When Queen Elizabeth II was delivered of a baby boy on February 19, 1960, the birth—the first to a reigning British monarch in more than a century—was marked by public celebration. The bells of Westminster Abbey pealed for an hour. The Royal Air Force performed a fighter-jet flyover of central London, as guns saluted from Hyde Park and the Tower. The ships in the Royal Navy fleet were notified of the arrival of a prince—his name, Andrew, had not yet been announced—with the injunction “Splice the mainbrace,” a euphemism for the distribution of a celebratory tot of rum.
Given such an entry into the world, any individual might get ideas above his station—particularly if, as was the case with young Andrew, the second in line to the throne after his brother Charles, there were only two positions in the social hierarchy that were actually above his station. Birthday celebrations in subsequent years seem hardly to have been calculated to kindle a sense of humility. On turning six, Andrew received a custom-made Aston Martin electric toy car. For his twenty-first, there was a party for about six hundred at Windsor Castle, and, for his thirtieth, a lavish “Dance of the Decades” at Buckingham Palace. When Andrew turned forty, he, along with his ex-wife, Sarah Ferguson, and their two daughters, commandeered a pod of the London Eye Ferris wheel—other riders complained bitterly about royal queue-jumping—then had a reportedly thirty-thousand-pound blowout at Sunninghill Park, the house they still shared in Berkshire. In advance of his fiftieth birthday, as Andrew Lownie recounts in his indispensable biography, “Entitled,” the Prince told a journalist he was doing “nothing big” to celebrate. Nothing big turned out to be a reception for some three hundred at Buckingham Palace, followed the next night by a bash at St. James’s Palace, with guests, Lownie reports, receiving a miniature album featuring photos of Andrew, as a party favor.
It was photographs, of course, that precipitated Andrew’s unravelling. In 2011, one day after his fifty-first birthday, a newspaper splashed an image of him walking alongside the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, headlined “Prince Andy and the Paedo.” Shortly after that, another paper published a snapshot from 2001 of Andrew with his arm around the waist of seventeen-year-old Virginia Giuffre, with a grinning Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s sometime paramour—and, since 2021, a convicted sex-trafficker—in the background. That photo was taken less than a year after Maxwell and Epstein were guests at yet another birthday celebration for Andrew, a party at Windsor Castle.
Andrew has always maintained that he has no memory of ever meeting Giuffre, and that he committed no wrongdoing in any of his relations with Epstein, who died in New York’s Metropolitan Correctional Center in 2019, while awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges. Nonetheless, in 2011, Andrew stepped down from his decade-long role as a U.K. international-trade envoy. In 2019, after a disastrous television interview in which he admitted that he had “let the side down” by his association with Epstein, Andrew stepped back from royal duties.
Just over two years later, Andrew was stripped of his royal patronages and military roles; soon afterward, he reached a reportedly multimillion-dollar settlement with Giuffre in a civil sexual-abuse suit, in which he admitted no liability. Last October, with the posthumous publication of Giuffre’s memoir, in which she alleged that she had had sex with Andrew on three occasions, he surrendered the use of his title Duke of York. Then—in what would once have seemed an impossible demotion—he was effectively stripped of his royal status altogether, and reborn as Mr. Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor. For a man whose identity was constituted around a sense of social superiority—according to Lownie’s book, if Andrew was met with insufficient deference upon entering a room he would loudly announce, “Let’s try that again,” before exiting and reëntering to hastily performed bows and curtsies—the reduction in status was surely a profound humiliation. Even Charles I, who was executed for treason in 1649, went to the scaffold as King.
Last week, Andrew spent his first birthday as a commoner in circumstances as degraded as earlier celebrations had been grand. At around eight in the morning, he was arrested at a farmhouse on the King’s Sandringham estate—not in relation to any sexual offenses but on suspicion of misconduct in public office. The arrest apparently resulted from documents recently disclosed by the United States Department of Justice suggesting that as trade envoy he had shared privileged information with Epstein. (Mountbatten-Windsor has, as of this writing, not been charged with any crime.) Identified by the police as “a man in his sixties from Norfolk,” Andrew, who is the first senior member of the Royal Family to be arrested since Charles I, spent about eleven hours in custody before being released under investigation. As the car carrying him departed the police station, a photographer captured another indelible image, of the former Prince slumped in the back seat, wide-eyed and slack-jawed—the boy for whom the chimes once pealed looking very much like a man for whom the bell now tolls.
Andrew is not the only highly placed member of the British establishment whose reputation, at the very least, has been destroyed by an association with Epstein. Peter Mandelson, the former Ambassador to the U.S., is under investigation for passing privileged information along to the financier. (Mandelson has not been arrested or charged, and a report by the BBC noted its understanding that “his position is that he has not acted in any way criminally.”) That scandal has shaken an already unsteady Prime Minister Keir Starmer, despite Starmer’s having never so much as encountered Epstein himself. “Nobody is above the law,” the Prime Minister said during a television interview, broadcast last week just as Andrew was being arrested.
In Britain, on the current evidence, that appears to be true: investigators have been promised the “wholehearted support” of the King, who issued a statement while his brother was still in custody that “the law must take its course.” It is striking that, by contrast, no authorities in the U.S. seem willing or able to seek comparable accountability from the powerful men who entered Epstein’s orbit. President Trump, when asked whether more former Epstein associates might face arrest, replied, “Well, you know, I’m the expert in a way, because I’ve been totally exonerated,” deflecting the question while allowing that events were “very, very sad” for the Royal Family, as if this were a parochial affair among posh Brits, free from implications for an American élite. Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s legal fate is still unfolding, but whatever the future holds, the party is over for him. When will it be over for the rest of them? ♦
