It’s a significant moment when your family marries into a new circle. But becoming part of the House of Windsor is an all together different matter. It must be an overwhelming sensation to know that you and your child are going to be forever associated with royalty. What is it like to suddenly find your family intimately within the royal orbit? Is it a dream? It was a total shock when it came.
Or a royal nightmare? And I was supposed in love. Whatever in love means. Outsiders have struggled to do well when they enter the royal family. Do you ever have disagreements about things? Oh, yes. When Fergie met the monarchy, it elevated her family to royalty. For Ron Ferguson, to have your daughter marry a prince, become a duchess, and to become a senior member of the royal family.
I mean, it just doesn’t get any better. But two families coming together brings with it palace politics. You’re not only marrying royal in-laws, but also all of the people working at the palace, and you have to be pretty sophisticated in order to maneuver yourself throughout. Royal insiders reveal what was said behind closed doors.
Charles apparently said, “Look, the problem with Sarah is you just can’t shut her up.” And when the Fergusons brought scandal to the House of Windsor, Ronald Ferguson was photographed entering a club for men, and it offered massage. And the rumor got around that the massage wasn’t quite all they offered.
We discover what happened to the royals’ new relatives. Senior royals did rue the day that they had ever invited the Ferguson family to join them. And if there is any way back. What it meant for Fergie was expulsion from the royal family, and she was on her own again. The love affair between Fergie and the monarchy began in the summer of 1985 at Ascot.
As the royals prepared to return for dinner at Windsor Castle, an unsuspecting Prince Andrew was about to be set up on a date. Prince Andrew was in the Navy. He’s still a bachelor, and I think that the royal family were quite keen for him to settle down. Diana said to the Queen, “You know, I think it would be be lovely if we could invite Fergie.
She’s a friend of mine. She’s about the same age as Andrew.” Both were good-time gals and boys, and the scene was set at Windsor Castle with a lot of booze. They sat next to each other, and they were flirting almost from the, you know, from the word go. Andrew rather cheekily insisted that she take a great big plate of profiterole, and said, “Don’t worry, I’ll have some, too.” And then didn’t.
So, I think she gave him a sort of playful slap, and I think that was really the beginning of their relationship. It was the start of a romance that would spark intense public interest in Fergie’s family. She came from a very well-to-do family. Sarah’s mother, Susan, married Ronald Ferguson when she was only 18 years old, and they had two children, Sarah, who’s called Fergie, and her sister, Jane.
And they bought this beautiful house called Lowood, very near Ascot, in in that very beautiful area full of rhododendrons and and trees and houses hidden behind big gates. And that’s where Fergie grew up. They always were aspirational, and I think they had a feeling they were sort of almost minor aristocracy.
For Sarah, in the back of her mind, she was always going to try to get a husband who was special and certainly rich. Even for the well-to-do Fergusons, Fergie’s relationship with Andrew was a tantalizing prospect. Ronald Ferguson was absolutely thrilled and delighted. 10 out of 10 for him. She couldn’t have done better.
Marrying into into the royal family has to change things, doesn’t it? Because it’s that final bit of icing on the cake. But there are hurdles to clear for a royal bride-to-be, not least a stern examination of the family tree. Thankfully, when it came to the Fergusons, the Windsors didn’t have to look too far from their own.
Some people like to say that Sarah Ferguson was middle class. She wasn’t. No, no. My God, to be thought of as a commoner. My goodness. No, no, no. They’re very much upper-class English. The Ferguson family actually can trace their lineage back to the royal family. So, Sarah Ferguson and Prince Andrew are very, very distantly related through Charles II, but not that is much of a cause for concern for the royal family.
In fact, they probably encourage that. It wasn’t just shared distant relations that tied the Fergusons to the Windsors, but also their social circles. Ron Ferguson, Fergie’s father, had had mixed with members of the royal family for many years. He’d been in a very smart cavalry regiment. He’d ridden alongside the Queen on the Mall.
He’d played polo with Prince Philip. And of course, he managed the polo lifestyle of the Prince of Wales. So, they were a family that the Windsors were familiar with. But Fergie’s well-connected background hid a childhood trauma. By the age of 13, her parents, Ronald and Susan, had separated. Sarah was at a a pivotal age.
