On a Thursday morning in August 1992, the newspapers reached Balmoral, the Queen’s private estate in Scotland. Downstairs at breakfast, the royal family sat flipping through the Daily Mirror. But the woman in its photographs was upstairs, a guest under the same roof. She was the Duchess of York, and the pictures had been taken beside a pool in the south of France.
That day, by her own account, her father-in-law tried to console her. In the years that followed, he was leaving any room she entered, and for the rest of his life, he kept his distance, while her daughters still came to stay. He insisted he was not vindictive. So what had she done that he of all of them would not forgive?
Long before she was a duchess, Sarah Ferguson was a familiar face on the polo grounds at Windsor, the daughter of the man who managed royal polo. That man was Major Ronald Ferguson, who served first as polo manager to the Duke of Edinburgh and later for many years to the Prince of Wales. Sarah Margaret Ferguson was born in London on the 15th of October 1959. She grew up in Hampshire at Dummerdown Farm, a 480-acre property, and the red-haired girl who came out of it could ride.
Her prep school remembered her as a courageous, bubbly, and outgoing little girl, and at Hurst Lodge in Ascot she showed talent for swimming and tennis. Then her family came apart. Her mother, Susan, left for Argentina with a polo player named Hector Barrantes in 1972. Her parents divorced in 1974, and the following year Susan married Barrantes and made her life on an estate in Argentina.
Sarah was about 13. Her father remarried in 1975. A Daily Mirror royal correspondent named Harry Arnold thought the loss marked her. He said later that she suffered even more than Diana did from lacking a maternal influence.
At 18, she went to Queen’s Secretarial College in London. What followed was the ordinary drift of a well-connected girl without much money. She worked at an art gallery, then at two public relations firms, then at a publishing company. Years later on Swedish television, she remembered the humbler jobs with something like pride.
I cleaned lavatories when I was 18, she said, and graduates’ bedrooms. She also waited tables at a strudel house where she admitted she did not cook. She took the strudel out of the freezer and put it in the oven. In her twenties, there was a long attachment to Paddy McNally, a motor racing manager more than 20 years her senior.
It lasted about three years and ended in 1985. The summer of that same year, by the standard account, she was invited to Windsor Castle for Royal Ascot Week. Diana, Princess of Wales, arranged the seating at lunch. She put Sarah beside Prince Andrew, the Queen’s second son.
They were not strangers. Andrew and Sarah had known each other since childhood from polo matches where their fathers’ worlds overlapped. But now he was 25, a Royal Navy helicopter pilot who had flown in the Falklands, and she was a lively young woman of 25. The story she tells of that lunch is a small one.
He wanted her to eat chocolate profiteroles. She declined because she was meant to be on a diet. Something in the teasing took. The courtship moved fast.
On the 19th of February 1986, Andrew’s 26th birthday, he proposed to her at Floors Castle in Scotland. By one account, he went down on both knees. The engagement was announced a month later. The ring was a Burmese ruby surrounded by ten drop diamonds made by Garrard, designed by Andrew himself to suit her red hair.
To the royal family, she was a known quantity. They had watched her grow up on the fringes of their own summers. She could ride, she could talk to anyone, she laughed loudly and often. Not everyone close to her was sure what she was marrying.
The biographer Andrew Lownie records her own father’s private verdict. She’s either in love with Andrew or in love with the royal family, Ronald Ferguson is reported to have said, and I think it’s the latter. In March 1986, the Duke of Edinburgh is said to have offered his verdict on his son’s choice in a handful of words. I think she will be a great asset.
The line comes from a single magazine account and should be held lightly. Yet it fits what others remembered of those first years. The Duke of Edinburgh was not an easy man to please. He had married the future Queen in 1947 and since 1952 had been her consort, a husband with no constitutional role who ran a great deal of the family’s private business.
He believed in duty and in keeping private life private. And here was a daughter-in-law who seemed to enjoy the life. The wedding was held on Wednesday the 23rd of July 1986 at Westminster Abbey. On the morning itself, the Queen made her son Duke of York, Earl of Inverness, and Baron Killy.
