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. 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. 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.
Major Ronald Ferguson 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 15 October 1959. She grew up in Hampshire at Dummer Down Farm, a farm of 480 acres, and the red-haired girl who came out of it could ride. At her schools, she was remembered as courageous, bubbly, and outgoing, with talents for swimming and tennis.
Then the family came apart. When Sarah was about 13, her mother left for Argentina with a polo player and eventually married him. Her father married again in 1975. A royal correspondent who knew the family thought the loss marked her, saying she suffered even more than Diana did from lacking a maternal influence.
At 18, she went to Queen’s Secretarial College in London and drifted through jobs at an art gallery, public relations firms, and a publishing company. Later, she remembered the humbler jobs with something like pride. She cleaned lavatories and graduates’ bedrooms and waited tables. In her twenties, there was a long attachment to a motor racing manager more than 20 years her senior.
It lasted about three years and ended in 1985. That same summer, by the standard account, she was invited to Windsor Castle for Royal Ascot Week. Diana, Princess of Wales, arranged the seating at lunch and put Sarah beside Prince Andrew, the Queen’s second son. They were not strangers, having known each other since childhood from polo matches.
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 19 February 1986, Andrew’s 26th birthday, he proposed to her at Floors Castle in Scotland. The engagement was announced a month later.
The ring was a Burmese ruby surrounded by ten drop diamonds, designed by Andrew himself to suit her red hair. To the royal family, she was a known quantity. She could ride, she could talk to anyone, she laughed loudly and often. Not everyone close to her was sure what she was marrying.
Her father reportedly gave a private verdict: she was either in love with Andrew or in love with the royal family, and he thought it was 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. The wedding was held on 23 July 1986 at Westminster Abbey. On the morning itself, the Queen made her son Duke of York.
About 2,000 guests filled the abbey, and around the world, about 500 million people watched on television. The bride’s dress was ivory duchess satin with a 17-foot train. Beaded into the train were anchors and waves for Andrew’s naval career and bumblebees and thistles from the Ferguson coat of arms. The public liked her at first.
She was called a tremendous breath of fresh air on the royal scene. Diana later recalled her husband saying he wished she would be like Fergie, all jolly, instead of so miserable. Inside the family, she was the cheerful one. In the first season of the marriage, the Duchess of York seemed to relish royal life.
By two accounts, she got on well with the Duke. Reports held that Philip and Sarah shared a taste for a particular kind of hearty humor and that she was, for a time, his favored daughter-in-law. She learned to fly. In February 1987, she was awarded her private pilot’s license after a 40-hour course paid for as a wedding present.
That December, she gained her license to fly helicopters. She also took up driving horses. One royal biographer said she learned to drive a carriage pulled by four horses, which was 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, you’ve got to be electable, but never elected.
A royal never stands for office, but a royal must always be the kind of person the public would choose if it ever came to a vote. The family’s place rested on goodwill, and goodwill could be spent. The Duke of York was a serving naval officer, and for most of the early marriage, his wife was married to an absence. From 1987 to 1988, he was based at Portland.
From 1989 to 1991, he commanded a helicopter flight aboard HMS Campbeltown. The Navy decided where he slept, and it was rarely at home. One writer put a number on it: in 1990, 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, the Mountbattens managed, and so can you.
His own marriage had begun with long naval separations. To him, a sailor’s wife put up with it. That was the bargain. Their new home, bought on behalf of the Queen, rose on Crown land at Sunninghill Park near Windsor.
Building began in 1987 and finished in 1990. It had 12 bedrooms. The press mocked it, and to the papers it looked less like a royal residence than a supermarket. Their first daughter, Princess Beatrice, was born in August 1988.
Within weeks, the Duchess flew to Australia to join Andrew for an official visit. She left the baby at home. The newspapers attacked her for it. The tide had changed.
During her first pregnancy, her weight had risen, and the tabloids called her the Duchess of Pork and Fat Fergie. Later came Freebie Fergie and Duchess of Do Little. She said years afterward that the names got inside her. When they say you’re the Duchess of Pork, she said, you start believing it.
Behind the nicknames sat a business. These were the years of the tabloid circulation war, and the younger royals became front page property. A duchess who laughed too loudly or flew off on holiday sold papers. For a man like the Duke of Edinburgh, whose whole model of royal life was duty and discretion, the arithmetic was plain.
A headline about the Duchess was a headline about the family. 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.
She denied it. 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. For Philip, there was a line between the family and the people who served it. For Sarah, who had cleaned lavatories and waited tables, the line was hardly visible. He saw the same habit and called it flirting.
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, 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.
Photographs of the 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. Two months later, the marriage was over in all but law.
On 19 March 1992, Buckingham Palace announced that the Duke and Duchess of York were to separate formally. What followed was a piece of palace theater she never forgot. On the day of the announcement, the Queen’s press secretary briefed journalists off the record. The gist was that the duchess was unsuitable for royal life.
A BBC correspondent got hold of it and went on air: The knives are out for Fergie at the palace. I have never known such anger here. The next day, the press secretary apologized. But a sentence spoken into a microphone does not come back.
Sarah wrote about it four years later: I had been tagged unsuitable for royal life, and the charge stuck. I was frozen out. 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. He signed himself with fondest love.
Diana wrote back to him as dearest P. 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. No published letter from Philip to Sarah has ever come to light.
That year, the Princess Royal divorced her husband, the writer Andrew Morton published Diana: Her True Story, fire swept through Windsor Castle, and 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. 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. Before she arrived, she took one more holiday in the south of France, and someone was watching from the undergrowth.
