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duck to water. It was enough for her that Andrew loved Sarah and, knowing her son as
she did, she was anxious to see him safely married. Philip appreciated Sarah’s feisty
exuberance and her refusal to be intimidated by him. Charles contrasted her
uncomplicated enjoyment of life with his wife’s tantrums and black depressions. ‘Why
can’t you be like Fergie?’ he would ask Diana. Those courtiers who knew Major
Ferguson and his daughter rather better had their reservations. ‘You know you won’t be
able to go on as you always have,’ one warned. ‘You’ll have to put on an act, conform.’
‘Oh, I’ll just be myself,’ Sarah replied airily.
And so there was another fairty-tale wedding, this time at Westminster Abbey, in July
1986, and another apparently passionate kiss on the Palace balcony in front of cheering
crowds to set the seal on a royal romance. Elizabeth created Andrew Duke of York on
the morning of his wedding day and as a present paid for a new house to be built on the
Sunninghill Estate, where she and Prince Philip had once planned to live. In 1989 the
Yorks began to build their dream home at a cost of £3.5 million. The Queen Mother,
apparently, cautioned against such excess, but Elizabeth, indulgent as always, made no
attempt to inhibit them. The conspicuous consumption represented by Sunninghill,
dubbed South York by the press after the Ewing ranch in Dallas, made a particularly bad
impression on the public and the timing of its completion in 1990 could hardly have
been worse, coming as it did at the beginning of a severe and prolonged recession,
during which thousands of people lost their homes and livelihoods. Publicity about
‘Fergie’s’ free-loading habits made frequent headlines; she was rumoured to have
haggled with tradesmen and suppliers during the building of Sunninghill for special
prices and then left them hanging on for months without being paid. The press zeroed in
on the amount of days she spent on holiday and the mountains of luggage with which
she would return from American trips. In an effort to outshine her sister-in-law, who
wisely bought British, Fergie patronized Yves Saint Laurent. There were rows over the
royalties for her books, on Queen Victoria’s Osborne and Budgie the Helicopter; she was
rumoured to have tried to claim all credit for the first, although it was in fact written by
Benita Stoney, the niece of the Royal Librarian, and it was alleged that ‘Budgie’ was a
plagiarization of a book published in the 1960s. Later she was to bring out an illustrated
book on Queen Victoria’s travels, of which the notable feature was photographs of
herself posed against various backgrounds. The implication was that she was using her
position for all that she could get. The press, having built her up at the time of her
wedding, now turned on her. Headstrong as ever, she gave them plenty of material –
charging Hello! magazine £200,000 for the privilege of taking photographs of herself
and Andrew with their children. In the disastrous charity TV show, It’s a Royal Knockout
(1987), she stood out for her un-royal behaviour. Once again, when it came to her
children, Elizabeth’s indulgence (in this case of Edward, whose brainchild it was)
blinded her to the dangers. Anne was bullied by the others into doing it. Charles, to his
credit, would not allow his wife to take part.
Edward is the most retiring and least known of Elizabeth’s children. Four years
younger than Andrew and fifteen years younger than Charles, he had grown up very