Prince Andrew Bombshell: Historian Claims Sarah Ferguson's Ex 'Bullied' Late Queen Elizabeth Over Epstein

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.

Police have since signalled that the inquiry may expand to cover additional potential corruption offences. Buckingham Palace was approached for comment and had not responded by the time of publication.​

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Speaking at the festival, Lownie was characteristically blunt in drawing his historical parallel. He described the 1936 abdication of Edward VIII, who renounced the throne to marry American divorcée Wallis Simpson, as little more than a 'three-day wonder' for ordinary Britons at the time.

Most people, he argued, had only a partial understanding of its implications, and Edward's sympathies toward Nazi Germany were not yet widely known. The sustained, global fury that has followed Andrew's association with Epstein is, in Lownie's telling, of an entirely different order.

Edward stepped down voluntarily. Andrew had to be compelled, stripped of his HRH title and military honours only after the full weight of his relationship with Epstein became impossible for the institution to contain.

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Lownie's most striking allegations at the Oxford Literary Festival concerned the late Queen herself. He told his audience that by the end of her life, Elizabeth was 'completely gaga,' and that King Charles had effectively been running the institution for some years before her death in September 2022.

Into that vulnerability, the historian alleged, Andrew repeatedly stepped. 'He would go up there and he would bully her into doing things,' Lownie said.​

What reinforces that claim is what he alleged was happening simultaneously in official circles. 'There were MI6 officers who went to private secretaries and said, 'Look, he's been caught with $5 million in a suitcase in Kazakhstan,' Lownie told the audience, 'and they were sent away with a flea in their ear.' Heads of the Foreign Office had lodged complaints as well, he added, apparently to no greater effect.​

The historian did not stop there. 'She, I'm afraid, abetted this,' he said of the late Queen. 'The whole family abetted this. They knew about it.'

Those are serious allegations. Lownie has not publicly produced documentary evidence to corroborate the Kazakhstan claim or the reported intelligence approaches, and the Palace has offered no public response to his remarks.

Andrew's unravelling has been a slow, grinding collapse rather than a sudden fall. A catastrophically misjudged BBC interview in 2019, in which he denied all wrongdoing and offered no visible sympathy for Epstein's victims, turned the public temperature permanently against him.

In 2021, Virginia Giuffre, one of Epstein's most prominent accusers, filed a civil lawsuit against him alleging rape and sexual abuse when she was 17 years old. He denied the allegations. The case was settled out of court in 2022 on undisclosed terms.

The Palace had presumably hoped that Andrew's removal from royal life would eventually exhaust public attention. With a criminal investigation now formally under way and Lownie's book continuing to reach new readers, there is little sign that the reckoning is anywhere close to finished.