The End of British Royalty?
The British royal family is facing its worst crisis in generations.
The flurry of scandals surrounding Princess Diana’s 1997 death, Prince Harry’s 2020 departure, and Meghan Markle’s 2021 accusations of racism have not helped the royals’ popularity. A majority of British teenagers and young adults already believe the Crown serves no useful purpose. Remaining support for the monarchy is largely driven by fond memories of the late Queen Elizabeth ii; her successor, King Charles iii, is not nearly so well-loved. And the shameful behavior of her second-born son, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, the former Prince Andrew, duke of York, is making matters worse.
Will Britain abolish its monarchy?
Royal Scandal
The public has known for years that Andrew was a close friend of the late Jeffrey Epstein and his partner in crime Ghislaine Maxwell. Epstein confessed to having sex with a 17-year-old girl and was credibly accused of heinous child rapes with apparently hundreds of girls as young as 14. He manipulated, coerced, transported and raped girl after girl after girl after girl for decades. He was constantly accompanied by teenage girls in public and in private. His main private jet was nicknamed after a character in an erotic novel who is repeatedly raped by a pedophile. In a world of evil people, Jeffrey Epstein was a monster.
Epstein was finally “caught” and pled guilty to solicitation of prostitution and procuring of a minor in 2008, and received outrageously light and brief punishment.
And Prince Andrew, a representative of the British throne, was his friend the whole time.
In 2011, photos emerged of Andrew and Epstein recently strolling together in Central Park. Allegations of Andrew having sex with minors including “Jane Doe 102” surfaced, and he was forced to step down as UK trade envoy. In 2014, “Jane Doe 102” revealed her name: Virginia Giuffre. The next year, court documents were unsealed and the allegation became global news. In a 2019 television interview, Andrew implausibly claimed that he had gone to New York, and taken the walk with Epstein, and stayed at Epstein’s house, specifically to end the friendship. In 2021, Giuffre filed a civil suit, and the next year Andrew settled out of court without admitting guilt, and was stripped of his military titles and royal patronages.
The fallout within the royal family continued even beyond these years of shame. Virginia Giuffre’s tortured life ended, apparently by her own hand, in 2025. Her autobiography, published posthumously, asserted that Andrew had sex with her in London, New York and on Epstein’s “pedophile island” in the U.S. Virgin Islands when he was in his 40s and she was 17.
King Charles iii subsequently stripped his brother of all his royal titles, but the scandal continues. Even though her claims, not to mention other allegations that had earned this man the nicknames “Randy Andy” and “party prince” in the British press, had not been conclusively proven in court, the U.S. Department of Justice released files on Epstein that show that he kept in close e-mail contact with Epstein even after he supposedly stopped talking to him in 2010.
Andrew continued to avoid the law until this year, when, on February 19, local police detained him for about 11 hours, questioned him and released him. He remains under investigation for possibly illegally sharing government trade information with Epstein.
Regardless of what happens next, the fact that the King’s brother was arrested on suspicion of providing secrets to a child rapist whom he lied about being close to is one of the most disgraceful moments in centuries of royal history.
Public Backlash
No senior British royal has been arrested in nearly 400 years. The last senior royal to be arrested was King Charles i, who was then beheaded in 1649. Public opinion had turned so hard against King Charles i that Britain replaced its monarchy with a republic for 11 years thereafter. For many reasons, not the least of which is the shameful and apparently criminal behavior of the royal family, some would like to see this history repeat itself under King Charles iii.
Polling data collected by the British Social Attitudes study last year found that 15 percent of respondents explicitly supported abolishing the monarchy, up from just 3 percent in 1983. Most of the royals’ support comes from the elderly. Among Britons ages 16 to 34, 60 percent favored replacing the monarch with an elected head of state. Royal scandals will push this figure higher.
Richard Burgon, a member of Britain’s Labour Party, wants to begin with an independent inquiry into what the royal family knew about Andrew’s Epstein links and end with a “serious national debate about abolishing the monarchy.” Public trust in the monarchy has tanked.
British commentator Piers Morgan said this scandal could end the royal family. “[T]his is the King’s brother, who remains eighth in line to the throne,” he told Fox and Friends. “So this might just be the tipping point of a gigantic scandal which represents, I would argue, an existential threat to the monarchy itself. It is that serious. … I have never seen a bigger threat to the future of the monarchy than what is unfurling right now” (February 19).
Lawmakers in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom have expressed support for removing Andrew from the line of succession. Yet this would require complex legislative changes in 15 Commonwealth realms, which would open up debate about the role of the monarchy itself.
“Charles is acutely aware that any hint of interference would be enormously damaging,” one palace insider told Radar. “From his perspective, the only responsible course of action is to support the authorities and allow the investigation to proceed without obstruction.”
Is this really “the only responsible course of action” for the King to take? Presumably, he knows whether his brother is innocent or guilty, so shouldn’t he be taking the lead in ensuring justice is served? Thus far, Charles’s hands-off approach has made Andrew appear guilty of serious crimes and the royal family too permissive and weak to confront them. As Britain’s head of state, King Charles should be taking the lead in condemning Epstein’s sins and in investigating to what extent his brother was involved.
