Prince Andrew, Pedophile
Meghan and Harry are being treated worse than an actual criminal
It’s been tough going to watch the suffering of the Duchess of Sussex, Meghan Markle, who opened up about her suicidal thoughts on Oprah Winfrey. Whatever your position on “Megxit” - and despite claiming not to care, everybody has one - there’s no question at all that neither Meghan nor Harry have ever been accused of any actual crimes.
But HRH the Duke of York, The Prince Andrew, Earl of Inverness, Baron Killyleagh (long breath…. because we’re about to list a lot of military titles and commands….
….) in Great Britain alone, Prince Andrew is
Colonel of the Grenadier Guards
Colonel-in-Chief of the 9th/12th Royal Lancers
Colonel-in-Chief of the Royal Irish Regiment (27th (Inniskilling) 83rd and 87th and Ulster Defence Regiment)
Colonel-in-Chief of the Small Arms School Corps
Colonel-in-Chief of the Yorkshire Regiment (14th/15th, 19th and 33rd/76th Foot)
Royal Colonel of the Royal Highland Fusiliers, 2nd Battalion Royal Regiment of Scotland
Honorary Air Commodore, Royal Air Force Lossiemouth
Commodore-in-Chief of the Fleet Air Arm
Admiral of the Sea Cadet Corps
In Canada, His Royal Highness is:
Colonel-in-Chief of the Queen's York Rangers (1st American Regiment)
Colonel-in-Chief of the Royal Highland Fusiliers of Canada
Colonel-in-Chief of the Princess Louise Fusiliers
and in New Zealand, Prince Andrew is Colonel-in-Chief of the Royal New Zealand Army Logistic Regiment
Got all that? There will be a test later. His daughters, way down the list from His Grace the Duke of Sussex (Harry) are still HRH Princess Beatrice of York and HRH Princess Eugenie of York.
But the trouble with all that is that Prince Andrew is a criminal. In fact, he is a career criminal. So well-known is his involvement with Jeffrey Epstein that the rest of Andrew’s grifting, criminal career has almost been forgotten and overlooked.
The Queen and the Royal Family, and Britain in general, have a huge problem with Harry and Meghan. The morning after their interview with Oprah, Twitter was full of sympathy for Meghan, which is right - she was brave to open up about her suicidal thoughts - but also full of rage at the Royal Family in general and Britain in particular for racism, which is monumentally unfair and will be received with disdain and dislike by Britons because it’s not true. The idea, for example, repeated across the media that Archie was “denied being a Prince” and Meghan was told “they don’t want him to be a Prince” is quite simply factually false, yet Americans are swallowing it wholesale. There was some truly bad communications breakdown, because Meghan clearly believes she was told Archie couldn’t be a Prince because he’s black. That’s not true. Under British law, Archie will become His Royal Highness, Prince Archie of Sussex, and his sister-to-be will become Her Royal Highness, Princess (n) of Sussex. Like Beatrice and Eugenie, they will be full-on Royal Highnesses. Archie’s wife will become Her Royal Highness, Princess Archie of Sussex.
But, and this is the part Meghan seems just not to have understood, under the law it wouldn’t happen immediately. It would happen when the Queen died, because, under the current law, only male-line grandchildren of the monarch get Royal Highness titles - with the exception that the children of the first in line (William) get simple “Prince/ss X” titles.
So this wasn’t racism. It wasn’t anti-Black bias. It would have happened to any child of Harry born before their grandfather, Charles, succeeds to the throne. If Meghan and Harry had elected it, Archie would be Viscount Something right now, a courtesy title of the Dukedom of Sussex, and the new baby girl would be Lady (x) Windsor. Then as soon as the Queen dies and Charles becomes King Charles III, Archie and his sister would suddenly become HRH Prince and Princess of Sussex.
None of that was determined, even a tiny bit, by Meghan’s skin color. And it is confusing. I mean, you’re probably confused. But it’s the law. For Meghan to say that the Royal Family “didn’t want Archie to be a Prince” is just rubbish, yet Britons have to wake up to spurious accusations of bias.
Under the law, Prince Edward, Earl of Wessex, has children who are entitled to be styled as HRH. Edward and Sophie chose for their daughter Lady Louise Windsor to be styled that way. Edward, unlike Harry, is the child, not grandchild, of the monarch. However, technically, Harry’s cousin Louise is Her Royal Highness, Princess Louise of Windsor. When she is 18, she will be able to decide for herself if she wants to be a Royal Highness. Meghan said:
And it’s not our decision to make. Even though I have a lot of clarity of what comes with the titles good and bad...that is their birthright to then make a choice about
She’s absolutely right. But Archie, even if his mom and pop had decided to keep him as plain Lord Archie when Charles becomes King, for a normal childhood, when he reaches the age of 18 - just like Lady/Princess Louise - he will have the right to make that decision for himself.
Nobody, in other words, has said Archie will not be a Prince and without a literal change in the law of the UK, he will be one.
How was it communicated so badly to Meghan, the expectant mom? “We were told it wasn’t protocol” - well, of course, it wasn’t protocol that Archie be called a prince before he actually becomes one. But somehow, Meghan got the wrong impression that SOME royal bigwig didn’t want an African-American-British boy to be a prince at all, when it’s simply the existing law that his coronet kicks in when his grandad succeeds.
