Andrew, the royal reprobate formerly known as Prince, is the first senior member of the royal family to be arrested since Oliver Cromwell caused Charles I to get an extremely low haircut. After the all-but-deadly-dull reign, at least morally, of the last two English monarchs, it is easy to forget that sexual scandals and assorted peccadillos are associated with almost every branch of the noble family tree.
George I (r. 1714–1727): “I came for the crown; I stayed for the mistress”
George I arrived from Hanover with two main hobbies: being king and not being married in any meaningful emotional sense. His wife, Sophia Dorothea, became the star of one of the era’s grimmest “relationship outcomes”: separation, scandal, and long confinement.
George’s marriage to Sophia Dorothea of Celle was a dynastic arrangement that curdled into open hostility. By the early 1690s, the story goes, she’d fallen into a dangerous romance with Philip Christoph von Königsmarck, and the pair began plotting the one thing a court hates more than infidelity: escape. Then, in early July 1694—after a late meeting in Hanover—Königsmarck vanished as neatly as a secret dropped into a river. (Sources bicker over the exact date, but they agree on the result: Königsmarck was professionally disappeared.)
What followed was less romance novel and more administrative cruelty. George pushed through a divorce that assigned Sophia Dorothea all the blame, stripped her of status, barred her from remarrying, and—most viciously—cut her off from her children. She was sent into lifelong confinement at Ahlden House, effectively a “respectable” prison, where she remained until her death decades later.
If you’re keeping score, this reign sets the tone: the monarchy is now British, but the marital peace is… multinational.
George II (r. 1727–1760): “The mistress is a job, and it comes with a pension”
George II and Queen Caroline were, by royal standards, a functional partnership: she supplied the brains, the charm, and (when he wandered off to Hanover) the competent adult supervision as regent, while he supplied the temper, the uniforms, and the firm conviction that fidelity was a charming folk custom practiced by lesser people.
And yes, he kept mistresses—because in that court, a mistress wasn’t always “a scandal” so much as a semi-official office, complete with access, allies, and enemies. One of his earlier favorites, Henrietta Howard, even served in Caroline’s household, which is the sort of arrangement that makes you suspect the Georgian court ran on powdered wigs, port, and spite.
His most famous late-career “department head” was Amalie von Wallmoden, Countess of Yarmouth—a Hanoverian import who didn’t just get the king, but got a life peerage in 1740, neatly converting adultery into a title you could print on calling cards. In a world where access was currency, that made her a gravitational body: politicians orbited, rivals hissed, and pamphleteers sharpened their quills with the usual insinuation that patronage, policy, and pillow talk all lived in the same suite of rooms. Rumor even assigned her an illegitimate son by the king—exactly the kind of story that doesn’t need to be proven to be useful, profitable, and repeatable.
Think of it as an early form of government: the Crown, the Cabinet, and the Side Piece.
George III (r. 1760–1820): “A domestic man trapped in a family business”
George III is the palate cleanser in this menu. He was known for being comparatively devoted to Queen Charlotte, producing an impressive number of legitimate children, and generally giving the nation fewer bedroom bulletins than it had come to expect.
His greatest “scandal,” if you must call it that, was the painful fact that the King frequently talked to trees and was barking mad. At one point, he believed that he was George Washington leading an army against himself. In short: less randy, more tragic, and arguably the last time Britain said, “Ah, finally, a normal one.”
If George III was the calm, George IV was the compensatory storm. As Prince Regent, he specialized in overpriced luxury, drama, and romantic chaos.
George IV (a.k.a. “Prinny” when the knives were out) managed to turn the monarchy into a traveling show of appetite, debt, and romantic arson. Before he was even king, he secretly married Maria Fitzherbert—an officially unacceptable match—then watched his allies publicly swat down the rumor when it became inconvenient while begging Parliament to cover his exorbitant debts. From there he lurched into the spectacularly unhappy marriage to Caroline of Brunswick and when he wanted out, he effectively tried to weaponize Parliament of the United Kingdom into a divorce court, sparking a public circus of accusation and counteraccusation so lurid it came with paperwork.
Meanwhile, the popular press and caricaturists treated him like a walking moral lesson. Cartoonists didn’t just draw him as bloated—they helpfully surrounded him with the sort of “medical” clutter that screamed venereal panic (the Georgian-era visual equivalent of yelling “pox!” in a crowded theatre). And the “madness” angle wasn’t just a cheap jibe: he became Prince Regent because George III was incapacitated by severe mental illness. By the end, the punchline turned grimly physical—corsets, dropsy, gout, and enormous doses of laudanum and opium to blunt the pain—less “divine right” than “medicated decline.” This is the era that convinces people the monarchy is a soap opera with better furniture.
William IV (r. 1830–1837): “Ten kids, one actress, and then—surprise—respectability”
Before he became king, William IV lived for years with the actor Dorothea Jordan and had ten children with her. Ten! If you’ve ever wondered how royals manage “spares,” William took a… generous interpretation of the concept.
Then he became king and, like a man who suddenly realized the portrait painter had arrived, he pivoted into legitimacy and public duty. Not exactly a scandal machine during his short reign—but the prequel season was a doozy.
Victoria (r. 1837–1901): “Make it moral, make it domestic, make it an empire”
Victoria is the monarch most associated with respectability—partly because she and Albert made a persuasive brand out of family life. If the Georgians felt like a champagne spill, Victoria felt like a starched tablecloth.
That said, the Victorian era did have its murmurs: intense grief, intense attachments (Hello, John Brown), and a public image so carefully stage-managed that it practically invented modern monarchy PR. If Victoria had a scandal, it was the quiet kind: feelings that were not filed in triplicate.
