When Sarah Ferguson got married in 1986 she was given a coat of arms with a Latin motto that translates as “out of adversity grows happiness”. She spent the next 40 years testing that theory to destruction. With her life derailed on what may be a permanent basis, she apparently spent a month at a £13,000-a-day wellness clinic in Switzerland, wallowing in self-pity, exhibiting no remorse and convinced that the world is out to get her. She is now said to have washed up, desperate and penniless, in the UAE, staying goodness knows where, at the expense of goodness knows who, having arrived on a flight paid for with goodness knows what. Close observers will recall that we have been here before.
Back in 1986, adversity seemed unlikely. While her childhood and character had been damaged when her mother ran off with an Argentinian polo player, she was nevertheless brought up in an affluent home, with ponies and skiing holidays and staff. She was also well connected, counting the young royals, including her future husband, as playmates. Her father, who worked as a polo manager for Prince Charles, once commanded the sovereign escort riding alongside Queen Elizabeth, who had to tell him to fall back. “It’s me they’ve come to see,” she told him, “not you.”
The young Fergie, as she became known at her first school, was sporty and popular, but a little wayward (by contrast, up at Gordonstoun, her future husband was viewed by fellow pupils as “a wally and a tosser”). A school report from 1972, when Ferguson was 12, proved prescient. “Although enthusiastic and anxious to please… Sarah has not yet learned to channel her energies in the right direction. Both work and behaviour are erratic and she needs to exercise greater control over both.”
A portrait session for Tatler in 2003
She left school with two O-levels and enrolled on a nine-month secretarial course, from which she graduated bottom of the class. Nevertheless, through family connections she landed jobs as a temp and at a PR firm, where she was remembered fondly for her ability to get on well with anyone and the many hours she spent on the phone organising her social life. Fuelled by insecurity, she could have terrible taste in men. An early lover was a former racing driver called Paddy McNally, a cad who was 22 years older than her. According to Andrew Lownie in his book Entitled: The Rise and Fall of the House of York, McNally once arrived home in the company of another woman and gave Ferguson the option of sleeping in the spare room or a threesome.
Ferguson with Princess Diana at Guard’s Polo Club, Windsor, in 1983
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But in Prince Andrew she found, she said in their engagement interview, “my perfect man and soulmate”. Having become reacquainted with him over lunch during Royal Ascot in 1985, she was felled by his wit, charm and good looks, and the engagement was announced the year after. Fêted as a breath of fresh air in the royal family and high on her own popularity, she ordered 25 new dresses in the run-up to the wedding and married her prince in July 1986. Her desire to have teddy bears and helicopters embroidered on her wedding dress was thwarted by its designer but the day was viewed as a PR triumph for the royal family. True, the cake cost £10,000, the photographs £20,000 and the flowers came in at nearly a quarter of a million, according to Lownie, but this attractive young couple were surely worth it. Weren’t they?
It soon began to seem not. The marriage very quickly went south, as did their popularity. A tour of Canada was either refreshingly informal or boorish, depending on your point of view. Living in Andrew’s suite of rooms at Buckingham Palace, with him frequently away with his naval career, she was lonely. Staff quickly grew tired of her returning late from a night out, with friends, demanding food. The year after her marriage she took nine holidays in nine months and her workload was compared extremely unfavourably with that of Princess Anne. In a sign of what was to come, the couple tacked a week’s holiday onto the end of an official tour of Mauritius, paid for by the island and a hotel chain.
On a canoeing trip in Canada, 1987
TIM GRAHAM PHOTO LIBRARY VIA GETTY IMAGES
During a tour of Mauritius, 1987
TIM GRAHAM PHOTO LIBRARY VIA GETTY IMAGES
However, over the years the money flowed in. Hello! paid £250,000 for an “at home with” the Yorks and their first child, Beatrice. A publisher paid £85,000 for her to write two books, Budgie the Little Helicopter and Budgie at Bendick’s Point, causing consternation at the Palace. Queen Elizabeth’s press secretary at the time described her as “the greatest single threat to the monarchy in the current era”. Matters weren’t helped when her claim to be donating the proceeds to charity turned out not to be entirely true: 90 per cent of them were in fact going to her, some of them perhaps paying for her regular consultations with her psychic, Madame Vasso.
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There was also trouble behind the scenes at the new marital home, Sunninghill Park in Windsor. Built on land given to them by Queen Elizabeth as a wedding present, it had a 35ft-high entrance hall with a glass dome, 12 bedrooms, 20 staff rooms and a helicopter landing pad. There were peach walls, tartan curtains, embroidered cushions, a £12,000 chandelier and, inevitably, teddy bears. Everything including the lavatory paper was embossed with the initials A&S.
There were reports that it had gone to the head of the middle-class breath of fresh air. Staff told the authors of Sarah’s Story: The Duchess Who Defied the Royal House of Windsor that her underwear and tights had to be ironed. Any clothes washed using the “wrong” fabric conditioner were returned to be washed again. The temperature of her two hot-water bottles had to be tested to meet her exact requirements. There was trouble if the orange juice served to her at breakfast was not freshly squeezed at the moment she sat down, and not a moment before. By the end of 1992, only six years after her marriage, Ferguson had become the most unpopular member of the royal family. A provincial waxwork museum recycled her as Nell Gwynn.
