THIS is not how Lord Louis Mountbatten planned to have his name remembered.

Mountbatten cured his insolvency by marrying Edwina Ashley, the granddaughter of a Jewish billionaire. He wormed his way into the Indian subcontinent’s history by becoming the last viceroy of India, and then its first governor-general. His final coup — the marriage of his nephew Philip to Princess Elizabeth — spawned his demand that the children of that union should bear his Mountbatten name, hence the hyphenated Mountbatten-Windsor.

Today, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor has gone against his great-grandmother Queen Mary’s warning: “I have seen three great monarchies brought down because they couldn’t separate personal indulgences from duty.”

Royalty has always been vulnerable to social upstarts who encouraged their ‘personal indulgences’. Never more so than when monarchs become hostage to faith healers. Tsarina Alexandra succumbed to Grigori Rasputin’s ‘magical’ powers beca­use his prayers alleviated the pain of her haemophiliac son. The Dutch Queen Julia­­na depended on Greet Hofmans to cure her youngest daughter of near-blindness. And now, Jeffrey Epstein has caused irreversible damage to the British monarchy.

Every day,........

© Dawn