Holding prestige but not power, Britain’s monarchy is finely tuned to public sentiment.

That has been evident with the disgrace of Andrew Mountbatten Windsor, who was stripped of his princely title and his spacious home by his brother King Charles on Thursday, a banishment that has left the disgraced royal increasingly exposed to scrutiny both in the UK and the US over his friendship with the deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

Following years of scandals related to Andrew, Charles arguably took the biggest step of his reign by seeking to insulate the monarchy from any further scandals relating to Andrew and his connections with Epstein, who took his own life in prison in August 2019 while awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges, more than a decade after his initial conviction.

It’s not the first time the current iteration of the British monarchy – the House of Windsor – has been in crisis over the past century and where the future of the institution has been threatened.

World War I

George Gross, a royal expert at King’s College London, said the most recent precedent for what has happened to Andrew is the 1917 Titles Deprivation Act, which “saw various members of loosely affiliated royals and dukes and members of the peerage losing titles if they had sided with Germany in the First World War”.