20 February—QE II—HM Queen Elizabeth II of the Untied [sic] Kingdom as opposed to QE2 the retired Cunard liner that’s now a floating hotel in Dubai—has tested positive and shown some allegedly mild symptoms of COVID-19. How the hell could the poor old thing have caught the dreaded coronavirus with all the precautions her servants should be taking to protect her from the scourges of the common folk? Unless one of them was the vector. Oh, the horror! Does the Lord Chamberlain wear at least one KN95 mask in HM’s presence?

Of course, we all hope the 95-year-old record-breaking monarch recovers promptly so she can give back to son no. 2, Prince Andrew, Duke of York, all the sinecures, titles, and privileges she had stripped him of simply for doing what spoiled royals have been doing since pre-biblical times.

It’s very generous and motherly of HM to dip into her meager resources in order to contribute £2 million ($2.7 million) to destitute Randy Andy’s reported £12 million ($16.3 million) settlement with his clever press-friendly accuser, Virginia Guiffre, about whom I can’t say anything substantive because I don’t want to open myself up for libel litigation. So I’ll just say that Virginia was a victim in every sense of the word and was forced to suffer all the unspeakable atrocities at the hands and other parts of Jeffrey Epstein and HRH, inter alia. Lucky she never got to meet America’s own Randy Andy, former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo. He doesn’t have a rich mother.

And it turns out that Royal Randy Andy’s big brother, the Loony Prince, a.k.a. Charles, Prince of Wales, once again finds himself in the royal cesspool. Just after news of Guiffre’s windfall broke, police in London announced they were investigating allegations that HRH Loony’s charity, the Prince’s Foundation, was involved in a so-called “cash for honours” deal in which a Saudi citizen was offered a knighthood in exchange for a hefty donation. Presumably the wealthy Saudi—is there any other kind?—also carries a British or Commonwealth passport, which he probably bought, too. Why not? As Max Bialystok said, “When ya got it, flaunt it.”

HM’s other kids, daughter Anne, Princess Royal, now Lady Laurence, and youngest son, Prince Edward, Earl of Wessex, have been behaving themselves lately, so they’re not worth writing about. Mummy re-created the hereditary earldom for Edward in 1999, rather than the customary royal dukedom, supposedly at her son’s request, because he liked the character in “Shakespeare in Love.” Wasn’t Wessex, played by Colin Firth, a villain?

No further comment is necessary on that. But Wessex was once a Saxon kingdom on its own and in the tenth century became the better part of the jolly old Kingdom of England. Then it became the locale of most of Thomas Hardy’s rather sententious and boring fiction. The original Earl of Wessex was Godwin, father of King Harold II (a.k.a. Harold Godwinson, Second Earl of Wessex), who lost it all—including his life—to William the Bastard in 1066. Godwin had been given the earldom by King Cnut just about a millennium ago. And here we thought the Earldom of Wessex had become extinct. That’s King Cnut, by the way. C-N-U-T. You must never metathesize the N and the U . . .