It felt like every old royal historian and royalist commentator got dusted off in recent months to give their definitive “take” on the Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor situation. What lessons were learned, what did King Charles do right, what did Charles do wrong, what is the larger message being sent, etc. For columnist A.N. Wilson, the unroyaling of Andrew was a mixed bag. In his opinion – and I’m not making this up – Andrew should have faced the guillotine. But Wilson also believes that the larger message is that the royal finances are all screwed up and when Scooter King William is on the throne, he should swear off all public money. Interesting. Some highlights from Wilson’s Times column:

Andrew would have been beheaded in a different era: The King has surely done as much as is possible, humanly and constitutionally, to make it clear that the royal family distance themselves from this deplorable fellow. Henry VIII would have been able to accomplish it more expeditiously. We live in gentler days — in some ways. (Speaking personally, I’d far rather be publicly beheaded, having said a few words on the scaffold, than go through what Andrew, through his own folly, has been put through since the Emily Maitlis interview.)

There’s no place for Andrew: It is hard to imagine anywhere else in the world where he could be anonymous. Though I would have thought, if he were brave enough, it would be possible to change his name completely (it was always an absurd invented surname), grow a beard and live up some rutted track in Maine or Vermont. (I remember in the days when I used to visit wise old Malcolm Muggeridge, him saying that the previous day Svetlana Stalin had been down to Robertsbridge to ask where she should go, and Mugg thought you could always lose yourself and your identity in the dear old USA.)

The crisis is about money: Back home the King and, even more, the future kings William and George have an equally thorny question to answer. How did this spectacularly awful crisis arise? Yes, it was Andrew’s appalling lack of judgment, his misbehaviour with young women, his grotesque choice of friends. Yes, the Maitlis interview was a catastrophic folly. But behind it all is the single word used by Andrew Lownie for his devastating biography of Andrew and Fergie: Entitled.

Queen Victoria: Who is entitled to what? Queen Victoria, bless her, was a guzzler, a hoarder. Her father died when she was a baby. She grew up with an immigrant mother who spoke virtually no English and she had the classic first-generation immigrant’s insecurity about money and property. When it was put to her that she should not be pocketing the income from the duchies of Cornwall and Lancaster, she refused to give back a single penny to the exchequer. She built up a vast personal fortune, which no previous monarch had ever had, building Balmoral and Sandringham and Osborne all as her private pads. Much as we love her, and much as we might love her successors — I don’t much, myself, I must own — this was a disastrous legacy.

All of the king’s castles & palaces: When a new monarch comes into the job, they of course take over the official residences — Buckingham Palace, Windsor Castle and so on — just as the Pope enters the Vatican and Castel Gandolfo. But the Pope does not suppose these palaces are his own. They just happen to be places where Popes live. Likewise, the cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces, should be seen as the tied cottages of our heads of state and their immediate family.

No more public cash: We are not Leninists. We are not going to go back over the last 200 years and demand that the Saxe-Coburg-Gotha family (now absurdly calling themselves Mountbatten Windsor) give us back Balmoral and Sandringham. But we do — those of us who support the system of constitutional monarchy — hope that the coming generations realise how potentially fatal it is for the monarch and his relations (and his ex-in-law in Fergie’s case) to believe they are entitled to public cash. It is really as simple as that. They should finish the job, begun by the humiliation of Andrew, and forswear any entitlement to public funds except the Sovereign Grant.

[From The Times]

Wilson slid that in at the end – “forswear any entitlement to public funds except the Sovereign Grant.” I guess the point being: none of the royals should live anywhere else but official residences, like Buckingham Palace or Kensington Palace? And their finances need to be monitored and controlled through the Sovereign Grant? The thing is, that only affects Princess Anne, Prince Edward, Sophie and (currently) Prince William and Kate, all of whom live on properties operated by the Crown Estates, all of whom likely have sweetheart deals on their leases as well. It’s such a narrow criticism or suggestion, but even then, it will never happen. Kate and William swore up and down that they’ll stay at Forest Lodge forever (max two years, in my opinion) and Sophie and Edward want to escape notice at Bagshot Park. Anne’s Gatcombe Park isn’t even being mentioned.

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