I mean, those early teenage years, it can really mess with your head when things at home aren’t the way you want them to be, and aren’t the way you expect them to be. She had this magical childhood, and then suddenly, it all sort of folded. She talks about it herself, how that’s when she started to feel very insecure and inadequate, and she blamed herself for the breakup of her parents’ marriage.
In 1975, Sarah’s mother, Susan, left the UK to start a new life with a new man in Argentina, leaving Sarah and her older sister, Jane, to be brought up by their father. As Sarah grew into adulthood, Ron Ferguson’s influence on her would be profound. After Sarah’s mother ran off to Argentina, she became quite a daddy’s girl.
I think she got a lot of strength from having her father solidly behind her, and he was very good with her. With Ron Ferguson’s sense of determination running through her, Fergie’s pursuit of happiness had now led her to her dashing prince. As their courtship blossomed, it was soon time for Andrew to take the relationship to the next daunting level.
Sarah was invited to Sandringham for a shooting weekend, because the Queen always believed that that the only way that her her children are going to ever get to know anyone is to entertain them in one of the royal homes. I think for Sarah to meet the Windsors is a hugely pressurizing point in her early relationship with with Andrew, because here you are, you are the outsider coming in.
You know that everybody’s gaze is on you. Her own mother and father had been to Sandringham for shooting weekends, and obviously, they had told her what to do. So, she was not completely ignorant of of of how it was going to work, but she was very nervous. So, I think she found herself in that situation all that at once can be a pressure-cooker situation for things to go monumentally wrong.
And I think in Sarah’s case, they kind of did. When she walked into the double sitting room at Sandringham, I think she tripped over one of the Queen’s corgis, and she spilled her drink. And then in her fluster, she just thought, “Who are all these people?” So, she just curtsied to everyone, because she knew that that way, she wasn’t making a faux pas.
After that, I wonder whether, from Sarah’s point of view, what she wanted to do was redouble her efforts to really please them and be the perfect person in their eyes. Despite less than royal first impressions, Fergie set about winning over the Windsors by appealing to their interests. She was someone who really threw herself into the pursuits that the royal family valued.
For example, she learned to drive four-in-hand, you know, carriage driving, the thing that Prince Philip at that time absolutely loved, and she was pretty good at it. And Philip thought this was extraordinary. She had learned to ride at a very young age, and Her Majesty loves horses, and she liked to ride. And the fact that Sarah could accompany her on horseback was another huge plus.
After finding common ground, Fergie’s outgoing nature began to charm the Windsors. I think with the royal family, when they’re in their personal time, it is a very outdoorsy kind of life that they lead, hunting, shooting, fishing, and she was up for all of that. So, her larger-than-life, boisterous, up-for-anything personality very much endeared her to them.
So, well, you know, the stars were really aligning very quickly for Andrew and Fergie because she had made such a big impression on his family. Sarah had passed the sternest of royal tests. Her family were up to scratch. By February 1986, Sarah Ferguson had been dating Prince Andrew for less than a year. After a whirlwind romance and winning over the royals Sandringham, Fergie was whisked away to Scotland where Andy had an important question to ask her.
Fergie and Andrew went to spend the weekend with the Duke of Roxburghe at Floors Castle. Um well, as you do if you’re a prince. And during that time, in that romantic setting, he went down on one knee and he asked her to marry him. And I think she was so surprised. I mean, she just burst out laughing.
She thought, was this all some big joke? You know, because she was felt she was so un-princess-like. She wasn’t this perfect-looking girl and she just couldn’t believe it could quite happen to her. And she said, of course, of course. She was just over the moon. The Fergusons, when they realized that their daughter was engaged to Prince Andrew, I mean, they were you know, that they were ecstatic.
They thought this was the most marvelous thing. How do you feel this morning, Major? How do you expect me to feel? Excited? I feel um absolutely thrilled. On the 17th of March, 1986, the announcement that Ron Ferguson had been waiting for finally came. Sarah Ferguson and Prince Andrew were to be married.
Do you remember what he said? Absolutely. [laughter] But I’m not telling you. It was the epitome of the social ambitions of Ron Ferguson to have his daughter marrying the Queen’s favorite and second son. I mean, it put them front and center of British public life. He went from being, you know, a landowner to being a member of the the House of Windsor.
And he referred to himself as being a member of the royal family. So, you know, the Fergusons had arrived. Thousands of miles away in Argentina, Fergie’s mother Susan was a little more restrained than her former husband in reacting to her daughter’s impending nuptials. How do you feel today? Very happy. Very Very pleased.