About 2,000 guests filled the abbey, among them Nancy Reagan and Elton John. Around the world, about 500 million people watched on television. The bride’s dress was ivory duchess satin with a 17-foot train, beaded with anchors and waves for Andrew’s naval career, bumblebees and thistles from the Ferguson coat of arms, and the initials A and S in silver beads. Prince William, aged four, walked as a page in a sailor suit.
Then the couple sailed for the Azores aboard the royal yacht Britannia. The public liked her at first. Harry Arnold called her a tremendous breath of fresh air on the royal scene. Diana later recalled her husband saying, I wish you would be like Fergie all jolly.
Why are you always so miserable? That is Diana’s telling, given to the writer Andrew Morton. It shows how the new duchess looked from inside the family in the beginning. She was the cheerful one.
In the first season of the marriage, the Duchess of York did not wilt. She waved, she laughed, she climbed into cockpits. For a while, she seemed to be exactly the asset he had predicted. By two accounts, she got on well with the Duke.
W Magazine, drawing on a Vanity Fair article from 1987, reported that Philip and Sarah shared a taste for a particular kind of bawdy humor, and that she was, for a time, his favored daughter-in-law. She learned to fly. On the 12th of February 1987, she was awarded her private pilot’s license at Oxford airport after a 40-hour course paid for by Lord Hanson as a wedding present. In December of that year, she gained her license to fly helicopters, too.
W Magazine reported that Philip was immensely impressed. She also took up the driving of horses. The royal biographer Tom Quinn said she learned to drive four-in-hand, a carriage pulled by four horses, which was, in Quinn’s words, the thing Prince Philip at the time absolutely loved. She remembered him, too, though she spoke of it only much later.
In 2023, on a podcast, she described him as very wise. You had to be on your best, she said. If you asked a silly comment, you were certainly told it was a silly comment. And she remembered one piece of advice he gave her.
Remember Sarah, the Duke told her. You’ve got to be electable, but never elected. The Duke of York was a serving naval officer, and for most of the early marriage, his wife was married to an absence. Andrew had been a flight pilot on HMS Brazen until 1986.
From February 1987 to April 1988, he was a helicopter warfare officer with 702 Naval Air Squadron at Portland. From 1989 to 1991, he commanded the Lynx helicopter flight aboard HMS Campbeltown. Tina Brown put a number on it. In 1990, she wrote, Andrew spent only 42 nights at home with his wife and their two children.
In her memoir, Sarah recorded the Duke of Edinburgh’s answer to the long absences. Well, he said, the Mountbattens managed, and so can you. His own marriage had begun with long naval separations when he was serving at Malta. To him, a sailor’s wife put up with it.
That was the bargain. Their first daughter, Princess Beatrice, was born on the 8th of August 1988. Within weeks, the Duchess flew to Australia to join Andrew for an official visit during the country’s bicentenary celebrations. She left the baby at home.
The newspapers attacked her for it. One wire report that October was headlined simply, Press attacks Fergie for leaving baby. The tide had changed. The nicknames followed.
During her first pregnancy, her weight had risen to 15 stone 10 pounds, and the tabloids called her the Duchess of Pork and Fat Fergie. Later came Freebie Fergie and Duchess of Doolittle. She said years afterward that the names got inside her. When they say you’re the Duchess of Pork or you’re frumpy Fergie, she said, you start believing it.
Behind the nicknames sat a business. These were the years of the tabloid circulation war, when the Daily Mirror, the Sun, and the News of the World fought for readers and the younger royals became front-page property. Their new home rose on Crown Land at Sunninghill Park near Windsor, bought in 1986 on behalf of the Queen. Building began in 1987 and finished in 1990.
It had 12 bedrooms. The tabloids named it South York after the ranch in Dallas. To the press, it looked less like a royal residence than a supermarket. Their second daughter, Princess Eugenie, was born on the 23rd of March 1990.
Then there were the books. In 1989, she published Budgie the Little Helicopter, children’s stories drawn from her flying lessons. The media accused her of copying an older book, Hector the Helicopter, published in 1960. She denied it.
According to Lownie, the palace took notice. He reports that the Queen’s press secretary, Robin Janvrin, told a publisher that the Duchess of York was the single greatest threat to the monarchy in the current era. Within the family, small frictions gathered. At Balmoral, where the family gathered each late summer, Sarah greeted one of the butlers with real warmth.
