Princess Eugenie Welcomes a Daughter — and a Royal Author Says Prince Andrew May Only Meet Her by Screen

Princess Eugenie gave birth to her third child, a daughter, on Monday 3 August 2026 at 6.20pm at a hospital in Lisbon, Portugal. The baby weighed 6 pounds 9 ounces. Buckingham Palace announced the birth the following day in a statement, and the official notice was published on the Royal Family's website, royal.uk, on 4 August 2026.

Eugenie, 36, and her husband Jack Brooksbank, 40, already have two sons: August, five, and Ernest, three. The newborn girl is their first daughter. She is also Prince Andrew's fifth grandchild, joining August, Ernest, Beatrice's daughters Sienna, four, and Athena, one, and Beatrice's stepson Christopher Woolf — known as Wolfie — who is nine.

The King and Queen and other members of the Royal Family were "delighted to be informed of the birth," according to the palace statement. Eugenie shared a first photograph of her newborn daughter on Instagram on 4 August 2026.

The family now lives in Portugal, where Brooksbank works in the drinks and hospitality trade. That distance from the UK — and from Andrew's residence on the King's Sandringham estate in Norfolk — frames a claim that drew attention in the days after the birth.

Royal author Andrew Lownie, whose book Entitled: The Rise and Fall of the House of York charts the York family's recent history, told the Daily Mail that Prince Andrew is "unlikely" to see his newborn granddaughter except through FaceTime. Lownie alleged that Beatrice's husband Edoardo Mapelli Mozzi and Eugenie's husband Jack Brooksbank do not want their reputations and earnings tainted by association with Andrew and Sarah, Duchess of York, and are encouraging their wives to keep their distance from the couple.

Andrew was stripped of his royal and military patronages in January 2022 after a civil sexual assault case in the United States was settled out of court. He has since lived at Royal Lodge on the Sandringham estate. Neither Buckingham Palace nor any member of the York family has commented on Lownie's claims.

What gives the claim its bite is the machinery around it. A palace birth announcement is a formal instrument — a statement issued by Buckingham Palace and logged on royal.uk, the Royal Family's official website. It confirms a birth, names the parents, and records the King's pleasure. What it does not do is place the new child on the public payroll. Eugenie and Brooksbank's children hold no royal titles and are not working members of the Royal Family. The baby will not appear on the Civil List or receive the Sovereign Grant — the annual payment, funded from a set percentage of Crown Estate profits, that supports the monarch's official duties.

The baby does, however, enter the line of succession. Under the Succession to the Crown Act 2013 — which replaced male-preference primogeniture with absolute primogeniture for those born after 28 October 2011 — her place is fixed by descent from King George VI, her great-great-grandfather, regardless of sex. She falls well down the order, behind her mother and elder brothers.

For royal-watchers, the details that linger are the ordinary ones: a 6 lb 9 oz baby, a photograph on Instagram, two big brothers at home. The political story — a grandfather on an estate in Norfolk, a granddaughter in a hospital in Lisbon, and a claim made by a biographer to a newspaper — runs alongside it.