Do you think that something might change in your life from today onwards? No, I don’t see any change. Because she went to live in South America, I think that Susan, Sa- Sarah’s mother, didn’t feel that the marriage would change things for her. But it’s a curious thing. She was very wary. After months of planning, on the 23rd of July, 1986, the big day arrived.
With her father by her side, all eyes were on Fergie as she prepared to become the Duchess of York. Fergie herself, you know, she was very nervous. But she had her father at her side in the coach going to Westminster Abbey and he just made her laugh and told her jokes all the way there. It was huge, you know, Andrew was fourth in line to the throne.
He was the favored son. And so, you know, this had to go really, really well. The focus was also on the Windsors and how they would accommodate Fergie’s fractured family. The etiquette can be quite tricky when you’ve got uh extended families, broken families. I mean, by this stage, both Sarah’s mother and father had remarried.
Uh she had half-sisters, half-brothers. Were they all going to be invited? Was it okay? You know, is divorce still a dirty word in the royal family? The other thing to remember is the fact that Fergie’s mother had married an Argentinian. That was a obviously a discussion at the time.
It wasn’t that many years since Britain had been at war with Argentina over the Falkland Islands. So, there all these sort of minor diplomatic niggles in the background which could affect, if you like, sort of the long-term integration of these families going forward. But things had moved on by this time, 1986.
And both her mother’s partner, Hector, and Ronald’s new wife, also called Susan, were invited. And in fact, actually, her half-brother and half-sister from her father’s new marriage, they they acted as pageboy and bridesmaid. So, it was very inclusive. It was very um forward-thinking of the royal family to embrace them at that stage because it was relatively new at the time in the UK where you started having these, you know, more complicated family structures.
And very much in their interest to bring them in because ultimately, they also become, in a way, ambassadors in terms of the royal brand. With the Ferguson family warmly welcomed, Fergie relished the day that she finally became a royal. I remember her saying to me, you know, the little girl that used to play tag with Andrew was now marrying her prince.
And he was her prince. She truly loved the man and she couldn’t quite believe it. You couldn’t take that smile off her face. It was almost a sort of, yeah, I’ve done it. You know, here I am, right up here marrying the Queen’s son in full view of everybody. I think there was a sense of of triumph about her in many ways, but also a sense that it’s unbelievable, isn’t it? It’s me it’s just me, Fergie.
The day was just as exhilarating for Ron Ferguson as it was for his daughter. Major Ron had been up half the night walking up and down the mall because everyone was partying there. And he just wanted to drink in the atmosphere. He was licking his lips at one point.
He was very much focused of of of attention as well as Sarah. And his whole family were the focus of world attention. And it was like, this is the stamp. This is the seal of approval for the Fergusons. He’d been part of royal circles for a long time, but to have your daughter marry a prince, become a Duchess with all the grand ceremonial at Westminster Abbey, and to be included in the royal family, become a senior member of the royal family.
I mean, it just doesn’t get any better. The union of the Fergusons and the monarchy was now complete. All that was left to seal a perfect day was for the royal couple to make the traditional balcony appearance in front of thousands of well-wishers. At the end of the wedding that afternoon, there was just a hint that all might not be well because they did a very strange thing.
They did this odd business of kind of working the crowd up, almost like they were a sort of musical entertainers. You know, they were the crowd were chanting kiss, kiss, kiss. And and Sarah was sort of conducting and orchestrating this. I think there’s a a fine line between sort of exuberance and sort of being over the top.
And Fergie strayed too often into the over-the-top realms. She somehow just didn’t know when to sort of throttle back. The senior royals standing alongside, there was an uncomfortable feeling about that. Again, the word is it was slightly vulgar. So, although the wedding itself was good, there was a hint of trouble to come.
Sarah Ferguson, the horsey girl from Hampshire, was now her royal highness, the Duchess of York. She had brought the Ferguson family name into the royal spotlight. And from the outside, she seemed to be settling well into royal life. But among her royal in-laws, not everyone was a fan. Anne was probably the only senior royal who, right from the start, was very wary of Sarah.
I mean, they she called her the outsider. What had at first seemed, especially to Charles, to Philip, this bright, positive uh young thing coming in and and sort of adding sparkle was just starting to to sort of leak away. Charles apparently said, “Look, the problem with Sarah is you just can’t shut her up.” She could be fun some of the time, but just not all the time because it was giving them a headache.