Edward VII spent most of his long apprenticeship as Prince of Wales treating the throne like a distant inheritance and London society like an all-you-can-eat buffet with a dress code. His “Marlborough House set” ran on racing, cards, weekend house parties, and adultery so routine a schedule might as well have been printed on the invitations.
In September 1890, Bertie turned up at a country-house party at Tranby Croft and did what he loved best: played baccarat, a game that was, inconveniently, technically illegal, especially when played for stakes by the glitterati. When a guest, Sir William Gordon-Cumming, was accused of cheating, the solution was pure high-society logic: don’t investigate too hard—stage a hush deal. Gordon-Cumming was pressured into signing a written pledge that he’d never play cards again, and the Prince of Wales obligingly signed, too, as if the heir to the throne were endorsing a royal non-disclosure agreement on a tapestry-covered card table.
Naturally, this secrecy popped like a champagne cork. Gordon-Cumming sued, and in 1891, the heir to the throne was hauled into court as a witness—an event that generated exactly the kind of “fashionable matinée” atmosphere that screams useless monarchy. Gordon-Cumming lost, his life was effectively socially and professionally detonated, and Bertie walked away with a fresh layer of public disgust, because nothing says “future national figurehead” like getting caught in the blast radius of a rigged secrecy pact.
This was not a man who dabbled. He acquired official mistresses with the kind of regularity with which other people acquired umbrellas. Lillie Langtry became his first publicly acknowledged mistress in the late 1870s, and society treated this as news, not a shock. Daisy Greville, Countess of Warwick, later became his “official” mistress (and she was eventually replaced by Alice Keppel), as though the position came with a job description, and a handover memo.
And when the gossip columns needed a courtroom sequel, they got one: in 1870, the Prince of Wales was dragged into the Mordaunt divorce scandal, subpoenaed to testify, and forced to deny—on the record—that anything “improper” had happened. The court applauded, which is a very Victorian way of saying, “We absolutely came for the mess.”
Queen Victoria, meanwhile, regarded Bertie’s appetites as a personal affront to both morality and monarchy. The distress caused by his affairs hit the family hard, and Victoria’s grief after Albert’s death curdled into lasting bitterness toward her heir. She wrote, memorably, that much as she pitied him, she could not look at him “without a shudder”—which is about as close as you get to a royal parenting review in one line.
George V (r. 1910–1936): “The serious one, starring in a family of chaos”
George V is often remembered as dutiful, conventional, and sturdily monogamous—the monarchy’s answer to, “Can we please just run the country without a subplot?”
Unfortunately, the universe heard this and responded by giving him children and relatives with… plot. Which leads us to—
Edward VIII (r. 1936): “Speedrun monarchy”
Edward VIII reigned less than a year but managed to deliver one of the biggest royal crises of the modern era: abdication to marry Wallis Simpson, a twice-divorced American, in a time when that collided spectacularly with monarchy, church, and politics. Even after his abdication, Edward managed to create new scandals, at one time plotting with Hitler to serve as puppet king in a postwar England.
This wasn’t “randy” so much as “romantic defiance with constitutional consequences.” Still, if you’re grading royal scandals on impact, this one is a platinum medal.
George VI (r. 1936–1952): “Stability, courage, and no time for nonsense”
George VI is the emergency replacement monarch who turned out to be exactly what Britain needed during WWII: steady, hardworking, and personally respectable, with a marriage that projected partnership rather than chaos.
If you’re hunting for scandal, this reign will disappoint you. Its drama was national, not tabloid: war, duty, health, and the weight of a job he never wanted. The juiciest thing about George VI is that he makes people feel bad for ever enjoying the gossip in the first place. (Well, there is that story about smoking three packs of cigarettes a day resulting in having a lung removed in an operation at home…)
åElizabeth II (r. 1952–2022): “The longest reign, the largest scrapbook”
Elizabeth II’s personal life, by royal standards, was famously restrained—yet her reign became a museum of modern scandal simply because it lasted so long, and because the press got louder, faster, and more hungry.
Her “royal scandal” chapter is not so much “the Queen did what?!” but more of a series of her family’s private lives showing up on the evening news:
- family marriages cracking under public pressure,
- the media turning private misery into public sport,
- and the monarchy learning that cameras don’t blink, and tabloids don’t forgive.
If earlier monarchs had scandals as events, Elizabeth II had scandal as weather—rolling in, blowing through, and occasionally taking the roof off the gazebo.
Charles III arrived on the throne with a backstory already widely known: a long, messy, very public romantic history that played out over decades, and a modern monarchy trying to look timeless while living in real time.
If you want “randy,” this reign’s reputation is mostly inherited from Charles’s years as Prince of Wales—proof that in royal life, your prequel can dominate your present. As king, the challenge is less romance than management: family narratives, rebuilding public trust, and the small task of being a symbol in an age that distrusts symbols.
Which brings us back to Prince Andrew, who proves that selecting leaders by birth order has never once produced a slow-motion fiasco. If your family business is literally hereditary symbolism, it’s only a matter of time before one member treats the whole operation like a private club with unlimited guest passes and no bouncer. Andrew’s modern masterpiece was the attempt to talk his way out of trouble on television—an interview that didn’t so much “clear the air” as replace it with a thick, lingering fog of disbelief—followed by the palace doing what it does best: removing uniforms, patronages, and public duties in the calm, administrative tone usually reserved for reassigning a problematic office printer.
And then the plot did what royal plots always do: it escalated. Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor was arrested. If the Georgians gave us mistresses with titles and the Edwardians gave us baccarat in the drawing room, the 21st century gives us the inevitable endpoint of a system that foolishly breeds for primogeniture instead of judgment: not scandal as naughty gossip, but scandal as paperwork, police statements, and the monarchy discovering—again—that “born to it” is not the same thing as “good at it.”
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