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oof’. ‘The pictures are only holiday snaps,’ Major Ferguson told Lesley Player, invited
by Sarah to act as her ‘lady-in-waiting’ on a charity visit to Palm Beach with the
instruction: ‘You must understand you’ve really got to be with Dads [Major Ferguson]
this time…’ ‘But’, the Major went on, ‘they show that Texan fellow in a basket chair
with his arm around her – and the one that really annoyed Andrew was little Beatrice
with no clothes on being cuddled by him.’ 1 When the pictures were published in the
tabloid Sun, every British ‘bloke in the street’ understood why Andrew had ‘hit the roof’.
Six days after the publication of the photographs, Andrew and Sarah agreed to
separate. On the following morning, 22 January, they travelled up to Sandringham to
tell Elizabeth of their decision. She looked, Sarah later wrote, ‘sadder than I had ever
seen her’, expressing her disappointment and asking them to reconsider before taking
an irrevocable decision. Privately, however, she was stunned. ‘I can’t understand my
children,’ she told a friend. ‘She [Sarah] didn’t even try to be a naval wife…’ For
Elizabeth, the period she had spent in Malta as a young naval wife had been one of the
happiest experiences of her life. Although there were other aspects of the failure of the
marriage which, sadly, she did comprehend, her daughter-in-law’s selfish have-it-all,
grab-it-all attitude was simply alien to her. Her eyes were beginning to be opened.
‘Fergie isn’t as nice as you think she is,’ a royal relation said. Sarah wanted sex, money,
fun and excitement and she was prepared to sacrifice everything in order to get it.
Incredibly, this woman was capable of self-delusion to the extent that she told her father
later, ‘I’m thirty-four, nearly thirty-five, and I haven’t lived my life at all…’ 2
Elizabeth was now aware that there was to be a second marriage failure; she was as
yet unprepared for the third. As the new year of 1992 opened, the year which was
intended to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of her accession, she was about to
experience the worst period of her entire life. The image of decency, honour and duty
which she had created around the monarchy over the past forty years was to be
shattered by the scandalous antics of the younger generation.
At this point the warring younger royals began seriously to deploy the newspapers as
weapons in their individual struggles to get the upper hand, thus putting the situation
beyond the control of Elizabeth and her advisers. ‘Always make friends with the Press,’
Sarah had told Lesley Player. ‘As you get to know them you’ll find your favourites who
will really look after you…’James Whitaker, royal correspondent of the Daily Mirror,
claims that in the spring of 1992 he had been visited at his London home by John Bryan,
masquerading as merely a consultant to the Duchess of York. Cocky and determined, he maintained he was
acting as a broker in the negotiations between the Queen’s solicitors, Farrer’s, and the Duchess of York’s over
the financial terms of her separation from the Duke. He described Farrer’s and their senior partner, Sir
Matthew Farrer, as ‘a bunch of assholes’ and he claimed to be playing a central role in the negotiations. ‘They
can’t do a damned thing without me,’ he bragged, ‘and the Queen has said I have got to be involved at every
single level of negotiation. My word is final.’ 3
On 15 March there was a lawyers’ meeting at Sunninghill between Sir Matthew Farrer,