The Queen was the one person who, you know, remained steadfastly loyal and absolutely loved being in the company of her daughter-in-law far more than she liked being with Diana. Fergie loved dogs, Fergie could ride, Fergie could do everything that Diana couldn’t do. Sarah’s husband, Prince Andrew, returned to sea.
And Fergie had to leave her old life as a Ferguson and navigate the new world of the Windsors by herself. She said she married a man, but ended up in a marriage with the palace. She had to act in a certain manner. That wasn’t Sarah. Sarah had was this huge, bubbling personality. People think that living in a palace, wow, how glorious being this princess.
It actually wasn’t. It was the reverse. It was very bleak. It was very lonely. And there was no escape from it. Despite Fergie’s problems within the palace, her place within the Windsor family was strengthened when she gave birth to Palace, her place within the Windsor family was strengthened when she gave birth to Princess Beatrice in August 1988, the fifth in line to the throne.
So, after 4 and 1/2 days, the York family, and now we can call them a family, left the Portland Hospital. But, who does she look like? Is it her father? Or is it her mother? House of Windsor or House of Ferguson? Well, only you can decide that. Ferguson bloods is now part of the royal lineage.
But, it kind of cements that relationship between the in-laws, in this case the Fergusons, and and the royals. Two years later, [bell] another baby, Princess Eugenie, joined the York family and became sixth in line to the throne. Her Royal Highness, Duchess of York, who safely delivered of a daughter at 7:58 p.m. today.
Her Royal Highness and child are well. Sarah had given the Windsors their first royal princesses since Princess Anne’s birth. Her most significant champion, the Queen, even came to visit the Duchess in hospital. But, despite the monarch’s support, Sarah seemed to be losing allies within the royal circle. Even the British press, who had once welcomed her with open arms, began to criticize her behavior.
Fergie and Andrew first went to America. They were in Los Angeles. And I was there. We I was part of the the press crew there. I would just remember there was this very big conference, and Andrew was giving a speech, and then Fergie got up and gave a little speech. Sarah, and I I know, against advice, wanted to make a speech, which, um, you know, the wives of royals wouldn’t normally do.
It’s It’s breaking with protocol, but she insisted. At last, I have the turn to talk. All these men around here. Love you. I’ll see you later. That phrase, it was only a joke, but it had us it had a sort of sexual connotation, which is a complete no-no. The worm had turned somewhat by then, and Fergie was not enjoying the same sort of flattering headlines that she’d had up until, uh, you know, in the early years of the marriage.
It was Ronald, her father, who stood up for her. Although the tide was beginning to turn against the Duchess, it was ironically her father, Major Ferguson, who first brought disgrace into Sarah’s new life as a Windsor. Well, in 1988, there was a huge scandal about Ronald Ferguson being photographed entering a club called the Wigmore Club.
Now, the Wigmore Club was, um, a club for men, um, and it offered massage, and the rumor got around that the massage wasn’t quite all they offered. It was deeply embarrassing for Ron Ferguson, because he was enjoying the, um, you know, the sort of reflected glory of being associated with the Windsors, and then all of a sudden he had his, um, his antics just splashed all over the front cover of all the tabloids.
And of course, must have deeply embarrassed his daughter. The fallout from this scandal of the Wigmore Club was enormous, because at the time, uh, Ronald ran the Guards Polo Club, and he had a very responsible job. But, this scandal really besmirched his name. He issued a statement to clarify reports in this morning’s newspapers.
In it, Major Ferguson said, “I have not been sacked, and I have not resigned, but I was not reelected, and was not prepared to accept the alternative position.” Prince Philip, who was president of the club, refused to help. He kept asking to meet Philip, and, you know, his daughter’s father-in-law, and Philip refused because of the associated kind of taint.
And it’s just you become basically persona non grata. And unfortunately, you know, look, families, we all fall out. We all fall out. We have tests and things like that. But, when you have a fall from grace like that within the royal family, it takes a very, very long time to be accepted back in, and in some cases, never.
Fergie becomes guilty by association. This is your father. This is what he’s done. And she almost has to mop up after that particular scandal, and redouble her efforts once again to get into the royal family’s good grace. Sarah’s loyalty to her own family was tested by her father’s scandal. With her new husband, Prince Andrew, often at sea, her loyalty to the Windsors was now also tested.
