How do you solve a problem like Prince Andrew?
The new year already is shaping up as another vintage one for the incumbent, Prince Andrew – the subject of a new tell-all book – despite gallant efforts by the British government to keep us in the dark.
The Duke of York: if ever a title brought trouble, it is this one.
The new year already is shaping up as another vintage one for the incumbent, Prince Andrew – the subject of a new tell-all book due out in a few months – despite gallant efforts by the British government to keep us in the dark.
Investigating allegations that Prince Andrew used publicly funded overseas trade trips to negotiate private business deals, biographer Andrew Lownie was told by the British Foreign Office that papers relating to a member of the royal family must remain closed until 105 years after that family member’s birth, meaning information on the errant duke could not be made public until 2065.
After being refused access to papers that would reveal who accompanied the prince on foreign trips, Lownie accused the British government last week of “covering up for Andrew”.
Ignominy follows the Duke of York the way the royal corgis followed his mother.
Just last month Andrew was outed for hobnobbing with an alleged Chinese spy, identified variously as Yang Tengbo, Chris Yang and the more James Bond-sounding H6.
The alleged spook was said to have operated “freely” for more than 20 years, during which time he befriended the Duke of York, met two prime ministers and cultivated a web of influential contacts in the upper reaches of British society. Six years after being chosen to run the Chinese arm of the duke’s entrepreneur business Pitch@Palace, H6 was banned from entering Britain on national security grounds.
A tribunal upheld the ban. While this enabled the British government to wash its hands of H6 and the duke, it will not be so easy for the King. For C3, H6 is one more entry on a sibling rap sheet that he must have hoped would end with Andrew’s calamitous friendship with Jeffrey Epstein.
According to one British intelligence expert, Andrew’s association with H6 would have been “a body blow to King Charles. Embarrassment doesn’t begin to describe it.” (Actually, it probably does.)
Anonymous palace “sources” claim the King has “no control” over the reprobate Duke of York, having already taken away his pocket money and slapped him with every royal punishment short of a year in the Tower. (C3’s ancestors R3 and H8 would not have been so squeamish about the latter.) Stripped of his HRH moniker, his military titles, his private office at Buckingham Palace and, cruellest of all, his right to wave down to the public from the palace balcony, Andrew has had to swim alone in seas infested with alleged Chinese spies and proven American sex predators, not to mention an ex-wife with a penchant for unorthodox revenue-raising schemes.
But life as a duke of York has never been easy. Andrew’s is the eighth iteration of a title first created in the late 14th century for one Edmund of Langley, whose son Edward inherited the title only to be killed at the Battle of Agincourt.
Edward’s nephew Richard, the third duke of York, became the richest and most powerful noble in England before losing his head in the Wars of the Roses.
Since then the dukedom has been re-created seven times, usually for second sons of the monarch, all of whom have become king (thus extinguishing the title) or failed to produce a legitimate male heir. As a 64-year-old father of two daughters, Andrew seems unlikely to reverse the trend.
Richard, the third duke of York, was not the last to have his life cut short by politics. The second son of King Edward IV, another Richard, was one of the boy princes murdered in the Tower on the orders of their uncle, Richard III.
Charles Stuart, the second son of King James I, was another ill-starred duke of York; he died on the executioner’s block after ruling for 24 years as King Charles I.
His own second son, James, the next duke of York, was no more adept at negotiating the subtleties of English politics, losing his throne in the so-called Glorious Revolution and spending the rest of his life in gloomy exile in France.
It took another century for Frederick, duke of York, to bring the dukedom into the tabloid age.
The second son of King George III, he had several things in common with Prince Andrew: both were army veterans plagued by cashflow problems and disreputable associates. Frederick was a notorious philanderer who struggled to keep up with the financial demands of his former mistress, Mary Anne Clarke. When the annual pension that paid for her silence was cut off, she looked for other ways to make ends meet, settling on a lucrative scheme to extract bribes from army officers in return for promotions.
The story got out, and during a fiery parliamentary inquiry the “pert and saucy” Clarke dropped a bucket on her former lover the duke, who had no choice but to resign. Like royal hangers-on through the ages, Clarke had a tell-all book ready to go, which she agreed to pulp in return for £10,000 upfront ($2m today) and a £400 annuity. A year later she burst into print anyway, admitting the whole thing was a stitch-up planned by the duke’s own brother, the duke of Kent. Exoneration came too late for the poor old duke of York, who gambled his fortune away on cards and horses before dying of dropsy.
Observers of the House of Windsor will recall a similar episode in the life of the current duke, whose ex-wife was caught soliciting £500,000 to “open doors” to Prince Andrew. Unfortunately for Sarah Ferguson, the man she was opening the door for was an undercover reporter for the News of the World. Explaining herself to Oprah Winfrey, Fergie claimed to have been “in the gutter” when the deal went down, which was the wrong place to be hoping for a windfall. The gutter led to Andrew’s friend Epstein, who was persuaded to make a modest contribution to her legal costs.
Whether the Chinese spying scandal inflicts any further harm on the Duke of York’s already damaged brand remains to be seen. Prince Andrew has said he met H6 “through official channels” and insists nothing of a “sensitive nature” was ever discussed between the pair. In any case, the duke claims to have “ceased all contact” with H6. He sang from pretty much the same songbook when confronted about his friendship with Epstein.
The truth is Prince Andrew has an extravagant lifestyle to maintain (his 30-room mansion in Windsor Park, for a start) and nobody, it seems, least of all his big brother, knows how he does it.
The King’s decision to stop funding his wayward sibling has been interpreted as a last-ditch effort to make him downsize.
According to royal biographer Anthony Holden, Charles once ruefully described Andrew as “the one with the Robert Redford looks of the family”. Did he have any parts in mind? Was it Redford as debonair Jay Gatsby in The Great Gatsby, an ex-bootlegger with unsavoury friends and a 30-room mansion in Long Island? Or Johnny Hooker, Redford’s character in The Sting, a small-time con man who tricks a mobster out of $11,000 and blows the lot on roulette?
As for Andrew, if he ever dreams about a Redford role it would have to be the Sundance Kid in George Roy Hill’s Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, riding off a cliff to escape the posse on his tail.
If that’s not a fantasy for a hard-up duke on the run from the tabloids, I don’t know what is.
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