Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie made an entrance at Peter Phillips’ Gloucestershire wedding last Saturday that seemed every bit as deliberate as the bride’s own arrival.
Rather than being driven straight to All Saints Church in Kemble like other relatives, allowing for a low-key appearance, the sisters opted to walk along the road in plain sight, accompanied by their husbands.
The move was widely seen as a pointed effort to reinforce their royal standing after months of upheaval surrounding their parents’ spectacular fall from favor and, more recently, reports that the two princesses have been living rent-free in royal properties despite not serving as working royals.
Yet, as the Daily Mail claims in an exclusive report, the force behind this striking show of confidence was allegedly their disgraced father, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor.
Sources say Beatrice and Eugenie had been uncertain about attending their cousin’s wedding at all. But Andrew, reportedly still reeling from personal and public humiliation, is said to have emailed his daughters from Norfolk, encouraging them not only to attend but to “hold their heads high.”
The episode adds to signs that, despite no longer holding his former royal status, Andrew remains determined to preserve a sense of rank. According to the report, he is now urging his daughters to defend their titles and help sustain what remains of the House of York.
More, later, of a jaw-dropping speech he gave his staff, telling them that despite being stripped of his titles, he would ‘damn well’ continue to be called by his ‘correct titles’ in his own house – until they ‘send a vampire to suck out every drop of royal blood in my veins’.
Increasingly furious at what he sees as his brother the King’s heavy handedness, Andrew is girding his loins for a right royal battle, one which now risks turning very ugly indeed.
Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie arrive at their cousin Peter Phillips’ wedding with their respective husbands Edoardo Mapelli Mozzi and Jack Brooksbank
Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor believes he has been made into a scapegoat, according to royal sources
According to the Daily Mail’s well-placed royal source: ‘Andrew has hardened considerably of late and believes he has been used as a scapegoat. He believes that the King has exceeded his authority and acted beyond his powers. He is beginning to fight back.’
As well as chasing hundreds of thousands of pounds from the Crown Estate after his lease at Royal Lodge in Windsor was cut short by his eviction in February, Andrew is also demanding a payout for his ex-wife, Sarah Ferguson, who was also thrown out and has since left the country.
While demands for face-to-face meetings with King Charles have been quietly ignored rather than refused, Andrew’s main point of contact is Lord Benyon, the Lord Chamberlain, who acts as the brothers’ go-between and has been to visit the former prince at Marsh Farm cottage, his new abode on the Sandringham Estate.
The King, meanwhile, did not so much as put his head around his brother’s door when he was in residence at Sandringham last month – evidence, if any more were needed, of just how much a thorn in his side his feckless brother has become.
According to the source: ‘Camilla in particular believes that the King would soften his stance towards Andrew if the two met up. His Majesty dislikes conflict and prefers to bury his head in the sand whilst others do the dirty work.’
Indeed, at Peter Phillips’ wedding, it was the ever-dutiful Prince of Wales who was tasked with greeting his beleaguered cousins with a kiss on the cheek. By the time the sisters arrived, the King and Queen were safely ensconced in a pew inside the church and therefore able to avoid any awkward public encounter with the pair.
After the marriage service ended Their Majesties were whisked away by helicopter to attend the Epsom Derby in their capacity as joint patrons of The Jockey Club, leaving the sisters no opportunity to cosy up to their uncle and smooth over recent troublesome events.
According to the source: ‘Beatrice and Eugenie’s hopes to lobby the King were dashed’ by this rapid exit.
One source claims: ‘Camilla in particular believes that the King would soften his stance towards Andrew if the two met up‘
The princesses have been under growing pressure in recent months, not just because of revelations about their own links to their parents’ friend and associate, the late billionaire paedophile Jeffrey Epstein, but because of concerns about the sources of their own incomes amid multiple trips to their father’s murky old stamping grounds in the Gulf States.
Further fuel was added to the fire last week when it emerged that the pair, who are not working royals and have vast family homes, have been enjoying rent-free London bolt holes at the expense of the King.
Beatrice, 37, who shares a £3.5million farmhouse in Oxfordshire with her 42-year-old husband Edo Mapelli Mozzi and their two daughters, has an apartment in St James’s Palace. Eugenie, 36, who is expecting her third child, lives in a £3.6million ocean-side home in Portugal with her husband Jack Brooksbank and two sons, but has the run of Ivy Cottage in the grounds of Kensington Palace.
In fact, as the Daily Mail has exclusively discovered, the King is not at all happy about this arrangement, which was put in place by the late Queen before she died, and has made efforts to move the pair on. Last year, Palace officials wrote to the princesses indicating that current ‘dwelling arrangements’ at royal residences were ‘to be reviewed’ and diplomatically suggested that they ‘might consider making alternative arrangements’ for central London lodgings.
According to the Daily Mail’s royal source: ‘They seem to have done nothing, prompting a follow-up letter in April.
‘The King has delegated the matter to officials to avoid getting his hands dirty and having to have awkward conversations with them.’
Beatrice, it is said, is ‘a particular issue’ as she stands in the way of plans to extend commercial lets at St James’s Palace. She has a relatively secluded apartment in what is a very open-plan palace and doesn’t want to move,’ says the source.
‘Anne, the last working royal living there, is unfussed by the opening up and is happy to remain there or move to an apartment elsewhere – whatever is best for the King.’
Eugenie’s grace-and-favour Kensington Palace home is equally problematic given that it is situated in a secure area and therefore not really suitable for the open market.