The Duke looked at her askance. Surely you have outgrown flirting with the staff, he said. She wrote that she knew he was right to upbraid her. It is a revealing moment for both of them.
For Philip, there was a line between the family and the people who served it, and a royal duchess did not cross it with a wink. For Sarah, who had cleaned lavatories and waited tables, the line was hardly visible. She liked people. She talked to whoever was in front of her.
He saw the same habit and called it flirting. Each was behaving true to type, and only one of them had written the rules of the house. Through all of this, as far as the record shows, the Duke had not yet turned against her. He corrected her as he corrected everyone.
But a correction is a sign that a man still thinks you can be corrected. That was about to change. Since 1989, a Texan oil heir had been part of her life, and the photographs of their friendship were about to reach the newspapers. In January 1992, photographs of a holiday in Morocco turned up in a newspaper, and the Duchess of York was in them.
They had been taken a year and a half earlier. In November 1989 in Houston, Sarah had met Steve Wyatt, a Texan oil heir. In June 1990, six weeks after the birth of Princess Eugenie, she flew to Morocco on the Wyatt family jet. Wyatt called the friendship platonic.
Lownie reports that the Queen asked her daughter-in-law whether Wyatt was quite the sort of person she should be encouraging, dear. Photographs of the Moroccan trip were found in Wyatt’s flat, and in January 1992 the Daily Mail published them. The Duke of Edinburgh’s son was a serving naval officer, often away. His daughter-in-law was in the newspaper with another man, and the newspapers, which had spent years building her up and tearing her down, now had the story they had been waiting for.
Two months later, the marriage was over in all but law. On the 19th of March 1992, Buckingham Palace announced that the Duke and Duchess of York were to separate formally and that lawyers were in discussion. What followed was a piece of palace theater that she never forgot. On the day of the announcement, the Queen’s press secretary, Charles Anson, briefed journalists off the record.
The gist of what he told them was that the duchess was unsuitable for royal life. The BBC’s court correspondent, Paul Reynolds, got hold of it and went on air. The knives are out for Fergie at the palace, Reynolds said. I have never known such anger here.
The next day, Anson apologized. But a sentence spoken into a microphone does not come back. Sarah wrote about it four years later near the start of her memoir. I had been tagged unsuitable for royal life, she wrote, and the charge stuck.
I was frozen out. Where was the Duke of Edinburgh in all this? He left no statement, but the royal biographer Ingrid Seward described his manner with Sarah around the separation as exceptionally brusque. According to Seward, he reminded her of her marital duty and insulted her by suggesting that if she really meant to leave, she should book herself into a nunnery or a loony bin.
That account is secondhand and comes from a single writer, and it should be heard with that in mind. Still, it is of a piece with what came after. Seward described the slow build of his temper in plain terms elsewhere. Philip became more and more irritated with Fergie, she wrote, and what he described as her antics.
The word is his, as she reports it, and it is a telling one. An antic is something done for show. To the Duke of Edinburgh, whose model of royal life was duty and discretion, his son’s wife seemed to hand the newspapers everything they wanted, and to do it for show. Sarah herself recorded a remark of his from after the separation, and it was smaller and sharper.
It concerned the school run. The Duke admonished her. Could you take your children to school looking a little smarter? She wrote it down without comment.
It is the voice of a man who had already decided she was a problem and who had begun to measure her by her appearance at the school gate. There is a striking contrast in the same year. 1992 was also the year the marriage of the Prince and Princess of Wales broke down, and the Duke of Edinburgh wrote to Diana about it. The letters were read out at the inquest into her death many years later.
If invited, he wrote, I will always do my utmost to help you and Charles to the best of my ability, but I am quite ready to concede that I have no talents as a marriage counselor. He signed himself with fondest love, Pa. Diana wrote back to him as dearest P. So in the same year, one troubled daughter-in-law received letters from the Duke signed with love.
The other received a remark about her children’s clothes. And all around them that year the family was coming apart in public. In April, the Princess Royal divorced her husband Mark Phillips. In June, Andrew Morton published Diana: Her True Story.
Later in the year, in November, fire swept through Windsor Castle, and in December, the separation of the Prince and Princess of Wales was announced. The Duke of Edinburgh watched three of his four children’s marriages fail inside a single year. Of all of it, the York separation came first. Why the difference?
