The City of London Corporation is drawing up plans to strip Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor of the Freedom of the City of London, an honour believed to date back to 1237 — but there is currently no legal mechanism to do so, so the Corporation is having to build one from scratch.

Andrew received the Freedom in 2012. He inherited it by patrimony — the traditional right of a Freeman to pass the status to a child — from his father, Prince Philip, who had been a Freeman since 1948. The Freedom of the City of London is one of the oldest civic honours in the country, a historic membership of the City's guilds and livery companies rather than a decoration in the modern sense. (Hello! Magazine)

The City of London Corporation's Court of Common Council, the elected body that governs the Square Mile, wrote to Andrew in April requesting that he voluntarily relinquish the honour. He failed to respond. The Court then expressed "profound disappointment" that he had not surrendered the Freedom despite being asked to do so, and stated that Andrew's links to Jeffrey Epstein were "wholly unacceptable and inconsistent with the status and obligations of a Freeman of the City of London."

The Corporation has acknowledged that there is currently no effective lawful mechanism to remove the Freedom once granted. It is developing a new process that would allow removal "where appropriate." If the elected Members of the Court of Common Council approve that process, they will then consider whether Andrew's Freedom should be withdrawn under it.

This is not the only honour Andrew has lost in recent months. King Charles stripped Andrew of his HRH styling and princely title via Letters Patent — the formal instrument by which a monarch grants, alters or removes styles and titles — under the Great Seal of the Realm, dated 3 November 2025. Following the loss of those royal titles, Andrew was evicted from Royal Lodge, his Windsor home, and relocated to Marsh Farm on the Sandringham Estate in Norfolk.

The City of London Corporation's difficulty is procedural rather than political. The Freedom predates most modern disciplinary frameworks by centuries, and its rules were written for a world in which the status was largely hereditary or earned through apprenticeship in a trade. Removing it from a living Freeman by vote, rather than by voluntary surrender, appears to require a process that does not yet exist in law or in the Corporation's own standing orders.

What gives the situation its edge is the silence on Andrew's side. The Corporation asked. He did not answer. Now the Corporation is preparing to act without his cooperation — if its members can agree on how.