Sam Chatto Wore Four Medals to the Coronation — None of Them Were His D
On the afternoon of the 6th of May, 2023, Westminster Abbey was already eight hours deep into the most choreographed day Britain had staged in 70 years. The Gold Coach had left Buckingham Palace at 10:23. The streets had been lined since before dawn. Inside the abbey, 2,000 guests in morning coats and gowns were packed into pews that dated from the 13th century.
watching the Archbishop of Canterbury lower the St. Edward’s crown, 4 lb and 12 o of solid gold onto the head of King Charles III. Somewhere in the middle of that congregation, behind the working members of the royal family, behind the foreign heads of state, behind the rows of military chiefs and senior clergy, a tall, dark-haired man in his late 20s was sitting between his parents.
He wore a well-cut morning coat. At his breast were four small metals, their ribbons catching the light from the abbey windows. Red, blue, white. The small, precise weight of commemorative silver. The press photographers outside had been working since 5:00. By midm morning, they had cataloged nearly every guest.
By lunchtime, captions were circulating that identified the man with the medals as a young military officer. The medals were the tell. The logic ran service ribbons, something earned. They had it wrong by half. His name was Samuel David Benedict Cado. He was 26 years old. His mother is Lady Sarah Cado, the only daughter of Princess Margaret.
His father, Daniel, is a painter and former actor. Sam earns his living as a working ceramicist, throwing pots in a studio in Sussex, firing them in wood kils, shipping them to galleries in London, Oslo, and Kyoto. The four medals on his coat weren’t awarded for service. His own father holds the same four listed on the public record.
Every member of the royal household who was present in the relevant years received them. They are commemorative. They are family. They aren’t military. The audience watching the coverage on YouTube understood this before most of the commentary did. A comment on the list’s video, which gathered 20 likes, put it in clean, factual terms.
Sam Cado’s medals aren’t military. They are medals commemorating significant milestones in the life of Queen Elizabeth as well as the coronation medal of King Charles. A few rows away from where Sam was sitting, his younger brother, Arthur Robert Nathaniel Cado, wasn’t in the abbey at all. A royal watcher account noted the absence and speculated he might be serving with his Royal Marines unit.
The two brothers were being discussed as though they were one man, the same man. a man the press had never been properly introduced to. Tonight, both of them named correctly with the ceramics and the rowing and the 30-year family architecture that put them here as civilians without titles earning their own livings and utterly unknown to the people who were supposed to be covering them.
Samuel David Benedict Cado was born on the 28th of July 1996 in London. He is Princess Margaret’s eldest grandchild, older than either of the Lindley children, Charles and Margarita Armstrong Jones. His mother, Lady Sarah, was born in 1964 as the second child of Margaret and Anthony Armstrong Jones, who was created the first Earl of Snowden in 1961.
His father, Daniel St. George Cado was born on the 22nd of April 1957. Daniel’s own background is worth understanding because it shapes everything. He worked as an actor through the 1980s, small but real parts in proper British films. He appears in James Ivory’s quartet in 1981, shot on location in Paris with Maggie Smith and Isabelle Ajani.
He is in Little Dorit in 1987, a 6-hour Dickens adaptation. He plays, with some irony, Prince Andrew in Charles and Diana, a royal love story, a 1982 television film before he had the slightest idea that his own life would eventually intersect with the royal family. His father, Tom Cado, was an actor who became a theatrical agent.
His mother, Roswater, was an actress. Daniel came from a working London theatrical family. Not a grand one, not a titled one. A family that went to work in the morning and earned its living on the stage. He left acting and became a painter. He now teaches the materials of drawing course at the Royal Drawing School in London, the same institution his son Samuel later attended.
Sam and his younger brother both attended Eaton College. The detail is worth holding because it sits in some tension with the ordinary life narrative. Eaton is elite, expensive, and royally connected. And the script won’t pretend otherwise. But Eaton isn’t a royal institution. It’s a school.
And from Eaton, Sam went to the University of Edinburgh where he studied history of art. He graduated in 2018 with an MA. What happened next is the kind of decision that looks obvious only in retrospect. Sam had three months working in the commercial art market after graduating. His own later description of it, relayed in press coverage, was that he found himself completely uninspired.
