The father of the groom and the bride’s mother, who were romantically involved two decades prior, found themselves sitting in the third carriage, waving to the onlookers. Prince Philip and Susan Barrantes, whose ex-husband managed Prince Charles’s polo team, had been part of the same social group for many years. They were now together to publicly celebrate the union of Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson.

On that summer morning in 1986, Andrew was granted the title of Duke of York, a traditional designation for the monarch’s second son. The redheaded bride was captivating in her ivory satin gown, which featured a 17-foot train embellished with the letters A and S in silver beads.

How, then, did it all gone wrong, ending in divorce 10 years later?

Introduced to each other in June 1985 by Princess Diana, they had a whirlwind romance, becoming engaged in February 1986 and marrying in July.

Andrew was emotionally affected when his former actress girlfriend, Koo Stark, married someone else. At the same time, Sarah felt frustrated as her live-in partner, the much-older race car driver Paddy McNally, seemed unlikely to propose.

They found each other when they were both needy, they got on instantly and, according to one of her friends, ‘things got better and better between them as the weeks passed. It wasn’t complicated. That was the nice thing about it. A straightforward love story.’

But there were mixed feelings in the Royal Family. They had known Fergie all her life and she shared their interests in outdoor pursuits, in dogs, horses, even charades. Compared to Diana, she was easy-going and clearly made Andrew happy.

Sarah, Duchess of York and Prince Andrew, Duke of York listen to wellwishers shouting ‘we want a kiss’ on their wedding day in July 1986

But according to a well-connected source: ‘Fergie couldn’t stop talking – and inappropriately. She was all high jinks, jolly hockey sticks and practical jokes. Andy loved it, no one else did. The Queen said to someone, ‘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 stated: ‘She’s either in love with Andrew or in love with the Royal Family and I think it’s the latter.’

But she impressed Prince Charles enough for him to urge Diana: ‘Why can’t you be more like Fergie?’ And the Queen is reputed to have told Sarah, ‘I’m so glad you’ve taken Andrew off our hands, but why on earth did you do it?’

Within weeks of the wedding, Fergie realised it was a mistake. They had few mutual interests – he liked shooting and golf, she preferred skiing and riding – and were dissimilar characters. The one thing they shared was an unsophisticated sense of humour.

It didn’t help that Andrew was never there. A naval officer, he was either at sea or on a naval base far away from her. Focused on his own needs, he admitted his priorities to his wife: ‘I am a prince, then a naval officer, then a husband.’ One year he spent only 42 days at home.

Sarah, insecure, in need of love and attention, became bored, depressed and lonely, amid the pressures of court life and criticism from both the media and the Palace. She was miserable.

After a rare weekend with her new husband, she would have to wave goodbye to him and then sit in her dressing room, stared at by the ‘stately oils’ of Queen Victoria on the walls, ‘and I would break. I would cry softly, resignedly’.

There were faults on both sides. According to one friend of Andrew, the marriage quickly became an arrangement in which neither was making enough effort. After the duke was posted to the naval base at Portland on the Dorset coast, an old manor house was rented for them so they could be together at weekends, but they only went there on four occasions.

She was annoying people. The exuberance and fun that at first had endeared her to the public now became a liability as she took 99 days’ holiday in nine months. She wore a T-shirt that said ‘Piste Again’ across the front.

There were also complaints from Palace staff who found her unnecessarily demanding. After an evening out on the town at Harry’s Bar or Annabel’s in Mayfair, she would arrive back at the Palace late at night with guests and expect staff to rustle up a meal, despite the fact they had been working since 6.30am.

When she was invited to Highgrove, Charles’s country estate, the housekeeper, Wendy Berry, noticed how the ‘rather frumpy Sloane’ she had first met had turned into ‘a very demanding young madam’. She was ‘obviously loving every moment of her newfound importance’.

Taking tea to Sarah one morning, Berry ‘asked if she needed anything pressing, and the duchess pointed to two bags filled with blouses and other clothes. ‘All of it, Ma’am?’ I asked. ‘Yes,’ she said firmly, ‘all of it.’