Part of it may simply have been the stakes. Diana was married to the heir to the throne, and her marriage touched the future of the crown. Sarah was married to a second son. Part of it may have been temperament, for Diana confided in him, and he answered.
But a larger part, perhaps, was the form each woman’s trouble took. Diana’s reached him in letters. Sarah’s reached him in newspapers, in photographs. The Queen, for her part, kept her door open.
Her two granddaughters were small, and their mother came with them. So in August 1992, when the family gathered at Balmoral for the late summer, the separated Duchess of York joined them with her two small daughters. She was still family, at least on the Queen’s estate. Before she arrived there, though, she took one more holiday in the south of France, and someone was watching from the undergrowth.
On the 9th of August 1992, a private jet carried the Duchess, her two small daughters, and her financial adviser to an airstrip west of Saint-Tropez. The adviser was John Bryan, an American. According to Lownie, a nanny and two protection officers traveled with them. The party had rented Lou Mas du Pijol, a farmhouse near the village of Bormes-les-Mimosas.
Lownie writes that it was booked under an assumed name and that it was the couple’s sixth holiday together that year. The precautions were not enough. A French photographer named Daniel Angeli had been tipped off. Lownie writes that he staked out the farmhouse, having crawled through a mile of undergrowth to do it.
By the following Monday, the Duchess was at Balmoral as the Queen’s guest with her daughters and with Andrew. On the Tuesday, John Bryan telephoned her there. I’m afraid they’ve got photographs of our trip to France, he said. She went to tell the Queen.
In her memoir, she gives the Queen’s answer in full. All right, let us see what happens. Bryan went to court in France and in London to stop publication and lost in both. Nothing more could be done.
Balmoral was the sovereign’s own estate, the place where the family spent the late summer in private, far from London. Whatever arrived in the newspapers that week would arrive at the breakfast table of the Duke of Edinburgh’s holiday under his own roof, while the woman in the pictures was upstairs. On Thursday, the 20th of August 1992, the Daily Mirror published the photographs, and The Sun ran a smaller selection. They showed the Duchess of York topless beside the pool and Bryan kissing her foot.
The newspapers called it toe sucking. Sarah later insisted in print that no sucking of toes had taken place in the south of France and that the picture showed John planting his mouth on the top of her foot. It made no difference. The palace, asked where the duchess was, said only this: She’s at Balmoral Castle, where she has been since Monday.
She had sat up through the night with Bryan and the children’s nanny, Allison Wardley. I was the prisoner in the dock, she wrote, already found guilty. When the papers came, she could not face the family. Andrew went down to the dining room alone.
The Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh, she wrote, had their breakfast upstairs. Around the table below sat Andrew’s brothers and sister, Charles, Anne, and Edward, with all the children, an equerry, and a lady-in-waiting or two. It would be accurate to report that the porridge was getting cold, she wrote. Eyes wide and mouths agape.
The adults were flipping through the Daily Mirror. When they saw Andrew, they stopped. Andrew, she wrote, leafed through the papers as if he were reading the cricket results. Then he carried a copy upstairs to her room.
He went down alone to face his family, read the papers as if nothing in them concerned him, and carried the evidence up to his wife. Whatever he felt, he kept it off his face. At 9, she went up to see the Queen. The Queen was furious, she wrote.
I had apologized, of course, but penance and contrition have their limits. Then for the rest of the day, she went from one member of the family to another, apologizing to each in turn. And here she recorded something that the popular story has never kept. They were all very gracious, she wrote.
Even Prince Philip, who could be stern at times, tried to console me. That is her account, written for publication in 1996 after the divorce, when she had no reason to flatter the Duke. It places him upstairs at breakfast and gentle in the afternoon. Other accounts disagree, and they disagree sharply.
The royal reporter James Whitaker said she came late into the breakfast room to find everyone hiding the Mirror under their copies of the Times and the Telegraph. Tom Quinn on Channel 5 went further. Apparently Prince Philip came into the breakfast room, he said, picked up one of the papers and just threw it in front of her and walked out. Quinn’s version contradicts hers on almost every point.
