Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s relationship with pedophile Jeffrey Epstein—and King Charles III’s response to it—may cause Charles to “fall on his sword” and abdicate, a royal biographer says.
Andrew Lownie, appearing on the debut episode of the podcast The Royalist Podcast, said Mountbatten-Windsor’s scandalous affiliation with Epstein has backed the crown into a corner.
“It’s a cover-up, and the cover-up is proving to be as bad as the initial crimes,” claimed Lownie, the author of Entitled: The Rise and Fall of the House of York, a 2025 biography of Mountbatten-Windsor and his connections with Epstein.
Mountbatten-Windsor was arrested a month ago—on his birthday—on suspicion of misconduct while in office. At the time, Charles, who had stripped his brother of his royal titles last October, said that the arrest prompted his “deepest concern,” but he acknowledged that “the law must take its course.”
Mountbatten-Windsor was released later that day, while the investigation continues.
“I think the interesting thing is that when my book came out...nothing happened to Andrew. The idea was that we would just sit this out, and the problem would go away. And I think it’s only because of this drip, drip feed, and just the wealth of material that has now emerged in pretty clear black and white with all these emails, that they’ve been forced to do anything,” Lownie said, referring to Mountbatten-Windsor’s inclusion in the released Epstein files, for instance, in photographs.
“And the problem is, having denied it before, they’ve just got to keep denying it,” Lownie continued. “It is a cover-up, and the cover-up is proving to be as bad as the initial crimes. So, I mean, all they can do, I think, is either to hope that the war in the Middle East takes everyone’s attention away from this. But I don’t think that’s going to work.”
The more likely option, Lownie said, is that “they accept that basically Charles has to fall on his sword, and accept that he...has to take the blame for this, and William takes over.”
This would be the case if Charles “has perverted the course of justice,” Lownie said.
In the meantime, “the firewalls are all going up.”
“They’re throwing all the members of the family under the bus to divert attention,” he said. “They will say that, you know, there’ll be some poor courtier who will have to take the rap, and Charles wasn’t briefed, didn’t know anything, but it’s just not conceivable, just from all the research I’ve ever done on the royal family, that the people at the top aren’t aware of what’s happening.”
Lownie continued: “Particularly in a huge scandal like this, there would have been briefings.”
“They brought this problem on themselves. If they had dealt with it much earlier, and being more ruthless, there wouldn’t be these wider questions being asked about royal accountability and privilege, but there also wouldn’t be questions now being asked about the King himself,” Lownie said. “And I just don’t think...it will continue to be a sustainable position if we find more and more evidence that he was warned.”
Buckingham Palace did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Daily Beast.
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