The record of Prince Philip’s relationship with his second son, Prince Andrew, is not a record of feelings. No memoir exists. No interview was given. No public statement was ever made about Andrew’s troubles. What survives is a trail of decisions, each with a date attached, about schools, postings, titles, and duties.
That trail begins in 1968, when Philip was among those who decided that a film crew should be admitted to Buckingham Palace. A team led by Richard Cawston of the BBC, working with ITV, filmed inside the royal household for about a year. Cameras followed the family through working days and private hours. The resulting film, called *Royal Family*, was broadcast in June 1969, days before Charles was invested as Prince of Wales at Caernarfon Castle.
The children who appeared in it were, in order of birth, a schoolboy who had just left Gordonstoun, a daughter at the end of her years at Benenden, and two much younger brothers who had grown up with Buckingham Palace as their address.
Philip’s influence over how the monarchy presented itself went back to February 1952. Born a Greek prince and educated at Gordonstoun, he had made his career in the Royal Navy. When his wife became Queen, that career ended. He was left with a title, a wife whose position outranked his own, and no defined work.
He filled the gap with tasks nobody else had claimed. In 1952, he chaired the coronation commission. In the same year, he became ranger of Windsor Great Park. Biographers report that the Queen gave him charge of the private estates at Sandringham and Balmoral, and that he set about modernizing the household.
A second line of his energy ran towards the young. Philip had been a pupil at Gordonstoun in the 1930s, at the school founded by Kurt Hahn. In 1956, he and Hahn launched the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award, a scheme that asked teenagers to complete expeditions, serve others, and acquire skills.
Meanwhile, he was raising children of his own. Charles was born in 1948, and Anne in 1950. Charles went first to Cheam, then from 1962 until 1967 to Gordonstoun. Jonathan Dimbleby’s authorized biography of Charles, published in 1994, records his unhappiness at Gordonstoun and presents the choice of school as his father’s. Philip never answered it in print.
Anne was sent to Benenden, where she stayed from 1963 until 1968. Then a second, younger set of children arrived. Andrew was born on the 19th of February 1960 at Buckingham Palace, the first child born to a reigning British monarch in more than 100 years. Edward followed on the 10th of March 1964.
By the time the film crew arrived, Andrew was eight and Edward was four. Both were young enough to run across a hillside in front of a camera without knowing what the camera was for.
Nothing in that sequence of years reveals what Philip thought of any one of them. The evidence lies elsewhere, in the pattern of choices that biographers describe.
Charles’s next years followed a path that biographers describe as one his father had walked before him. In 1971, he went to the Royal Air Force College at Cranwell, then to Dartmouth, and afterwards he joined the Royal Navy, in which he remained until 1976. His last command was the mine hunter HMS *Bronington*.
Philip, who had given up his own naval career on the day his wife became Queen, was by then busy on other fronts. He had been president of the World Wildlife Fund’s British branch since 1961. He was Chancellor of the University of Edinburgh, a post he had held since 1953, and in 1976, he became Chancellor of Cambridge as well.
Anne’s path ran through a different medium. She rode in three-day eventing, and in 1971, she became European champion. Five years later, she was a member of the British equestrian team at the Montreal Olympics. Her father had been president of the International Equestrian Federation since 1964, and he would remain so until 1986.
The younger brothers were growing up in the shadow of these arrangements. Andrew went first to Heatherdown, a preparatory school, and in 1973, he followed his father and his elder brother to Gordonstoun. In 1977, he spent an exchange term at Lakefield College School in Canada. He left Gordonstoun in 1979.
Edward, four years younger, would go there in his turn and stay until 1982. For a few years, the school on the Moray coast held two of Philip’s sons at once.
One paragraph of dates gives the shape of the decade better than any description of a single day. In 1971, Charles went to Cranwell and Dartmouth, and Anne won the European title. In 1973, Andrew entered Gordonstoun. In 1976, Charles left the Navy and Anne rode at Montreal. In 1977, Andrew went to Canada for a term. In 1979, he left school and joined the Royal Navy on a commission of 12 years.
Andrew qualified as a helicopter pilot in 1981 and was posted to 820 Naval Air Squadron, which flew Sea King helicopters from the aircraft carrier HMS *Invincible*. In July of that year, the family’s attention went elsewhere, for on the 29th, Charles married Lady Diana Spencer at St. Paul’s Cathedral.
On the 2nd of April 1982, Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands, and Andrew’s ship was among those assigned to the response. Reporting at the time described ministers raising the question of whether the Queen’s son should be reassigned to safer duty. The palace’s position, as reported, was that he was a serving officer and would sail with his ship. The decision was described as the Queen’s.
