Sarah Ferguson: A duchess unsuited to royalty
It’s not been an easy royal ride for the Duchess of York. As she launches her first romantic novel this week, Sean O’Grady charts the highs and lows of her remarkable life
Yes, indeed, Fergie’s in the news again. This time, though, it isn’t the usual gruesome PR catastrophe, but because she’s got a rather sweet book out – literally a Mills & Boon historical novel. And yes, she’s trading on her name: it’s a sub-Jane Austen mash-up with a titian-haired, insecure, aristocratic heroine, and the clumsy self-references fall long and hard on the reader. But at least no members of the royal family were harmed in the production of Her Heart for a Compass. So there’s no toe-sucking, Jeffrey Epstein-style house parties where the Duke of York is definitely not present, or indeed much sex of any kind. It’s as chaste as a night out at the Pizza Express, Woking.
Fergie also, quite fairly, gives full credit to her “co-author” Marguerite Kaye, who has seen some 82 such novels pass through her word processor. Mills & Boon made a wise choice in commissioning Ms Kaye’s assistance. Some of the titles to be found within her prolific output suggest a certain flair for the genre, and it must have been clear that she would make an excellent collaborator for the duchess: Penniless Brides of Convenience; Matches Made in Scandal; The Undoing of Daisy Edwards, and, inevitably, Titanic.
Sometimes the prose lurches from the 1870s to the 2010s (“I am heartily sick of being the subject of press speculation”) but the historical context seems well researched. It’s still ever so twee, though. Here’s a clip:
Lord Rufus Ponsonby, the Earl of Killin, was considered by most to be a presentable-looking man. His tall, rather lean figure was always immaculately dressed. His aquiline profile was suitably haughty, as befitted an earl of the realm. Every aspect of him was austere, repressed, and calculated.
Lady Margaret Montagu Douglas Scott took an involuntary step back as he loomed over her. ‘I’m all too aware of that.’
As ever, he seemed oblivious to her prickly reaction to him. ‘Why are you skulking in the shadows? Perhaps you are insecure about your appearance,’ he continued, answering his own question. ‘Allow me to reassure you. Your gown is neither too simple nor too ornate for the occasion. Her grace, your mother, has excellent taste.’
And so on. I know everyone’s had a pretty tough couple of years, but I have to warn you that there is talk of TV and film rights being awarded for adaptations of Her Heart for a Compass – what you might term “variants of concern”.
The critics have been mostly unkind. The Independent’s Roisin O’Connor notes that “some passages read like Wikipedia entries”; The Daily Telegraph found it a “slog”; while the Mail’s Jan Moir, who seems to be hardhearted by nature, called it “a blizzard of cliches”. Then again, Ms Moir once wrote a column under the heading: “I can’t take any more of Fergie blabbing about her blubber” – so we know, at least, where she’s coming from.
The book is a very Fergie-ish affair, and not just because Lady Margaret Montagu Whatsit is based on a distant ancestor of Sarah Margaret Ferguson, who is a descendant of the Buccleuch family. The character almost shares her birthday, has similar horsey interests, and is described as “very naive but, by heavens, she had real spirit”. Ferguson herself declares that “people will spot the similarities between me and my heroine, Lady Margaret. She’s a redhead, she’s strong-willed, she’s led by her heart. But I hope people won’t read too much into it.” It’s hard not to, though.
The fact that this is a historical romance is very telling. Though she is by no means an academic historian, you get the impression that few would get greater pleasure from time travel than Sarah Ferguson. The publicity videos for her novel have her dressed up in 1870s riding gear and big flouncy gowns, and she hasn’t looked happier in years. No one is going to take the mickey out of those smart, classy outfits like they used to laugh at her rather bold dress sense in the 1980s (think ra-ra skirts and big puffy sleeves).
She seems obsessed with the 19th century. She’s written books about Victoria and Albert, her elder daughter Beatrice was named after Queen Victoria’s youngest child, and her younger daughter Eugenie was named after a granddaughter of Victoria’s who wound up as Queen of Spain, as it happens. It’s certainly true that “Princess Fergie” would probably have found life rather easier in most of the Victorian era, when she might have been looked after rather better, financially, than she has been since her divorce from Andrew in 1996. Also, they didn’t have long lenses in those days. No wonder it appeals.
She is also hopelessly romantic (like a character in a Mills & Boon book), open and sentimental – though she strangely married into a family that is anything but. (And yes, the parallels with Diana Spencer and Meghan Markle, among others, are compelling in that regard.) She once said that, when she got hitched to Prince Andrew in 1986, she wasn’t marrying the fairytale but the man – but the truth is maybe the other way around.
