Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor has left his Windsor residence and moved to the Sandringham Estate in Norfolk, the BBC understands.
He departed Royal Lodge on Monday night and is staying in a temporary property on the Sandringham Estate while his future home there undergoes renovations. Buckingham Palace said in October that he would be leaving Royal Lodge at the same time his title of prince was removed.
The former Duke of York has faced increasing pressure to give evidence in the US over his relationship with the financier Jeffrey Epstein; he has consistently denied any wrongdoing.
It is believed he will eventually live at Marsh Farm on the Sandringham Estate. The estate is privately owned by the King, who will cover the costs of his brother’s new home.
Mountbatten-Windsor is expected to return to Windsor in the coming weeks to collect remaining belongings, but his permanent base is now officially in Norfolk. He was last seen in Windsor on Monday riding a horse near Royal Lodge and was photographed driving away from Windsor Castle, waving to passers-by.
A Buckingham Palace statement in October said “formal notice has now been served to surrender the lease”. The move followed controversy over the rent paid to the Crown Estate for Royal Lodge.
A National Audit Office report shows that when he took on the lease in 2003 he agreed to pay more than £8m, covering repairs and effectively buying out future rent obligations for the 75-year lease. That arrangement was based on a notional rent of £260,000 a year. He could have been entitled to about £488,000 for an early surrender of the lease, but a Crown Estate report for MPs said the property needs so many repairs that “in all likelihood” he “will not be owed any compensation”.
Royal sources told the BBC in October that the move would be delayed until the new year to avoid the awkwardness of him being at Sandringham at Christmas, where the Royal Family traditionally gathers.
Sandringham, bought in 1862 by the then Prince of Wales (later Edward VII), covers roughly 31 square miles (80 sq km) of gardens and grounds — about the size of Nottingham.
The allegations linked to Epstein include an encounter said to have occurred at Royal Lodge in 2010. The woman, not British, was in her 20s at the time. The BBC asked Mountbatten-Windsor for comment when the allegations were first reported, but he has not responded and has previously strongly denied any wrongdoing.
Her lawyer Brad Edwards, whose US firm has represented Epstein victims since 2008, said the woman alleges that after spending the night with Mountbatten-Windsor she was given tea and shown around Buckingham Palace. That account is the first time an Epstein survivor has alleged a sexual encounter took place at a royal residence.
In 2014 Virginia Giuffre became the first woman to publicly accuse Mountbatten-Windsor of similar encounters. She alleged she was trafficked by Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell as a 17-year-old and forced to have sex with Mountbatten-Windsor — a claim he denies. Giuffre filed a civil lawsuit in the US in 2021 and settled the case in February 2022 for an estimated £12m. She took her own life last year.
Mountbatten-Windsor’s links to Epstein have come under renewed scrutiny with the release of millions of pages of documents and images by the US Department of Justice. Among the files published were a number of email exchanges between Epstein and Mountbatten-Windsor from the years after Epstein pleaded guilty to soliciting a minor. Epstein died in a New York prison cell on 10 August 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.