Nothing has ever been published that shows Philip’s part in that discussion, if he had one. What is known is that *Invincible* sailed from Portsmouth on the 5th of April, and the Queen’s second son was aboard. He flew during the campaign. The islands were retaken in June after fighting that cost lives on both sides.
Andrew’s own later accounts say that his helicopter was used as a decoy against incoming missiles and that he took part in picking up survivors from the water. The ship came home on the 17th of September 1982. The Queen and Philip went aboard to greet the returning company.
No statement by Philip about that meeting has survived. None of the accounts of the day claims to report what was said between them.
What the record does show, laid out child by child, is that each of the four had by that autumn met the same kind of expectation in a different form. Charles had been given a naval career and a public role. Anne had found a sport her father presided over. Edward was still at Gordonstoun. Andrew had returned from a war with a reputation unlike that of anyone else of his generation in the family.
Edward came to the structure last. After Gordonstoun, where he became guardian just as his father had, he spent a gap year teaching in New Zealand, and in 1983, he went up to Jesus College, Cambridge, the university of which Philip was chancellor. He stayed until 1986.
Andrew’s life, meanwhile, was moving on a faster track. His engagement to Sarah Ferguson was announced on the 19th of March 1986, and on the 23rd of July, the Queen created him Duke of York. The naval career went on regardless. He later took command of the mine hunter HMS *Cottesmore*, and remained an officer until 2001.
Two daughters were born to the couple, Beatrice on the 8th of August 1988 and Eugenie on the 23rd of March 1990.
In September 1986, only weeks after the Abbey wedding, Edward began commando training with the Royal Marines as a university cadet. He left in January 1987. What Philip made of his youngest son’s departure has been reported in several ways, and the reports do not agree. None of them comes from Philip.
In June 1987, Edward organized a televised charity event called The Grand Knockout Tournament. Andrew, Sarah Ferguson, and Anne all took part. The spectacle was widely criticized in the press. Philip took no part in it. Whether his absence was a decision, a scheduling matter, or a preference is not recorded anywhere.
The years that followed placed the weight on four marriages. Charles and Diana had wed in 1981. Andrew and Sarah had married in 1986. Anne had been married to Mark Phillips since the early 1970s. In 1992, all three of those unions reached a public turning point within a single calendar year.
On the 19th of March, the separation of Andrew and Sarah was announced. In April, Anne’s divorce from Mark Phillips was completed. On the 20th of August, newspapers published pictures of Sarah with John Bryan, taken while she was staying at Balmoral with the royal family. By her own account, she left the castle on the day they appeared.
She has also said that in the years afterwards, Philip kept his distance from her. Philip never answered that in public. Biographers, Brandreth among them, have written that Philip seems to have liked her. The two statements sit side by side without being reconciled by any document.
The autumn brought a different kind of event. On the night of the 20th of November, fire broke out at Windsor Castle. Four days later, the Queen described the year as an annus horribilis. On the 9th of December, the Prime Minister told the House of Commons that Charles and Diana had decided to separate.
In the middle of these events, Philip was writing to his daughter-in-law. His letters to Diana in that year became public through the Metropolitan Police’s Paget report of 2006 and through the inquest into her death. The report described their tone as supportive rather than hostile. They are the only place where his private words of that year survive in the public domain.
Three days after the common statement, Anne was married again. On the 12th of December, she wed Commander Timothy Laurence at Crathie Church.
The repair of Windsor Castle gave Philip a task of the kind he had always taken up. He is reported to have chaired the committee that oversaw the restoration. The work occupied the better part of five years, reaching completion in November 1997.
Another body of the same decade is known only by the name the newspapers gave it. The Way Ahead Group, as it was reported to have been called, brought together senior members of the family and senior officials. No account of what was said around that table has ever been published.
In 1994, Jonathan Dimbleby published his authorized biography of Charles, and presented a television film to accompany it. Both portrayed Philip as a remote and demanding father. Both were made with Charles’s cooperation. Philip did not reply in public.
The marriages ended in law during the next two years. On the 30th of May 1996, Andrew and Sarah were divorced. On the 28th of August in the same year, Charles and Diana were divorced.
Diana died in Paris on the 31st of August 1997. Six days later, her coffin was carried through London on a gun carriage, and Philip walked behind it with Charles, William, Harry, and her brother Earl Spencer. That is the whole of what the pictures establish.
On the 19th of June 1999, Edward married Sophie Rhys-Jones at St. George’s Chapel, Windsor. On the day he was created Earl of Wessex, and the palace announced that he would in due course receive the title Duke of Edinburgh. The blank was filled on the 10th of March 2023, when King Charles created Edward Duke of Edinburgh for his lifetime.
