LONDON (AP) — King Charles III has issued a legal document formally stripping his brother Andrew Mountbatten Windsor of the title of prince.
The disgraced royal has also lost the designation “his royal highness” after the king issued a Letters Patent, a centuries-old type of document signed with a formal seal that expresses the will of the monarch.
An announcement published Wednesday in The Gazette – the U.K.’s official public record – said “THE KING has been pleased by Letters Patent under the Great Seal of the Realm dated 3 November 2025 to declare that Andrew Mountbatten Windsor shall no longer be entitled to hold and enjoy the style, title or attribute of ‘Royal Highness’ and the titular dignity of ‘Prince’.”
The king announced on Oct. 31 that he was removing his brother’s titles and evicting him from his royal residence over his relationship with sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Demand had been growing on the palace to oust the 65-year-old prince from his Royal Lodge over new revelations about his friendship with Epstein and renewed attention on sexual abuse allegations by one of Epstein’s victims, Virginia Roberts Giuffre, whose posthumous memoir was published last month.
The king went even further to punish Mountbatten Windsor for serious lapses of judgment by removing the title of prince that he has held since birth as a child of a monarch, the late Queen Elizabeth II.
