In March 2022, the man still known as Prince Andrew was in disgrace, his reputation shredded by increasingly lurid revelations about his ties to the sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Stripped of his royal duties and military titles, he had just paid a multimillion-dollar settlement to Virginia Giuffre, a victim of Mr. Epstein’s trafficking network who said Andrew had sexually assaulted her when she was a teenager.
Nevertheless, Andrew was front and center at the memorial service for his father, Prince Philip. He accompanied his 95-year-old mother, Queen Elizabeth II, from Windsor, then escorted her into Westminster Abbey.
If the queen indulged and protected Andrew all his life, he would get no such treatment from King Charles III, who has responded to each new unsavory turn in his brother’s scandal by taking away more of the trappings of his royal life — money, status and titles.
Though Andrew took his place with the royal family at Elizabeth’s funeral later that year, Charles forbade him to wear his military uniform. Andrew attended his brother’s coronation but was assigned an ignominious seat in the third row of the Abbey. Last fall, Charles stripped him of the last vestiges of his royal identity — no more Prince Andrew, no more Duke of York — decreeing that he simply be called Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor.
And on Thursday, when the former prince was arrested on suspicion of “misconduct in public office,” Charles released an unusual statement that had, by Windsor standards, the sharpness and savagery of a guillotine. Most royal statements are written in an anodyne third-person voice, conveying the thoughts of His or Her Majesty. But this one began with “I,” offering the unfiltered, if formal, words of an angry king.
“I have learned with the deepest concern the news about Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor,” Charles wrote, adding that the authorities would have “our full and wholehearted support and cooperation.” (Mr. Mountbatten-Windsor, who was held by the police for more than 10 hours, has not been charged with a crime and has long denied any wrongdoing in connection with Mr. Epstein. He has issued no public statements since his arrest.)
Even apart from his ties to the toxic Mr. Epstein, or the conduct now under investigation, there have long been concerns about Mr. Mountbatten-Windsor’s behavior, which has been often marked by recklessness, greed or poor judgment. But the current state of affairs also involves the dynamics of his rarefied, dysfunctional family — and, in particular, his relationship with his older brother.
Charles — the oldest of four siblings, born in 1948 — was an introspective and sensitive boy. Prone to self-pity, more bookish than athletic, he felt chronically misunderstood by his parents, especially the no-nonsense, caustic Prince Philip. The sporty Andrew was easier for Philip to like, and he had a cheeky exuberance that endeared him to his doting mother.
“The baby is adorable,” the queen wrote after Andrew’s birth in 1960. “He’s going to be terribly spoilt by all of us.” Elizabeth had been a distant, formal parent to Charles and his sister Anne, but she was far more hands-on with Andrew and her youngest child, Edward, born in 1964.
“Charles and Anne got very different parenting styles to Andrew and Edward,” Catherine Mayer, the author of “Charles: Heart of a King,” said in an interview. “It was almost like they had different parents.”
If Charles spent much of his pre-king life mired in self-doubt about his role in the world — a Hamlet on the Thames, yearning for something he couldn’t define — Andrew was brash and self-confident, seemingly untethered from any notion that he had a duty to anything but his self-enrichment. The tabloids called him “Randy Andy” for his busy life as a bachelor.
“They are opposites,” said Geordie Greig, editor in chief of The Independent and a veteran royal Kremlinologist. “Andrew is bovine, philistine and opines with great inanity and self-importance, while Charles is hugely sophisticated.”
Baked into the relationship, thanks to birth order and the ancient system of primogeniture, is the fact that Charles inherited not just the job of monarch, but the perks and money that come with it.
Andrew and the two other siblings, while hardly living in penury, have less money of their own, and few obvious ways to earn enough to live in the style to which they think they should be accustomed. (When Charles reduced Andrew to commoner status, he ejected him from the grand Royal Lodge in Windsor, sending him to live in a much more modest house on the royal estate in Sandringham, Norfolk, some 140 miles away.)
Charles and Andrew have never seemed close and over the years have rarely appeared in public together, except at mandatory occasions like the annual Trooping the Color parade, when the royal family appears en masse on a Buckingham Palace balcony and waves to the crowds below.
Neither Charles nor his sons, for instance, attended the lavish masked ball that Andrew and his ex-wife, Sarah Ferguson, threw at Windsor Castle in 2006 for their daughter Beatrice’s 18th birthday, for a reported cost of 400,000 pounds. The guests did include friends of Andrew like Harvey Weinstein, Ghislaine Maxwell and Mr. Epstein.
Andrew’s service in the Royal Navy, from 1979 to 2001, included a successful stint in the Falklands War that briefly earned him war-hero status. After he left the military, his mother appointed him Britain’s “special representative” for international trade and investment. The police now appear to be investigating his conduct in that role, amid reports that he may have improperly shared government documents with Mr. Epstein.
The job came with a salary of about 250,000 pounds, paid by the queen, and provided so many opportunities for lavish, taxpayer-financed travel to vacation spots and hobnobbing with dubious foreign leaders that the prince gained a new tabloid nickname, Air Miles Andy.
One royal historian, Andrew Lownie, wrote that Charles saw the appointment as “a disaster waiting to happen” and tried, unsuccessfully, to block it. In his book “Entitled: The Rise and Fall of the House of York,” Mr. Lownie quotes a royal source as saying that Charles thought Andrew would not “be able to resist the temptation of mixing business with pleasure.”
But the queen — reportedly backed by Peter Mandelson, the Labour Party politician now disgraced by his own ties to Mr. Epstein — was adamant that Andrew should get the job. And courtiers had learned not to bring complaints about Andrew to her.
“Elizabeth did not think that there was a distinction between protecting the monarchy and protecting Andrew,” Ms. Mayer said. “She believed that protecting the monarchy was her duty as a monarch and that protecting him was her duty as his mother.”
Charles is 77. With both of his parents gone, it’s up to him — and to some extent his son Prince William, who is said to loathe his uncle — to find a way to preserve both their family and the monarchy at this precarious moment.
Mr. Mountbatten’s arrest, and the haunting photograph of him slumped in the back seat of a car after his interrogation, have renewed calls for an overhaul of the institution. Prime Minister Keir Starmer is said to be considering legislation that would change the rules of succession to remove Andrew from his position as eighth in line to the throne.
“Charles has always put duty ahead of everything, and there’s a profound sense of sadness on his behalf that everything he is trying to do is in jeopardy,” said Russell Myers, the royal editor of the Daily Mirror tabloid and author of the forthcoming “William and Catherine: The Monarchy’s New Era: The Inside Story,” which delves into Andrew’s problematic role in the family.
“The worry is that this is threatening to be one of the defining moments of his reign,” he said.
Sarah Lyall is a writer at large for The Times, writing news, features and analysis across a wide range of sections.
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