Today, at the age of 66, she faces an uncertain future. Brought down by her association with a convicted paedophile, disowned by every charity she supported, she is being evicted from the home she has shared with the former Prince Andrew for 30 years. He has now lost, it seems, his final and most loyal ally. Where she will now live, what she will do and how she will pay for it, are as unclear as they’ve ever been.
It started with a food fight. It was Royal Ascot in June 1985, and Princess Diana was playing matchmaker. She was convinced that her boisterous, bouncy old friend Sarah Ferguson, the daughter of Prince Charles’s polo manager, would get along with Randy Andy, the hero prince of the Falklands who’d arrived back on shore with a rose between his teeth. The Queen duly invited Ferguson to lunch at Windsor. By the end, he was feeding her profiteroles, whereupon she punched him in the arm and said they were far too fattening. He tried to stuff them in her mouth, so she threatened a food fight. At a lunch, at Windsor Castle, with the Queen. She was invited to Sandringham for a week over new year. She gamely went carriage riding with Prince Philip and horse riding with the Queen. A month later, at Floors Castle in Scotland, Andrew got down on both knees to propose. She said yes, but told him that if he changed his mind, in the morning he could say it was all a joke. They were both 26.
“In Andrew, I found my perfect man and soulmate,” Ferguson recalled in her 2011 memoir, Finding Sarah: A Duchess’s Journey to Find Herself. “He was relaxed and endlessly charming, a prankster like me, yet solid and kind. In me, I suppose, Andrew saw a wildflower — a bubbly and forthright woman without pretence or motives. Together, we were like well-matched bookends, pleasant to look at and equally supportive of one another.”
The New York Times reported that England was gripped by Fergie fever. When the engagement was announced in March 1986, it gave a boost to the stock market. She was praised for being a “modern young English woman” while he was “a man of charm, bravery and not a little dash. If, like most young men, he would benefit from the complementary virtues of a sensible young woman, he seems to have an ideal partner in Miss Ferguson.”
In their TV engagement interview, she said she’d fallen for his “wit, charm and good looks”. She was praised for her confidence and aplomb and how much more mature she was than Diana when she got engaged.
“Diana may take a better picture,” wrote The Washington Post, “but Fergie is more fun.”
She moved into his bachelor suite of six rooms in the east wing of Buckingham Palace, a place of damask curtains and electric fires, which she described as, “An absolute time warp. Dozens of stuffed animals blanketed the bed. Boys’ guns and bachelor bits lay all over. One teddy bear wore a vest with, ‘It’s tough being a prince.’ ” It was only in the short term, as after the wedding they might, courtiers mused, move to Kensington Palace, where Charles and Diana lived. Their for ever home, though, looked likely to be Clarence House. In the meantime, with Andrew away and busy with his career in the navy, Fergie went shopping. Before the wedding, she was fitted for 25 new outfits.
* Read more news and analysis about the royal family
Over at the palace, courtiers noted with satisfaction that her previous boyfriends — of which, shockingly for a royal bride, there were several — were “not the type” to cash in with kiss and tell revelations. They worried, though, about the optics of once again planning a wedding when the bride’s parents were divorced, as Diana’s had been. Like Diana before her, Ferguson spent her last night as a single woman at Clarence House, listening to the crowds outside chanting, “Fergie, Fergie!” The post office issued a special wedding stamp.
“I was totally in love with my handsome prince,” she recalled in 2023. “I was the luckiest girl in the world.”
On July 23, 1986, a congregation of 2,000 inside Westminster Abbey and 500 million TV viewers worldwide watched her walk up the aisle. The groom wore the ceremonial day dress of a naval lieutenant, while the bride wore a satin dress with a 17ft 6in train by Lindka Cierach.
The four-year-old Prince William was a pageboy in a sailor suit, poking his tongue out at bridesmaid Zara Phillips, his cousin. The bride and groom returned to Buckingham Palace in an open-topped carriage, waving to cheering crowds, before the wedding party at Claridge’s. The headlines were in agreement: “Fabulous Fergie”. Years later, Diana told Andrew Morton that Charles once said to her, “Why can’t you be more like Fergie?”
Shortly after the wedding, flying home first class from a trip to New York, she was fined almost £1,000 for 51 pieces of excess luggage. It was said to include £33,000 of new purchases and a £515 teddy bear.
“Not even Joan Collins has this much,” said a baggage handler at Heathrow. The palace declined to say who footed the bill.
