Prince Andrew has not paid rent for Royal Lodge since 2003

By Victoria Ward.

Prince Andrew has not paid rent on Royal Lodge for more than two decades, it emerged on Monday night (Tuesday AEDT).

A copy of the leasehold agreement on his grace-and-favour Windsor mansion obtained by The Times shows he has paid "one peppercorn (if demanded)" in rent per year since 2003.

The revelation helps to explain how he and Sarah Ferguson, his ex-wife, have been able to afford to remain in the 30-room estate and will add to pressure on the Prince to give it up.

Prince Andrew was cut off financially by the King last year, leaving his £20,000-a-year ($41,000) naval pension as his only source of declared income.

The Prince was previously believed to have paid £1 million ($2 million) for the lease, and a "notional" £260,000 ($536,000) per year in rent from 2003, as well as committing to fund refurbishment of the property worth £7.5 million ($15.5 million).

The lease agreement reveals the notional rent would only be paid if he failed to do the works, meaning he could pay a "peppercorn rent".

The Crown Estate, which manages Crown properties for the benefit of taxpayers, confirmed the Royal Lodge is now held on a peppercorn rent, with a value of "nil" having been recorded in a National Audit Office report. The Prince must still pay for the buildings' upkeep.

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The lease agreement also says the Crown Estate would need to pay Prince Andrew about £558,000 ($1.15 million) if he gave up the lease.

He would be due a £185,865 ($383,000) a year compensatory sum until year 25 of the agreement is reached in 2028.

Earlier on Monday it emerged in Virginia Giuffre's posthumous memoir that Andrew's team had tried to hire "internet trolls to hassle" her. Giuffre took her life in April.

In her book Nobody's Girl, which is published on Tuesday, Giuffre also reveals details about negotiations during civil litigation before the Prince's scheduled deposition. Giuffre was suing the Prince for alleged sexual assault.

The behind-the-scenes discussions led to a settlement deal, after her lawyer had read Andrew's agreed statement to her at 2.30am "through tears, both hers and mine".

Prince Andrew has consistently denied claims that he raped or abused Giuffre on three separate occasions in 2001, when she was 17 years old and after after she was trafficked by Jeffrey Epstein, the late financier and convicted paedophile. The Prince agreed to the settlement in early 2022.

He agreed to the deal after facing pressure from Buckingham Palace to draw a line under the scandal as legal proceedings threatened to overshadow Elizabeth II's Platinum Jubilee celebrations.

In her memoir, Giuffre wrote: "Initially, the Prince made it difficult for my lawyers to serve him with papers, fleeing to Queen Elizabeth's Balmoral Castle in Scotland and hiding behind its well-guarded gates.

"After casting doubt on my credibility for so long – Prince Andrew's team had even gone so far as to try to hire internet trolls to hassle me – the Duke of York owed me a meaningful apology as well.

"We would never get a confession, of course. That's what settlements are designed to avoid. But we were trying for the next best thing: a general acknowledgement of what I'd been through. After my lawyers hashed out the basic details on Zoom, I then participated in two days of mediation talks."

She added: "Finally, at 2.30am Florida time, the Prince's lawyers agreed to the statement we'd been pushing for. Siggy [McCawley] called me immediately and read it to me through tears, both hers and mine."

Ms McCawley later told Giuffre that the phone call would be one of the highlights of her career.

On Sunday, the Metropolitan Police said it was "actively" looking into claims that Prince Andrew had passed Giuffre's date of birth and social security number on to his bodyguard in an attempt to begin a smear campaign when she first went public with her claims in February 2011.

Leaked emails sent by the Prince to a Buckingham Palace aide reveal that he had sent her confidential information to his taxpayer-funded police protection officer before forwarding confirmation of his actions to Epstein.

On Saturday, Prince Andrew announced he had relinquished his remaining titles and honours. The King is said to have pressured his younger brother into accepting the sanction by warning that he would otherwise remove the titles himself.

The Buckingham Palace website was updated on Monday to remove Prince Andrew's Duke of York title.

Palace aides were keen to avoid wasting parliamentary time, but Sir Keir Starmer is facing pressure to pass a law to strip the Prince of his dukedom.

In her memoir, Giuffre also recounted how the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, left her feeling scared amid unproven claims the Royal family had been involved.

She wrote that the conspiracy theories surrounding Diana's death at the time had an impact on her because she was "surrounded by people who wielded vastly more clout than I ever would".

She alleged that she had sex with Andrew four years after the Princess died, to keep "powerful" people happy while she was in the UK.

"I hadn't wanted to have sex with the Prince, I said, but I felt I had to," she wrote, saying she believed there was no way to free herself from Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell's grip.

She said Tony Figueroa, then her boyfriend, was "scared that I was alone in a foreign country with people so powerful; he said he understood why I felt powerless.

"Less than four years earlier, Lady Diana had died in a car accident, prompting some conjecture [never proven] that the Royal family had somehow been involved.

"Tony and I had no way of knowing if this was true, but we were sure that I was surrounded by people who wielded vastly more clout than I ever would."

Giuffre added: "Tony and I agreed that, especially while I was abroad, I needed to keep Epstein and Maxwell happy."

Mohamed al-Fayed, the former Harrods boss, had claimed Prince Philip "masterminded" the car crash that killed Diana and Dodi al-Fayed, his son, but an inquest found that Henri Paul, their chauffeur, was drunk and had been driving too fast.

Prince Andrew's office did not immediately respond to the claims.

© Telegraph Media Group Limited 2025

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