‘She is known to be very fond of it,’ says the Daily Mail’s royal source. ‘She really doesn’t want to go although the option of paying the rent herself, with the amount made public, has been put on the table. William would prefer that a clean break is made and that she move out of the royal gated community.’
Amid suggestions from some quarters that the entire House of York be removed from the line of succession, the princesses are seen by many to be walking a tightrope.
Last month, the King gave a clear indication of support for his nieces when he asked officials to make a formal announcement about Eugenie’s third pregnancy, saying that he – tellingly, there was no mention of Queen Camilla – was ‘delighted’ with the news.
But barely three weeks later, Eugenie, I am told, promptly blotted her copybook, when she attended a promotional event in London for Discovery Dunes, an ultra-luxury Dubai-based golfing and real-estate development, exactly the kind of project that her father, whose love of golf, money and the UAE apparently had no bounds, would have once become involved with.
Her husband, Jack Brooksbank, is involved in the project but, as the Daily Mail’s royal source put it to me: ‘Seeing Eugenie following in her father’s footsteps, and in a high-profile way so soon after the King publicly put a metaphorical arm around her shoulder by organising a Palace announcement of her pregnancy, has jarred.’
As the Daily Mail has previously reported, there is concern at the Palace that Andrew and his business friends have in the past acted as Beatrice and Eugenie’s financial advisers.
The sisters are said to have resisted a call from the Prince of Wales to allow an ‘ethics’ check on their finances and also to have turned down an offer of help from the King to provide the services of one of his senior advisers to ensure that his nieces’ reputations are not tainted by the sins of their avaricious parents.
Speaking of whom, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, as last week’s National Audit Office report on the royals’ residential property arrangements makes clear, still retains the lease on 30-room Royal Lodge and could be entitled to a compensation payment of £301,967.66 given that it doesn’t expire until October 30, 2026.
That eye-watering amount could be adjusted down depending on ‘dilapidation costs’ which have not yet been assessed. Royal Lodge was said to be in a poor state of repair by the time the erstwhile duke was whisked off to Norfolk.
The Daily Mail has now learnt that Andrew falsely believed the unexpired lease would protect him and ignored warnings that the King’s men were on their way to ‘move’ him to Sandringham under cover of darkness.
According to my royal source, he sat firm, confident that no one would dare to remove him by force, while Sarah Ferguson, now lying low at a private Austrian ski chalet, did an instant flit.
‘Andrew didn’t go quietly and some light force was employed,’ says the source of that bleak winter night in early February.
This week, Andrew was lying low at his new home, four-bedroom Marsh Farm Cottage in Sandringham where he spends much of his time in his bedroom, watching the new flat screen TV he has recently had installed there.
He has been keeping out of sight ever since he was spotted last week sporting a vast bruise across his cheek while driving to take one of his dogs for a walk. So what did cause that nasty contusion on his face? Could it be that he tripped over an item of bulky furniture brought from spacious Royal Lodge and crammed into the smaller rooms at Marsh Farm?
Or is it, as some sources indicated last week, the result of a ‘non-serious medical condition’?
It’s not the first time the ex-prince has been seen sporting a shiner. In June 2017, he turned up to the Knightsbridge funeral of Countess Mountbatten of Burma with a bruise under his right eye which was also never explained.
If Andrew has had something of a rough ride in recent weeks then he remains bloodied but unbowed – still clinging on to his unwavering belief in his status, no matter what the King does.
Not least, I can reveal, he is still insisting on being addressed by his staff – all three of them – as ‘Sir’ and referred to as ‘The Duke’.
Few will forget the expletive-laden rant he delivered last October from the top of the staircase at Royal Lodge where he reminded his lackeys that despite being stripped of his titles, they’d better not forget he was still the son, brother and uncle of monarchs and the father of princesses, a man related to the thrones of Greece and Denmark through his father.
His black-and-blue face will probably have healed by the time of his next appearance in public, by video link, which is likely to be at Westminster Magistrates’ Court on July 29. He is due to give evidence against a man accused of threatening him near his Norfolk home last month and will be forced to endure the indignity of being addressed as plain old Mr Mountbatten-Windsor.
Alex Jenkinson, 39, of no fixed address, is charged with two counts of using threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour to harass someone or cause alarm or distress. He denies the allegations but did plead guilty to failing to provide a specimen of blood while being held in custody.
Andrew is also facing a new allegation of inappropriate behaviour towards a waitress working at Royal Ascot in 2002, the year of the late Queen’s Golden Jubilee. Thames Valley police sources have said that their investigation into him is wider than many previously realised and also covers sexual misconduct.
He was arrested on his 66th birthday in February and questioned under criminal caution on suspicion of misconduct in public office, related to his role as a British trade envoy. He denies any wrongdoing.
If exile in Norfolk is somewhat dull, at least he is better off than some of his ill-fated forbears.
Marsh Farm cottage is infinitely more cosy than the Tower of London. He recently had a second flat screen TV delivered to his country pad and installed in his bedroom where he reportedly spends much of his time.
One can only wonder if he will be tuning in to watch today’s Trooping the Colour, recalling happier days when, as honorary Colonel of the Grenadier Guards, he rode directly alongside his mother, the late Queen, during the grand annual parade.
His last Trooping the Colour appearance was in 2019. He stepped back from public life in November that year at the start of what has proved to be a seemingly unending fall from grace.
It is one which, by all accounts, is not over yet.
