A royal historian has claimed at the Oxford Literary Festival that Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, the former Duke of York and ex-husband of Sarah Ferguson, 'bullied' the late Queen Elizabeth II into shielding him from scrutiny over his ties to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, with the crisis now judged to be a more damaging rupture for the monarchy than the abdication of Edward VIII in 1936.
The remarks were made by Andrew Lownie, author of Entitled, a biography of Andrew and Ferguson published in 2025, during a talk at the Oxford Literary Festival in March 2026. They landed weeks after Andrew was arrested on his 66th birthday in February on suspicion of misconduct in public office, making him by some accounts the first member of the British royal family to be detained since King Charles I was taken prisoner in 1647.
