The biggest royal scandals in British history as Andrew crisis deepens
Britain’s monarchy is so well tuned to public sentiment because, after all, it has prestige but not power.
This is evident in the embarrassment of Andrew Mountbatten Windsor, who was stripped of his noble title and large household by his brother King Charles on Thursday.
It’s an exile that has exposed the disgraced royal to increasing political and legal scrutiny over her finances and her friendship with sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
After years of scandals surrounding Andrew, Charles has taken arguably the biggest step of his reign by trying to insulate the monarchy from further scandals related to Andrew and its connections to Epstein.
In August 2019, more than a decade after his initial conviction, Epstein committed suicide in prison while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.
This is not the first time that the current version of the British monarchy (the House of Windsor) has entered crisis in the last century and the future of the institution has been threatened.
World War I
Royal expert George Gross of King’s College London said the most recent precedent for what happened to Andrew was the 1917 Deprivation of Titles Act, which “led to various members of the royals and dukes losing their titles if they sided with Germany in the First World War.”
Europe’s royal families are closely intertwined, and Britain’s are predominantly German; especially after Queen Victoria married Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, with whom she had nine children.
When Britain and Germany went to war in 1914, some members of the British royal family found themselves on opposing sides.
Britain’s King George V changed his surname from Saxe-Coburg and Gotha to Windsor in 1917 and introduced legislation to expunge the titles of princes and lords who “bear arms against Her Majesty or her Allies during the present war, or remain loyal to Her Majesty’s enemies.”
One of the targets was Prince Ernest Augustus, Duke of Cumberland and Teviotdale, a member of the United Kingdom’s royal family who is also a prince of Hanover. He was stripped of his title on the grounds that he was an enemy of Britain under the 1917 Act, which came into force in 1919 after the war ended.
According to the House of Commons Library “this was the first and only occasion when such a title was removed in this way.”
abdication
The relationship between Edward, Prince of Wales and US socialite Wallis Simpson was a headache that turned into a constitutional crisis. Simpson was divorced twice, and Edward, the heir to the throne, would become the ceremonial head of the Church of England, which does not allow divorced people to remarry in the church.
The prince became King Edward VIII when his father, King George V, died in early 1936. She continued to say that she wanted to marry Simpson despite opposition from the British government.
Forced to choose between duty and passion, he abdicated in December 1936, announcing in a radio broadcast: “I have found it impossible, as I wish, to fulfill my duties as king without the help and support of the woman I love.”
This news came as a surprise to many in Britain, but not beyond. British newspapers had not reported on the affair, and American magazines had cut offending articles before it went on sale.
The abdication put the monarchy on a new path. Edward’s younger brother ascended to the throne as King George VI. He was succeeded by his daughter, Queen Elizabeth II. Elizabeth and her son, King King III, after her 70-year reign. Charles passed. All insisted on the idea that the essential characteristic of the ruler should be a sense of duty; This was something Edward was missing in the popular imagination.
Edward and Wallis, now the Duke and Duchess of Windsor and suspected by some Nazi sympathizers, were sent to the Bahamas, where he served as governor. After the war they mostly stayed away from England and lived a nomadic life of luxury.
Princess Diana’s death
The death of Charles’ ex-wife Princess Diana in a car crash in Paris in 1997, aged 36, shocked the world and left her family, including sons William and Harry, then 15 and 12, in mourning.
The strong public sentiment surprised the royal family. Tons of floral gifts were piled outside the gates of Buckingham Palace to mourn the loss of a princess shunned by the royal family after her divorce from Charles in 1992.
The Queen, along with her husband Prince Philip, Charles, William and Harry, were on summer holiday in Balmoral, Scotland. The family kept their sadness secret and stuck to the routine; They took the ashen-faced children to church on Sunday morning, and the queen made no statement for several days.
Prime Minister Tony Blair, who perfectly captured the public mood with his own eulogy calling Diana “the people’s princess”, advised her to show her grief publicly.
Following newspaper headlines such as “Talk to us, lady” and “Show us you care”, the queen delivered a live-streamed address to the nation on the eve of Diana’s funeral.
“As your queen and grandmother, I say from the bottom of my heart what I say to you now,” the Queen said, acknowledging the country’s pain, praising Diana and promising to keep her memory alive.
The problem with Harry
Until the Epstein scandal resurfaced last year, Andrew was trying to win back into the family’s good graces. Aside from the family’s high-profile medical issues, she may have indirectly benefited from her trouble with Prince Harry, who was the source of much of the drama at the time.
Harry became estranged from his father and older brother Prince William, the heir to the throne, when he and his wife Meghan quit their jobs and moved to California in 2020. The couple aired their grievances with the royal family in a tell-all interview with Oprah Winfrey and in a revealing Netflix series. Harry, also known as the Duke of Sussex, later ratcheted up tensions by revealing personal conversations in his memoir “The Substitute.”
Harry also broke royal protocol by turning to the courts to resolve his legal problems. She became the first senior royal to give evidence in court in more than a century in her successful phone hacking case against the Daily Mirror.
But a failed legal attempt to restore the police protection detail that was stripped from him when he left royal duties was seen as an attack on his father’s government.
The court’s eventual dismissal of the case provides a chance for father and son to reunite. The pair had a cup of tea at Charles’ London residence, Clarence House, in September. It was their first meeting in more than a year. It took less than an hour.