Fergie was a very needy woman. She She needed her man there. She needed him beside her. And often, when Andrew came back from these long stints, his main preoccupation was either golf or watching television, because he was simply too tired to do anything else. And And And the marriage began to unravel. Sarah’s friendships with other men began to be scrutinized, particularly when she became close with American businessman Steve Wyatt.
Fergie’s new friendship was revealed in the newspapers when a cleaner found photos of them on holiday. And the press began to ask questions about the Yorks’ marriage. The stories claimed that the Duchess traveled to Morocco with Mr. Wyatt and met for other holidays, parties, and private dinners. A cleaner at Mr.
Wyatt’s former flat is said to have found photographs of the couple together. It wasn’t an obvious, uh, example of definite proof of of infidelity, but, you know, it was pretty close. The separation was was a huge step forward, and and one which the Queen must have been deeply saddened about.
But, they clearly needed a break from each other, because things were not happy. But, I think the the Queen was as baffled as as the rest of us as to why it had come to this. Sarah had to decide to either make the marriage work or move on. And in March, the Duke and Duchess announced their separation.
The Yorks’ apparent separation leaves two young children in an unprecedented position so close to the throne, and a young woman whose role and future as a divorced Duchess of York will take the royal family into uncharted waters. After the separation was announced, all Sarah’s formal, um, appointments, all the events that she was booked for, they were all canceled.
Fergie’s royal life stopped. Once you’ve stepped across a certain line, you’re cast into outer darkness, and and that’s what happened to Sarah. The press speculated that Fergie could reenter the Windsor fold by somehow repairing the marriage. But, then rumors began to circulate of a new man in her life, John Bryan.
Fergie was in a very distraught state. So, her friend of the moment, who was her financial advisor, supposedly, John Bryan, decided, “Let’s get away from it all. I’ll rent, uh, a villa in the south of France, and Fergie, uh, and I will go there with the children and the nanny, uh, and we’ll just have a break.
” But, unfortunately for them, the photographers found them immediately. Unknown to Fergie and John Bryan, they’d been caught by the paparazzi. Sarah later flew to Balmoral to stay with the royal family on their annual summer break. The morning’s newspapers are all laid out on a side table, um, in the breakfast room in Balmoral, and that morning’s newspapers were filled with pictures of Sarah Ferguson.
She was caught lying in the sun with this guy apparently sucking her toes. I mean, he claims, as if it makes any difference, he was kissing her toes. Anyway, unbeknown to Sarah, the newspapers had got photos The paparazzi had taken these pictures. The newspapers got them. These are the pictures that the Queen and her son, the Duke of York, will have seen at the breakfast table at Balmoral this morning.
An intimate series of photos showing her daughter-in-law and his wife topless at the poolside in the south of France kissing a Texan millionaire. The Queen’s granddaughters, fifth and sixth in line to the throne, are pictured standing by watching. I mean, it’s it’s impossible to imagine the shock, the horror, even for someone as self-confident as Sarah, when she saw these pictures.
And apparently, Prince Philip came into the breakfast room, picked up one of the papers, and just threw it in front of her, and walked out. Fergie had shamed the Ferguson and Windsor names, and left Balmoral soon after. The Duchess of York left Balmoral Castle today using a side entrance of the royal estate to drive to Aberdeen Airport.
Her two daughters, Princess Eugenie and Princess Beatrice, were with her. No longer the luxury or privilege of an began between her and Prince Andrew. But as the mother of the fifth and sixth in line to the throne, she still had to navigate the world of the Windsors. Well, basically after the breakup of the marriage, the family ignores Fergie.
Uh Prince Philip is absolutely incandescent with rage with her cuz he feels that she’s let down the monarchy. Which he has spent his entire life supporting I his wife the Queen. And in you know, in a few years Fergie had reduced the reputation of the monarchy to shreds in his mind and he was absolutely not going to put up with it and he said to the Queen, she is not coming here. She’s out.
I don’t ever want to see her again. Sarah and Andrew officially divorced in May 1996. Fergie could retain the name Duchess of York but was stripped of her Royal Highness title. Any support she could take from the Ferguson clan also began to slip away. In 1998, Sarah loses her mother who dies in an accident and in 2003, she loses her father and her only sister lives in Australia.
So we once again find her in that space where she’s isolated, lonely and cut off and grieving. The closest family she had left in the UK were her daughters and her ex-husband Prince Andrew. Sarah had very publicly cuckolded Andrew and yet Andrew is very forgiving of her. He continues to be there for her. He helps her financially.