On 9 August 1992, a private jet carried the Duchess, her two daughters, and her financial adviser, John Bryan, to an airstrip in the south of France. The party had rented a farmhouse. A French photographer had been tipped off and had crawled through a mile of undergrowth to stake it out. By the following Monday, the Duchess was at Balmoral as the Queen’s guest.
On the Tuesday, 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.
On Thursday, 20 August 1992, the Daily Mirror published the photographs. They showed the Duchess of York topless beside the pool and Bryan kissing her foot. Sarah later insisted in print that the picture showed Bryan planting his mouth on the top of her foot. It made no difference.
That morning, as she described it four years later, she had sat up through the night. I was the prisoner in the dock, she wrote, already found guilty. Andrew went down to the dining room alone. The Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh had their breakfast upstairs.
Around the table below sat Andrew’s brothers and sister with all the children. The adults were flipping through the Daily Mirror. Andrew leafed through the papers as if he were reading the cricket results. Then he carried a copy upstairs to her room.
At nine, she went up to see the Queen. The Queen was furious, she wrote. Then for the rest of the day, she went from one member of the family to another, apologizing to each in turn. They were all very gracious, she wrote.
Even Prince Philip, who could be stern at times, tried to console me. Other accounts disagree. One reporter said she came late into the breakfast room to find everyone hiding the Mirror under their copies of the Times and the Telegraph. A biographer on Channel 5 went further, saying Philip came into the breakfast room, picked up one of the papers, threw it in front of her, and walked out.
Another line is often put into the Duke’s mouth that morning: There, but for the grace of God, go I. No one has ever confirmed it. It belongs to legend. One thing is certain: whatever he said or did not say at Balmoral, he kept the conclusion to himself for years.
Prince Philip’s conclusion that summer survives only secondhand. His biographer summed it up in three words: Enough was enough. Philip came to regard his son’s wife as simply beyond the pale. Years later, the biographer Ingrid Seward gave the same verdict a temperature: after the breakup of the marriage, Prince Philip was absolutely incandescent with rage with her.
He was furious 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, forty 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, the Queen gave a speech marking forty years since her accession.
Four days earlier, fire had torn through Windsor Castle. Nineteen ninety-two 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. A separation agreement was signed on 28 March 1993.
In January 1996, Andrew 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 had made generous provision, and management of her financial affairs was the Duchess’s responsibility. The divorce was made final in the High Court on 30 May 1996. 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. 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.
In 1999, the Duke’s biographer asked him about his former daughter-in-law. The Duke gave an answer that deserves to be heard whole. I try to keep out of these things as much as possible, he 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. Two years later, the biographer spoke to Sarah. She told him what the policy looked like from the other side of the door.
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.
That June, the Duke turned eighty. Sarah sent him a handsome dinner service. It was supposed to have twelve settings, but it arrived with thirteen. The sample had been included with the set.
Something always goes wrong. Christmas was the family’s other great private ritual at Sandringham. Sarah was not there. Ever since 1992, she wrote, I had been excluded from all these events.
Balmoral was different because Balmoral was the Queen’s. The Queen would invite Sarah at times when the Duke was not there. Her stays were fitted around his like two trains on one line. The Queen kept the door open a crack.
Her husband kept to the other side of the house. In 2005, according to one friend quoted in the press, Sarah went back to Balmoral while the Duke was in residence, by one count for the first time in thirteen years. He avoided her like the plague, the friend said. I don’t think they spoke a single word all week.
Then she gave him fresh reason. In May 2010, an undercover reporter posed as a businessman, and Sarah was recorded offering access to Andrew in return for money. She apologized: I very deeply regret the situation and the embarrassment caused. That is no excuse for a serious lapse in judgment.
In March 2011, she admitted that she had taken money 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. On 2 August 2017 at Buckingham Palace, the Duke of Edinburgh carried out the last of his solo engagements, the Captain General’s parade of the Royal Marines. 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. In May 2018, his biographer published the old interview on his blog. I am not vindictive, the Duke had said. I don’t see much point.
In October 2018 came the wedding that would test the policy. Princess Eugenie was married in St George’s Chapel at Windsor. She 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. For one day, the rule bent. The official portraits were taken afterwards. 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. It did not last, and perhaps it was never meant to. In August 2019, Sarah was at Balmoral again. A royal insider 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. So the Duchess left. He was 98 years old, and the point he had been making since 1992 had not changed by a word.
On 17 July 2020, Princess Beatrice was married in a small ceremony in the chapel at Royal Lodge. There were about twenty 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. The policy of a lifetime gave way for an afternoon to the plain fact of family. Prince Philip died at Windsor on 9 April 2021, two months short of his 100th birthday. His funeral was held on 17 April, and under the rules of the pandemic, only 30 guests could attend.
Sarah was not among them. On the day of the funeral, by one report, she stayed at Royal Lodge and looked after her grandson. She made no public statement about the Duke’s death. 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.
She did his voice. Why are you asking me that? I do it every day. 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. The Queen died on 8 September 2022. Four days later, it was announced that Andrew and Sarah would take in two of the Queen’s corgis.
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. 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. With the Duke and the Queen both gone, the doors he had kept shut were opening again.
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.
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. He put it best himself in 1999 to the one writer who asked. He did not see her, he said, because he saw no point.
But the children come and stay. And far away and long ago, as she remembered it, on a Thursday morning in August, the newspapers lay open across the breakfast table at Balmoral, the porridge was getting cold, and the Duke of Edinburgh was upstairs while the woman in the photographs waited in her room for the day to begin.