Sarah Margaret Ferguson was born on October 15, 1959, in a private hospital in London. Her father, Ronald, was an army officer who in retirement embarked on a career in polo. He became friendly with Prince Philip and later became Prince Charles’s polo manager. Sarah was brought up with her elder sister, Jane, near Sunninghill and was sent to the first of two boarding schools when she was eight. Staff at Danes Hill noted that she was a “courageous, bubbly and outgoing little girl”, while at Hurst Lodge she showed promise in swimming and tennis.
She was 13 when their mother walked out and went to Argentina with polo player Héctor Barrantes. Thereafter, she said, they were brought up by nannies.
* Is it game over for Fergie, the duchess of disaster?
“She was emotionally stunted by her upbringing,” writes Tina Brown in The Palace Papers. “Her noisy, irreverent personality disguised the fact that she always felt uncool, overweight and financially insecure.”
But she was also brought into contact with the royal family. When Prince Charles came to stay, they both found it hilarious when she put fake dog poo outside his bedroom door. She and Andrew would play together as children at Windsor Castle.
“I’ve known the King all my life,” she told The Sunday Times. “I absolutely adore him. He’s kind and I love that he still calls me Fergie. Queen Camilla was close friends with Mum, which is why we’re so close now. Diana was my best friend from the age of 15. Queen Elizabeth was much more my mother than my mother was. I called her Mumma.”
In a recent interview with the Financial Times, Ferguson described how she “failed everything” at school but persuaded her father that U was a good mark. When she left, she did a secretarial course, followed by jobs at a lettings agency, an art gallery and a PR company. She had a long-term relationship with Paddy McNally, a racing driver 22 years her senior.
And then she met Andrew. On their wedding day the Queen bestowed on them the title traditionally given to second sons of the monarch, Duke of York. Soon after, the optics — to employ the palace’s word — of the Yorks began, at first slowly, to unravel. There was the PR disaster that was It’s a Royal Knockout. Then came their tour of Canada, where Ferguson arrived wearing a hat with a maple leaf. So far, so good. But they were criticised for taking what some saw as a frivolous approach to the serious business of royal duty, and by animal rights charities for accepting a free pair of fur coats from a local bigwig.
Back at home, alone and pregnant with her first child while Andrew was away at sea, Ferguson was lonely, complaining that they only spent 40 days a year together. “I spent my first pregnancy alone,” she told Harper’s Bazaar. When Princess Beatrice was born in 1988, Andrew was given ten days’ leave, and when the couple went on a tour of Australia, she, but not he, was criticised for leaving six-week-old Beatrice at home. Their second child, Princess Eugenie, was born in 1990. At a dinner party in New York that year, Ferguson playfully used a knife to “knight” a dog called Rutherford. “Arise, Sir Rutherford!” she told the startled guests.
“The duchess was on great form,” said one. “But it kind of surprised us when she knighted the dog.”
By 1991, when she carried out 108 official engagements to Princess Anne’s 768, Fabulous Fergie had become Freeloading Fergie.
“She gives the impression of a council estate girl in the typing pool who’s married the boss’s son and is exploiting it for all she can get,” wrote the Daily Mail.
A particular low point for Prince Philip was said to be the publication in August 1990 of a Hello! “at home with the Yorks” special. Alongside a picture of a beaming Andrew holding his daughters, and Fergie in a sunhat, the cover read: “The Duke and Duchess of York grant us the most personal of interviews and for the first time ever throw open the doors of their home and invite us to share their intimate family moments.” Inside, the magazine promised, was “a spectacular 48-page report with over 70 unique photographs”, for which they were paid a reported £240,000.
“Prince Philip thought she was a bad egg who would let them all down,” said one royal watcher. He was not the only one. In 1992, after six years of marriage, she and Andrew separated. A courtier greeted the news with the observation that she was “sweet-natured but vulgar”.
“The Duke of York is not in close contention for the job of monarch,” shrugged one editorial. “His matrimonial misfortune is therefore hardly a matter of state or a threat to the constitution.”
“The biggest problem in the Yorks’ union was — and always would be — money,” wrote Tina Brown. “Fergie was a crashing spendthrift married to a natural cheapskate who also happened to have much less cash than she had expected. Although far from broke, Andrew was entirely dependent on the Queen’s bounty.” Fergie, she reported, spent freely on holidays, restaurants, clothes and gifts and by the time of the separation, she was £4 million in debt to Coutts.
