Ex-Prince Andrew Insisted Princess Eugenie Deserved a Grand Royal Wedding After Prince Harry’s

The former Prince Andrew was determined that his daughter Princess Eugenie‘s royal wedding would be celebrated with the same grandeur as Prince Harry‘s marriage months before.

Status meant everything to the former Duke of York, and he reinforced its importance as a father, pushing for his daughters, Princess Beatrice and Princess Eugenie, to be styled as “Her Royal Highness” and receive princess titles at birth.

Ahead of Eugenie’s marriage to Jack Brooksbank in October 2018, Andrew insisted on a full-scale royal wedding at Windsor Castle’s St. George’s Chapel, complete with security and public spectacle, despite mounting questions about his own standing inside the family.

Sources tell PEOPLE in this week’s exclusive cover story that he bristled at comparisons to Prince Harry and Meghan Markle‘s royal wedding earlier that year, determined that his younger daughter’s ceremony not be seen as lesser.

“She’s a granddaughter of the Queen — a princess of the blood,” says Andrew Lownie, author of Entitled: The Rise and Fall of the House of York. “He believed she should get everything.”

Prince Harry and Meghan also wed at St. George’s Chapel in May 2018, and Andrew pointedly noted in the run-up to Eugenie’s nuptials that her guest list would be larger than her cousin’s, underscoring tensions around status and scale.

“It will not be the same as the previous one that was held in May. This is not a public wedding, this is meant to be a family wedding,” Andrew said in an interview with ITV’s This Morning, which broadcast his daughter’s big day, The Mirror reported.

“There’ll be a few more people than most people have. There are a few more than Harry had, but that’s just the nature of Eugenie and Jack — they’ve got so many friends that they need a church of that size to fit them all in,” he explained.

Eugenie and her beau had a larger guest list with about 850 people, compared to Prince Harry and Meghan’s 600 guests. However, an estimated 1.9 billion people tuned in to watch Princess Diana‘s younger son marry his American bride, making it one of the largest televised events in history.

A family friend tells PEOPLE that Eugenie and Beatrice are clinging tight to their royal status following their father’s arrest on Feb. 19 and the shadow it has cast over their family.

“They want to hold on to their royal status,” a family friend says. “It’s their identity.”

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When Andrew was arrested at home in Sandringham on his 66th birthday in February, shock spread quickly through a family long insulated from consequence, an institution conditioned to contain damage and a public no longer willing to accept royal privilege as a shield.

What began as a legal crisis for Queen Elizabeth’s son — detained for 11 hours on suspicion of misconduct in public office, linked to allegations that he improperly shared information as a trade envoy with the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein — became something broader: a harsh moment of exposure for the palace culture that protected him, and his family, for decades.

“What’s changed now is that the public tolerance for indulgence without accountability has collapsed,” says Catherine Mayer, author of Divide & Rule.