King Charles dramatically exiled his brother Andrew to the British royal family’s gloomiest and most haunted property Thursday—as well as stripping him of the title “Prince.”
The royal formerly known as Andrew was unceremoniously removed from the 30-room mansion he had been due to live in for free for the rest of his life and sent to a cottage beside Sandringham, one of the king’s other homes.
The exile puts Andrew Mountbatten Windsor, 65, 100 miles from other royals and helpfully, for King Charles and Prince William, out of the easy view of paparazzi and gawpers.
He will now live on the dank and often windswept estate far from London and the life he once lived, with plenty of time to reflect on his fall. As a bonus, the 20,000 acre Sandringham Estate is where one of the key moments in his slide into disgrace began, when he hosted Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell for a shooting party there in 2000.
Three months later he was photographed with Maxwell and Virginia Giuffre, then a 17-year-old who went on to accuse him of raping her while she was trafficked by Maxwell and Epstein. Andrew’s evasions and lies about Epstein lasted for years but finally ended his status as a royal weeks after Giuffre’s posthumous memoir was published and amid moves for a rare legal move in England, a private prosecution.
Exiled to the estate is a double humiliation: Sandringham is where the extended royal family have for generations gathered for Christmas. But Andrew has already reportedly been disinvited from the celebrations, leaving him as a spurned relative who will be able to see his family only from a distance, without taking part. That family includes his two daughters and four grandchildren, who still appear to be part of the King’s fold.
Additionally, seeing those grandchildren just became more difficult. They live in London, which is 25 miles from his former home in Windsor but as much as three hours from Sandringham by road. The alternative is public transport but Andrew has never been seen on a normal train in his life.
Sandringham, deep in the rural county of Norfolk, has long been a haunted place for the royals; Andrew’s grandfather, King George VI, and his great-grandfather, George V, both died there. Queen Elizabeth went there every year on the anniversary of her father’s death to mourn him. George V’s elder brother, Prince Albert Victor, who should have been king, died of pneumonia there in 1892, aged just 28. And Prince Philip moved there when he retired from public life, earning opprobrium when, aged 97, he pulled out of the estate driveway in his Land Rover and crashed into an oncoming car. Prosecutors decided not to press charges and in return he quit driving.
Unlike other palaces, Sandringham is entirely the private property of the royal family, which allowed King Charles has been able to stash Andrew on it without seeking permission from any official British body.
The estate was bought by Queen Victoria in 1862, just after her husband Prince Albert’s death, to try to keep her heir, the future King Edward VIII, from the carnal temptations of London when he was 20. It did not succeed: Edward became the most notoriously dissipated member of the family before Andrew’s self-inflicted disgrace. Edward turned it into the most luxurious property in Victorian England—and energetically entertained friends, family and mistresses at it—but successive generations of royals have, guests have reported, not exactly kept it up to date.
In his memoir, Spare, Prince Harry described the big house as stuffy and overheated for the sake of the corgis. He writes, “The cool air would make them whimper, and Granny would say: Is there a draft? And then a footman would promptly shut the window. (That loud thump, unavoidable because the windows were so old, always felt like the door of a jail cell being slammed.)”
The land around the main house is flat, damp, and crisscrossed by mudflats. in winter it is chilled by bitter winds off the North Sea. The estate has multiple small cottages and one large farmhouse, any one of which might be given to Andrew.
Andrew has been reported to spend his weekdays playing computer games and watching television and his weekends shooting. Sandringham has been where generations of royals have shot game birds. It will now fall to King Charles to decide if he lets Andrew use the grounds to that end, itself a fraught decision: Much of the estate is visible from public places, meaning people who go there to shoot can be photographed. Andrew also goes riding regularly. It is unclear if he has his own horses which would have to be taken from the Windsor stables and moved to Sandringham, or if he uses the King’s stables, in which case, even that pastime will now be in the gift of his brother.
There will be further discomfort for Andrew from the fact that his neighbor on the estate will be Prince William, who has been his most determined enemy inside the family. William and Princess Kate have their country home, Anmer Hall, on the estate, making for the awkward possibility of the two men meeting on its grounds.
And Andrew will have to live with the knowledge that unless he is outlived by the 78-year-old Charles, who has cancer, William will gain the keys to Sandringham the moment he is acclaimed as king, making the disgraced royal’s future even more perilous.
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