“In largely secular, godless Britain, there is a strong element of the sacred in this relationship between the people and the crown,” British journalist Melanie Phillips wrote after Queen Elizabeth’s death in 2022. “The monarch in Britain is consecrated to a higher King. At the coronation, which will take place next year, Charles will be anointed. The oath that he takes is not to the people but to God. That’s why his duty to serve the people is unbreakable. And that’s why the monarch is a unifying force and melds the people into a united nation.”
Thus far, King Charles has not upheld his oath to God to serve the British people by seeing sex traffickers brought to justice, whether they are in his own family or not. That is one major reason Britain has become so divided on whether or not the Crown serves a useful purpose in Britain today.
Ancient Monarchy
Britain’s royal family is the world’s oldest continuous hereditary monarchy, with a lineage that spans millennia. The idea that the British may abolish it is shocking.
Turning the United Kingdom into a republic seems even less likely when you know, as some monarchs and other Britons of the past knew, that this royal line actually goes all the way back to King David of Israel. The Bible emphasizes God’s history with Israel before and during its time as a monarchy. It records that the kingdom split into the Kingdom of Israel and the Kingdom of Judah. It records that each of these kingdoms was destroyed and the sitting king deposed.
Yet it also records a promise from God to David that “thine house and thy kingdom shall be established for ever before thee: thy throne shall be established forever” (2 Samuel 7:16). God repeated this promise to the Prophet Jeremiah, who saw the second of those two kingdoms fall to invaders and almost all of the royal line executed.
“For thus saith the Lord; David shall never want a man to sit upon the throne of the house of Israel” (Jeremiah 33:17).
There are only 26 active sovereign dynasties in the world today, and only two of them have histories that stretch back to the time of King Zedekiah: the throne of Great Britain and the throne of Imperial Japan. The Bible further specifies that David’s throne would “overturn, overturn, overturn” before the coming of the Messiah (Ezekiel 21:27). Only the throne of Britain has a 3,000-year history with three overturn events.
The first overturn occurred in 569 b.c. when Jeremiah transplanted the throne of David from Jerusalem to Tara Hill in Ireland. The second occurred in a.d. 513, when Fergus the Great moved the throne to Scotland. The third occurred in 1296 when Edward i brought it to England.
The English almost abolished this throne in 1649, when they executed King Charles i, but God intervened to restore his son, Charles ii, to the throne because He had promised that David would never lack a man to rule over Israel. A descendant of David, up to and including Jesus Christ at His Second Coming, will always rule the descendants of the patriarch Israel (Jacob).
The incredible history of how that throne was preserved is recorded in biblical and secular history and explained in The United States and Britain in Prophecy, by Herbert W. Armstrong. Nothing will make your Bible and history come alive quite like that book!
Queen Victoria knew of her direct line of descent from King David, as did her son King Edward vii. One of Victoria’s granddaughters, Countess Alice of Athlone, served as patron-in-chief of the British-Israel World Federation until her death in 1981. But the current generation of British royals never talk about their biblical heritage, if they still believe it, and are not providing their kingdom with any moral leadership.
A New Throne
In his 2018 book The New Throne of David, my father, Gerald Flurry, writes that Britain’s throne was doomed to disaster and is no longer the throne of David!
The New Throne of David focuses on Ezekiel 21:27, where God prophesied, “I will overturn, overturn, overturn, it: and it shall be no more ….” Many people, including those in the British-Israel World Federation, believe that this means the throne will be no more overturned once it reaches England, but that is not what the Bible says. “It shall be no more” doesn’t mean it will “be no more overturned” but rather that the throne would be erased!
How is that possible? How can God erase and destroy that throne in Britain, and still keep His promise to David?
God established a new throne of David! When Jesus Christ returns, He will take possession of a throne from the line of David. That throne will not be reigning over Great Britain but rather over God’s Church. This is the only way God can establish a new throne in Jerusalem without overturning the throne of Britain a fourth time. To understand this prophecy, you need to request your free copy of The New Throne of David.
The scandals in the British royal family have signaled the erasure of that old throne of David. My father has said that the Hosea 3:4 prophecy that “the children of Israel shall abide many days without a king” was not referring to the past but to the coming Great Tribulation that Jesus Christ prophesied of. These days are already being fulfilled since God erased the old throne several years ago.
“When God gave the revelation about the new stone on Jan. 16, 2017, the royal family of Britain was displaced as the royal family of David’s throne,” my father wrote. “That was a signal of terrible things to come upon Britain, as well as a sharp decline of America and Judah. It was also an indication that we would see a rapid decline in Britain’s royal family. Look at what began happening to Britain’s royal family almost immediately after this change.”
When those words were written, Queen Elizabeth ii was still alive, and, besides the Prince Andrew scandal, the monarchy’s worst publicity largely involved Prince Harry and his wife acting like spoiled children and Prince William working with a pop star to normalize mental health problems. Things are far worse today. The King’s brother was arrested for apparently giving classified information to a child rapist, and he apparently committed child rape. We still don’t know what happened and who knew, but an institution that began with King David and God has become a source of shame and evil.
The New Throne of David says, “God wants to bury what is happening with that throne in Britain today! He doesn’t want to have anything to do with it again!” God’s focus has already shifted to the new throne.