Andrew Lownie, author of several books including three on the British Royal Family (Photograph supplied)<\/p>\n
Londoner Andrew Lownie, author of a sizzling series of books about the British Royal Family, spent part of his boyhood in Bermuda.<\/p>\n
Mr Lownie\u2019s latest book, Entitled: The Rise and Fall of the House of York<\/em>, hit the top of the Sunday Times<\/em> bestseller list after its release last August.<\/p>\n His Scottish-born father, Ralph Lownie, was a senior magistrate in Bermuda from 1965 to 1972.<\/p>\n An article in the December 6, 1965 Royal Gazette <\/em>announced that the new chief magistrate, Ralph Lownie, had arrived, but had to leave his family in East Africa because Andrew, 4, was unwell.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n The cover of Andrew Lownie\u2019s latest, bestselling book (Photograph supplied)<\/p>\n \u201cI have very happy memories of Bermuda,\u201d he said. \u201cIt 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.\u201d<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Larry Tacklyn and Erskine \u201cBuck\u201d Burrows were hanged for the murders and several others, including that of Chief of Police George Duckett in 1972.<\/p>\n \u201cThere was a hit list,\u201d Mr Lownie said. \u201cThe Chief of Police was number two and my father was number three.\u201d<\/p>\n Fearing for the safety of his family, the magistrate moved his family to Great Britain. He never returned to Bermuda.<\/p>\n \u201cMy mother returned once and my sister and I came back in 2007 with our children,\u201d Andrew Lownie said.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n He founded the Andrew Lownie Literary Agency in 1988. He published his first book a few years later: the Literary Companion to Edinburgh<\/em>. Others followed, such as John Buchan: The Presbyterian Cavalier<\/em> about the author of the 1915 thriller, The Thirty-Nine Steps.<\/em><\/p>\n Mr Lownie\u2019s book, Stalin\u2019s Englishman: The gripping true story of \u2018Cambridge Five\u2019 spy Guy Burgess<\/em> (2015) won him St Ermin\u2019s Intelligence Book of the Year.<\/p>\n From there he moved into the royal domain.<\/p>\n \u201cI felt there was a gap,\u201d he said. \u201cThere weren\u2019t serious books about the royals based on research. There was just an interesting story there.\u201d<\/p>\n The Mountbattens: Their Lives and Loves <\/em>hit book shelves in 2019, followed by Traitor King: The Scandalous Exile of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor<\/em> in 2021.<\/p>\n His third and most recent book on the royals, Entitled<\/em> is about the former Prince Andrew and his ex-wife Sarah Ferguson.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n Mr Lownie discovered that the late Queen Elizabeth II had done much to protect her third-born.<\/p>\n \u201cWe 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,\u201d Mr Lownie said. \u201cIt wasn\u2019t just about one bad apple but about the endemic corruption within the institution.\u201d<\/p>\n 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\u2019s uncle stepped down to marry American divorc\u00e9e Wallis Simpson.<\/p>\n \u201cThis story (about Mr Mountbatten-Windsor) has been rumbling on for 15 years with negative headlines,\u201d Mr Lownie said. \u201cIt shows that two monarchs \u2014 the previous queen and the present king \u2014 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\u2019t want to take the crown and got pushed out.\u201d<\/p>\n He is doubtful that Mr Mountbatten-Windsor will ever see the inside of a jail cell. He believes that the Royal Family will either \u201cfiddle\u201d him out of the charges, or the former prince will skip to the Middle East to avoid arrest.<\/p>\n \u201cHe has a useful palace in Abu Dhabi,\u201d Mr Lownie said.<\/p>\n This month, Marius Borg H\u00f8iby, the stepson of Norway\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n \u201cThis sends a signal that maybe there isn\u2019t a two-tier legal system,\u201d he said. \u201cSome hope that there will be a proper accountability for Andrew. I\u2019m not so sure.\u201d<\/p>\n He has never had a direct response from the Royal Family over his books but there has been pushback from the public.<\/p>\n \u201cPeople don\u2019t like when myths are shattered,\u201d he said. \u201cI 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\u2019s very difficult to tell.\u201d<\/p>\n Some people have accused Mr Lownie of having a political agenda.<\/p>\n In an interview with The Telegraph<\/em> in May, he insisted he was not on a mission to wreck the Royal Family, despite the revelations in Entitled <\/em>and his other books.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.royalgazette.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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\u2019s latest book, Entitled: The Rise and Fall of the House of York, hit the top of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2481737,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[43],"tags":[23560,24214,358545],"class_list":["post-2481736","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-royalty","tag-literature","tag-royalty","tag-spotlight"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/Former-Warwick-Academy-student-becomes-royals-expert-The-Royal.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2481736","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2481736"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2481736\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2481738,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2481736\/revisions\/2481738"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2481737"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2481736"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2481736"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2481736"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/div>\n