Imagine knowing your whole life that your family has been touched by fate to follow a different set of rules.
You can’t vote. You can’t have public displays of affection — unless they come with an entourage on a balcony. You must always travel with a black outfit in case of an unexpected death. You need your mother or brother to approve your marriage — and that marriage can never be to a Catholic.
But you also know that other rules will never apply to you.
On Thursday, those humdrum rules for common folk were applied to Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor.
Sandringham — the Norfolk estate where two kings have died — was where the current king’s brother was taken into custody. Officers arrested him on suspicion of misconduct in public office in connection with his relationship with the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. He has denied wrongdoing, and the case will proceed through the British legal system.
The arrest is the loftiest reach in the Epstein saga to date. It has unfolded in slow motion. The surprise is not that consequences are arriving in connection with the late convicted sex offender’s sprawling web. It is that power appears unable to remain above them.
Mountbatten-Windsor has been pulled slowly down to Earth since 2019, when his mother, Queen Elizabeth II, stripped him of military titles and patronages following allegations by Virginia Giuffre that she was 17 when she was trafficked to him. A photograph of the two, taken in 2001 at the London home of Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell, became emblematic of the scandal.
In 2022, he withdrew from public life. In the years that followed, he lost honors, patronages and the use of royal styling that once signaled insulation.
He should have known then, but how could he? How could someone whose whole life had been one of untouchable privilege understand that the moat surrounding him had been drained?
For someone raised inside fairy-tale walls of wealth and deference, it may truly be impossible to understand that the rules apply without exception. When you move through palaces and halls hung with portraits of ancestors who ruled by divine right, detachment is not accidental. It is cultivated.
Now the former prince will understand some measure of what it is to be grounded in the law.
He is not alone. In Europe, investigations connected to Epstein have led to charges against a former Norwegian prime minister, resignations by senior officials and new criminal inquiries in Britain and elsewhere. The consequences are moving beyond rumor and into courtrooms.
Charges should not be rushed. They should not arise from public appetite rather than evidence. Due process is not theater.
But the scale of the Epstein network invites comparison. How is this poison apple enough to bring down royalty abroad, yet insufficient to disturb those named in the country where the abuse occurred?
Mountbatten-Windsor is learning that losing titles does not just strip ceremony. It strips distance.
Americans do not have titles. There is no divine right of kings here. But can wealth, influence and connection build a moat just as deep? Or is equal treatment under the law the only fairy tale we are willing to believe?