It is the one the world remembers. Lownie, setting the versions side by side, records yet another in which she walked into the breakfast room, found everyone reading the story, and fled. Four tellings of one meal, and only one of them from the woman herself. Another line is often put into the Duke’s mouth that morning as he handed her the newspaper.
There, but for the grace of God, go I. No one has ever confirmed it, and W Magazine, repeating it, called it oft repeated but quite obviously never confirmed. It belongs to legend. Not everyone by other accounts was gracious.
According to a guest quoted by the biographer Chris Hutchins, Princess Anne came close to throttling her and at dinner told her exactly what she thought of her. Sarah’s own memory of that dinner was of eyes. I was levelled when I entered the room for dinner and saw everyone staring at me, she wrote. The butlers and footmen gaped and I felt naked in their sight.
The Mirror, she wrote, sold 2 million extra copies. Lownie counts 55 photographs, one of them with two-year-old Eugenie looking on. The photographer had crawled a mile to take them. It was the sixth holiday of the year.
She stayed three more days under the Queen’s roof as planned. She would not run. So I stayed and got stared at as a term of my surrender, she wrote. I would do it for the sovereign.
She found a bleak joke in it, too. I pinned on my scarlet letter, she wrote. Mine would be a T for toe sucking. On Sunday the 23rd of August, she flew from Aberdeenshire with her daughters home to Rivenlee Lodge at Wentworth.
The palace said there had been no change in the arrangements. So which duke was in the house that week? The consoling one in her book or the furious one in Quinn’s story? It is possible that both are true at different hours.
A man may offer a kind word on the day and still reach a hard decision overnight. What is certain is that whatever he said or did not say at Balmoral, he kept the conclusion to himself for years. When at last he spoke of her on the record, it was to a biographer seven years later, in a sentence that never once raised its voice. Prince Philip’s conclusion that summer survives only secondhand, and his biographer Gyles Brandreth summed it up in three words.
Enough was enough. Brandreth had interviewed the Duke himself. In the account he published after the Duke’s death, as reported by the Daily Beast, Philip came to regard his son’s wife as simply beyond the pale. Those words are Brandreth’s description of the Duke’s view, and they should be heard as his.
But they echo with a strange exactness the phrase Sarah had used about the courtiers that spring. Now the man at the head of the family seemed to share it. Ingrid Seward on Channel 5 gave the same verdict a temperature. After the breakup of the marriage, she said, Prince Philip is absolutely incandescent with rage with her.
And Seward named the reason. He was furious, she wrote, because he saw it as her undermining what he had taken years to establish, undermining the monarchy, undermining her own husband. The Duke had been consort since 1952, 40 years of making the monarchy work as an institution. The photographs from the south of France struck at the family’s dignity in the most public way imaginable, and they did it while the Duchess sat at the Queen’s table as a guest.
Three months later, at the Guildhall in London, the Queen gave a speech marking 40 years since her accession. Four days earlier, fire had torn through Windsor Castle. 1992 is not a year on which I shall look back with undiluted pleasure, she said. In the words of one of my more sympathetic correspondents, it has turned out to be an annus horribilis.
The separation became formal. A separation agreement was signed on the 28th of March 1993. Years before, the Duke had told her she must always be electable. By now, measured by the newspapers, she had lost every election going.
She was still the Duchess of York. She was still the mother of two princesses. But the goodwill he had warned her to protect had been spent. And in his view, it seems it had been spent on the family’s account as well as her own.
In 1995, Lord Charteris, who had been the Queen’s private secretary, called the Duchess vulgar in an interview with The Spectator. Lownie’s version has it vulgar, vulgar, vulgar. Even the wording became a matter of dispute. Some later writers gave the tripled phrase to the royal author Jane Dismore, others to the commentator Richard FitzWilliams, each quoting a courtier.
The word itself had stuck. Sarah unusually agreed. Charteris was right, she wrote. I was never cut out for royalty.
Then came the money. In January 1996, the Sun claimed her debts had reached £3 million, with the interest alone running at £1,726 a day. The palace’s reply was crisp. The Queen has made generous provision to the Duchess of York over a number of years.
Management of her financial affairs is the Duchess’s responsibility. By October, the reported figure was more than £4 million. The truth is, Sarah said that year, I am making cutbacks, huge ones. The divorce was made final in the High Court on the 30th of May 1996.
