In a week where King Charles hoped to project unity as a "bulwark against those promoting conflict, division and tyranny", his scandal-ridden brother reigned supreme.
The monarch flew to Rome on Wednesday for a historic state visit to the Vatican with Pope Leo — an elaborate event that had been in the royal calendar for months.
A photo of the two men praying together was supposed to send a message of accord between the two churches after a 500-year rift.
But the history-making moment inevitably took a back seat to the fraught political drama of the "Prince Andrew problem".
Buckingham Palace is very clear that it does not act for the prince in any way. Instead, it was Andrew who said he would renounce his titles last week, at the urging of Charles and Prince William.
But if the announcement was supposed to be a more formal public cleaving of Andrew the person from Andrew the royal — years after he stepped back as a working member of "The Firm" — it appears to have fallen short of expectations.
"Andrew must cease styling himself prince and disappear," a scathing editorial in The Times declared just two days after the prince's announcement.
Pressure has continued to build on the Windsors, especially as it came to light that Andrew had only paid a nominal rent of "one peppercorn" over the course of his two-decade tenancy in a 30-room royal mansion just a stone's throw away from the royal family.
This week also saw the release of Virginia Giuffre's posthumous memoir, Nobody's Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice, a harrowing account of a woman who had long fought for justice against her abusers.
In witness statements and various accounts provided over the years, she claimed she was trafficked by Jeffrey Epstein to Andrew and had sex with him on three separate occasions. Prince Andrew has denied all the accusations against him.
The memoir's release came shortly after it emerged that the Metropolitan Police is investigating claims that Andrew asked an officer to dig up dirt for a smear campaign against Giuffre.
As more revelations came to light, it meant that Andrew, not Charles, was making front-page news at the precise moment the king hoped to be setting the agenda.
But what more could be done to disappear a man who, by all accounts, would not go quietly?
A bigger royal demotion
Along with calls from The Times, two-thirds of the public surveyed in a YouGov poll have called for Andrew to be stripped of his title as "prince", which cannot be done easily on account of him being a son of Queen Elizabeth.
There has also been movement in parliament, where MPs sought to lodge a motion to take away his dukedom, making official what has essentially become a defunct title.
The rare foray into royal issues by the supposedly separate UK government would be far from straightforward, requiring public backing, political will, and, at the very least, the tacit support of the king.
The writers at The Times presented another option: Andrew should "call himself plain Mr Windsor and [take] himself off to some sunny spot where he can live a life of golf and quiet self-reflection".
The royal's iron-clad lease at the Royal Lodge in Berkshire, which runs until 2078, has also been the subject of much debate this week, with calls to end his sweetheart deal early.
Baroness Margaret Hodge, who chaired the Public Accounts Committee between 2010 and 2015, has said the Royal Lodge arrangement "looks like a rotten deal" and asked for greater transparency regarding royal finances generally.
"There's no transparency — so inevitably we're sceptical and we ask questions," she told BBC Radio 4's Today programme.
"All we've got here is another specific issue, which is an example of a much, much wider problem, which is that the royal finances are mired in secrecy and that lack of transparency associated with those finances ends up with us asking all sorts of questions."
Attempts by the king last year to kick Andrew out of the stately home spilled over into the press in what became known as the siege of Royal Lodge.
It ended with the former duke remaining where he was so long as he could pay for the upkeep of the large house himself, the BBC reported.
With so much speculation going on in the UK press this week, it was perhaps serendipitous that Charles was due to fly out of the country and make history.
Yet it wasn't enough to distract from the bad news swirling around Andrew.
As royal biographer Andrew Lownie observed, it is more than just "a distraction from the good work the royal family does".
"I think, also, it's actually part of the destruction of the royal family because this, of course, is what everyone remembers …," he told the ABC.
"And this is now causing a lot of collateral damage, it's raising questions about royal accountability and transparency, and I think it's actually been very damaging to the monarchy."
The different approaches of Charles and William
Over the past week, as the royal family sought to keep attention firmly trained on its working members, the king was in a difficult position.
