For a brief moment, Sarah Ferguson, Duchess of York, seemed to be enjoying a fairytale return to the royal fold. After decades on the periphery following her 1996 divorce from Prince Andrew, she was back at Sandringham for the Christmas walk in 2023, warmly welcomed at Royal Ascot by King Charles III, and—most importantly—embraced by her daughters, Princess Beatrice and Princess Eugenie.
But just as she stepped back into the warmth of royal approval, a new scandal has erupted—one threatening to undo years of careful rehabilitation and drag her once more into the shadow of disgrace.
The trigger? A newly published book by historian Andrew Lownie, which resurrects some of the most damaging episodes from Fergie’s past. It claims that during her marriage to Prince Andrew (1986–1996), the Duchess lived a life of opulent excess, amassing hundreds of thousands of pounds in debt—bills that, the book alleges, were eventually paid by none other than Queen Elizabeth II herself.
For Sarah—already navigating a recent cancer battle that earned her widespread public sympathy—the headlines are brutal. Former BBC royal correspondent Jennie Bond calls the revelations “a very tough read,” especially for someone who has only recently been “brought in from the cold.”
And the stakes are even higher. The book doesn’t just dig into old financial wounds—it makes a bombshell claim about the future of the Yorks within the monarchy. According to Lownie, Prince William “loathes” both Sarah and Prince Andrew and “can’t wait” for the day his father, King Charles, removes them from royal life entirely. If Charles doesn’t act, the author alleges, William will—moving to expel them from their longtime home, the Royal Lodge in Windsor, as soon as he becomes king.
Such a move would be seismic. The Royal Lodge has been their shared sanctuary for years, even after their divorce. For Beatrice and Eugenie, already scarred by their father’s scandals, another public humiliation for their mother could be devastating.
In the face of it all, Fergie is staying silent—but speaking volumes. This week, she appeared in shoes emblazoned with the phrase “Never Complain, Never Explain”—the late Queen’s motto. It was a pointed, defiant nod to royal tradition: dignity in the face of disgrace.
Yet beneath the composed exterior, the Duchess faces one of the most precarious chapters of her life. Her painstaking return to royal favor now hangs by a thread—threatened by the ghosts of her past, the hostility of the future king, and the relentless gaze of the public eye.