The accounts of the settlement differ, and no two sources give the same figures. That August, new letters patent removed the style of royal highness from the former wives of a sovereign’s sons. She kept the title Duchess of York. The change mattered more than it sounds.
A woman who married a royal prince became a royal highness and a working member of the family, carrying out engagements on the Queen’s behalf. Without the style, she was a former daughter-in-law with a duke’s title and no official place. She was outside the institution the Duke of Edinburgh had spent his life serving. Yet she remained, as events would show, inside his family.
On the day of the decree, she said, I think it’s a fresh, clean page. I think I can go onwards and upwards. That same year she published her memoir, My Story, written with Jeff Coplon. It was frank about her marriage and her mistakes and about the courtiers who, she said, had frozen her out.
About the Duke of Edinburgh, it was, if anything, generous. It recorded his corrections without complaint. It said that at Balmoral, on the morning of the photographs, he had tried to console her. No reaction from the Duke to the book has ever been recorded.
If he read the kind words, they changed nothing. The following January, she signed with Weight Watchers for about $1 million a year. I’d just been divorced, she said, and I needed to earn a living. Divorced, no longer a royal highness, and earning her own living, she might have been expected to drift out of the family’s sight.
She stayed close through the years that followed. She remained close to Andrew. She shared Sunninghill Park with him until 2004, when he moved to Royal Lodge in Windsor Great Park. In 2008, after a fire at the house she was renting at Englefield Green, she moved into Royal Lodge as well.
In May 1999 at Sunninghill Park, Gyles Brandreth asked the Duke of Edinburgh about his former daughter-in-law. It was a bold question to put to a man who told people plainly when they had asked something silly. Brandreth recorded the answer, and years later he published it on his own blog. These are his own recorded words about Sarah Ferguson.
I try to keep out of these things as much as possible, the Duke said. Her behavior was a bit odd, but I’m not vindictive. I am not vindictive. I don’t see her because I don’t see much point, but the children come and stay.
There is no anger in the words as recorded. That is what makes them so complete. A man in a rage may cool. A man who has simply concluded that there is no point is not waiting to be persuaded.
Brandreth went back to Sunninghill two years later in March 2001 on Mothering Sunday, and this time he talked to Sarah. She told him what the policy looked like from the other side of the door. It was ridiculous, she said. As soon as I came in through one door, he’d be falling over the corgis to get out of the other.
It was very funny. Except, of course, it wasn’t. A man who leaves a room is making a statement to everyone else in it, and anyone left behind can read it. Each exit, however comic, was a small public verdict, delivered again and again in the family’s own houses by the one person whose verdict mattered most after the Queen’s.
Of course I want to see him, she told Brandreth. I am the mother of his granddaughters after all. That June, the Duke turned 80. Sarah tried a peace offering.
According to Brandreth, she sent him a handsome dinner service. It was supposed to have 12 settings, he wrote, but it arrived with 13. The sample had been included with the set. With Sarah, somehow something always goes wrong.
The 13th plate is the whole relationship in miniature. She meant well. She overdid it. Something always went wrong.
And the man it was meant to soften did not soften. Christmas was the family’s other great private ritual at Sandringham. Sarah was not there. Ever since 1992, she wrote in her memoir, I had been excluded from all these events.
No source says it was the Duke who personally barred her from Christmas. But in the years he lived, she did not return to it. Balmoral was different, because Balmoral was the Queen’s, and the Queen went on asking her. Ingrid Seward described how it worked.
The Queen would invite Sarah to Balmoral at times when the Duke was not there. Her stays were fitted around his like two trains on one line. In 2005, according to a friend quoted in the Express, Sarah went back to Balmoral while the Duke was in residence, by one count for the first time in 13 years. He avoided her like the plague, the friend said.
I don’t think they spoke a single word all week. Count what that silence measured. Thirteen years since the morning of the photographs, a week under one roof. Not a single word.
Then she gave him fresh reason. In May 2010, the News of the World ran a sting. An undercover reporter, Mazher Mahmood, posed as a businessman, and Sarah was recorded offering access to Andrew in return for money. And then you meet Andrew, she said.
And that’s fine. £500,000 when you can to me. Open doors, she was heard saying. And look after me and he’ll look after you.