"There is certainly considerable public and political pressure on the Palace to do more than merely ask the duke to not use his titles, but the problem is one that King Charles III has to confront," royal commentator for Flinders University Giselle Bastin said.
"He is, naturally, torn between dealing with Prince Andrew as a royal, and dealing with him as his younger brother. It's a very difficult position for him to be in."
The same difficulty does not seem to extend to William, who has long been believed to have a frostier relationship with his uncle.
"[William] certainly understands the problems in a way that I suspect Charles doesn't," Mr Lownie said.
"[The king] is a very, shall we say, non-confrontation character, who has some sentimental attachment to his younger brother in a way that Prince William does not."
Dr Bastin agrees that there is a growing sense that "William's up for the fight".
"Andrew might have to disappear into the shadows and simply remove his face from all public events and ceremonies for a bit," Dr Bastin said.
However, even after Andrew stopped working as a royal, he continued to enjoy a prominent role at royal events.
Some of his appearances have been unavoidable, like in the case of his mother's funeral.
At other times, the prince's continued presence at highly-publicised occasions has thrown into sharp relief the treatment of Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, who have not been accused of any serious wrongdoing.
After "stepping back" as senior working royals in 2020, Harry and Meghan moved out of Frogmore Cottage and agreed to pay back 2.4 million pounds ($4.3 million) in public funds that were used for renovations on their UK residence.
They were also stripped of their state-funded protection.
Royal commentators previously told the ABC that if Harry and Meghan no longer have royal properties or security after stepping back from their positions, "then the same things should not be afforded to Prince Andrew".
Why this scandal refuses to go away
The royal family is no stranger to controversy and scandal.
History is littered with dukes and duchesses whose actions have brought the monarchy into disrepute.
One clear example is when a dukedom was last taken away from a senior royal.
Prince Charles Edward — one of Queen Victoria's grandsons — lost the title of Duke of Albany for fighting on the German side during World War I.
Associating with Germans was also a problem for the Duke of Windsor, who is best remembered for abdicating the throne.
Dr Bastin says he was known to then British prime minister, Winston Churchill, and King George VI for his "ill-judged contact with many members of the Nazi command, and people associated with the German military in the years leading up to, and in the first year of, World War II".
"After Winston Churchill learned of the duke's indiscretions, he [with encouragement of the king] organised for the Duke of Windsor to be posted as governor of the Bahamas in 1940, a move designed to keep him as far away from mischief as possible," Dr Bastin said.
"Much to his displeasure, the duke served as governor of the Bahamas from 1940 to 1945.
"One suspects that if the Moon had been one of the outlier regions of the British Empire, that Churchill would have considered sending the Duke of Windsor there."
Andrew's case is different because his alleged crimes are not just in the court of public opinion, but in the memoir of a woman who accused him of sexual abuse.
His behaviour connects the monarchy to a convicted sex offender and to a conspiracy theory that keeps public interest alight.
Other perceived missteps by royals, such as divorce or infidelity, might threaten the moral authority the monarchy holds so dear, but Andrew's sins go further.
"These specific allegations [against Andrew] are, of course, extraordinarily damaging in the first place, but they also run counter to some of the causes that members of the royal family take up," Craig Prescott, who teaches law at Royal Holloway, University of London and specialises in the constitutional and political role of the monarchy, told the NBC.
According to the royal family's own website, one of Queen Camilla's projects has been to "highlight organisations supporting victims of Rape and Sexual Assault".
A 'significant step'
What the renunciation of Andrew's titles has done, perhaps, is to more forcefully project the royal's status as a family outsider.
Contemporary historian Anthony Seldon told the BBC that the former duke's renunciation of his titles "historically" is a "very, very significant step".
As for how damaging this latest scandal will be for the monarchy, Dr Bastin said there is a question mark.
"They've certainly outlasted many a scandal for hundreds of years, and I imagine they'll outlast this episode as well," she said.
In the meantime, Andrew will presumably be left to his own devices at Royal Lodge, exiled from his family, cut off from the royal pocketbook, and uninvited from lavish gatherings.
But there is still an open question over whether he will ever truly retreat to the shadows.
