The Gist
Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor—formerly Prince Andrew—was stripped of his royal titles and privileges by his older brother King Charles on October 30.
Andrew, of course, knew Charles’s ex-wife Princess Diana, who apparently found the former Duke of York “very, very noisy and loud.”
The former Princess of Wales also reportedly declared that Andrew’s personality “wasn’t for [her].”
Like the rest of us, Princess Diana had opinions about the man formerly known as Prince Andrew and now, as of last month, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor.
The former Princess of Wales described her brother-in-law Andrew as “very, very noisy and loud,” and wondered if “there was something troubling” him, according to Andrew’s biographer Andrew Lownie, who wrote Entitled: The Rise and Fall of the House of York.
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Prince Andrew and Princess Diana on December 25, 1988
Per The Daily Mail, Diana said that the former Duke of York’s personality “wasn’t for [her],” adding that he was “very happy to sit in front of the television all day watching cartoons and videos.” Diana also assessed Andrew as someone who was “not a doer.”
“One moment he would be diligent and polite, the next aggressive and rude,” Lownie wrote of Andrew. “Like his father [Prince Philip], he had a short temper, a rather Germanic sense of humor, and did not bear fools gladly.”
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Prince Andrew and Princess Diana on March 5, 1990
Andrew was wildly different from his older brother, King Charles, as “Charles was sensitive and thoughtful” whereas “Andrew was macho, confident, and extroverted, the sort of son Philip had always wanted.”
Fellow royal biographer Tom Quinn wrote in his book Yes Ma’am: The Secret Life of Royal Servants that “Andrew always behaved as if he was frustrated about not being the first-born and therefore destined to become king.”
“If he liked a member of his staff, he could be very loyal and supportive, but he couldn’t resist being imperious and bossy and bad-tempered if anything went wrong or wasn’t done exactly to his liking,” Quinn continued.
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Princess Diana and Prince Andrew on July 21, 1985
Back to Diana for a moment—it seems that, according to royal biographer Ingrid Seward, Queen Elizabeth thought her second son was a better match for Diana than Charles was.
In her book My Mother and I (and per The Independent), the late Queen thought Andrew and Diana were better suited because they were much closer in age. Diana was born in 1961; Andrew was born just one year prior in 1960, whereas Charles was born in 1948.
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Prince Andrew, Lady Diana Spencer, and Prince Charles on July 26, 1981
“I think some of Diana’s friends thought that Andrew would be more fun for her than Charles because [Andrew] was very much her age and he was full of fun and everything else,” Seward previously told Us Weekly. But, Seward said, “Diana wasn’t interested in Andrew. It was Charles she was interested in.”
Read the original article on InStyle