IT used to be the Tower of London. Those who forfeited the favour of the king would be sent there for incarceration, even execution. Today, it is the Sandringham estate. Mr Andrew Mountbatten Windsor has been banished there by his elder brother King Charles III, following serious charges of sexual abuse against the former prince, who was recently stripped of his royal and military titles.
While archaic tradition continues in the United Kingdom — prisoners are detained still ‘at His Majesty’s pleasure’ — decapitation is no longer a royal prerogative. Famously, Queen Elizabeth I once threatened contrary councillors: “I will make you shorter by the head.” To preserve his own head and his crown, Charles has done the next best thing: he has amputated a diseased limb.
The British royal family, like the Roman Catholic church, needs to survive to thrive. Over the centuries, it has committed many acts of self-preservation. For example, it changed its dynastic DNA: the House of Stuart (a Frenchified adaptation of the Scottish clan-name Stewart) was followed by five German Hanoverians, then three monarchs from the House of Saxe-Coburg Gotha, until 1917, when, well into the First World War against Germany, George V renamed it the House of Windsor.
In 1960, Queen Elizabeth II succumbed to pressure from her once Greek husband and his ambitious uncle Lord Louis Mountbatten (formerly Battenberg). She changed her family name to the House of Mountbatten-Windsor. The dynastic name of Windsor though remains for those descended directly from her and Philip.
British royals have routinely acted to guard their own interests.
Over the years, the Royal Family has learned to shed itself of deadwood. It saw off the Duke of Windsor (who died an exile in France), Group Capt Townsend (Princess Margaret’s suitor who was posted to Brussels as Britain’s air attaché), Diana, Princess of Wales (who died in Paris with her Egyptian paramour ‘Dodi’ Fayed), a disgruntled Harry, Duke of Sussex and his American duchess to the US, and now Andrew and his wild ex-wife Sarah Ferguson.
Charles III needed to act before parliament did, aware that his namesake Charles I was executed by parliamentarians. (Oliver Cromwell dismissed that king’s beheading as “a cruel necessity”.)
Another ‘cruel necessity’ occurred in 1918, when King George V, prompted by his demi-German wife Queen Mary, left his Russian cousin Tsar Nicholas II and his family to their fate. Buckingham Palace feared “an internal revolt and public outcry”. George, however, at the insistence of his mother Queen Alexandra, sent H.M.S. Marlborough to rescue her sister (his aunt) the former tsarina, Marie Feodorovna.
Interestingly, the Romanovs — now safely dead — are back in fashion. Tsar Nicholas II and his family have been canonised as ‘new martyrs’ by the Russian Orthodox Church Abroad and as ‘passion bearers’ by the Moscow Patriarchate. With the Kremlin’s approval, the remains of Marie Feodorovna were retrieved from her native Denmark and interred in the cathedral of St Peter and St Paul in St Petersburg.
Other dislodged royalty has not been so lucky. The last imperial Romanov Grand Duchess Olga died in east Toronto (Canada). The former King Constantine of Greece spent his exile in London before returning to die in Athens. His brother-in-law — the former King of Spain Juan Carlos — abdicated in 2014 in favour of his son Felipe. His reason? He did not want his son “to wither waiting like Prince Charles”.
A deeper cause lay in Juan Carlos’ dodgy financial de-alings and extramarital escapades. His alleged mistress Corinna zu Sayn-Wittgenstein-Sayn claimed that Juan Carlos had received kickbacks from co-mmercial deals from Gulf rulers, in particular the 6.7 billion Haramain high-speed railway in Saudi Arabia. She revealed that he had purchased a number of properties in her name, “[not] because he [loved] me a lot, but because I reside in Monaco”. He himself now lives in the UAE.
Power, Henry Kissinger once said, is a powerful aphrodisiac. That explains the Marilyn Monroe liaison with both the Kennedy brothers (JFK & RFK), the Bill Clinton/ Monica Lewinsky indiscretion, Trump’s indulgences, and other high-profile scandals, that are routinely denied. In such cases, one is reminded of the response by the ‘model’ Mandy Rice-Davies during the Profumo scandal of the 1960s. A lawyer told Rice-Davies that Lord Astor denied having an affair with her. Her tart reply was: “Well, he would, wouldn’t he?” That retort has since been enshrined in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations. In her own words, Mandy’s subsequent life became, not unlike the former prince’s, “one slow descent into respectability”.
The writer is an author.
Published in Dawn, November 6th, 2025