He closed that chapter and drove north. In the summer of 2018, he spent six weeks at Northshore Pottery in Latheron on the north coast of Scotland, a stretch of flat gray coastline where the sky sits low over the sea and the clay comes from the ground under your feet. He was learning the fundamentals.
How to center clay on a wheel, how to control a wall, how heat transforms wet material into something permanent. The Make Hower and Worth catalog describes his practice in precise terms. He studied functional objects inspired by the studio pottery movement, developing his passion for wood firing, digging clay, and making glazes. The language is accurate.
Wood firing isn’t clean or efficient. It requires days of feeding fuel to a kiln, reading the temperature by color, accepting results you can’t fully predict. The process is the point. You don’t control a woodfired vessel so much as negotiate with it. After Latheron, he enrolled at the Royal Drawing School in London in 2019 and completed a program there by 2020.
The school’s artist profile reads, “Interested in the idea of transformation through process in both ceramics and print making, he joined the Royal Drawing School in 2019. He has since developed a highly individualistic practice where both the subjects of his work and the materials he uses display his deep connection to the landscape around him.
His father Daniel teaches there. The overlap isn’t discussed in any press profile. It’s simply a fact. Father and son at the same institution working in adjacent disciplines not mentioned. In 2023, Sam apprenticed with the Japanese master Yagi Akira, bringing a traditional Japanese approach to ceramic structure into a practice already grounded in Scottish and English studio traditions.
The following year, 2024 he completed a residency at Tokyo Gallery in Kyoto working in a studio outside the city. The year after his first Scandinavian solo show titled Tracked Earth opened at Ram Gallery in Oslo running from May to June 2025. His exhibition record compiled from gallery CVS covers Makeauser and Worth in Somerset, the Red Fern Gallery in London, Soyo Gallery in Keyoto, and Ram Gallery in Oslo, which presented his first Scandinavian solo show titled Tracked Earth from May to June 2025. His Instagram account @ Sam Shadow is entirely professional. exhibition notices, glaze tests, works in progress. Nothing personal has ever appeared on
it. He describes himself on the account as a British artist and maker currently working in clay to create functional and sculptural woodfired ceramics from his home and studio in West Sussex. He hasn’t given a tabloid interview. There is no quotation on record from him about his family, his position, or his grandmother.
Arthur Robert Nathaniel Cado was born on the 5th of February, 1999 in London. He also went to Eaton where he was a member of the combined cadet force, the school’s military training program and where, according to press accounts from 2018, the military direction was already being anticipated. He went to the University of Edinburgh to study geography, arriving as a fresher in September 2017.
The tab covered his arrival. the chiseled 18-year-old and member of the royal family. He was at that moment 23rd in line to the throne and entirely uninterested in the coverage. While still in Edinburgh, he was working as a personal trainer at Bound Fitness gym by October 2020.
People magazine, Hello, and Tatler all ran short pieces. He was 21. He had an Instagram account @ archadow with 94,000 followers. He appeared to be building a life in Edinburgh around fitness, sport, and the kind of outdoor physical pursuits, Arctic diving, mountain climbing that tend to appear in the social media accounts of young men who are going to do something harder with their bodies later on.
The harder thing came that summer in July 2020. Arthur and three teammates, Charles Bramhead, Harry Lidley, and Oliver Dah Lane, set out from Tower Bridge on the GB Row Challenge. The route runs 2,000 m around the entire coastline of Great Britain, south from the Tempames, around the tip of Cornwall, north up the Irish Sea, around the top of Scotland, and back down the North Sea to return where they started. No support vessel.
The weather around the British coast in summer isn’t reliably gentle, particularly off the northern Scottish headlands. They rode in shifts. They ate on the water. They slept in the cramped cabin of the rowing boat while teammates pulled at the oars. They returned under Tower Bridge on the 16th of August, 2020.
The Ocean Rowing Society records the time with precision. 42 days, 8 hours, 23 minutes, and 16 seconds. The team raised over £21,000 for just one ocean and the British Red Cross. Arthur posted his own caption, one of the very few direct statements attributed to him in any press record. We finished the GB row under Tower Bridge in 42 days 8 hours 23 minutes 16 seconds and became the youngest team ever to row around Great Britain. He wrote it in lowercase.
He didn’t dress it up. The achievement received coverage in Town and Country, Hello and Tatler. The pieces noted the effort, the charity, the record. Then the press cycle moved and Arthur moved with it out of the papers and back into ordinary life in Edinburgh. In August 2021, the Times reported that he had informed the Queen of his intention to train as a Royal Marines officer.