Andrew’s course ran in another direction. In 2001, he left the Royal Navy, and in the same year he was appointed UK Special Representative for International Trade and Investment. The post was unpaid, and it came with official travel. It kept him in public view until 2011.
Andrew knew Jeffrey Epstein, the American financier. In 2008, Epstein pleaded guilty in Florida to a criminal offense. In 2011, photographs of Andrew with Epstein were published together with reports of a visit he had made to Epstein in New York in December 2010. In July 2011, Andrew stepped down as trade envoy.
He has never been charged with or convicted of any criminal offense.
No statement by Philip about the association at that point has survived. By then, Philip was in his 90s. On the 4th of May 2017, the palace announced that he would stop carrying out public engagements from the autumn of that year.
His last solo engagement was on the 2nd of August 2017, a Royal Marines parade on the forecourt of Buckingham Palace, held in the rain. He withdrew to Wood Farm, a modest house on the Sandringham estate.
He had been Colonel of the Grenadier Guards since 1975, and in December 2017, the colonelcy passed to Andrew. No reason for this one was ever recorded.
On the 17th of January 2019, Philip’s car was in a collision with another vehicle on a road close to the Sandringham estate. Two women in the other car were injured. Philip, then 97, was not seriously hurt. In the days that followed, he wrote to one of them in a letter that the press later published. Early in February, he gave up his driving license.
Later that year, the name of another man began to dominate the newspapers. Jeffrey Epstein was arrested in the United States on the 6th of July 2019, and in August, he died in custody. Andrew’s acquaintance with Epstein was again the subject of daily reporting.
Buckingham Palace agreed that Andrew should give an account of himself on television. The interview was recorded in a state room at the palace with Emily Maitlis of the BBC’s Newsnight asking the questions, and it was broadcast on the 16th of November 2019. The answers were widely judged to have failed.
A written statement followed within days in which he expressed sympathy for Epstein’s victims. On the 20th of November, a statement in his name announced that he had asked the Queen whether he might step back from public duties for the foreseeable future.
That week, Charles was on an official tour of New Zealand, and Philip, aged 98, was at Wood Farm. Newspapers reported, citing unnamed palace sources, that both men would have been of the view that Andrew should withdraw. The sources were never named. No statement from Philip followed that week or afterwards.
Philip died at Windsor Castle on the 9th of April at the age of 99. On the 11th of April, Andrew spoke to cameras outside the Royal Chapel of All Saints in Windsor Great Park. He described his father as the grandfather of the nation.
The funeral took place on the 17th of April at St. George’s Chapel. Because of the rules then in force, only 30 mourners could attend. The coffin crossed the quadrangle at Windsor on a Land Rover that Philip had helped to modify. The Queen decided that no member of the family would wear uniform.
Four months later, in August 2021, Virginia Giuffre filed a civil complaint in a federal court in New York, in which she alleged that she had been wronged by Andrew. Andrew denied the allegations, as he has consistently done since.
On the 12th of January 2022, Judge Lewis Kaplan declined to dismiss the case. On the 13th of January, the palace announced that, with the Queen’s approval and agreement, Andrew’s military affiliations and royal patronages had been returned to her, that he would not use the style His Royal Highness in any official capacity, and that he would defend the case as a private citizen.
On the 15th of February, the case was settled out of court, with no admission of liability and a sum that was not disclosed.
On the 29th of March 2022, a service of Thanksgiving for Philip was held at Westminster Abbey. The Queen was escorted to her seat by Andrew, and the palace said that the choice was hers.
The Queen died at Balmoral on the 8th of September 2022. Philip’s coffin was moved from the Royal Vault to the King George VI Memorial Chapel at Windsor to lie beside hers.
The events of 2025 were reported in quick succession. In April, Virginia Giuffre died in Australia. In August, Andrew Lownie’s book on the Duke and Duchess of York was published, and in October her memoir appeared posthumously, followed by fresh reporting about Andrew’s past correspondence with Epstein. Andrew continued to deny the allegations against him.
On the 17th of October, a statement in his name said that after discussions with the King, he would no longer use his titles and honors, including that of Duke of York. On the 30th of October, Buckingham Palace announced that the King had begun a formal process to remove his style, titles, and honors, that he would be known as Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, and that he had been given notice to surrender the lease on Royal Lodge.
By the time of these decisions, Philip had been dead for more than four years. He died before the ruling of the 12th of January 2022, before the return of his son’s military affiliations, and before any of the steps taken in the autumn of 2025.
What he would have said or done had he lived to see them is not recorded anywhere. He left no memoir, gave no interview, and made no public statement on his son’s situation.
The claim that Philip despised his son is a claim about a feeling. The only things that survive are the dates and the decisions attached to them.