Not since the Boston Tea Party in Massachusetts have Americans dealt such a lethal body blow to Britain. That Queen Elizabeth’s second son Andrew, a ‘prince of the blood’—as the British grandly and arcanely refer to the monarch’s male descendants in imitation of the defunct French appellation of Prince Du Sang—has been stripped of his titles is cataclysmic for that family’s history. All because of an intrepid American woman who died by suicide this April.

Andrew, now just Mountbatten-Windsor and banished to title-less obscurity on his brother King Charles III’s private estate in Norfolk, should have known better than to dabble in dangerous activities with American women. After all, before him, two princes of his family were impacted by their own relationships with American women too—Prince ‘David’ (briefly Edward VIII) and Prince Harry. It must be noted, however, that those two did nothing criminal or lie.

Had Prince Edward Albert Christian George Andrew Patrick David not met Wallis Simpson in 1931, this sorry saga of forfeited titles may never have begun. Edward VIII lost his titles of King and the ‘His Majesty’ when he abdicated in 1936 but retained the lesser prefix of ‘Royal Highness’ as Duke of Windsor; his American wife, however, only became a Duchess, minus other honorifics. But the all-important ‘royalness’ was not taken away from the former king.

And soon after his indirect descendant Prince Harry married American Meghan Markle in London in 2018—four years after yet another American, Virginia Guiffre, named Andrew in a Florida court filing relating to being trafficked for sex by Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell—they took “a step........

© News18