Things became worse in August 1992, five months after the separation, when the repose of the royal breakfast table was shattered. The front page of the Daily Mirror featured Fergie having her toes sucked by her financial adviser, John Bryan, and kissing him in front of Princess Eugenie. Ferguson, who had been invited to stay at Balmoral for a week with her daughters by the Queen, was promptly banished back to London. An appalled Prince Philip rarely spoke to her again — in an interview in 1999 he said, “I don’t see her because I don’t see much point” — and Diana gleefully texted a journalist friend from the Daily Mail with the words, “The redhead’s in trouble.” Fergie had, it was claimed by some, “made our royal family look a laughing stock in front of the world”.
When he wasn’t sucking her toes, Bryan discovered that her £860,000 annual expenditure included £150,000 on gifts, £50,000 on flowers and £50,000 on parties.
In 1996, the Yorks divorced. Ferguson complained that the palace had killed her marriage. “We got divorced because I had to go out to work and Andrew and I believed that it wasn’t right for me to be commercial while I was still in the royal family.” She had written the first Budgie book while still married, she added, “because there was no money for the second son. Or very little. When people say, ‘You can’t afford to do that,’ I say, who are you? It’s my money. I’ll do as I want.”
“Fergie mishandled the terms of her divorce with the same unerring naiveté with which she mishandled everything else,” wrote Tina Brown, who thought her settlement slightly stingy and shortsighted of the royals. Ferguson admitted that she prioritised retaining the goodwill of Queen Elizabeth and the wider royal family but nevertheless, the settlement was supposed to last her a lifetime. She was given £350,000 in cash, £1.4 million in trust for her daughters and £500,000 towards buying a house. In the event, the Queen bought her a large house in Surrey to live in after her divorce, but Ferguson told Trevor McDonald in 1998 that she wanted a smaller, more manageable house to live in, one which was less expensive to run, so she could avoid getting into debt. “I would much rather live in a small cottage, have my dogs and my cats and my girls,” she added.
“I’m going to survive,” she said defiantly in 1999, “and I’m going to damn well win.”
Yet somehow, monies out always exceeded monies in. In 1996 she was reported to have sold the rights to the Budgie series in return for payment of her debts of as much as £3 million. According to the new biography of her and Andrew by Andrew Lownie, she once spent £14,000 in a month at a London wine merchant and, when in New York — to which she invariably flew by Concorde — she stayed in a suite at the Carlyle. In 1999, Camilla Parker Bowles, as she then was, told a friend she hoped flying Concorde wouldn’t make people think she was like Fergie.
According to Lownie, she spent £25,000 in an hour at Bloomingdale’s, took up to nine holidays a year and employed a full staff including a cook, driver, maid, butler, dresser, nanny, three secretaries, a PA, two gardeners, a flower arranger and a dog walker. At one point she owed £51,000 to Selfridges and, according to Lownie, was sued for non-payment by everyone from an artist who painted a portrait of their daughters for Andrew’s 50th birthday, to the makers of the silver frame in which she presented it, and from an accountancy firm in Harpenden to a solicitor’s in Mayfair. She variously owed £5,000 to a complementary therapist, £65,000 to a personal trainer and £500 to the local newsagent. A Saudi prince once recalled that he sat next to her at dinner and asked if there was anything he could do to help.
“As a matter of fact, you could pay off my overdraft,” she replied.
Yet in a 2011 reality show on US TV, Finding Sarah: From Royalty to the Real World, for which she was paid a reported $300,000, she complained, “I am continually on the verge of bankruptcy.” She told an audience in Washington DC that she was a hard-up single parent.
Over the years, she variously sold blenders and hair straighteners on QVC, launched a range of teas and discussed the possibility of selling biscuit tins adorned with her S monogram. She became an ambassador in America for Weight Watchers and Wedgwood china, with the latter contracting her to make promotional appearances at 40 to 50 malls in the US in a 12-month period. A businessman paid her £100,000 to open a shopping centre in Vienna, during which she was escorted by fake guardsmen while an oompah band played the national anthem. She made a documentary about her attempts to improve the lifestyle of a working-class family in Hull, and lent her name to an ill-starred venture in nursing homes.
She lived for a while in a house near Royal Lodge, Windsor, but moved out after a small fire — started by a Diptyque candle in a bathroom when she was out — necessitated renovations. She moved into Royal Lodge in 2008 and never left. The arrangement was best for their daughters, she explained, with Andrew telling one journalist defensively, “Why can’t you be friends with your ex-wife?” Discussing the arrangement in 2015 with one reporter, she said, “We dare to be different.”
