The former BBC anchor who famously grilled Prince Andrew about his scandalous friendship with Jeffrey Epstein revealed Tuesday that Prince William threatened to remove the royal titles of Andrew’s daughters unless their disgraced father finally agreed to leave Royal Lodge, the 30-room mansion he and his ex-wife, Sarah Ferguson, occupy near Windsor Castle.
Emily Maitlis said on her The News Agents podcast that the heir to the throne apparently met with his cousins, Princess Beatrice and Princess Eugenie, last Thursday and told them they needed to put pressure on their father and mother to move out of Royal Lodge, “otherwise we will start re-examining the state of your own titles,” the Daily Beast reported.
William’s alleged meeting with Beatrice and Eugenie was followed the next day by news that Andrew had begun “advanced talks” with King Charles’s senior aides about vacating the mansion, according to The Guardian, citing a report by The Telegraph.
“They are, at the moment, allowed to be princesses,” Maitlis said about Beatrice and Eugenie. “But there was pressure being put on them. Obviously, you can see why Andrew, as a father, would want to keep his daughters happy and keep their titles in place.”
Andrew and Sarah’s continued occupancy of Royal Lodge has been an ongoing source of public outrage for some time, with it intensifying in the weeks since emails were published, showing that the self-described “happiest divorced couple in the world,” continued to stay friendly with Epstein, the late pedophile and accused sex trafficker, after both publicly said they had cut ties with him and stopped taking his money. In one 2011 email, Epstein revealed that Sarah brought herself and Beatrice and Eugenie to visit him after his release from jail in Florida, where he was convicted in 2008 of one count of soliciting a minor for prostitution. The revelations about the emails led to both Andrew and Sarah renouncing their Duke and Duchess of York titles in the past two weeks.
But the outrage over the couple has only continued with the posthumous publication of the memoirs of Virginia Giuffre, the late American woman who alleged that Epstein trafficked her as a teen and who accused Andrew of sexually assaulting her three times in 2001.
Pressure also has increased on the king to finally find a way to get Andrew and Sarah out of Royal Lodge after the Times UK published a report last week saying that the ex-spouses had been living there, virtually rent free, for nearly two decades. Andrew reportedly paid some $1.3 million to lease the mansion in 2003 and spent up to $10 million to upgrade it, though he was only expected to pay.a minimal mount in rent, and only if demanded, according to The Guardian.
Unfortunately for the king, he apparently can’t make Andrew and Sarah leave Royal Lodge because Andrew has a “cast iron,” pre-paid lease with the Crown Estate, which owns and manages various royal homes in Windsor Great Park, the Daily Mail said. Andrew reportedly has 50 years left on the lease, and it’s not clear whether he would receive compensation for the millions he spent on renovating the mansion, the Daily Mail reported.
The Daily Beast, though, reported that William has grown impatient with the “spectacular mismanagement of the entire Andrew affair” by Charles’ team. For that reason, William — “in a demonstration of his growing power as his father lives with incurable cancer” — coordinated the moves to get Andrew to renounce his title, something his father’s team had long said was impossible, impractical and pointles, the Daily Beast added. William “has effectively taken control of the process to sever Andrew from the royal family.”
Now, William has reportedly threatened to take steps to strip Beatrice and Eugenie of their princess titles when he becomes king, according to Maitlis and The Daily Beast. Those threats may have finally convinced Andrew to begin talks about leaving Royal Lodge.
But now there is a potential new source of outrage over reports that Andrew and Sarah will only agree to leave Royal Lodge if the king offers them two houses, one each, as compensation for leaving their long-term home, the Daily Mail said.
Andrew has reportedly told the king that he would like Frogmore Cottage, the former home of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, while Sarah is eyeing nearby Adelaide Cottage, the home that William and Kate Middleton are expected to move out of next month, the Daily Mail reported.
There’s also been some back and forth over whether Andrew and Sarah demanded the two houses, or Charles initiated the offer, the Daily Beast said. Royal expert Richard Fitzwilliams told the Daily Mail he doesn’t think the king would make such offer. “If they think that having two homes — which the king I’m sure won’t agree to — is likely to solve things, they’re still living in a rather weird fantasy world,” Fitzwilliams said.
The expert also said that this request for separate homes shows that the happy-divorced-couple relationship that Andrew and Sarah long boasted about may be coming to an end. The request for two homes also suggests that their arrangement may have been less about companionship and co-parenting than about making money, he added.
“The relationship between them, as I’ve always seen, it’s symbiotic in a sense,” Fitzwilliams said. “It’s lucrative for both of them to be together. The point is that this has been an arrangement of convenience to enable them to live at a certain level.” They stayed together and they stayed friends with Epstein, a once well-connected billionaire financier, because “they are extremely greedy,” Fitzwilliams added, saying, “I think the problem was, they desired a certain lifestyle, and this was the main way to get it.”