He had been accepted onto the 32-week officer training course at the Commando Training Center. Royal Marines Business Insider ran its own piece. The Queen’s grand nephew, once dubbed the next Prince Harry, was set to become one of the first royals to join the Marines. On the 8th of December 2022, he took part in the passout parade at the Commando Training Center and completed his officer training, receiving the rank of lieutenant.
A social media account tracking royal events noted the ceremony with specific detail, including the date and the location. Whether he serves in the regular Royal Marines or the Royal Marines Reserve isn’t clearly established in the mainstream press record. What is on the public record. He completed officer training.
He holds the rank of lieutenant and he hasn’t discussed any of it publicly. Arthur no longer has a public Instagram account. Back to the medals briefly. The confusion on the 6th of May was structurally predictable. Arthur was the brother with uniformed service. Sam was the one at the coronation.
Arthur was absent from the abbey, reportedly serving with his unit. Sam was present in a morning coat, wearing four commemorative medals that his own father holds on the public record, and that any grandchild of the relevant generation would have been presented. The press working fast on a crowded morning conflated service with ceremony and got the brothers mixed.
The audience in comment sections corrected the record before the corrections reached the caption writers. That inversion, the people watching more closely than the people covering is the persistent pattern with these two. The question of how Sam and Arthur arrived at adulthood without royal titles requires a short detour into constitutional mechanics.
Under the letter’s patent issued by King George V in 1917, the style of his or her royal highness is limited broadly to children of the sovereign, male line grandchildren of the sovereign and certain direct successors through the male line. Princess Margaret’s children, David and Sarah, were never princes or princesses.
They descend through a daughter of King George V 6th, not through a son. David became Lord Lindley as child of an earl. Sarah became Lady Sarah. The Cadows have an untitled father and descend through the female line of a princess. Under the 1917 framework, no title was ever available to them.
There was nothing for their parents to decline. No petition was necessary because no petition could have succeeded under existing law. But something was decided all the same, even without a formal application. Lady Sarah Armstrong Jones and Daniel Cado married on the 14th of July 1994 at St. Steven Wahbrook in the city of London. St.
And Steven Wahbrook is a Ren church in the heart of the financial district. Small, domed, intimate, nothing like the grandeur of a state occasion. The ceremony lasted 30 minutes. Around 200 guests attended. Children weren’t invited because the building couldn’t hold them. Queen Elizabeth II and the Queen Mother were there.
Princess Margaret arrived separately. Diana received the biggest ovation from the crowd outside. The bride didn’t arrange a royal carriage. There was no red carpet. The bells didn’t ring. The couple left the church without announcement. The car wasn’t in position, and they stood on the pavement together and laughed while the driver ran back.
The reception was at Clarence House. The dress was Jasper Conren. The honeymoon was in Bombay. The whole affair was described in contemporary accounts as remarkably low-key for a royal wedding, and it set the register for everything that followed. Both sons were given the surname Shadow. Not Armstrong Jones, the courtesy name their mother carried as the daughter of an Earl.
Not Snowden, the title her brother David inherited when their father died in 2017. Cadow, the name of a working actor’s family from London, a name with no heraldic weight and no footprint in the tabloids. Neither boy appears in the court circular. Neither holds official royal patronages. Neither has ever had a press representative.
Lady Sarah does not undertake public royal duties, though she attends major family events, funerals, jubilees, coronations. She was named president of the Royal Ballet School in June 2024, succeeding King Charles III in the role, having previously served as vice president since 2004. Princess Margaret had held the same presidency from 1956.
The thread from grandmother to daughter to grandson runs through the Royal Ballet School program notes, not through any official working brief. Daniel teaches at the Royal Drawing School. Sam exhibits in Norway. Arthur completed the passout parade. No one has explained the arrangement in a newspaper.
No on record statement from either Sarah or Daniel about how they raised their sons has ever been located. Not a single interview, not a quotation in any profile, not a column inch of explanation to any of the journalists who have over three decades noticed the pattern and asked around. The silence isn’t an oversight.
The strategy’s entire effectiveness depends on the parents never explaining it because explanation is exposure, and exposure is precisely what they chose to protect their sons from. The Cadow Sons aren’t the only children of their generation in England who have come of age this way. Sophie, Duchess of Edinburgh, spoke to the Times in June 2020, about her own children.