And with that confusion, comes her sincerely held belief that British laws set up long before Harry even started to date her, are racist.
The fundamental problem now is that all of America erroneously believes the nasty mean old Queen denied Archie his rights, because he’s black. Harry backpedaled some via Oprah this morning, saying not to blame the Queen or Prince Philip, but at this stage, that’s like pouring a thimble of water on a house fire. So what can the Queen do to put matters straight?
Right now? Absolutely nothing.
Because the real problem in the House of Windsor is not Harry or Meghan, it’s Prince Andrew, and the double standard employed towards the son and grandson of the Queen.
No HRH for the Sussexes, not working royals? Cool. But then why does HRH the Duke of York still have the Royal Highness? It’s a double standard so glaring, it can be seen from space.
Can you see that little KG at the top there? Knight of the Garter? In England, that’s about the highest honor that can be bestowed short of an actual throne. Andrew had to throw it in there. He still has it, like he has all his other titles. “I have asked Her Majesty if I may” (read - ‘I have been told by Her Majesty that I must’) “step back from public duties for the foreseeable future”.
We were told by Buckingham Palace that Harry and Meghan would not be allowed to use the HRH titles because they were not working royals. But the Duke of York is not a working Royal. Harry was extremely upset to lose his military commands and honors - he was, among other things, Captain General of the Royal Marines - but the reason given for it is that he’s “not coming back as a working royal”. Guess what, nor is Prince Andrew. Not now, and not ever.
But Andrew is not coming back as a working Royal not because he doesn’t want to or because the Queen won’t permit it. It appears reasonably clear that both things would eventually happen under ordinary circumstances. No, he won’t be coming back because of Audrey Strauss, the prosecutor in charge of the Southern District of New York.
The monarchy is in real crisis because of Harry and Meghan as well as Prince Andrew. If there was simply a bad Prince who committed very bad crimes, the monarchy, which once had a serial killer at its head (Henry VIII, founder of the Church of England, killer of teenage girls*), could get past it. But with Meghan’s wrong belief that “Archie wasn’t allowed to be a Prince” being accepted as fact in America, alongside the very true and genuine discrimination that Harry and Meghan have suffered versus the treatment of Andrew, the monarchy may not in fact survive.
Right now, Andrew is just seen around the world as a bad guy, a witness who won’t talk, the pal of a pedophile, a guy who won’t help SDNY prosecute Ghislaine Maxwell. But it is in fact far, far worse than that. And although the Crown could, over time, correct the false ideas presented in the Oprah interview, once it comes out what Andrew actually did, and the legal troubles he is actually facing….. then the stern line taken with the Sussexes will and should disgust everybody, in Britain and in America, whether you think Harry and Meghan are heroes or grifters, truth-tellers or egomaniacs. Because what does it matter? You can think the very worst of Meghan Markle; you can think she wasn’t confused, she was actively lying; that she is smearing Harry’s dad and jealous of Kate, or whatever else you want to think. You could be Piers “I hate Meghan” Morgan. None of that matters, because it pales into comparison with the actual crimes of a man who was allowed to keep his Princely dignity, his palaces, his Royal commands, his honors, and pretty much everything that matters, while the young, unhappy woman that married into the Royal Family and needed more support than she was given by senior staffers, was treated sternly and strictly. Buckingham Palace dunked on the duchess, but protected the pedophile. And that will never be OK.
In the next piece at Dear Mr. Putin, which will be for subscribers only, I will lay out some of the horrors facing Andrew and the monarchy, and why they have zero chance of simply going away.
Thank you. I very little knowledge of how this all works and this sheds much light on it for me.
Louise, if we are to assume Meghan didn’t understand the protocol in which her son would become a prince then we must assume Prince Harry didn’t either. Surely, she would have discussed this with her husband before forming an opinion and certainly before going public.
What I gathered from the interview is that Meghan had a taste of life behind the curtains and realized it wasn’t what she or Harry wanted for their child. Simply put, his safety and her mental health/well-being became a priority.
It’s a lot easier for a person born into royalty to accept being controlled. She was asked to give-up basic freedoms that she was accustomed to that most can’t imagine life without. Like, who’s asked to give up their passport? That meant, like a prisoner, she had no choice to leave. I imagine, she was also or at least felt under constant surveillance, by cameras and staff. Could she then trust that her tea or food wasn’t being tampered with at some point? My goodness, lies were being printed incessantly, she was in a mansion, full of strangers and knew not who her enemies were.
You can’t just dismiss her feelings or conclude that she didn’t experience racism as the difference in treatment was glaring. It was also obvious that they chose not to share things that were perhaps more damaging about the family and that should be applauded.
Being told how to exist after living 30-plus-years free to choose, would certainly create a state of mind that most would have to live to understand and once she understood she/they weren’t being protected, they had to do what was best for their family. Maybe the fact that she rejected royalty, so to speak, is what’s really caused some of this disdain.
So could it be, Harry got a taste of true freedom, realized the tumult the monarchy created in his new life and no longer wanted to be controlled then he and Meghan decided that the lifestyle of a Royal was no longer worth the sacrifice of true peace and happiness?