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I’m losing track now of how many times I’ve had to revise my definition of rock bottom to think about what has happened to Prince Andrew over the past few years. Or rather, Andrew Mountbatten Windsor, as he will henceforth be called, after King Charles III announced Thursday that he will officially be stripped of the prince title.
I can think of a few other, less publishable sobriquets that formerly prince Andrew will come to be known by, but there it is. Andrew Mountbatten Windsor, just a regular man with a second name like the other human beings with whom he purports to share a species. He’ll also have to move out of Royal Lodge and into part of the Sandringham estate, away from London and away from Windsor. You get the sense that the royal family would not so much like Andrew to “retreat from public life” as lock himself in a cupboard in Norfolk and stay there. This comes on the heels of Andrew “choosing” to relinquish his duke title a week or so ago, ahead of the posthumous publication of Virginia Giuffre’s autobiography detailing her alleged abuse by the prince, and on top of stepping back from royal duties in 2019 after the car-crash Newsnight interview.
Andrew has continued to deny all of the highly credible accusations of sexual assault made against him by Giuffre, even after it was conclusively proven recently that his claim that he cut off contact with Jeffrey Epstein in 2010 was a lie. Emails have now been made public between him and Epstein from 2011, in which the ex-prince stated that the two of them were “in this together.” The palace famously doesn’t give much away about what kind of negotiations go on behind the scenes that result in decisions like this, but it seems likely that Prince William had a hand: He has taken a very hard line against his uncle, and Charles understands that, at 76, his job as monarch is partly to hand over the reins to his son with the firm in relatively good order. Andrew has been a threat to that order for a while now, and nothing has gotten any better.
Whereas previously the party line has been that Andrew has given up his titles and honours voluntarily, now it is clear that he is being forced out. He remains eighth in line to the throne, just below Harry and Meghan’s daughter, Lilibet, but that is about all that is left of his royalty and, barring some kind of mass blue-blood extinction event, unlikely to have any real bearing on his future or anyone else’s.
The move by King Charles is rare, but it isn’t quite unprecedented. Royals can lose their titles. In 1936, Edward VIII was more or less forced to abdicate in order to marry Wallis Simpson, and thereby lost his royal status. But what happened with Edward VIII happened nigh on 90 years ago, and his crime against the royal family was to fall in love with a divorced woman. Both King Charles and Prince Harry are married to divorced women, and while both those relationships have been, shall we say, delicate matters for the monarchy, neither man has lost his title over them. Times have changed. What’s unprecedented about this is that it has come as a direct result of public outrage.
It’s an interesting development because it pulls in two directions in terms of the future of the royal family. On the one hand, stripping Andrew of his prince title protects the royals from further criticism because it says to the public: It is not acceptable to us for someone like Andrew to receive the benefits of being a royal. And it is convenient for them to be able to say “Andrew sucks” rather than get into the real weeds of the issue: that the institution of the royal family sucks. On the other hand, the entire sanctity of being royal is based on birthright. To set the precedent that behavior can lead to the removal of the supposedly inalienable status of prince is a dangerous move for the monarchy. Royals can, it seems, be done away with after all. This one was removed, ultimately, because we all hated him so much, so loudly, and so relentlessly over his—and I still have to put “alleged” here, however absurd that may now seem—alleged sex crimes. Who else might we decide does not meet our criteria for an acceptable prince? Once one royal is defenestrated, how do you close the window?
One has to presume that Andrew will be hopping about all this. I have, for this magazine, slogged through all 400-odd pages of Entitled, Andrew Lownie’s excoriating biography of Andrew and his ex-wife, Sarah Ferguson, so take it from me that Andrew has done little in his life other than flop about spending money and being bad at the jobs his title allowed him to secure. His princeliness was the sine qua non of being Andrew. Without the royal moniker, he is just another dim, faded playboy with more money than morals or sense.
Sarah Ferguson reported that, when she met Andrew at 26, he had a teddy bear on his bed that wore a vest reading, “It’s tough being a Prince.” How terrible it must have been for him. Time, at last, to give poor Andrew a go at not being one instead.
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