She apologized. I very deeply regret the situation and the embarrassment caused, she said. That is no excuse for a serious lapse in judgment. In March 2011, she admitted that she had taken £15,000 from Jeffrey Epstein towards her debts and called it a gigantic error of judgment.
No reaction from the Duke to either episode has ever been recorded. At Royal Ascot in June 2015, Sarah was at the races, too. According to a report in the Daily Beast, quoting racegoers, the Duke was reportedly said to look furious, and as his carriage moved off, he twisted back in his seat for a second look at her, a very visible double take. An unnamed source offered the summary.
They loathe each other, to put it frankly. It is gossip and it should be heard as gossip. But it is gossip that fits. He was in his nineties now.
His granddaughters were grown women, and two weddings were coming that would put him and their mother in the same chapel, and in the end in the same photograph. On the 2nd of August 2017 at Buckingham Palace, the Duke of Edinburgh carried out the last of his solo engagements. It was the Captain General’s parade of the Royal Marines, and when it was done, he stepped back from public life. He was 96, and he had been the Queen’s Consort for 65 years.
By one count, he had carried out 22,219 solo engagements since 1952. Ten days before that wedding in May 2018, Gyles Brandreth published his old interview on his blog under the title Setting the Record Straight. Brandreth put the Duke’s own words of 1999 on the record at last. I am not vindictive.
I don’t see much point. Nearly 20 years on, nothing in the arrangement had changed. The following May, his grandson, Prince Harry, married Meghan Markle at Windsor. Sarah was invited to the church and to the lunch afterwards.
She was left off the list for the evening reception, which was hosted by the Prince of Wales. The reports placed that decision with Charles. The Duke’s own feelings about the guest list were not recorded. That summer, the old pattern held at Balmoral.
Sarah was there as the Queen’s guest, and the Duke, according to a report, delayed his arrival at Balmoral until after she had departed. Then in October came the wedding that would test the policy. On the 12th of October 2018, Princess Eugenie was married in St. George’s Chapel at Windsor.
Eugenie was Philip’s granddaughter. She was also Sarah’s daughter. There was no arranging a wedding so that the bride’s mother and the bride’s grandfather were never in the same place. So for one day, the rule bent.
The official portraits were taken afterwards and released the next day. In them, Sarah stands among the family with the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh. It was reported to be the first time the two had been photographed together in about 26 years. Set it beside the first photographs.
In 1986, about 500 million people had watched the Duke’s son marry the polo manager’s daughter at Westminster Abbey. Thirty-two years later, the same two families needed a granddaughter’s wedding to stand the Duke and his former daughter-in-law within one frame. The portrait does not record what either of them said that day, if anything. The portrait records only that both of them were there and that both of them stayed.
But the children come and stay. He had said it in 1999, and in the portrait it came true in the most literal way. The children had come and stayed and grown up and married, and their mother had come with them. It did not last, and perhaps it was never meant to.
A wedding is the one occasion a family cannot divide. Once it was over, the old timetable returned. In August 2019, Sarah was at Balmoral again. A royal insider quoted in the Daily Mail described what happened.
In previous years, the Duchess has left the day before the Queen’s husband arrives. This year, he arrived yesterday, several days earlier than expected, which is rather strange. So the Duchess left. Whether by accident or by design, the effect was the same.
The guest packed and went. He was 98 years old, and the point he had been making since 1992 had not changed by a word. The next summer, on the 17th of July 2020, Princess Beatrice was married in a small ceremony in the chapel at Royal Lodge. There were about 20 guests.
The Duke of Edinburgh was among them, and so was Sarah. It was the second time in two years that a granddaughter’s wedding had brought them into the same room. He was 99. Whatever he felt, the policy of a lifetime gave way for an afternoon to the plain fact of family.
His granddaughters had done what no dinner service had ever managed. They had put their mother and their grandfather in the same small chapel. Prince Philip died at Windsor on the 9th of April 2021, two months short of his 100th birthday. He was 99.
His funeral was held on the 17th of April, and under the rules of the pandemic, only 30 guests could attend. Sarah was not among them. On the 11th of April, she had cancelled a planned bookshop event. On the day of the funeral, by one report, she stayed at Royal Lodge and looked after her grandson, August.
