The King and Queen attended church at Balmoral today after reports suggested that Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson have been informed they are not welcome at the Royal Family’s Christmas festivities due to a renewed scandal involving Jeffrey Epstein.

Charles, who is receiving treatment for an undisclosed type of cancer, and Camilla, 78, traveled in a Range Rover to attend the Sunday service at Crathie Kirk nearby.

The 76-year-old monarch, wearing a stylish cream coat, was seen seated in the back of the car, while his wife took the front passenger seat on their customary outing.

Smiling gently during the journey, the Queen appeared elegant in a green tartan outfit with a matching feather-decorated pillbox hat.

Their presence at the service follows claims that the Duke and Duchess of York have been told to remain ‘invisible’ at future royal events, while Prince Harry criticized ‘men in grey suits’ at Buckingham Palace last night, accusing aides of attempting to undermine his reconciliation with the King.

Sources suggest the King wishes to keep Andrew and his former wife, both 65, at a distance after the Mail on Sunday revealed that Fergie had written to Epstein to apologize for her public disavowal of the disgraced financier, despite the couple living together at Royal Lodge in Windsor since their divorce in 1996.

It comes after Charles asked the Duchess of York to help convince her ex husband to ‘do the decent thing’ and avoid the Royal Family’s Christmas gathering last year after it emerged the Duke had become close with alleged Chinese spy Yang Tengbo.

The Yorks spent last Christmas together at Royal Lodge instead.  A source close to the King told The Sunday Times: ‘You can’t sack someone from being your brother. 

‘But this year, if the duke and duchess were both to be as honourable [as last year], it would be very much for the best and the family would not be disappointed, not least to avoid the King having to make any more difficult decisions.’

It follows several charities dropping the Duchess in the wake of the Mail’s exposé last week, which laid bare how she cynically lied when she pledged to cut ties with Epstein.

Just weeks after publicly disowning him, she then wrote him a gushing private message calling him a ‘steadfast, generous and supreme friend’ – and admitting she only distanced herself from him to save her own reputation.

The Duchess ‘humbly apologised’ to the convicted sex offender for letting him down, and said she had been told to speak out if she wanted to save her career as a children’s author.

She sent the grovelling message ‘from the truth of my heart’, less than two months after telling journalists: ‘I will never have anything to do with [Epstein] again.’

The Duchess’s friends say she was ‘devastated for any embarrassment’ caused by the latest scandal and ‘will explain herself to the wider Royal Family in due course’.

It was claimed Sarah sent the apology email to Epstein, in which she described him as a ‘supreme friend’, after he threatened to ‘destroy’ her family in a ‘chilling call’.

James Henderson, the Duchess’s spokesperson at the time, said the email was sent after a ‘really menacing and nasty’ phone call from the sex offender who had a ‘Hannibal Lecter-type voice’, the Telegraph reported.

Sources close to the King have told The Sunday Times that the monarch would prefer if Andrew and Fergie keep out of sight when appearing at family events by arriving and leaving through discreet entrances where possible.

Buckingham Palace declined to comment. 

Fergie had recently made a return to the royal fold after bouncing back from several embarrassments over the years – including being photographed having her toes sucked by US financial adviser Johnny Bryant as well as being caught in a sting offering access to her ex-husband for an alleged £500,000.

But she was invited to join the Royal Family’s Christmas gatherings in 2022 and 2023, her first invitations for three decades. She also joined the family’s traditional walk from Sandringham house to church alongside Andrew, Beatrice and Eugenie in 2023.

Andrew stepped down as a working royal over the scandal involving his friendship with Epstein in 2019. It followed a disastrous Newsnight interview about his relationship with Epstein and questions over his relationship with Virginia Giuffre who claimed she was sexually assaulted by the Duke three times when she was 17.

Andrew, who always denied the allegations, agreed an out-of-court settlement with Ms Giuffre, believed to be worth around £12million. Ms Giuffre, who claimed she was trafficked by Epstein, took her own life in April aged 41.

New files showing phone message logs, copies of flight logs and manifests for aircraft, as well as copies of financial ledgers belonging to Epstein were released by Congressional Democrats in the US on Friday night, naming Andrew, as well as billionaire Elon Musk, among them.

Meanwhile, Prince Harry last night lambasted ‘men in grey suits’ at Buckingham Palace, accusing aides of trying to sabotage his reconciliation with the King.

The Duke’s furious broadside is an extraordinary echo of his mother Princess Diana’s criticism of shadowy royal courtiers – who she also derided as ‘the men in grey suits’ and accused of undermining her.

Harry is understood to be infuriated at what he sees as a concerted campaign by unnamed Palace officials to torpedo his efforts to strike a rapprochement with his father by giving hostile briefings to newspapers.

‘The relationship between the Duke and His Majesty The King is a matter for the two of them and the two of them only,’ a source close to the Duke told The Mail on Sunday. ‘The men in grey suits should stay out of it.’

It came after Harry spent around 50 minutes with the King at Clarence House earlier this month – their first face-to-face meeting in 18 months. 

On Saturday, in a further apparent escalation, The Sun newspaper claimed that Harry’s meeting with his father had been ‘distinctly formal’ and that the Duke had later described the meeting as ‘very official, like an official visit’.

It cited insiders claiming that the ‘awkward exchange’ was carried out in a similar style to that of dignitaries visiting royal residences.

The newspaper pointedly reported that Charles’s meeting with his son was his shortest of the day and claimed there were no plans for father and son to be seen together in public.

When the newspaper declined to retract the quotes on Saturday, the Duke’s spokesman issued a stinging statement, saying: ‘Recent reporting of the Duke’s view of the tone of the meeting is categorically false. 

‘The quotes attributed to him are pure invention fed, one can only assume, by sources intent on sabotaging any reconciliation between father and son.’

The spokesman also claimed that ‘presumably, those same sources’ had inaccurately told The Sun that Harry had handed his father a framed photograph of himself with wife Meghan and their children Archie, six, and Lilibet, four, to mark the reunion.

The monarch was said to have given his younger son an early birthday present, six days ahead of his 41st birthday.

The spokesperson said: ‘While we would have preferred such details to remain private, for the sake of clarity we can confirm that a framed photograph was handed over, however the image did not contain the Duke and Duchess.’

Harry has long railed against senior Palace courtiers who he claims are behind negative stories about him and his wife Meghan.

In his memoir, Spare, he referred to a mysterious trio he named ‘Bee, Wasp and Fly’, who he said handled the tense negotiations that resulted in him and Meghan stepping down from public duties and moving to California in 2020.

‘I’d spent my life dealing with courtiers, scores of them,’ Harry wrote. ‘But now I dealt mostly with just three, all middle-aged white men who’d managed to consolidate power through a series of bold Machiavellian manoeuvres.’

Such criticisms echo those of his mother Diana who was said to have described courtiers who briefed against her during the breakdown of her marriage to Charles as the ‘men in grey suits’.