It has been just over a month since Buckingham Palace announced that Prince Andrew, Duke of York, would be formally stripped of the title of Prince as well as the title Duke of York. Notices to this effect were published in the London Gazette (see my previous posts). I submitted a Freedom of Information Request to the Ministry of Justice to see the full texts of the legal instruments in play. The answer arrived yesterday:

Your request has been handled under the FOIA. I can confirm that the MoJ does hold some information related to your request, it has no plans to publish the texts of the Warrant and Letters Patent relating to the Peerage Roll and title “Prince”. The Warrants relating to the Order of the Garter and Royal Victorian Order are not matters for this Department and you may wish to contact the Cabinet Office to request this information.

This feels like a refusal, and indeed the Ministry’s response does not include the documents I requested, and yet those very same documents were released to the public yesterday.

In the run-up to this I emailed Jason Loch of A Venerable Puzzle, François Velde of Heraldica and David Torrance of the House of Commons Library (no reply from the latter). I also wanted to inform Benjamin Lewis but could not find his contact details. Loch had submitted his own request and has already put out his analyses of both documents. There are many peculiarities compared to other such instruments which might be considered the nearest precedents.

Notable in the patent is that it begins with “AND WHEREAS” in the first clause, when logically that shouldn’t happen until the second. It also doesn’t refer to “Prince Andrew” first and then explain that he is being renamed “Andrew Mountbatten Windsor” but instead refers to him by his plain name from the start. There’s also the fact that the patent omits any greeting and the warrant declines to name a recipient. A lot of the flowery formalities normally seen in documents like this are likewise notable for their absence.

In part these oddities may be a deliberate choice by the Palace in response to the circumstances which forced this action (e.g. Andrew can hardly be called “Most dear and entirely beloved”) and in part they could be explained by the extreme haste in which this operation has been carried out. Even so, questions about constitutional propriety are likely to linger.

There have been further notices in the Gazette yesterday that Andrew’s appointments to the Royal Victorian Order and the Order of the Garter have been revoked. Jason or I may need to submit another request to see those legal instruments now as well.

It should be noted too, that since these instruments were originally signed off Andrew has gone through yet another change of name, very petty this time: The patent and warrant, along with the press release on 30th October, give him the surname “Mountbatten Windsor”, omitting the hyphen that normally appeared there. This was corrected twelve days later, and the Gazette notices from yesterday show his surname in the hyphenated form. This, of course, required the third movement of his Wikipedia page in the space of two months.