London: Prince Andrew has fought for years to stay in a stately home near Windsor Castle despite a persistent effort to move him away from the royal family.

The reason is simple: his rent for Royal Lodge is too good to be true.

But with Andrew engulfed by scandal, a new question emerges: is this lease too good to last?

For years, many assumed the prince was paying handsomely to stay at Royal Lodge, a grand house that dates to about 1830 and comes with 40 hectares of lawns and woodland.

The market rent for the property was sometimes guessed at £260,000 – more than $530,000 – a year but the terms were secret. Nobody was sure how much it cost Andrew to use the home, with its 30 rooms, conservatory and surrounding cottages.

Now, with Andrew under more scrutiny than ever, the terms of the lease have been revealed. And his critics have begun a furious search for the fastest way to force him out.

The Times revealed on Monday that Andrew had not paid rent for years. That is because the lease required him to pay £1 million when he first took on the home and at least £7.5 million for renovations done soon after he moved in.

The rent, says the lease, need only be “one peppercorn (if demanded)” every year. This lasts until 2078.

While Andrew must cover the cost of maintenance, including exterior and interior painting over the years, he need never pay a second peppercorn in rent.

Andrew lives at the home with his former wife, Sarah Ferguson, under the lease he signed with the Crown Estate in 2003. He took on the house after it had been used by his grandmother, Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, for five decades.

He cannot sell the home or gain any benefit from its increase in value over time, but the lease can be transferred to Ferguson or their daughters, Beatrice and Eugenie, upon his death.

King Charles III has tried to end the lease and move his brother out of the lodge, according to several royal correspondents for major media outlets, but the terms were not easily revoked.

The Crown Estate would have to pay Andrew about £500,000 in compensation to cancel the lease. This would be a decision for the government because the Crown Estate is not at the King’s direction. (It collects revenue for the state and reports to parliament as an independent agency.)

There is some talk of ending the generous lease. “It’s about time Prince Andrew took himself off to live in private and make his own way in life,” said Robert Jenrick, a senior Conservative MP, to the BBC. Nobody on the Labour benches has been that blunt.

Some also think that last Friday’s action on Andrew’s titles was inadequate. The statement from Andrew, after consultation with the King and other members of the royal family, promised to go further than previous steps. “I will therefore no longer use my title or the honours which have been conferred upon me,” he said.

But this did not extinguish Andrew’s titles – he simply agreed not to use them. He remains the Duke of York. With more stories about him emerging over the past four days, there are calls to remove this title.

About a dozen MPs are speaking up for a vote in parliament to extinguish Andrew’s formal rank, something that has not been done since the passage of the Titles Deprivation Act in 1917, when parliament cancelled the English titles of several German descendants of Queen Victoria.

There is also the idea of finding some way to stop Andrew being called a prince. This is even more challenging because the rules were set out in letters patent in 1917 and confirmed by Queen Elizabeth in 2012.

Under this law, the title of prince or princess goes to the children of a monarch, as well as others, in a detailed stipulation. Removing Andrew as a prince would require an act of parliament that singles him out by name.

The scandal surrounding Andrew is not easing. The memoir by Virginia Roberts Giuffre, with her account of sex with Andrew when she was 17 and in the pay of sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, has arrived in bookstores and sets out the case against the prince in detail.

He has always denied the allegations and repeated this in a statement last week.

For now, Andrew is likely to stay at Royal Lodge. The only way he can be removed is if the government decides to pay the cost of cancelling the lease and he agrees to the terms of his departure.

Andrew can remain in the countryside near Windsor Castle. He will be about 10 kilometres from royal family members when they visit. For some of them, that is still too close for comfort.

Get a note directly from our foreign correspondents on what’s making headlines around the world. Sign up for our weekly What in the World newsletter.