Since he took the throne last September, King Charles’ fingers have received an unexpected amount of attention.
His swollen fingers (which he previously described as “sausage fingers“) have even gone viral, at one point ranking seventh on Google’s most searched list.
The king is often depicted with swollen hands and feet, especially after long periods of flying or traveling to hot countries.
He was also seen with painfully swollen hands and feet during the first day of his royal tour of India in 2019, when he took off his shoes to enter a Sikh temple in New Delhi.
Observers also pointed out the royal’s swollen hands as he drank a pint at The Prince of Wales pub in Clapham Old Town in 2021.
The king (pictured) has received a lot of attention since he came to the throne for his self-described ‘sausage fingers’
Queen writes to her music teacher about king charles hands sausage
Although the monarch’s hands have been in the spotlight since he took the throne, they have long been a prominent feature on King Charles’ body – and were even mentioned when he was a child.
His late mother, Queen Elizabeth II, noted that her firstborn had great digits when he was just a baby.
And his large hands were a feature the Queen described in a letter to her music teacher after Charles was born.
She wrote: ‘The baby is very sweet and we are very proud of him. He has an interesting pair of hands for a baby.
‘They are quite large, but with fine, long fingers, very different from mine and certainly different from his father’s.
“It’ll be interesting to see what they become.”
When Prince William (pictured) was born, the then Prince Charles wrote in a letter to a friend: ‘he has sausage fingers just like mine’
Charles’ comments about Prince William’s hands
While the King is certainly the royal with the most noticeable sausage-like fingers, he’s not the only big fingers.
It appears he passed the thick limbs on to his eldest son, something he commented on when the heir to the throne was just a baby.
When the now monarch wrote a letter to a friend about his newborn son, Prince William, he was talking about his swollen hands.
“I can’t tell you how excited and proud I am,” he wrote, as quoted in Howard Hodgson’s Charles, The Man Who Will Be King.
‘It looks surprisingly tasty and has sausage fingers just like mine.’
Like his older brother, Prince Andrew (pictured) also has fingers that are a bit thicker, and these have been at the center of a controversy
Prince Andrew’s allies have insisted that photo is fake
Another royal with fingers on the thick side is Prince Andrew.
While his numbers haven’t attracted as much attention as the king’s, they have been the focus of some strange conversation.
When a photo showing Prince Andrew and his charge Virginia Giuffre was published, fans of the royal family insisted the photo had been tampered with and was fake.
And one of the reasons they gave for believing this has to do with the royal family’s fingers.
The photo, reportedly taken in 2001, shows Andrew with her hand around Ms. Giuffre’s waist next to a smiling Maxwell.
It was first published by The Mail on Sunday in 2011 after the newspaper found Ms Giuffre in a small bungalow in New South Wales, Australia. She allegedly gave the original to FBI investigators in 2011.
Andrew and his allies spread a series of theories to suggest the photo is fake, including that his fingers in the snap “aren’t chubby enough.”
The Duke of York’s friends have previously cast doubt on the photo’s veracity, claiming the hand around Ms Giuffre’s waist “doesn’t look right” and suggesting it looks too small.
A source told the London Evening Standard: ‘Look at his fingers in the photo. The Duke has rather chubby fingers; they don’t look good, and neither does the height of the duke and the girl.’
The monarch’s swollen hands were on full display last week as he toasted French President Emmanuel Macron at a state banquet at the Palace of Versailles.