She made no public statement about the Duke’s death. The record does not say why. It records only an empty seat that was never hers to fill and a grandmother minding her grandson at Royal Lodge. In the days after his death, the Daily Beast reported on Gyles Brandreth’s new portrait of the Duke, Philip: The Final Portrait.
It was there that the world read how the Duke had decided in 1992 that enough was enough. The man himself was no longer there to confirm it or deny it. He was gone, and the policy died with him. Two years after his funeral, on a podcast, Sarah Ferguson was asked what the Duke of Edinburgh had been like, and she answered with one word.
Terrifying. It was March 2023, and she was talking to Alan Carr. She did his voice. Why are you asking me that?
I do it every day. Why are you asking me that? And then she let out a groan. And then you lose all confidence.
But she also called him very wise. And she repeated the advice he had given her all those years before. Remember Sarah, you’ve got to be electable, but never elected. He had told her at the start what the family’s survival rested on.
She had heard it. She had remembered it for decades, and she had spent the goodwill anyway in the south of France and in the newspapers, and he had never let her forget it by the simple method of never speaking to her at all. The Queen died on the 8th of September 2022. Four days later, it was announced that Andrew and Sarah would take in two of the Queen’s corgis, Muick and Sandy.
That October, Sarah told the Telegraph how it was going. The carpet moves as I move, she said. But I’ve got used to it now. So the corgis came to her, the same breed of dog that a man had once fallen over to get out of her way now followed her from room to room.
She was the one left holding the leads. At the Queen’s funeral, she spoke warmly of her. She said the Queen was the most incredible mother-in-law and friend. On Christmas Day 2023, she walked with the family to church at Sandringham, back among them at Christmas, two years after the Duke was gone.
The accounts differ on how long she had been away, since 1991 by one count, since the separation by another. Either way, she had not walked that path at Christmas while the Duke was alive. With the Duke and the Queen both gone, the doors he had kept shut were opening again. It did not last long.
In September 2025, an email she had written to Jeffrey Epstein in 2011 was published, in which she called him a steadfast, generous, and supreme friend. On the 22nd of September, charities including Julia’s House and Teenage Cancer Trust dropped her as their patron. In October, Andrew announced that he would no longer use his titles, and Sarah stopped using the title Duchess of York. On the 30th of October, the King began the formal process of removing his brother’s style, titles, and honors.
He became Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and was served notice to give up the lease on Royal Lodge. By early 2026, according to one account, Sarah had left Royal Lodge, too. She lost the title she had married into. She lost the house she had shared with the man she divorced.
She lost the patronages and the name. And by then, the one man in the family who had warned her at the very start to stay electable was no longer there to see it. Here, at last, is the answer to the question his silence raised. What had she done that he of all of them would not forgive?
The others had their scandals in that terrible year. Princess Anne divorced. The Prince and Princess of Wales separated, and their marriage was pulled apart in print. Yet Diana, in the worst of it, still wrote to him as dearest P, and he still wrote back with fondest love.
Diana’s trouble had come to him in letters. Sarah’s came to him in a newspaper at his own breakfast table, in photographs, while she was a guest under his roof. Count the years the policy ran. Twenty-nine of them.
From a Thursday morning at Balmoral to a funeral with 30 names. Seven years before he explained it in a single interview. Thirteen years before a week under the same roof with not one word. Twenty-six years before a single shared photograph.
Two years after his death, one word from her on a podcast. Terrifying. And two corgis in the end, padding after her from room to room. And there was the Queen’s open door.
If she had shut Sarah out, his absence would have meant nothing, for there would have been nothing to be absent from. Because she kept inviting her, he had to keep leaving. Each invitation from his wife set the stage for another exit by her husband, and in the end, the newspapers reported both. In the code he seems to have lived by, a private failing could be forgiven.
A public one could only be answered, and he answered it with absence for 29 years. Scandal in that old royal world could perhaps be survived. Being seen, it seems, could not. Diana confided and stayed his correspondent.
Sarah was photographed and became the one person in the family he would not sit with. Read that way, the freeze was not a tantrum, it was a policy, and he kept it the way he kept everything else, quietly and to the end. He put it best himself in 1999 at Sunninghill Park, to the one writer who asked. He did not see her, he said, because he saw no point.
But the children come and stay.