It was shortly after 8am on Thursday when a small fleet of unmarked police cars drew up at Wood Farm on British king Charles’s private Sandringham estate in Norfolk.
Plainclothes officers stepped out into the late winter drizzle and readied themselves for a historic act that the royal family might have been expecting and dreading for weeks. Inside the house, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor was perhaps sitting down to a birthday breakfast.
On February 19th, 1960, queen Elizabeth II gave birth to her third – and some say favourite and most indulged – child at Buckingham Palace. Exactly 66 years later, Andrew – no longer a prince, and ostracised by many members of his family – was about to face the ignominy of being arrested and taken into police custody before being released almost 12 hours later.
It was, said maj gen Alastair Bruce, a historian and royal watcher for Sky News, the “most shocking day for the British crown, to have a former prince of the blood arrested”. The arrest was “about as critical as the institution could face”, he said.
Other commentators described the arrest as ex
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