The Privilege of Prince Andrew

In Britain, land of incremental change, the downfall of Prince Andrew happened in installments.

In 2011 he stepped down from his role as a trade envoy after his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein, a notorious sex offender, was exposed. In 2019 he was forced to withdraw from royal duties after a disastrous BBC interview in which he said he had “no recollection” of ever meeting Virginia Roberts Giuffre, a victim of Mr. Epstein who accused Andrew of sexually assaulting her when she was 17. In 2022 he was stripped of the “His Royal Highness” honorific while defending a civil case against Ms. Giuffre, in which he continued to deny the accusations but settled for an undisclosed sum.

Andrew might have thought that would be the end of it — some even thought he was slowly trying to get back into the fold, attending an Easter service with the royal family in the spring and the Duchess of Kent’s funeral in September.

But this month has brought revelations from which he is unlikely to recover. A newly disclosed email shows Andrew was in touch with Mr. Epstein after the date he said he’d severed all contact. In the email he wrote that they’d “play more soon” and were “in it together.” And Ms. Giuffre’s memoir, “Nobody’s Girl,” was released in Britain, describing the alleged sexual assaults in detail. (Ms. Giuffre died by suicide earlier this year.)

Enough, it seems, might finally be enough. Andrew has relinquished further privileges — the Duke of York title and his membership of the Order of the Garter, an aristocratic society that walks around Windsor Castle in Tudor-style bonnets. The British public is not yet satisfied. There is growing clamor for him to give up Royal Lodge, the 30-room home near Windsor Castle that he shares with his ex-wife, Sarah Ferguson, and rents from the Crown Estate for a peppercorn per annum. There are also calls for him to lose the title of prince and be forced to live as Mr. Mountbatten-Windsor.

Each disclosure has been a reminder that constitutional monarchy is a lottery, which is both its weakness and its strength. You might get an Elizabeth II, a woman so assiduously attuned to public opinion that in 1993 she agreed to dispense with the exemption of monarchy and start paying taxes; who could wear the Imperial State Crown with what looked like bargain basement spectacles or play a Bond girl, complete with a naughty grin, for the opening ceremony of the London Olympics in 2012. But you might also get a tyrant or a total dud. You just don’t know.

In earlier times, an Andrew might have been locked in the Tower of London. The equivalent in the mass media age is to abandon him to the tabloids and leak stories that he will not be welcome for family Christmas at Sandringham.

For the royal family, this is a necessary purge. Andrew must be thrown overboard before he sinks the whole ship. But in these less deferential times, is that enough?

The inordinate gilded privilege of being a member of the royal family — the sycophancy, the Venetian masters, the grouse shooting — takes anything but the strongest character and ruins all the good in it. This is particularly true for the second son, born to such privilege with no discernible purpose. Andrew, like Prince Harry, is a second son. And primogeniture is winner takes all: Whatever Andrew had, it wasn’t enough, because it couldn’t be the crown. The role of a “spare” is a contradiction: equal parts grandeur and humility. A strong character can take this; a fragile one cannot.

Andrew has been dogged by stories about a spoiled, entitled nature for years. He was once reported to have deliberately rammed his Range Rover through a closed gate rather than take a detour of a mile to get home. According to Andrew Lownie, a royal historian, who wrote an unauthorized biography of the prince, he once called someone an “imbecile,” using an expletive, for getting the title of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother wrong.

In public, he presents less as someone unable to tell the truth than as someone who is unsure of what truth is. In what may have been the weirdest part of the infamous BBC interview, he said that Ms. Giuffre couldn’t have thought he was sweaty when she said they’d danced at a nightclub because, he said, he cannot sweat — a medical condition that dated back to his combat tour in the Falklands War.

He is vain, and he thought he could redeem himself by force of personality. He was wrong.

The myth, of course, is that the royal family is ordained by God and can therefore only be unordained by God. (God, so far, has said nothing. As far as we know.) In reality, the British royal family rules by consent in a part of the world that toppled many of its crowned heads — Hapsburgs, Hohenzollerns, Romanovs — a century ago. Their survival is dependent on good manners and public whim, their actions calculated for self-preservation. You don’t keep a throne for a thousand years by being sentimental. If Britons no longer consent to Prince Andrew, then making a once-Duke of York live as a mere Mr. might be a perfect expression of the constitutional monarchical ideal: power and submission.

Andrew once told a journalist he would rather be a plumber than a prince.

Perhaps there’s still time.

Source photograph by Peter Nicholls, via Getty Images.

Tanya Gold is a British journalist who writes for Harper’s Magazine, The Spectator and UnHerd.

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