In Méribel, staying as a guest in a socialite’s chalet, she insisted the maids call her ‘Ma’am’, curtsey to her at all times and required them to spend hours cooking a meal before deciding to dine out.

All the while she was developing extravagant habits. Sponsored by People magazine, she flew Concorde to New York to attend a charity performance of The Phantom Of The Opera, staying in the $3,000 Presidential Suite of the Waldorf Towers. Partying continued long into the night, leaving the sponsors with several thousand dollars to pay for extra catering and room service. One who saw the wine bill commented: ‘Well, she certainly knows her vintages.’

In truth, though, Sarah was finding the growing pressures on her difficult to cope with and was constantly in tears, particularly after her husband signed on for a further 10 years in the navy. Six months’ pregnant, she now weighed getting on for 15 stone, having ‘drowned my sorrows in mayonnaise, sausage rolls and smoked mackerel pate sandwiches from M&S’.

Her confidence wasn’t helped when a fashion commentator named her number one on his list of ‘Worst Dressed’ women, describing her as ‘a fashion obscenity who walks like a duck with a bad leg’ and ‘looks as if she makes beds in Ireland or milks cows’.

The birth of Beatrice in 1988 did not solve the problems in the marriage. Andrew appeared incapable of responding to his wife’s needs and changing moods, which were accentuated by appetite suppressants. Nor did he give her the support she needed to deal with the criticisms of her weight, dress sense and the number of holidays she took.

Just-married Sarah, Duchess of York and Prince Andrew, Duke of York as they kiss on the balcony of Buckingham Palace

She told one of her confidants: ‘I’d write to him almost every day and eagerly await the post for his return letters but they never came. I was missing him madly and couldn’t understand why he couldn’t spare the time to let me know what he was up to. It was so depressing.’

The reality was that the marriage had been in difficulty for some time, with Andrew having affairs. According to his former driver, the duke had slept with ‘more than a dozen women before their first anniversary’.

A royal insider said: ‘Sarah discovered Andrew wasn’t coming home on some of his leave. He was going elsewhere – and this just drove her crazy. She didn’t like the fact she was a shore widow, and to discover she was shore-widowed intentionally really hurt.’

One source claimed the arguments they had ‘bordered on domestic violence’. ‘You have to understand what I am dealing with here,’ the duchess told a friend. ‘I’m married to a man who has never been inside a supermarket.’

Fergie told Madame Vasso, her psychic healer: ‘He’s just not strong enough, and he’s never there when I need him.’ According to a mutual friend, ‘Andrew’s idea of a good time on a beautiful sunny day was to sit in the house and watch golf on the television. His dinner would be placed in front of him so he could continue watching TV, and then he would go to bed.’

It got to the stage where Sarah would make any excuse not to be with her husband. ‘She would ask if the duke was in for dinner and, if he was, she would make sure she was out.’

Initially, she tried very hard to save the marriage but then concluded all the compromising was coming from her side. She tried to raise the state of her marriage with the Queen, but HM was uncomfortable about being involved in other people’s emotional problems and the talk was quickly deflected to dogs and horses.

It was only a matter of time before the duchess found the excitement and affection she craved with other men. When she met American playboy Steve Wyatt in November 1989, she was ripe for an affair. Bored and lonely, she was instantly attracted to him with his thatch of brown hair, soft blue eyes and rich, hypnotic voice, and shared interest in alternative medicine.

One who was present remembered: ‘There was chemistry between them.’ The relationship that would eventually lead to her divorce began. He would provide the emotional security she had been missing.

In March the following year, her second child, Eugenie, was born by Caesarean section. The baby did little to save the marriage. In fact, according to a friend, it was the moment the sexual side of their marriage ended.

Their mutual attraction had always been physical and without it the relationship crumbled: ‘Sarah is a sensual woman who needs to be loved and likes to show affection.’

