Queen Elizabeth Shows She Doesn’t Care What the World Thinks About Prince Andrew

How many people can you offend in one gesture?

Queen Elizabeth’s decision to have Prince Andrew as her personal escort at Westminster Abbey today for Prince Philip’s Service of Thanksgiving was as calculated as it was astonishing. They are now reportedly back at Windsor Castle, having skipped attending several receptions being held afterwards.

The queen must have known that such a display of defiance would dominate the commentary across the world, even though the whole event was to honor Philip’s life, not rehabilitate Andrew, who recently agreed to pay an undisclosed amount to settle a lawsuit over allegations that he had sexually assaulted Virginia Roberts Giuffre when she was 17 and being trafficked by Jeffrey Epstein. Andrew has always emphatically denied the claims.

Queen Stages Huge Show of Support for Disgraced AndrewDOES WHAT ONE WANTS

Philippe Naughton

The victims of Epstein will get the message: Against the queen’s family values you have no standing. The priapic second son of the monarch remains his mother’s favorite, no matter that no other family in the world would want him anywhere close. And that, of course, makes Prince Charles a victim too—not on the same level of pain or suffering, but as an openly declared preference for one child over the other, especially as Charles and Prince William have played so central a role in Andrew’s excommunication from official royal life.

This was the queen’s first public appearance in five months, entering the abbey from a side door holding a walking stick and holding on to Andrew's elbow.

Her attendance was a surprise even to the last moment, with the palace only confirming her attendance hours before. It should have been a simple, heartwarming occasion to see her among her loved ones, as speculation around her health—and its impact on her Platinum Jubilee appearances—continues. The visual of her among and leading the family, as a contrast to the image of her sitting very alone at Philip’s funeral last April, was striking.

Nearly everyone was there: Kate and William came with Prince George and Princess Charlotte, Princesses Eugenie and Beatrice and their husbands were there (Beatrice was seen apparently breaking down in tears). Behind the British royals were 51 vestigial members of the extended royal family from Europe seated in descending order of rank and relevance in the rows behind the Windsors, from Sweden to Monaco. More than 500 representatives from charities and other organizations Philip led or was a vocal advocate for were also present.

The most visible non-attendees were Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. Harry is presently involved in a legal fight over the security he says he needs and is entitled to when he and his family are visiting Britain. Many have been critical of his decision and no-show, especially as he will soon travel to the Netherlands for the Invictus Games. Harry still hopes to visit the queen personally, perhaps with the great granddaughter she has only yet met via Zoom, and who shares her pet name, Lilibet.

The queen’s overt show of support for Andrew today was not exactly a vote of confidence in her oldest son and heir, but then Charles has spent his life wanting affection and not getting it. Last week, there was the fiasco of William and Kate’s colonial-era echoing tour of the Caribbean. Today, the sight of Andrew shepherding the queen was an even greater display of the tin ear and the blind eye of another age.

If Charles fought to prevent this outrage and failed it signals that only one person’s will still prevails when she chooses to exercise it. And that is also part of the point. The queen chose to do it against whatever howls of pain and protest were made within the walls of Windsor Castle, and in such a way that Andrew must have felt finally redeemed in the eyes of the one person he most depended upon, when the other siblings were united against him. And mummy had been there all along, with the cash to bail him out of the huge repugnant pit that he dug himself into.

The presence of the foreign royals was a reminder that Philip was an exotic refugee from all those fading lesser dynasties, in his case from the Greek and Danish royal families as well as being a direct descendant of the Romanovs. He arrived alone in England in the 1930s and was adopted by Louis Mountbatten, who became a kind of Rasputin figure behind the throne, steering Philip to his match with the young Elizabeth and then becoming a surrogate father to Charles and urging him into the catastrophic union with Diana.

This elaborate bloodline now narrows to just four who will surely carry the burden of sustaining the Windsor monarchy: Charles and Camilla and William and Kate, seated respectively alongside and immediately behind the queen in the abbey. William has no blood ties to this crowd apart from his father. He’s half a Spencer, from a hardy native lineage that was valorous in their service to the crown centuries before the Windsors showed up, a particularly resonant detail in the abbey, where many other honored native warriors are interred.

There were strong notes of green in the chosen wardrobes, a direct nod to Philip’s official livery of “Edinburgh Green” and also perhaps a hint that new shoots are replacing old and withering ones—or, at least, hoping to. For this is a fraught moment for the monarchy, when the relevance of such a heavily populated and generously remunerated dynasty to the life of the kingdom will come under far more rigorous scrutiny once the queen has gone. Just seeing them all gathered together under this one ancient roof brought home the true size of the problem.

That’s why the optics of the Andrew resurrection are so dangerous. Why has he been given such a clearly maternal blessing when so much is at stake, when reputation matters so much more than it once did?

It is true that Andrew’s relationship with Philip was as close as it obviously remains with his mother. Andrew was the alpha male that Charles could never be, allowed the same alpha male sexual hunting license that Philip himself enjoyed for a long while until he finally settled into a stable marriage. Andrew and Philip shared a taste in crass and sometimes really off-color humor and, apparently, Andrew was always fun for his mother to have around. Today showed he still is.