida, on a private holiday. Then the news cycle moved on. So did he. He finished healing. He went back to the magazine. He continued being invisible. The absurdity of this isn’t an accident and it’s not the point.
>> [snorts] >> The point is that it happened. He was briefly involuntarily famous for exactly the kind of reason he’d spent his whole life avoiding. And it had nothing to do with royalty and everything to do with bad luck in the Atlantic Ocean. One brief note on the mechanics of the system because it clarifies the scale of what was set in motion in 1963.
Under the 1917 letters patent, royal styles HRH, prince, princess are strictly reserved for children and grandchildren of the sovereign in the male line. James Ogilvy, as the son of a daughter of a son of the sovereign, was never going to access those styles regardless of what his father did. The letters patent drew that line before James’ parents even met.
But peerage titles are separate. They’re granted by the crown on an individual basis. They don’t flow automatically. They require a decision. Had Angus accepted the offered earldom in 1963, James would have carried a courtesy vicounty as the eldest son. Not royal, not an HRH, but a named designation that placed him formally within the British aristocratic structure.
Something with a capital letter. Without it, he’s addressed as Mr. James Ogilvy. The same styling given to his dentist. He is a great-grandson of a king and he is Mr. Peter Phillips, son of Princess Anne, occupies a recognizably similar position. Zara Tindall, Lady Sarah Chatto. The extended fringe of the family that holds proximity without title is now a fully established category.
James Ogilvy was among its modern architects by inheritance if not by choice. His son Alexander, born in 1996, attended Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island then Sandhurst. In August 2025, he was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Blues and Royals, the Royal Horse Guards and First Dragoons, a regiment with a history traceable to the English Civil War.
Princess Alexandra, 88 years old and now using a wheelchair, attended the graduation. James and Julia were there. The family photographed together. The last living granddaughter of King George V, her son, his wife, and their officer son. Alexander Ogilvy holds no title. The pattern is now three generations deep and nobody appears to be unduly troubled by it.
In 1996, when James Ogilvy gave the most comprehensive interview he appears to have given about his unusual position, he offered one phrase that has stayed in the record. Asked about what it’s like to be born into the periphery of the royal family, he said, “When you are born into a situation, it’s not like being landed with a job.
You slowly become acclimatized.” That verb, acclimatized, isn’t a complaint. It’s not resignation. It’s not pride, either. It’s an accurate description of what happens when a human being grows up inside circumstances he didn’t choose and couldn’t change. You adapt. You build around the fixed points. You make something real with the materials available.
James Ogilvy was baptized by an Archbishop of Canterbury with a queen as his godmother. He was schooled inside Buckingham Palace alongside a prince who would one day hold a dukedom. He stood at royal weddings and funerals and on the balcony of the most recognizable building in the British Isles. He carried none of the designations that would make any of this legible to the general public.
What he built instead was a private life, actual and chosen. A wife he met at university, children born in Scottish hospitals, educated in Edinburgh schools, now growing into their own careers. A magazine he founded in a home office, a landscape practice on two continents, a marriage, by the accounts available, of genuine partnership and shared purpose.
A life that looks, from the outside, like a life. His father’s choice in 1963 was philosophically sincere and operationally consequential and Angus eventually understood both of those things to be simultaneously true. He believed that marrying into the family wasn’t grounds enough for a title. He also believed, later, that he’d failed to think through what grandchildren of monarchs deserved.
He held both positions without reconciling them. That tension never quite resolved. James doesn’t appear to have inherited the tension or, if he did, he found a way to set it down. He’ll be at the next royal wedding, positioned somewhere in the balcony count, name in the family photograph caption that most viewers won’t bother to read.
A great-grandson of King George V, a godson of Queen Elizabeth II, the godfather of a living princess, standing in the place his father’s decision assigned him before he was born. And when the cameras sweep the crowd or the balcony or the procession route, he’ll be right there. You just won’t know it’s him. Subscribe for more stories like this.