Andrew Lownie, author of several books including three on the British Royal Family (Photograph supplied)
Londoner Andrew Lownie, author of a sizzling series of books about the British Royal Family, spent part of his boyhood in Bermuda.
Mr Lownie’s latest book, Entitled: The Rise and Fall of the House of York, hit the top of the Sunday Times bestseller list after its release last August.
His Scottish-born father, Ralph Lownie, was a senior magistrate in Bermuda from 1965 to 1972.
An article in the December 6, 1965 Royal Gazette announced that the new chief magistrate, Ralph Lownie, had arrived, but had to leave his family in East Africa because Andrew, 4, was unwell.
When the rest of the Lownies finally landed on the island, Mr Lownie went to the nursery at Strawberry Hill in Paget before attending Warwick Academy. The family lived at a house called Rosewood in Paget. He remembers pedalling his bike to school.
The cover of Andrew Lownie’s latest, bestselling book (Photograph supplied)
“I have very happy memories of Bermuda,” he said. “It was a lovely place to grow up. We used to go to the beach a lot. I was involved with the Cub Scouts. We had a boat and used to go out on weekends.”
It was a turbulent time to be a magistrate in Bermuda. In March 1973, Governor Sir Richard Sharples and his aide-de-camp, Hugh Sayers, were assassinated at Government House.
Larry Tacklyn and Erskine “Buck” Burrows were hanged for the murders and several others, including that of Chief of Police George Duckett in 1972.
“There was a hit list,” Mr Lownie said. “The Chief of Police was number two and my father was number three.”
Fearing for the safety of his family, the magistrate moved his family to Great Britain. He never returned to Bermuda.
“My mother returned once and my sister and I came back in 2007 with our children,” Andrew Lownie said.
After leaving Bermuda, he went on to earn a doctorate from Edinburgh University. He became a fellow of the Royal Historical Society and served as a visiting fellow at Churchill College, in Cambridge, England.
He founded the Andrew Lownie Literary Agency in 1988. He published his first book a few years later: the Literary Companion to Edinburgh. Others followed, such as John Buchan: The Presbyterian Cavalier about the author of the 1915 thriller, The Thirty-Nine Steps.
Mr Lownie’s book, Stalin’s Englishman: The gripping true story of ‘Cambridge Five’ spy Guy Burgess (2015) won him St Ermin’s Intelligence Book of the Year.
From there he moved into the royal domain.
“I felt there was a gap,” he said. “There weren’t serious books about the royals based on research. There was just an interesting story there.”
The Mountbattens: Their Lives and Loves hit book shelves in 2019, followed by Traitor King: The Scandalous Exile of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor in 2021.
His third and most recent book on the royals, Entitled is about the former Prince Andrew and his ex-wife Sarah Ferguson.
In recent months, Mr Lownie has been interviewed by many British newspapers television channels and social-media outlets about Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and the Epstein scandal.
It is alleged that the former prince had a longstanding friendship with Epstein who supplied him with underage girls. There is also a criminal investigation into whether Mr Mountbatten-Windsor shared classified government information.
Mr Lownie discovered that the late Queen Elizabeth II had done much to protect her third-born.
“We always thought she put the monarchy ahead of her own family but she covered for him, giving him rewards like Knight of the Garter after some of the Epstein allegations arose,” Mr Lownie said. “It wasn’t just about one bad apple but about the endemic corruption within the institution.”
He thought the Epstein scandal was much more serious than the abdication of King Edward VIII back in 1936. After 325 days on the throne, Queen Elizabeth II’s uncle stepped down to marry American divorcée Wallis Simpson.
“This story (about Mr Mountbatten-Windsor) has been rumbling on for 15 years with negative headlines,” Mr Lownie said. “It shows that two monarchs — the previous queen and the present king — were involved in covering up a man who basically committed treason against his country. This is a much more serious thing than basically a king who fell in love and didn’t want to take the crown and got pushed out.”
He is doubtful that Mr Mountbatten-Windsor will ever see the inside of a jail cell. He believes that the Royal Family will either “fiddle” him out of the charges, or the former prince will skip to the Middle East to avoid arrest.
“He has a useful palace in Abu Dhabi,” Mr Lownie said.
This month, Marius Borg Høiby, the stepson of Norway’s Crown Prince Haakon and eldest son of Crown Princess Mette-Marit, was convicted of two counts of rape and 32 other offences, and sentenced to four years in prison.
“This sends a signal that maybe there isn’t a two-tier legal system,” he said. “Some hope that there will be a proper accountability for Andrew. I’m not so sure.”
He has never had a direct response from the Royal Family over his books but there has been pushback from the public.
“People don’t like when myths are shattered,” he said. “I specialise in shattering the curated narrative. I get the impression that there are briefings against me in an attempt to undermine my credibility. Where that comes from, it’s very difficult to tell.”
Some people have accused Mr Lownie of having a political agenda.
In an interview with The Telegraph in May, he insisted he was not on a mission to wreck the Royal Family, despite the revelations in Entitled and his other books.
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.royalgazette.com ’
