You will have seen the photograph by now: Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, formerly a prince, slumped in the back of a car outside Aylsham police station in Norfolk. His face is corpse-like – his lips tight, stare fixed, eyes turned red by the camera flash. It’s a far cry from Randy Andy, the handsome prince with the big teeth and the easy grin, whose face was once plastered on china cups and plates and commemorative tins, pressed into the soft metal of national affection.
Never the heir, but less of a spare than Harry somehow, Andrew’s face was once memorialised in the way that only royalty, Jesus and the saints were: endlessly reproduced as public property. Andrew’s face was part of his – and the royal family’s – brand; he was the warrior prince, the helicopter pilot, the man who had served. He had sweated for us, so much in fact, that he could never sweat again.
That face on those cups and plates was not merely decorative but an assertion of something ancient: that lineage writes itself in bone structure; that the face of a royal is not just a face but a symbol, a cipher, a condensed history of power.
In antiquity, the ruler’s face was stamped on coins not merely for identification but as a claim: this profile is authority, this jawline is legitimacy, this gaze is the state. By the time of the Tudors, the royal portrait was an act of sovereign self-presentation – as seen by Holbein’s Henry VIII or later in Van Dyck’s Charles I.
Andrew’s face was never intended for coinage. Yet its “physiognomy” was a text that would have been read for centuries as royal lineage: that strong jaw asserting resolution and authority; the broad forehead intelligence; the wide-set eyes openness and clear-sightedness; the full mouth sensuality, which would have worried Johann Kaspar Lavater, the 18th-century founder of the pseudoscience. Why? Because a sensual mouth spoke of negative character traits, including a lack of intellect, sloth and moral degradation.
We can’t read faces so easily now. But for centuries, it was used to “prove” how some men, especially rich white men, were morally, intellectually, physically, superior to others. The founder of eugenics, Francis Galton, and the French police officer who developed biometrics, Alphonse Bertillon, measured and photographed the faces of criminals and poor people, sorting humanity into hierarchical categories. The distinction that underpinned their work – compared with the rich tradition of portraiture – mattered enormously: to be portrayed was to have your humanity affirmed; to be catalogued was to have it denied.
The widespread democratisation of photography in the late 19th century made it possible for us to take our own portraits. The face became less a symbol of lineage than an index of personhood and individualism. And the royal family got in on the act too. After the death of Queen Victoria’s beloved husband, Prince Albert, the palace released a postmortem image of his face, still in deathly repose, his jaw held closed by a bandage.
But something vital has happened to the image of the monarchy that we can see in the face of Andrew in the back of a police car. Until now, the lens through the car window has been in service of proximity to glamour – a glimpse, a wave, as people have craned to see Diana and Charles, William and Kate, Harry and Meghan (who, apparently shockingly, opened her own door) and Andrew and Sarah Ferguson as they stepped in and out of waiting cars: state limousines, Bentleys, Rolls-Royces.
Never, before Andrew, had we seen a member of the royal family leaving a police station in an unmarked car after their arrest. And in that photograph, Andrew’s face is not glimpsed but trapped behind glass; no mugshot (yet) but a recumbent image of a man brought low, with a face read anew: he looks “haggard, shamed and haunted”, says the Daily Mail; all dignity lost.
Many newspapers reached for Charles I, the last time a member of the royal family was arrested. And there are similarities beyond a public fall from grace. In 1649, Charles I walked to his execution scaffold at Whitehall wearing two shirts – the extra layer so that he did not shiver in the cold; he didn’t want his body shaking, to suggest that he was frightened.
Rather less nobly, when Andrew declared on that now infamous Newsnight interview that he couldn’t sweat, supposedly a medical condition from the Falklands, he presented his body as not like other bodies, common bodies, bodies that had not sacrificed themselves for queen and country.
Two years later, Virginia Giuffre filed her civil lawsuit against Andrew and that famous photograph of the once prince grinning at the camera, his arm around Giuffre, came to symbolise the case. When the image circulated for the first time in 2011, Andrew wrote to Jeffrey Epstein: “We are in this together and will have to rise above it.”
Fifteen years on, what has Andrew’s face become? The ageing man is there before us, hollow and undone, but in that image there remains the remnants of the Falklands hero, the grinning prince on the china cup, the Newsnight face with its sneer of disdain, the face staring into the camera bent over the body of a young woman or girl, as revealed in the Epstein files.
How do we reconcile these faces of a man who for 66 years has been a fixture of the royal family, maintained by the public and consumed by the press?
It is perhaps ironic that it is Epstein’s endless cataloguing that has brought us here. Epstein built a Victorian-style archive of surveillance of the rich, alongside a gallery of victims, and that was seemingly for leverage, rather than classification. Now that catalogue, the instrument of bureaucratic power, is turning against power itself.
And the public have become the classifiers – poring over 3m pages of files, running AI facial analysis on images of men that look like Epstein, sharing debunked images that show him living in Tel Aviv with a beard. We are all physiognomists now, and we are all archivists. Every face simultaneously a portrait and a document.
Andrew once controlled which side of that equation he stood on, or at least, he thought he did. He took his seat before the Newsnight cameras by choice, certain that the interview was just another way of putting his face forward – a portrait sitting, perhaps, with Emily Maitlis as Van Dyck, allowing him to compose his face for posterity. Which did happen – just not in the way he intended.
Dr Fay Bound-Alberti is a writer and professor of modern history at King’s College London. Her book The Face: A Cultural History is published by Allen Lane on 26 February
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