The New Yorker:

Following his arrest last week, Andrew spent his first birthday as a commoner in circumstances as degraded as earlier celebrations had been grand.

By Rebecca Mead

When Queen Elizabeth II was delivered of a baby boy on February 19, 1960, the birth—the first to a reigning British monarch in more than a century—was marked by public celebration. The bells of Westminster Abbey pealed for an hour. The Royal Air Force performed a fighter-jet flyover of central London, as guns saluted from Hyde Park and the Tower. The ships in the Royal Navy fleet were notified of the arrival of a prince—his name, Andrew, had not yet been announced—with the injunction “Splice the mainbrace,” a euphemism for the distribution of a celebratory tot of rum.

Given such an entry into the world, any individual might get ideas above his station—particularly if, as was the case with young Andrew, the second in line to the throne after his brother Charles, there were only two positions in the social hierarchy that were actually above his station. Birthday celebrations in subsequent years seem hardly to have been calculated to kindle a sense of humility. On turning six, Andrew received a custom-made Aston Martin electric toy car. For his twenty-first, there was a party for about six hundred at Windsor Castle, and, for his thirtieth, a lavish “Dance of the Decades” at Buckingham Palace. When Andrew turned forty, he, along with his ex-wife, Sarah Ferguson, and their two daughters, commandeered a pod of the London Eye Ferris wheel—other riders complained bitterly about royal queue-jumping—then had a reportedly thirty-thousand-pound blowout at Sunninghill Park, the house they still shared in Berkshire. In advance of his fiftieth birthday, as Andrew Lownie recounts in his indispensable biography, “Entitled,” the Prince told a journalist he was doing “nothing big” to celebrate. Nothing big turned out to be a reception for some three hundred at Buckingham Palace, followed the next night by a bash at St. James’s Palace, with guests, Lownie reports, receiving a miniature album featuring photos of Andrew, as a party favor.

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