With her daughters, Princess Eugenie and Princess Beatrice, in 1993
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Perennially short of money, she found an obliging benefactor. The founder of an energy drink company was reportedly only too happy to supply her with bags of cash and relished the “kudos” he thought it brought him. Still, as the marriage drew to a close, the Yorks threw a lavish housewarming for Sunninghill Park, soon to be the former marital home. The jungle-themed black-tie do was later described, according to Lownie, as “Bunfight at the Yorkie Corral”. (The politician and journalist Woodrow Wyatt described Ferguson at this time in his diaries as “like a barmaid who has got into some money”.)
Two months after the housewarming, Fergie invited her lover, Steve Wyatt, to a ball celebrating her husband’s birthday. The Dance of the Decades at Windsor Castle was held in honour of Andrew’s 30th, Princess Anne’s 40th, Princess Margaret’s 60th and the Queen Mother’s 90th. Queen Elizabeth told her daughter-in-law that she questioned whether Wyatt was “quite the sort of person” she should be “encouraging”. Not for the last time, her advice was to no avail. Having met Wyatt during an official visit to America in 1989 — a trip from which she infamously returned home with 51 pieces of excess baggage — she was soon hosting dinners for him at Buckingham Palace, with people who could help his commercial interests in the Middle East. They once turned up to a dinner to which they were not invited, at Le Gavroche, and proceeded to put on what one guest described as “a display of mutual fondling I have never seen before in a three-star restaurant”.
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When the affair became public it ended the marriage. Wyatt returned to America, supposedly to earn enough money to propose. Instead, his friend John Bryan gallantly took up the baton and invited Fergie to dinner. To his astonishment, she went home with him that night. Thus began a relationship which they denied until the day the toe-sucking photographs appeared on front pages in 1992. According to one fellow guest at Balmoral, Princess Anne came very close to throttling her soon-to-be-former-sister-in-law. The divorce came through in 1996, four years after they separated, with Ferguson said to be keen to move on with her life. The deal was that her debts would be settled, and she would be given £1.4 million in trust for her daughters and money to buy a house. Instead she spent a fortune renting a six-bedroom mock-Tudor pad in which she promptly installed a new marble bathroom.
Sarah at a Canadian government banquet in Toronto, 1987
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And so began her time in the wilderness. Over the years, between interviews with Oprah and on American breakfast TV, she travelled the world, stayed in the finest hotels and ordered room service. She endorsed, variously, bed linen, perfume, cutlery and jewellery. There were discussions with QVC about selling things and talks with Tommy Hilfiger about wearing things. An appearance on Donald Trump’s Apprentice was mooted, and there were lucrative contracts with Weight Watchers and Wedgwood.
Launching her diet book in Los Angeles, 2002
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Yet by the time she turned 50 — an occasion for which Hello! paid her £50,000 — she admitted being £600,000 in debt, several thousand pounds of which were to a Malibu “spirit guide”. She once spent £25,000 in an hour at Bloomingdale’s in New York and £300,000 of taxpayers’ money doing up an apartment at St James’s Palace for her daughters.
Asked by a Saudi prince if there was anything he could do for her, she replied, “As a matter of fact, you could pay off my overdraft.” The woman once described by Tina Brown as “a crashing spendthrift married to a natural cheapskate” spent £20,000 renting a villa in the south of France for a summer holiday with her daughters and friends in 1994. There were daily deliveries of her favourite Puligny-Montrachet and Laurent-Perrier champagne. (More recently she developed a taste for the expensive rosé Whispering Angel. The vineyard’s owner, Sacha Lichine, has a pair of angel wings on his desk sent to him by her, Beatrice and Eugenie, Ferguson’s younger daughter, as a thank you and told me three years ago that they visit if they’re staying with a friend nearby.) In 1994 Ferguson was musing aloud about buying the rental villa for herself, for £1.7 million, even as she was being pursued back home for an unpaid electricity bill. Defiant in 1999, she declared: “I’m going to survive and I’m going to damn well win.”
At the wedding of her daughter Eugenie and Jack Brooksbank at St George’s Chapel, Windsor, in 2018
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Instead, nine years later she moved back into Royal Lodge with her ex-husband while her own house was being renovated. She held court from a four-bedroom apartment and ran her office from the billiard room. As recently as 2014 the couple found £18 million down the back of the sofa to buy a chalet in Verbier (although they had to sell it in 2022 to help to fund his legal bills over the Virginia Giuffre lawsuit). Princess Eugenie’s wedding in 2018 was the first time she had appeared in public with the royal family for 27 years. She marked the occasion by erecting a stall selling her own-brand teas next to the marquee.
Life was, for a time, looking promising. By 2019 she had a new brand, Duchess Inc, a new range of products to flog, the Duchess Collection, and a new book deal. She would go on to write sub-Mills and Boon potboilers endorsed by Jeffrey Archer. And then, with Andrew’s Newsnight interview, it began slowly, then quickly, to crumble. Eighteen years after she arrived at Royal Lodge, she was forcibly evicted and their paths finally diverged. The happiest divorced couple in the world could not, it seemed, be happy together anywhere else. Having fled the furore for someone else’s chalet in the Swiss Alps, she is thought now to be staying in someone else’s house in the Middle East.
“I look at life,” she said in 2018, “with a child’s sense of enjoyment and joy.” At 66, she might reasonably conclude that it’s time to grow up.