LONDON - King Charles formally stripped his brother Andrew of his prince title. The Monarch has also stripped him of his HRH by issuing a rare Letters Patent as his younger brother was officially made a commoner.
It marks another dark day for the former Duke of York, whose reputation is in tatters due to the Jeffrey Epstein scandal and most recently Virginia Giuffre’s posthumous autobiography.
Details of the King’s Letters Patent have been published by the Crown Office in The Gazette, the UK’s official public record.
The entry read: “The King has been pleased by Letters Patent under the Great Seal of the Realm dated 3 November 2025 to declare that Andrew Mountbatten Windsor shall no longer be entitled to hold and enjoy the style, title or attribute of ‘Royal Highness’ and the titular dignity of ‘Prince’.” It came a week after Buckingham Palace confirmed the 65-year-old would no longer be a prince with immediate effect - and would also be leaving the 30-bed Royal Lodge nestled in the grounds of Windsor Castle.
The palace coldly announced the ‘censures (were) deemed necessary’ amid the growing controversy surrounding his relationship with paedophile financier Jeffrey Epstein, with whom Andrew lied about cutting ties with.
It was The Mail on Sunday that revealed Andrew told Epstein in an email ‘we are in this together’ a day after the infamous picture of the former prince with his alleged then-teenage sex victim Virginia Giuffre was published.
In the wake of the fallout, Ms Giuffre’s family said she was ‘an ordinary American girl from an ordinary American family’, who had ‘brought down a British prince with her truth and extraordinary courage.’
And new emails from unsealed court documents from a legal battle between the US Virgin Islands and JP Morgan show the former prince told Epstein it would be ‘good to catch up in person’ months after the child sex offender was released.
Andrew has continued to deny the allegations made against him as well as ever meeting Ms Giuffre, who made damning revelations about Mr Mountbatten Windsor in a posthumous memoir. She took her own life earlier this year, aged 41.
In 2022, Andrew settled a US civil case she lodged for a reported £12million, reportedly receiving money from his mother, Queen Elizabeth II, to help meet the costs. The settlement came with no admission of liability
The shunned ex-duke has been erased from the Royal website entirely, with no mention of him on ‘The Royal Family’ page or when the term ‘Andrew’ is entered into the search bar.
King Charles formally stripped his brother Andrew of his prince title. The Monarch has also stripped him of his HRH by issuing a rare Letters Patent as his younger brother was officially made a commoner. (Pic: AAP News - Australian Associated Press)