Prince Andrew inherits a Royal Lodge, the Queen Mother’s home in Windsor Great Park. He does it up at great expense and Fergie pretty much moves in with him and continues to live there. It was baffling to the royal family particularly to Prince Philip who could not understand why she was still occupying a royal home.
And they were very very determined to make this one of the happiest divorces you could do and that’s what they did. As Fergie’s turbulent history with the Windsors faded, she was slowly and quietly admitted to the fringes of royal life. But in 2010, she was in debt and made a reckless decision revealed in an exclusive undercover expose.
Undercover reporter Mazher Mahmood, dubbed the Fake Sheikh, had posed as a businessman and lured Sarah into a financial sting. At the time, Andrew was the UK’s trade envoy. Although there was no suggestion of any wrongdoing by the prince, for Fergie, it looked even worse than the toe-sucking pictures with John Bryan that had effectively expelled her from the royal family.
It was considered to be particularly damaging because it was selling the royal brand for for the highest bidder. And when that news story came out, it did damage the brand of the Windsors because all of a sudden everybody around the world felt, well actually, if you want to go and have tea or coffee or a meeting, you just, you know, show them the money.
I don’t think the royal family could envisage a worse betrayal than someone selling access to them. Well, I think probably the senior royals did rue the day that they had ever invited the Ferguson family to join them. The Fake Sheikh business was one of the low low points in in Fergie’s life.
It looked like Fergie had really gone too far this time and had burnt her bridges with the Windsors for good. In the face of scandals, affairs and divorce, could there ever be a way back into royal life? There were only two things that joined the Windsor and the Ferguson families together indefinitely.
Their names were Beatrice and Eugenie. The children are the glue between the Fergusons and and the House of Windsor and that glue is unbreakable. Having grown up in the shadow of their parents, as young women they found themselves torn between the Windsors and Fergie. Beatrice and Eugenie by this time are adults.
They’re very conscious of their position within the royal family. But they also have this relationship with their mother who is is such a pivotal part of their lives. Yeah, I’m here for [laughter] you. Yeah, thanks, Mom. I see myself as a mini mommy. So I kind of I kind of have this I kind of have this sort of almost anything you could do I want to do better.
So So I want to I have to tell you that’s easy. It’s almost a sort of split world. The wild side of them can come out when when they’re with Sarah and it certainly does. And then the restrained side, they perform for the royal family. The Queen loved Eugenie and Beatrice. They’ve done terribly well considering the hot water that their grandfather and their mother and father have got themselves into.
This tug-of-war for the princesses reared its head in the most public of settings. In 2011, the royal family came together to celebrate the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton. Royal weddings are a chance for us to have a a window, a peek a peek into the the Windsor world. It tells us who’s in and who’s out.
In 2011, Fergie was plainly still very much out. Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie were invited along with their father but Fergie was left firmly out in the cold. I’ve always thought it’s incredibly harsh actually for the girls to be invited to things like the wedding of William and Catherine, you know, prominent role in that and their mother not to be there.
The wounds were still raw for the royal family and the split between the Windsors and Sarah Ferguson seemed irreparable. When she wasn’t invited to Kate and William’s wedding, it was extremely hurtful for her. That she said to me, you know, she was the last girl to go down that aisle. Sarah felt a real knife in the heart that she couldn’t be with her daughters.
That was a real nail in in the coffin for Sarah. But even the princesses’ appeal only went so far with the Windsors. Andrew and brother Charles had reportedly been at odds for years over the role of the princesses in the future of the royal family. He wanted them to be treated as senior royals and and they’re not really.
He wanted all the trappings, the money, the protection that goes with that that role and he foresaw their future as being full-time working royals. This is not how Prince Charles sees it. He wants a slimmed-down monarchy and he didn’t want them being part of the the royal finances. For Fergie herself, there was to be a glimmer of hope.
After Prince William’s wedding, the Queen started cautiously inviting Sarah to some events. She’s occasionally invited to Balmoral. She’s been to Ascot. I think the Queen is mellowing in her old age. I think very tentatively the Queen is sort of saying, okay, look, we’re just going to try this but if you put a foot wrong, it will all stop again.
