‘Unsettled’: Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, Sarah Ferguson marriage origins revealed

By 1984, following his service in the Falklands War, the pressure was on to find Prince Andrew a wife. Various women continued to be linked to him in the press and in March The Sun suggested candidates for marriage, arguing that when he settled down it would be with a woman “who will not have had a string of wildly unsuitable boyfriends.”

Yet at just 24, Andrew was already gaining a reputation as an entitled lightweight.

A month earlier, in February 1984, he’d been promoted to the rank of Lieutenant and the Queen appointed him one of her personal aides-de-camp. After representing the Queen at the 150th anniversary celebrations of St Helena, he went on a four-day tour to California to support the British Olympic Association and a trade promotion. A Foreign Office report, copied to Buckingham Palace, concluded the visit had been a considerable success.

The reality was rather different. A thousand people were kept waiting at an exhibition after Andrew dawdled at an aircraft factory. On a visit to Los Angeles, the prince turned a spray gun on a group of reporters and photographers splattering them with white paint with the words: “I enjoyed that”. He later apologised, claiming his finger had slipped, but the damage had been done. The Queen made Andrew pay for the damage, which was estimated at between £15,000 and £30,000 and stipulated that in future he was to be accompanied by a PR person as well as an equerry. The People chose him as 1984’s “Twit of the Year” on account of the episode.

The previous August Andrew’s former girlfriend Koo Stark had married, which had deeply unsettled him. He admitted to a friend, “I am a loner – I really am. Yet when I say that no one believes me. I’d really like to be married but I’ve yet to meet the right girl.”

That was all about to change, after an intervention by Princess Diana, who was in need of an ally at court and had already tried to make Sarah Ferguson one of her ladies-in-waiting. Sarah, who worked for an art publisher, was dating the racing car driver Paddy McNally, who had separated from his wife. McNally had no wish to remarry so Sarah had begun to flex her independence.

Diana suggested Sarah be invited to join the royal house party for Ascot in June 1985. Whether by luck or by design, Andrew, on leave from his duties as Lynx pilot on the frigate HMS Brazen, was seated beside her. She was on one of her periodic diets and he goaded her to finish her chocolate profiteroles and he would do the same. He then went back on his word and she playfully whacked him.

When they discovered they had the same childish sense of humour, their mutual attraction increased, but Sarah still had feelings for McNally. She hoped this new love interest might make him jealous, yet a wished-for marriage proposal on a holiday on the shores of Lake Como never materialised – it was time to move on.

Shortly afterwards Andrew took Sarah to the ballet at Covent Garden, entertained her at Buckingham Palace and sent bouquets of flowers. Both were ready to settle down, but there were mixed feelings in the Royal Family. They had known Ferguson all her life as she was part of royal circles and shared their interests in outdoor pursuits, in dogs, horses and even charades. Compared to Diana, she was easygoing and clearly made Andrew happy, but according to a well-connected source:

Fergie couldn’t stop talking, and inappropriately. She was all high-jinks and jolly-hockey sticks and practical jokes. Andy loved it, no one else did. I was told that the Queen said to someone after Fergie had left, ‘Does that girl never stop talking!’ … The Duke of Edinburgh just thought she was a girl on the make.

Even Sarah’s own family were not sure about the relationship. With characteristic candour, her father, Major Ron Ferguson, stated: “She’s either in love with Andrew or in love with the Royal Family and I think it’s the latter.”

There were also concerns that there might be scandals in her private life. A Palace source confided in journalist Stuart White that the worry was ‘Fergie had put it about a little’.

In December Andrew took her to an Elton John concert to make their relationship public, but since she wasn’t his usual type, the press didn’t even notice. Then, just before Christmas, the story broke in the Daily Mirror: “An attractive redhead is set to join Prince Andrew for Christmas at Windsor Castle. She is Sarah Ferguson, the new love in Andrew’s life and one of Princess Diana’s best friends.’” A friend added, “No one is expecting any sort of early engagement but this is a romance which should be taken seriously.”

Ferguson spent New Year at Sandringham and Andrew broached marriage. Feeling under pressure from his family to settle down, on the rebound from various failed relationships, driven by a strong physical attraction to Ferguson, and loneliness, he felt this was an opportunity he should not lose; but she was worried at the speed of events, as one friend remembered: “While she was enormously happy, she was petrified about what she was letting herself in for.”

The courtship continued into 1986, with Andrew driving up to London every Friday in his Jaguar to take his new girlfriend out. They spent weekends at the homes of friends but reports in the press maintained the prince was still infatuated with Koo Stark and intended to keep seeing her, and there were stories of phone calls to Buckingham Palace from a “Fiona Campbell”.

In early February, HMS Brazen docked in London and Sarah made her first public appearance with members of the Royal Family, accompanying Diana to a cocktail party. Learning the shop sold knickers with the word “Brazen” embroidered on the front, Diana bought several pairs for herself and Ferguson.