Lady Louise Windsor, born the 8th of November, 2003, and James Earl of Wessex, born the 17th of December, 2007, are entitled under the 1917 Letters patent to use his and her royal highness. They descend in the male line from the sovereign sun. Their constitutional situation is the inverse of the shadow position.
They have titles available and have chosen not to use them. Sophie was direct about the reasoning. Hence, we made the decision not to use HR titles. They have them and can decide to use them from 18. But I think it’s highly unlikely. The difference between the two families is constitutional. The resemblance is behavioral.
Two sets of parents, same generation, same country, same general direction of travel, children growing up without the apparatus, studying at ordinary universities, earning their own livingings. James turned 18 in December 2025. An audience member watching a video about the Chatt Brothers left a comment noting a strong physical resemblance between Arthur and Prince James. Two likes.
A small observation that nonetheless comes from genuinely paying attention. Two families, same generation, same choice, same quiet outcome. One question surfaces in comment sections whenever Arthur Chatt is mentioned and it has 13 likes on one video. It reads, “Please, could Arthur take over Invictus? Prince Harry founded the Invictus Games in 2014 with the first games held in London that September.
Since the Duke of Sussex’s step back from royal duties in 2020, the game’s long-term institutional identity has been a recurring topic among royal watchers who care about the program’s future. Arthur Cado completed officer training with the Royal Marines. He rode 2,000 m around Great Britain for charity.
He is the right age, the right physical profile, the right family connection. The audience’s arithmetic isn’t irrational. What the record shows is simpler. Arthur hasn’t put himself forward, hasn’t been asked publicly, and hasn’t commented. The question belongs to the audience. It sits here as what it is, a sincere ask from people who have been paying far closer attention than most.
And the script will go no further than that. Princess Margaret was born on the 21st of August 1930 and died on the 9th of February 2002. For five decades, she was among the most photographed members of the British royal family. Every relationship was documented. Every evening out was filed. Every departure from expected behavior was printed and reprinted.
She couldn’t leave a room without the room recording it. The Cambridge University paper on royal photography notes the striking difference between pre and postwar monarchies in how they managed photographic subjects. And Margaret was at the center of that transformation. The princess who grew up when celebrity photography was discovering its range and never found a way out of its frame.
Her daughter chose a 30-inute wedding at a city church, a borrowed surname, and 30 years of silence on any explanation. Her grandsons have chosen something quieter still. Samuel David Benedict Cado is 29 years old in 2026. He works from a Sussex studio, fires his ceramics in wood kils, ships work to Oslo and Kyoto, shows in London, and keeps an Instagram feed that has never contained anything more personal than a bowl.
He was photographed at the coronation of King Charles III on the 6th of May, 2023, wearing four commemorative medals on the breast of his morning coat and was home by evening. Arthur Robert Nathaniel Cado is 27 years old in 2026. He completed Royal Marines officer training in December 2022 and holds the rank of Lieutenant.
Before that, he rode 42 days and 8 hours around the British coastline with three teammates and raised 21,000 for environmental charity. Neither brother has given an interview. Neither has a press representative. Neither has published a memoir, appeared on a panel, or accepted the invitations that their proximity to the crown would make available to them every week.
The family decision to raise two sons with the surname Chadow outside the royal apparatus without explanation, without complaint, has produced two adults who have in every observable way honored it, not because they were instructed to, because they appear to understand exactly what it cost and exactly what it gave them back.
In the line of succession to the British throne, Sam stands approximately 28th and Arthur approximately 29th as of 2026. Numbers that shift with every birth in the senior line and have never been the operating fact of their lives. They aren’t working royals. They aren’t forgotten royals. They are private individuals who inherited a position they don’t use as their parents intended and who are doing exactly what their parents quietly arranged for them to do.
The audience in comment sections has been reading the names correctly for years. The press has been catching up. Read them back on the record once more. Samuel David Benedict Arthur Robert Nathaniel Shadow on both. They have nothing to say to a journalist, nothing to confess, and nothing to prove.
They are without title and without duty the two grandsons of Princess Margaret, who have spent their adult lives doing what their grandmother couldn’t manage for an afternoon, staying out of the press. That was the decision. That is the result. The two of them are the verdict. Subscribe for more stories like