Certainly she was in love with Andy – “my man”, as she called him. In stark contrast to Diana and (especially) Charles in 1981, there were no private doubts in their minds, and they seemed very well suited to one another in their boisterous, fun-loving, non-intellectual way. Whatever may have happened in more recent times, it seemed that “Randy Andy” had sown his wild oats and was set on being a family man. When she joked to Andrew after he proposed to her that he could change his mind in the morning, it was just a self-deprecating joke: not a Freudian “whatever love means” slip.
But both were a bit on the rebound, coming out of relationships they hadn’t wanted to end. Andrew’s dalliance with the American actress Koo Stark might not have proscribed his continuing as a “senior royal”, as the phrase goes, but the revelation that she had appeared topless in an otherwise unremarkable film version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover put the tin hat on it. In Sarah’s case it was her rejection by Paddy McNally, a wealthy businessman connected to Formula One. For some reason, McNally, 20 years her senior, didn’t want to marry her when she made the suggestion, and that was that.
Betrayal is the recurring motif in the tragic noveletta that is the real-world life of Fergie. The first instance was when she was eight years old, when her beautiful aristocratic mother Susan (nee Wright) left her father, Major Ron, yeoman farmer of Berkshire, also leaving behind the young Sarah and her elder sister Jane. Susan ran off to Argentina with an even richer suitor, Hector Barrantes – like Ferguson, a big shot in the world of polo. (She died in a car accident in 1998.) It was through the polo connection that Sarah met Andrew when she was very young, though they’d not spoken for years by the time Diana and the Queen conspired to do some matchmaking for the pair in the 1980s.
Ron had been informal polo manager to Prince Philip and then Prince Charles, and his position at the Guards Polo Club left him pretty well connected – usefully for his younger daughter. Later, though, after being caught visiting a brothel, Major Ron compounded the error of judgement by writing a memoir – The Galloping Major – which blamed “toadies” at the palace for Sarah’s difficulties. Another greatly upsetting betrayal for the duchess, though she had forgiven him for it by the time he died of cancer in 2003.
I was never cut out for royalty
Her most consequential betrayal, though – the one that crushed her marriage almost before it began – was at the hands of the palace. When she married the Duke of York (the title was a wedding present from the Queen) and became a royal duchess, Fergie and Andy expected, Mills & Boon style, to be living together and starting a family like any other naval couple (Andrew was a royal navy helicopter pilot and had seen service in the Falklands, which he was later famously to claim left him with an inability to sweat). Instead, their honeymoon on his mother’s yacht Britannia lasted all of three days before the boat had to go for its usual cruise around Scotland with the entire Windsor gang.
The Yorks were told that Sarah would have to live in a flat in Buckingham Palace, and Andrew was to stay in naval quarters when he wasn’t at sea. They saw each other for 42 days a year. It was ridiculous, but they couldn’t change it because the courtiers made sure they couldn’t. It was not that big a shock to find the marriage running into trouble. The Duchess of York found herself without any support, and the person who knew exactly how “the Firm” worked – her husband – was down in Portland or on a boat somewhere.
Fergie spent too much, larked around too much, was too familiar with the public and the servants, had unconventional taste in fashion, was considered too keen on free hospitality, and the press decided her bottom was too large (for what was never made clear). The nicknames were coined, and stuck – Frumpy Fergie, Freebie Fergie, Duchess of Pork. They were undeserved and deeply damaging to a woman who was prone to low self-esteem.
As Sarah often says, she has a gift for “self-sabotage” – but matters were not helped by her new family. Many years later she could still recall – and agree with – Prince Philip’s rhetorical question: “How could such a smart woman be so stupid?”. There was a tearful, blistering row when Princess Anne made an unguarded quip about “outsiders”. Even Sarah’s great friend Diana, an ally in a hostile environment, was always upstaging her – more stylish, slimmer, more elegant, higher up in the pecking order. They were fourth cousins, similar ages, and had much in common as high-born Sloane types, and Diana wanted Sarah to marry her husband’s eligible brother.
Ferguson was in the front row on Diana’s side at the wedding in 1981, and Prince William was a page at Fergie’s wedding. They stayed close, mostly, all the way through the collapse of their respective marriages, and even holidayed together after their divorces came through (there was even once a plan to synchronise their departure from royal life). They were said to be like sisters, so also prone to squabbles. They didn’t speak for months once after Fergie turned up at an Aids function and Diana accused her of stealing her gig. When Diana died, they’d not spoken for a year.
As the years have gone on and his own family has expanded, Charles has been edging the Yorks out of the picture, and the Epstein affair has left all of them out in the cold. Fergie gets on better than most with the Queen. When asked what she “required” for a divorce settlement, Sarah told her mother-in-law “your friendship”. Touching, yes, but also some protection against her enemies at court.