Later that month, with Andrew back at sea, Sarah joined the Prince and Princess of Wales on their annual Klosters skiing trip, impressing Charles enough for him to exhort to his wife, “Why can’t you be more like Fergie?”

After Brazen docked in Sunderland on a five-day goodwill visit, Sarah travelled up under the name of Miss Anwell to see Andrew again at Floors Castle. Yet that Sunday the News of the World ran a story, “Andy Girl in Cocaine Castle”, alleging that drug-taking was prevalent at McNally’s chalet in Verbier, which had been christened “Snow Castle”.

It did not put Andrew off. After a boisterous snowball fight, he proposed. Ferguson was so surprised she offered him the chance to change his mind the next morning but he only reaffirmed his proposal. Given that they needed permission from the Queen, who would not be back from a tour of Australia and New Zealand for another three weeks, they told no one.

Eventually, on 15 March, Andrew saw the Queen, seeking permission to marry. She already knew what he was going to ask and readily agreed. “She was overjoyed,” Andrew recalled. “Very pleased and beyond that what else is there? Just that of a delighted parent.” He had already asked Sarah’s father’s permission – after meeting the major at the top of the Long Walk at Windsor by the statue of the copper horse and talking “for about twenty minutes. It was short and sharp”.

Whatever the misgivings among the two families, it was obvious the couple were in love. Astrologer Penny Thornton remembered meeting them at dinner: “It was a very merry evening … they couldn’t stop touching each other, they giggled with each other, they were clearly absolutely identifiably mad about each other”.

The engagement was announced on 19 March with an official photocall on the Buckingham Palace lawn. Sarah claimed to be attracted by Andrew’s “charm and good looks”, he by her “red hair”. Their banter was a refreshing change from the usual formality of such events and the stilted engagement photocall of Charles and Diana. The public loved her eye-rolling talent for silly faces, sense of humour, irreverence, unpretentious manner, ebullience, and the fact that, in contrast to the Princess of Wales, she appeared not to care about her clothes.

Instantly, Sarah was installed in Andrew’s suite of rooms in Buckingham Palace and the couple were invited to stay at Highgrove, whose housekeeper Wendy Berry remembered one visit in particular that suggested the night before had been riotous: “By all the evidence Andrew and Sarah had decided to try out both rooms in the space of a few hours … Several staff at Buckingham Palace had warned me that I would be changing both beds every day for the length of their visit.”

Sarah would later describe her wedding day in July 1986 as the best day of her life. Her dress with its seventeen-foot train had been widely admired and the Evening Standard leader that day spoke for many when it wrote that Miss Sarah Ferguson “is an ornament to the Queen’s family as she would be to any family in the land”. Following a honeymoon on the royal yacht Britannia cruising the Azores and Scotland, a party was held at Windsor Castle to thank everyone who had helped organise the wedding. Sarah encouraged everyone to jump fully clothed into the swimming pool.

But within a year the marriage was being declared “an arrangement”, Sarah had been criticised in the press for taking nine holidays in nine months, the courtiers found her reluctant to conform and Palace staff had begun to find her disorganised and demanding. After an evening out on the town, she would regularly arrive at the Palace late at night with guests and expect staff, working since 6.30am, to rustle up a meal.

Clairvoyant Maureen Conway, meeting Sarah later that year after a gap of twelve months, felt: “The lovely, carefree, unaffected girl had gone. Now there was a rather grand person – only too aware she was a Duchess.” It was a view shared by Highgrove housekeeper Wendy Berry: “Marriage brought her attention and a list of privileges that she could never have dreamed of. It was quite to turn her head.”

The birth of Princess Beatrice, who was induced to fit in with Andrew’s leave from Singapore, did not solve the problems in the marriage. Sarah, suffering from postnatal depression, faced further press disapproval when she joined Andrew on a ten-day tour of Australia for the Bicentennial celebrations, leaving 10-week-old Beatrice with her nanny. As the Duchess admitted: “Most of all, I need to shore up my marriage. The two years since our wedding had wafted us apart.”

Andrew appeared incapable of responding to her needs and changing moods, which were accentuated by appetite suppressants, or of giving her the necessary support against the criticisms of her weight, dress sense and the number of holidays she took. She had managed to add another with her sister and mother on the exclusive Bedarra Island Resort on the Great Barrier Reef, paid for by Australian Airways.

The Yorks’ relationship deteriorated, even as they found out Sarah was expecting their second child. Upset by Andrew’s bullying and his recent close relationship with a married woman, Sarah was receptive to falling in love. In November 1989, four months before the birth of Princess Eugenie, she was introduced to Steve Wyatt, the son of an oil magnate. The relationship that would eventually lead to her divorce had begun.

This is an edited extract from Entitled: The Rise and Fall of the House of York by Andrew Lownie, published by HarperCollins and available now.