King Charles, Prince Andrew had ‘desk-pounding shouting match’ over monarch’s idea to downgrade nieces: author

Before Prince William and Prince Harry were known as the battling brothers to rock the House of Windsor, there was King Charles and Prince Andrew.

In 2008, several years before Andrew’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein came to light, his older brother had an idea to streamline the monarchy, and it didn’t go well.

“Charles floated the idea that several Windsor offspring be demoted, stripped of their HRH standing, have their royal protection taken away, and, most revolutionary of all, kicked off the royal payroll,” Christopher Andersen, author of “The King,” told Fox News Digital.

“Prince Andrew fought these proposals that would have resulted in his daughters Beatrice and Eugenie each being forced to earn their own living and downgraded from ‘Princess’ to ‘Lady,’ a suggestion that was shouted down in an angry confrontation between him and Charles,” Andersen said.

According to Andersen, the Duke of York didn’t think twice before he decided to “throw a fit.”

“By all accounts, it was a literal battle Royale, a desk-pounding shouting match between the two brothers, both known for their volatile tempers,” Andersen claimed. “Keep in mind that this was years before Andrew’s involvement in the Jeffrey Epstein sex abuse scandal essentially forced the king to put Andrew out to pasture.”

Andersen’s claims came shortly after several royal experts told Fox News Digital Beatrice and royal cousin Zara Tindall have stepped in to support William as his father and Kate Middleton undergo treatment for cancer.

Andersen said Charles, 75, had good reason to think about the monarchy’s future before his feud with Andrew came to a head.

“In 2006, Prince William joined the Way Ahead Group, his grandmother Queen Elizabeth’s tight-knit circle of family and anonymous advisers whose whole purpose was to chart a future course for the monarchy,” Andersen explained. “Its members included Charles and his siblings Anne, Andrew, Edward, and, of course, the queen. Details of the group’s twice-yearly meetings were top secret.

“The queen’s decisions to voluntarily pay income taxes, to mothball the royal yacht HMS Britannia, and to end primogeniture — the thousand-year-old old rule stipulating that males have precedence over females in the line of succession — all grew out of Way Ahead Group deliberations,” Andersen explained. “Although Prince Harry was then third in line to the throne, he was not invited to join.  By 2008, deliberations focused on future King Charles’ vision of a more efficient, streamlined monarchy.”

While demoting Eugenie and Beatrice would have been “a major shakeup,” Andersen claimed the rivalry between the brothers goes way back.