Then in 2018, there was a thawing of relations. Prince Andrew and his daughters were invited to the wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. But so too was a new key guest. When Harry and Meghan married, he made it very clear that Fergie should be invited to the formal wedding. Harry was probably using the invitation as as a a sort of a reconciliation olive branch.
He knew that Fergie was not popular with the some members of the royal family but he wanted her there because she was important to him and to his childhood. Harry was not the only royal getting married that year. Princess Eugenie had herself found love and was due to marry Jack Brooksbank only months later. It was to be a test of the status of Andrew and Sarah Ferguson in the royal family.
Princess Eugenie’s wedding to Jack Brooksbank was really the string that pulled Fergie back onto the periphery of the royal family because she’s mother of the bride. There’s no way that she couldn’t be invited and I think it was a uniting of of the families. If there’s any link, positive link between the Fergusons and the Windsors, it will be the two daughters.
So there’s almost an inevitability about Sarah being with members of the House of Windsor because of that because of their children. But while the Queen had been cautiously warming towards Fergie, this didn’t extend to her husband. For many many years, Philip absolutely refused to have anything to do with [clears throat] Fergie at all and if she walked into a room, if she happened to walk into a room which was pretty rare, he exit stage left immediately.
It was Sarah Ferguson who had walked down the aisle 32 years before, who was the most nervous on the big day. Having not been part of the royal family for so long, she didn’t want to put a foot wrong. She only just beat the bride to the door of St. George’s Chapel, and she got out waving.
She was like on a buoyant form. But as the guests gathered inside the chapel, there was some nervousness around the arrival of a key royal guest. There was a huge amount of speculation before Eugenie’s wedding about whether Philip would finally give way and be in the same building as Fergie. He managed to make it to St.
George’s Chapel and took his place um in the ceremony, not far from Fergie. Fergie had a qualified return to the fold as guest of honor in the heart of Windsor Castle, for her daughter would always be a Windsor. But within a year, it all came tumbling down. This time, it wasn’t Sarah, but Andrew who fell spectacularly from grace.
2019, new details of Andrew’s long-term friendship with convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein emerged. The Epstein scandal really seems to have tentacles that reach out and have enveloped uh Andrew’s family because well, he uh Jeffrey Epstein was a guest at uh Princess Beatrice’s 18th birthday party.
You know, he’s a family friend. Uh when Fergie was in one of her many money troubles, she turned to him for a loan. So, it’s very intertwined, really. He decided to do this interview. It was the wrong move. Just was a total disaster. Just the worst interview, I think, anyone has seen. This is ITV News with Alister Stewart.
Good evening. Prince Andrew’s explosive Newsnight interview last night has today been judged to have blown up in his face. It was to be a scandal too far for the royal family and for the Queen. 4 days after he was interviewed by Newsnight, Andrew gave up his royal duties. There’s no template here.
You can’t stop being the Queen’s son. He can’t stop being a member of the royal family. All he can do is no longer represent or work for that family. The tables had turned. After years of Andrew standing firm in the face of Fergie’s scandals, it was now his ex-wife who was supporting Andrew as he found himself distanced from the Windsors.
There’s this huge loyalty, which I think actually comes from, you know, Fergie’s side of the family. This great loyalty that that that their father instilled in them. Um you know, it’s it’s a very strong trait in Fergie and the two children. 2020 was to be a new era for the family. For Fergie, none of her family were any longer working royals.
She’s carved out her own career. She goes from project to project now. I mean, her latest project is is writing or co-writing um a Mills & Boon uh romantic thriller. It may not only be in fiction that Sarah Ferguson is thinking about romance. Fergie and Andrew’s close relationship has fueled rumors that they could retie the knot.
Will Sarah and Andrew marry again? Will they remarry? Never say never, that’s what I say. I’d love it if they did. I think the girls would love it. Whether they will or not is another thing. I think Andrew and Fergie are the most married divorced couple that I know of, but real marriage? No, not a chance in hell.
She doesn’t want to get back into the straitjacket of royal life. She wouldn’t be accepted, anyway. There’s no place for Fergie. One thing is for certain, in royal circles, Fergie will never be forgotten. Fergie would never be free of the Windsors. The Windsors were never going to be free of Fergie. Because those two royal princesses are the the bond between the Fergusons and the royal family.
They really do bring the royal family together, and that is thanks to Sarah, because she’s been the most wonderful mother to these girls. They will remain in the public eye. Um they will remain of public interest. And so, um that bond will never be severed.
