Buckingham Palace was handed an archive of 30,000 emails about Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor in 2020, court documents show, putting the royal household in possession of material that would later become central to fresh scrutiny of the former prince. The emails were passed to the Lord Chamberlain, and later rulings say a copy of the archive had already been provided by May 2020.
The timing matters because police attention around Mountbatten-Windsor has intensified again. Thames Valley Police last week issued a fresh appeal for people to come forward with information after his arrest on suspicion of misconduct in public office, raising new questions about what the Palace knew, and when it knew it, long before the latest inquiry moved into view.
The archive, which ran up to June 2013, sat inside a wider legal dispute over the alleged theft of the material. Court records indicate that by 10 July 2020 an email was referring to the archive as having been delivered to Buckingham Palace, and a High Court judgment in April 2021 also showed that a copy had been given to the Lord Chamberlain in May 2020. A further ruling in June 2022 repeated that the emails had been delivered to the Palace.
The material matters because it was not a loose collection of private notes. It was said to include information about Mountbatten-Windsor's controversial financial dealings, including business ties involving the Rowlands and Banque Havilland. Earlier this year, emails published by another outlet showed him asking for a confidential Treasury briefing in 2010 and then sharing it with a personal business contact. Jonathan Rowland later confirmed that the published messages about Icelandic banks had been taken from his account and were part of legal proceedings.
That leaves the sharpest unresolved point untouched: Buckingham Palace says it cannot comment because of an ongoing police enquiry, yet the court record shows the archive reached the Royal Household years ago. What happened to the emails after they were delivered remains unclear, and that gap now sits at the center of the story.