Seven years later, she expanded on her theme to The Sunday Times Magazine. “When I’m in the UK I’m lucky enough to stay at Royal Lodge. I wouldn’t call it my home as that would be presumptuous.” She breakfasted, she said, on soft boiled eggs, granary toast and a tangerine, otherwise she “gets very uptight”. Lunch is always grilled fish or chicken and, “I like to have a proper dinner, but I don’t cook. I can’t. I haven’t the patience.”
Her reputation never recovered from her encounter with the Fake Sheikh. An undercover reporter from the News of the World filmed her in 2010 offering access to her ex-husband for £500,000. She told him exactly how to transfer the money, promised him in return “whatever you want” and went home tipsy with a suitcase full of cash as a £40,000 “down payment”. She went on The Oprah Winfrey Show to confess that she had been a little drunk, and living beyond her means.
“There aren’t really very many words to describe an act of such gross stupidity,” she admitted. “Beatrice and Eugenie just called me and said, Mum, actually, it’s a really good, fresh, clean start for you because we’re here 100 per cent for you and we love you. And I said to them, ‘I’m so glad that through my mistakes you’ll never do this.’ ” Amid the fallout, her staff bill was slashed. Perhaps, she reflected, she should have listened more to Prince Philip when he told her, “Remember when you go out in public, you have to know your actions will hit the front pages of the newspapers.” The Panama Papers in 2016 exposed her offshore finances in the British Virgin Islands, and her confusion about who ran them.
And then there’s Jeffrey Epstein. Epstein was convicted in 2008 of soliciting prostitution from a minor, and negotiated a “sweetheart deal” with prosecutors under which he was released on probation after 13 months. In 2010, on January 16, by which time Epstein was released under house arrest, Ferguson wrote, “Is there any chance I could borrow $50 or $100,000 to help get through the small bills that are pushing me over? Had to ask.” In June the same year she told him: “I will never forget your kindness and friendship at this time.” The next month, July, she emailed him, “My friend, am I allowed to go visit Little St Jeffs? Or is it unavailable to bankrupts?”
In March 2011, it emerged that two months earlier, she had accepted £15,000 from Epstein to help pay off a former PA. In an interview with the Evening Standard, she said that her involvement with Epstein had been a “gigantic error of judgment… I abhor paedophilia and any sexual abuse of children.” Now, it has emerged that the very next month, April 2011, she emailed Epstein to apologise.
“I know you feel hellaciously let down by me. And I must humbly apologise to you and your heart for that. You have always been a steadfast, generous and supreme friend to me and my family. I am apologising to you today for not replying to your email or reaching out to you. I was bedridden with fear. I was paralysed. I was advised, in no uncertain terms, to have nothing to do with you and to not speak or email you. And if I did, I would cause more problems to you, the duke and myself. I was broken and lost. So please understand. I didn’t want to hurt Andrew one more time. I was in overriding fear. I am sorry.”
That August, Epstein wrote to her. “When you first got in trouble, you said to me, ‘Jeffrey, I know that as I told everyone, you’re either on the team or off. I knew you were always on my team.’ That was right.” Ferguson replied, “I am on yours and you are on mine. With great love and strength.”
But she won praise for her attempts to highlight awareness of skin cancer and breast cancer, after she was diagnosed with both and underwent a single mastectomy. Her YouTube videos during lockdown, Storytime with Fergie and Friends, were laudable. But going on Good Morning Britain in 2018 to say that Kate and Meghan could learn from her mistakes was perhaps not the wisest of moves. After her gushing emails to Epstein were revealed earlier this year, she was said to be devastated that she was swiftly dropped by the organisations with which she had previously been associated. Amid the uncertainty about her living arrangements, she is now said to be “on the edge… with nowhere to go or anyone else to go with”.
In 2021, she gave an interview to People magazine, a US supermarket tabloid, in which she said, with considerable justification, that she had “an extraordinary fear of getting it wrong”. However, she added reflectively, she had come to the conclusion that being perfect “is no longer necessary. I’ve really become Sarah. The duchess is there. Good old Fergie’s there too. But Sarah is authentically present. Being Sarah is just enough.”
Alas, the duchess isn’t there any more and being Sarah has proved too much. Only time will tell where Fergie — hard up, homeless and alone — goes next.
