LONDON (AP) — Using a formal document affixed with a royal seal, King Charles III has formally stripped his brother Andrew Mountbatten Windsor of the title of prince.
The disgraced royal has also lost the designation “his royal highness” after the king issued a Letters Patent, a centuries-old type of document used by monarchs to bestow — and remove — appointments or titles.
An announcement published Wednesday in The Gazette — the U.K.’s official public
record — said “THE KING has been pleased by Letters Patent under the Great Seal of the Realm dated 3 November 2025 to declare that Andrew Mountbatten Windsor shall no longer be entitled to hold and enjoy the style, title or attribute of ‘Royal Highness’ and the titular dignity of ‘Prince.'”
The king also formally removed the title Duke of York from his brother.
The king announced on Oct. 31 that he was removing his brother’s titles and evicting him from his royal residence over his relationship with sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Demand had been growing on the palace to oust the 65-year-old prince from his Royal Lodge home over new revelations about his friendship with Epstein and renewed attention on sexual abuse allegations by one of Epstein’s victims, Virginia Roberts Giuffre, whose posthumous memoir was published last month.
The king went even further to punish Mountbatten Windsor for serious lapses of judgment by removing the title of prince that he has held since birth as a child of a monarch, the late Queen Elizabeth II.
Andrew also is moving from Royal Lodge, the 30-room mansion near Windsor Castle where he has lived for more than 20 years, into a more remote home funded by his brother on the king’s 20,000-acre (8,100 hectare) Sandringham Estate in eastern England.
The king's decision was welcomed by the family of Giuffre, who died by suicide in April at the age of 41. She said that in the early 2000s, when she was a teenager, she was caught up in Epstein’s sex trafficking ring and exploited by Andrew and other influential men. Epstein was found dead in a New York City jail cell in 2019 in what investigators called a suicide.
Andrew denies Giuffre's allegations.
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