Paedophile probe: Ex-teacher guilty

Richard Findley, 43, was arrested in January by police at his home near St George's School in Ascot, Berks, where Beatrice was head girl.

A Metropolitan Police spokeswoman said Findley admitted attempting to incite a child to engage in sexual activity, causing a child to look at images of people engaged in sexual activity and making and distributing indecent images of children when he appeared at Southwark Crown Court.

He will be sentenced at the same court on October 5.

Beatrice, 19, who is fifth in line to the throne, was a day pupil at St George's School from 2000 and achieved an A and two Bs in her A-level results.

Police said Findley began communicating with who he thought was a 12-year-old girl in an internet chatroom in July 2006.

However, the "girl" was an undercover detective from the Metropolitan Police Paedophile and High Tech Crime Unit.

Findley used the name Suzie in the chatroom, claiming he was a 13-year-old girl from Essex, police said. He later used the identity Roody1, posing as Suzie's 42-year-old boyfriend.

He established that the girl would turn "13 in August" and went on to conduct several sexually explicit conversations and sent a pornographic image. After they exchanged mobile phone numbers Findley sent the girl 56 messages, some of them sexually explicit.

Following his arrest he admitted to having cyber conversations with the girl, but said he believed he was talking to an adult pretending to be a child, describing it as "a Britney Spears scenario". Investigators later found 155 indecent images of children on his computer.