But really, has anyone ever cast a longer and darker shadow from the grave than Jeffrey Epstein? American presidents shudder at his name, a British ambassador to Washington has been fired, a London government is rocked, while once-celebrated and admired men desperately wish they’d never met him. Musk, Spacey, Gates, Branson, Clinton, Exner, Bannon, Dershowitz, Trump, Mandelson, Summers, Chomsky (Chomsky!): What might once have seemed a galaxy of great eminences from finance to high tech to politics to scholarship now looks like a rogue’s gallery.
And yet one name is in a special class. Politicians and businessmen come and go, but the English monarchy is 1,000 years old. It has known good times and bad and weathered many storms and scandals, but it has survived when most of the royal dynasties of Europe are now nothing more than names from history books. Even so, it’s hard to think of any past event so drastic in its implications as the arrest of the king of England’s brother on suspicion of misconduct in public office. This is a very grave offense in English law, with a maximum sentence of life imprisonment, and the event has no obvious parallels. And all because he met Jeffrey Epstein.
Reigning dynasties have long resorted to many expedients to save themselves, and have often done so with considerable ruthlessness, not least if it means dealing with difficult or threatening kinsmen. Even before this latest drama, King Charles III had well and truly canceled his brother, you might say. Until recently, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor was His Royal Highness Prince Andrew, Duke of York, Knight of the Garter, but he’s now a commoner, with no honors or ranks at all. He had been kicked out of his house on the Windsor Estate and cast into outer darkness, or at least Norfolk, which some would say comes to the same thing.
It was bad enough when Andrew was shown to have associated with Epstein even after Epstein’s imprisonment for soliciting sex with a minor, and we saw photographs of Andrew embracing poor Virginia Giuffre, or straddled over another young woman. Libidinous royals are nothing new. Many if not most of the kings of England have had mistresses, unless, like William Rufus or James I, they preferred boys. Edward VII was nevertheless an energetic adulterer, who on one occasion had to appear in court to deny that he had been the lover of another man’s wife. The marital difficulties of the recent Windsors, not least His current Majesty, are painfully seared into Britons’ minds.
But far more serious is the present charge. In 2001, Andrew was appointed as an official British “trade envoy,” which struck many of us as ludicrous even at the time. The appointment was made by Tony Blair, at the urging of his old consigliere Peter Mandelson (you see, it all falls into place!). Even by the modern standards of the House of Windsor, Andrew isn’t the brightest bulb in the lamp. And it may now appear this wasn’t an opportunity for him to enjoy travel, golf, and girls. It may now appear that he was using his position to send confidential information to Epstein.
Shocking as this charge is, what matters for the Palace is self-preservation and self-interest. These qualities were once conspicuously displayed by other dynasties, as recalled in sour phrases. “Travailler pour le roi de Prusse” are words still understood—“To work for the king of Prussia” means working for no reward—and receiving “the thanks of the House of Habsburg” meant getting no thanks at all. Indeed, sometimes “the august House” wasn’t even kind to its own. In 1848, much of Europe was convulsed by the revolutionary spring described in Christopher Clark’s splendid recent book of that name, and that was true not least of Vienna, where the Habsburg archdukes of Austria had been ensconced since the Middle Ages, by now ruling over vast lands. When the year began, the emperor of Austria was the simple-minded Francis, whose only recorded remark was: “I am the Emperor, and I want noodles.”
That, and his question when Metternich told him that his throne was threatened by revolutionists: “But are they allowed to do that?” By December of that fateful year, he was pushed aside to be replaced by his 18-year-old nephew Franz Josef, who reigned for 68 years. It’s a sad irony that when Franz Josef’s own nephew, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, was assassinated by Serb terrorists in Sarajevo in 1914, Franz Josef was privately relieved, because the stain of Franz Ferdinand’s marriage to a woman of lower rank was now expunged.
Another dubious marriage shook the British throne within just about living memory. King George V, who reigned from 1910 to 1935, was a paragon of public rectitude and private decency. “I am not interested in anyone’s wife except my own,” he said, a contrast indeed to his father, Edward VII, and his son, the Prince of Wales, who became king, very briefly, in 1936. As Edward VIII, his determination to marry the twice-divorced American adventuress Wallis Simpson meant that he was forced to abdicate before the year ended. The whole episode dismayed and disgusted respectable people, including his mother, Queen Mary, who exclaimed, “Really, this might be Romania!” Edward’s brother, another and more admirable Duke of York, took his place as King George VI (famous these days for his stutter).
The new king showed a streak of ruthlessness of his own over nomenclature. His elder brother became the Duke of Windsor, and Wallis a duchess when they married, but she was denied the title “Her Royal Highness,” which rankled with her husband for the rest of his life. The wisdom of keeping them at arm’s length became clear within a year of the abdication, when the Windsors had gone abroad and were to be found cavorting with leaders of Nazi Germany, including Hitler himself at Berchtesgaden.
That episode is well known; another case of royal ruthlessness much less so. Although I’ve called George V a man of decency, he was resolutely concerned to guard his position. When the Great War began, the monarchs of three combatant Great Powers were first cousins: the King-Emperor George V and Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany as grandsons of Queen Victoria, King George and Tsar Nicholas II of Russia through their Danish mothers. As Russia faced defeat by Germany in 1917, and many Russian soldiers were “voting with their feet” by giving up the fight, the democratic February Revolution deposed Tsar Nicholas II. Sir George Buchanan was the British ambassador in Petrograd and reported that the provisional government expected the tsar to be offered refuge in England, as previous deposed rulers, such as Louis Philippe and Napoleon III, had been.
But Nicholas wasn’t. Much later, a completely false story was spread by the deplorable Lord Mountbatten that the king had wanted to help the tsar but that David Lloyd George, the prime minister, prevented him. This was the reverse of the truth. Lloyd George was ready to give the tsar refuge if it kept Russia in the war. But it was King George, nervous about his own position amid popular murmurs of discontent with the monarchy, who could “not help doubting, on general grounds of expediency whether it is advisable that the Imperial Family should take up their residence in this country.”
Those words sealed the fate of that family. After the October Revolution, the new Bolshevik regime dispatched “Nicky and Alicky,” as King George knew the tsar and tsarina, to Yekaterinburg, where in July 1918 they and their son and four daughters were brutally murdered on Lenin’s orders. No doubt King George felt sorry for their fate, but there’s no sign that he felt much remorse. The interests of his own family and royal line came first.
So they do today for King George’s great-grandson. Following his purging of his brother from the family, King Charles has dealt with Andrew’s arrest in a statement which isn’t so much icy as it is at absolute zero:
I have learned with the deepest concern the news about Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and suspicion of misconduct in public office. What now follows is the full, fair, and proper process by which this issue is investigated in the appropriate manner and by the appropriate authorities. In this, as I have said before, they have our full and wholehearted support and cooperation.
“Let me state clearly: the law must take its course”—even if Andrew ends up in another royal residence of the kind known as His Majesty’s Prisons! Not much of a hint there that the king will be a kindly prison visitor.
But then, there have been decidedly more severe examples of monarchical toughness, not least in fraternal dealings. In the heyday of the Ottoman Empire, the first thing a new sultan did on inheriting his position was to have all his brothers strangled. King Charles enjoys reading history and could be forgiven for thinking wistfully about the good old days in Constantinople, while Andrew might reflect that things could be worse.
