After weeks of backlash following the latest round of revelations about Prince Andrew‘s ties to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, Buckingham Palace announced this week that the disgraced royal was being stripped of his “Prince” title and will now be known as Andrew Mountbatten Windsor.
The decision to strip Andrew of his Prince title (as well as to evict him from Royal Lodge, the royal residence he and his ex-wife, Sarah Ferguson, have called home since 2003), was ultimately King Charles‘ to make. While royal experts largely agree that the move must have been a difficult one for Charles to make about his younger brother, royal author Christopher Andersen says the move likely wouldn’t have happened at all if the late Queen Elizabeth were still on the throne.
“This must have been a painful decision for the King — this is his brother, after all,” Andersen told Us Weekly. “Charles must know how much booting Andrew out of the royal family would have hurt his mother, the late queen. I can’t imagine Elizabeth II would have ever gone this far—not ever.”
As Us Weekly‘s report points out, Andrew was “famously the late queen’s ‘favorite’ child, and Andersen says that was the case “to the very end” of her life.
“She did what she could to protect him,” he explained.
Although formally stripping Andrew of his Prince title must have been a difficult step for the King to take, another royal expert and friend of the monarch says it’s one that likely also left him feeling relieved.
Jonathan Dimbleby, who became a close friend of the monarch after writing a biography on him in 1994, told the BBC that Andrew’s own behavior and attitude over the years was what ultimately made the demotion necessary.
“I suspect he will be feeling a measure of relief. His brother—this is not an easy thing for any brother to do, to be banished, eternal imprisonment in a way, on Sandringham Estate,” Dimbleby said (per the Mirror). “We know his brother was boorish, arrogant, entitled, that he made an awful lot of bad friendships, all sorts of questions about how he got his own money—there is a lot that will be discussed.”
At the end of the day, Dimbleby said, Charles had to what was best for the monarchy, especially since Andrew’s scandals are likely to continue to rage on.
“If there are further investigations, which I’m sure there will be into Andrew himself, the King himself will be quite separate from that and more importantly the institution of the monarchy will be detached from that,” Dimbleby added.
This aligns with the explanation Buckingham Palace offered in the official statement announcing that Andrew would be stripped of his Prince title and evicted from Royal Lodge, which read, in part:
“These censures are deemed necessary, notwithstanding the fact that he continues to deny the allegations against him.
“Their Majesties wish to make clear that their thoughts and upmost sympathies have been, and will remain with, the victims and survivors of any and all forms of abuse.”
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