You will have seen the photograph by now: Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, formerly a prince, slumped in the back of a car outside Aylsham police station in Norfolk. His face is corpse-like – his lips tight, stare fixed, eyes turned red by the camera flash. It’s a far cry from Randy Andy, the handsome prince with the big teeth and the easy grin, whose face was once plastered on china cups and plates and commemorative tins, pressed into the soft metal of national affection.

Never the heir, but less of a spare than Harry somehow, Andrew’s face was once memorialised in the way that only royalty, Jesus and the saints were: endlessly reproduced as public property. Andrew’s face was part of his – and the royal family’s – brand; he was the warrior prince, the helicopter pilot, the man who had served. He had sweated for us, so much in fact, that he could never sweat again.

That face on those cups and plates was not merely decorative but an assertion of something ancient: that lineage writes itself in bone structure; that the face of a royal is not just a face but a symbol, a cipher, a condensed history of power.

In antiquity, the ruler’s face was stamped on coins not merely for identification but as a claim: this profile is authority, this jawline is legitimacy, this gaze is the state. By the time of the Tudors, the royal portrait was an act of sovereign self-presentation – as seen by Holbein’s Henry VIII or later in Van Dyck’s Charles I.

Andrew’s face was never intended for coinage. Yet its “physiognomy” was a text that would have been read for centuries as royal lineage: that strong jaw asserting resolution and authority; the broad forehead intelligence; the wide-set........

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