In any case, Fergie wasn’t left with nothing (or only £20,000 a year, as she once pleaded to Oprah Winfrey). In fact she got half a million to buy a decent house (it was a long time ago), £350,000 to clear debts, £1.4m for a trust fund for B and E, plus Andrew would pay for their education. The £20,000 pa was just a formality, the equivalent of Andrew’s £20,000 naval officer’s stipend. Within a few years, Fergie was back in debt, with an overdraft of between £2m and £3m, and desperate for cash.
That fatal lack of money, along with her expensive tastes, was also the root of another, more unusual betrayal. The News of the World in 2010 organised a classic sting – the secretly filmed footage shows her with a bottle of wine, smoking a cigarette, as a bogus businessman opens a briefcase with $40,000 cash in it. She is overwhelmed. Later, on Oprah, she said she seemed drunk, but wasn’t drunk – rather “worse for wear” – and she was very expansive. In the grainy video, she impulsively ups the ante with a bid for £500,000 – “That opens up everything you would ever wish for. I can open any door you want, and I will for you. Look after me and he’ll look after you… you’ll get it back tenfold.” The basic flaw in the sting was that no one in their right mind thought that Andrew could be worth that much just to meet.
It was a complete journalistic fraud, enacted on a vulnerable woman. The following year she was hit by another damaging financial revelation when it emerged that Andrew had got Jeffrey Epstein to let her have £15,000 to clear another debt. It seems a curiously trivial sum (by their standards), but it was another reason for her to hate herself. The reason she lives with Andrew is perhaps that she can’t afford any other way to enjoy the kind of surroundings a duchess is supposed to enjoy, although they also share a genuinely warm friendship. Even after the Epstein allegations and the weirdest royal interview ever (with Emily Maitlis on Newsnight), Sarah still sticks up for Andrew, telling anyone who’ll listen (not many) what a super grandfather he is (Eugenie gave birth in June, and Beatrice is due to shortly).
All Sarah could ever do after her divorce was try and leverage her fame and reputation, and she did exactly that, always picking herself up from whatever blunder she’d wandered into. Ambassador for Weight Watchers, TV ads for a bank (very amusing), the Budgie books, more children’s stories, a couple of uneasy interviews with Oprah, sofa telly, an ITV documentary for which she lived on a deprived council estate in Manchester for a week, and now the historical novels – she’ll do it. She’s had to, because for as long as Prince Philip and Prince Charles drew breath she wasn’t going to get a penny out of the House of Windsor.
Was her failure in her royal role due to a conspiracy, as Sarah and her father suspected? Perhaps somewhat. Sarah seems confused about it, though, blaming herself often, but also putting the responsibility on others. The truth is it was probably a bit of both.
There were doubts in some quarters about Fergie’s suitability as a raw recruit. If you watch the footage of the 1986 royal wedding – a very big deal at the time – you can see that someone had strapped a giant teddy bear to the back of the horse-drawn carriage that took Andrew and Sarah to Westminster Abbey. That was Fergie’s idea: the royal family’s answer to football’s joker Paul Gascoigne.
About a decade later, a former private secretary to the Queen, Lord (Martin) Charteris, gave an interview to The Spectator in which he called Fergie a “vulgarian”. She was perfectly capable of self-destruction, not least in her odd reliance on a mystic Greek lady named Madame Vasso who sat her under a perplex pyramid for therapy sessions and did tarot-card readings. “Fergie’s witch”, as Diana called her, actually warned Fergie off her Texan lovers, but she took no notice. (Sure enough, Vasso also betrayed her with a tell-all book.)
But whatever scrapes Fergie got into, including galumphing around on It’s a Royal Knockout, the palace just let her get on with it, allowing her plenty of rope. According to Ferguson, they betrayed her trust – “You tell them a few secrets, and then, bang, they come back the other way.” She thought herself “ugly, fat, with a huge bottom” – and so, it seemed, did they. As it was, they wouldn’t let Andy and Fergie live together, and she’d been brought up not to be a “bore” or “encumbrance” and tried to get used to it by working from 6am to 2am. It might have been better all round if she’d been the Olympic show-jumper she had once dreamed of becoming.
In a cringey interview a decade ago with Oprah’s in-house psychologist, Dr Phil, as part of her “self-punishment” after the News of the World entrapment, Fergie found herself agreeing with his diagnosis. He had worked out that she was an “addict” – that is, that she was addicted to pleasing others. She is a self-declared long-term “pleaser”. She has never lost that addiction, despite the “others” consistently betraying her. The great, unfathomable exception to that pattern was, and is, Andrew. Even when confronted with the “toe-sucking” pictures (with his infant daughter looking on) and all the other stories, he refused to accept she’d been unfaithful to him, and forgave her anyhow. Now, at 60 or so, they still have each other, but face an uncertain future. In Sarah’s own words, she “was never cut out for royalty”. Funnily enough, neither was her husband.
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