What is a prince, when he is no longer a prince? For Andrew Mountbatten Windsor – and how he must wince at each syllable – a hereditary status has formed the basis of his life.
People unfortunate enough to have worked with Andrew speak of that status as the very foundation of his sense of self. It has also defined the lives of his children, Beatrice and Eugenie, whom Andrew spent years insisting should be treated as senior members of the Royal Family. For ‘the girls’, Andrew demanded the balcony appearances, the palace digs, the Sovereign Grant funds, because he knew that their status reflected his.
Andrew’s place in life was determined by his mother; his daughters’ places in life would in turn be determined by his own. In 2016, he was said to be fervently lobbying for their future husbands to be given Earldoms, and mortified at the prospect of ‘commoner’ grandchildren. No living royal has a more medieval view of monarchy.
Nowadays, the Princesses will be far more worried about being the daughter of Andrew than the mother of a commoner. He has not only torpedoed his own life; he has irreversibly damaged theirs. (In neither case, let us be clear, as devastatingly as his friend Jeffrey Epstein damaged the younger, poorer women he trafficked for sex.) Andrew has also undermined one of the central arguments for monarchy on which his daughters and the wider Royal Family rely. Why should we trust that those born into public life reign will rise to that responsibility, when it is clearly no guarantee of character?
The trio seen at the celebrations for The Queen’s 90th birthday at on June 12, 2016 in London, England. (Photo by Alan Crowhurst/Getty Images for The Patron’s Lunch)From Aristotle to Erasmus, writers once argued that children born into royal families were ideally placed to be nurtured as public servants, educated into virtue. In Andrew’s case, it made him only noxiously spoilt, notorious in elite circles even by the Naughties for his treatment of diplomatic staff as a ‘trade ambassador’ and protected him for twenty years from the consequences of that behaviour. Stories were ten a penny back in the day about Andrew’s demands for deference, throwing fits should anyone fail to stand swiftly enough when he entered a dining room. We read them in print only now, thanks to a change of sovereign and a change of times.
Beatrice and Eugenie have never done anything to prove themselves bad adverts for monarchy. They’ve never done much to prove themselves good adverts, either. Each have charity patronages: neither has made a significant impact on their chosen sector. There is some public sympathy for the Princesses’ position, which will protect them. Monarchy is at its most relatable when it reflects the generational shifts within our own families. Beatrice and Eugenie are millennials, and they are not the only millennials to be embarrassed by the outdated values of their parents.
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They are also experiencing a peculiar version of a shift replicated in more general terms across Europe: millennials stepping up to care for a parent in crisis; ageing Boomers reluctantly abjuring the headship of the family. However little sympathy the public has for Andrew, his children will be deeply worried about him. He has lost everything that ever mattered to him: a total nullification of the self. (Those determined to punish Andrew further should remember this.) They are also likely to feel some financial responsibility for him and for their mother, Sarah Ferguson.
Amid all this personal crisis, they are unlikely to be inviting more public attention anytime soon. If the royal family wants to move on from this episode, they should encourage the princesses to step out of the limelight and stay that way.
Neither Beatrice nor Eugenie is responsible for their father’s behaviour. Most of us would accept that neither woman should be punished simply because of who their father is. But once we accept that principle, we accept the reverse: a woman’s father should make her neither damned nor sacrosanct.
What is a princess, if not the daughter or the wife of a prince? To be royal is to claim descent from a sacred bloodline: monarchy depends on the rest of us collectively accepting that myth. Once we decouple the rank of a princess from the rank of her father, the edifice falls. About time, too.
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