Photo: getty
He's the Queen's grand-nephew and his Instagram is smoking hot.
By Rebekah Kuschmider — Written on Jan 29, 2020
Move over Prince Harry, there's a new hot royal in London Town! Arthur Chatto, the grand-nephew of Queen Elizabeth, seems to have taken the title of Most Eligible Royal bachelor these days thanks to his hot Instagram pictures.
The 20-year-old university student is part of the latest generation of young royals growing up and starting to gain attention in the tabloids and online.
Chatto, for his part, is not just making waves on social media; he's making literal waves in the English Channel as he trains for an endurance rowing event for charity. He and several friends are planning to row a boat around the entire island of England to raise money for an environmental group this spring.
The extremely fit art history student wants to raise awareness about the environment as well as competing to set a new record for rowing around his home country.
Who is Arthur Chatto and is he single? Read on for all the details.
1. Who is Arthur Chatto?
Chatto is related to Queen Elizabeth on his grandmother's side. In fact, his grandmother, the late Princess Margaret, was the Queen's sister. Chatto's mother is Princess Margaret's younger child, Lady Sarah Frances Elizabeth Chatto.
Chatto's father is Daniel Chatto, an actor and painter who has no claims of the nobility of his own; his father was also an actor and his mother was a theatrical agent. He met Lady Sarah in India and the couple married in 1994. Their son Samuel was born in 1996 and Arthur followed in 1999.
2. Could Chatto ever be the King of England?
Because Samuel and Arthur are somewhat closely related to the Queen, they're both in the royal line of succession, at numbers 25 and 26, respectively. They're behind everyone from Prince Charles and his problematic brother Andrew to Prince Harry's infant son Archie.
So while they can tell people they're distantly in line to be king one day, the chances of them ever sitting in on the throne of England are somewhere between slim and none.
3. What's all this about a shirtless Instagram selfie?
Chatto, being a 20-year-old university student, is no stranger to social media and he uses Instagram to share photos of his adventures. He's a fan of diving and hiking and there are a fair number of selfies of him on mountaintops or in the water. At one point, he posted a shirtless photo of himself in the Scottish Highlands, with his six-pack abs on full display. He has since taken the pic down and explains now that there some royal rules about social media that he hadn't quite grasped before.
“Um, I am learning as I get older that there are more rules than I thought,” he told a reporter. “When I first started, obviously Instagram was a less big thing, so I had a bit less sort of, um… I mean, I don’t think I really have that many guidelines to be honest, but obviously I like to check in with the family and make sure everything’s alright.”
While Chatto himself might have taken the photo down, screenshots live forever so you can still see the picture on fan accounts on Instagram.
A fan account preserved the shirtless selfie.
4. Chatto is the first royal to comment on The Crown.
Most of the Royal family has been silent on the subject of the wildly popular show The Crown. Chatto, however, not only admits to watching it but has dropped hints that the portrayals of people on it are different than his experience of those people in real life.
“I guess it’s only an interpretation," he says of the show about his relatives. "So I just kind of remember what they’re actually like and don’t let the TV persona mar my judgment of any of them.”
5. Chatto is planning to row around England for charity.
These days, Chatto is using his general fitness to prep for a major athletic feat: he and three friends are planning to row around England for charity. He had three friends are training for GB Row Challenge 2020. They plan to be one of two boats attempting to set a new world record for circling Great Britain. The event will raise £150,000 for an environmental charity called Just One Ocean.
He and his buddies have two big priorities: getting sponsors and learning to row well enough to actually complete the challenge. None of them have ever done anything like this before. And it isn't just a matter of having the strength to row for a long time, though that is part of it.
The last time someone did this it took 27 days to get around the island. The other challenge is the fact that the waters they'll be rowing in have commercial and military uses.
“The shipping lanes, especially in the Channel, are going to be quite bad,” says Chatto's teammate Charles Bromhead. “The first one will be Camber, then Lulworth, then a few a bit further down, there’s a missile firing range just on the edge of the Lake District. There’ll be a lot of dynamic risk-assessing.”
The event is set to begin on June 1, 2020.
6. Does Arthur Chatto have a girlfriend?
If anyone was hoping to snag a hot royal date with Chatto, we're afraid you're out of luck. He has a girlfriend named Lizzie Friend, who is a classmate of his at the University of Edinborough. The two have been dating since 2018 and she shows up in his social media posts pretty regularly.
Chatto with girlfriend Lizzie Friend.
Chatto's big rowing adventure will certainly make for headlines round England once it starts. There is also the possibility of more hot photos on his Instagram so keep an eye on that as well.
Rebekah Kuschmider has been writing about celebrities, pop culture, entertainment, and politics since 2010. She is the creator of the blog FeminXer and she is a cohost of the weekly podcast The More Perfect Union.