She was by now deeply involved with Wyatt, and he was one of 800 guests invited to Buckingham Palace to mark the Queen Mother’s 90th birthday, Princess Margaret’s 60th, Princess Anne’s 40th and Prince Andrew’s 30th. The Queen asked her whether Wyatt was ‘quite the sort of person you should be encouraging, dear’.

But Sarah ignored the royal warning to sever contact with Wyatt and continued the affair – until he returned to the US, ostensibly to make his fortune before he proposed to her. His friend John Bryan saw an opportunity and invited her to dinner at La Tante Claire, intentionally less than a minute from his Chelsea flat.

They slept together that night, after which he reflected: ‘Here she was jumping into bed with me. I couldn’t believe that anyone behaved with such reckless abandon.’

But one of his friends thought she was deliberately playing off the men in her life against each other – using John to taunt Steve while showing her still-admiring husband that she was attractive to jet-setting figures like them. ‘Over the years, her Machiavellian skills have received little credit, but here they could be seen in their true colours.’

Some months later it was with John Bryan, whom she described as her ‘financial adviser’, that she plumbed new depths after they were secretly photographed together in early August 1992, holidaying at a farmhouse in France.

Later that same month the Daily Mirror published 55 pictures over nine pages showing a topless Sarah rubbing sun cream on the head of the balding Bryan, kissing him, lying under him and letting him kiss or lick – the actual activity has since been disputed – her toes.

Johnny Bryan with Sarah Ferguson, Duchess of York on holiday staying in St Tropez, southern France, in 1992

Friends say Andrew accepted his wife’s infidelities and that his marriage was over. He would dine alone off a tray in his study while Sarah and one of her lovers ate together elsewhere in the house.

Sarah, however, was jealous of any of Andrew’s girlfriends. She wanted to remain ‘The One’, with all the perks that brought, and girlfriends were invariably despatched through a mixture of charm and ruthlessness.

In this she had the support of her mother-in-law. According to a senior royal aide: ‘It used to be a bit of a joke that whenever Andrew showed too close an interest in a girl, the Queen promptly issued an invitation to Fergie for afternoon tea at Windsor.’

Eventually, after much negotiation, a separation was finalised and a financial settlement hammered out in return for a non-disclosure agreement. The duchess’s bank overdraft of £300,000 would be paid, a house would be found for her and £1.4million placed in trust for her daughters. She would keep custody of the children but no longer carry out official engagements. All the memorabilia relating to her was removed from the Windsor Castle gift shop.

Her reduced status was quickly evident. The previous Ascot, she had been riding in a carriage with the Queen Mother. Now she watched from the roadside as the Queen passed by. Beatrice cried out: ‘Can we come, too?’ The Queen just carried on waving. Andrew spent Father’s Day alone at Sunninghill. The marriage was, to all intents and purposes, over.

And yet the two of them remain a unit, called ‘the royal odd couple’ as people struggle to understand how a partnership that lasted only six years before separation should have endured to this day, 33 years later.

The key is that, as a friend of the couple said of their fluctuating relationship, ‘You have to understand that Andrew still loves Sarah.’

The signs were there that first Christmas after their separation when they sent out joint Christmas cards and together hosted a Christmas party at Buckingham Palace, but were separated for Christmas Day itself.

It was a pattern that was to continue for many years – Andrew with the girls at Sandringham and Sarah entertaining guests at Wood Farm on the Sandringham Estate. The duchess then joined the rest of the Royal Family for a Boxing Day lunch at a royal shooting lodge.

In what was to become another annual tradition, the following summer, they holidayed in southern Spain together, the party staying for the first week at a five-bedroomed villa, where the Yorks shared a bedroom.

In the press, a debate began about whether they were getting back together. But according to friends, though they had discussed starting afresh and Andrew had ended a recent relationship, Sarah backed off: ‘She realised it wouldn’t work.

‘She loved Andrew – still does – but not in the way he would like. There is no physical side to their relationship. And uppermost in her mind was the prospect of the Palace getting their hands on her again.’

It was still remarkable, though, that through all the affairs, the extravagance, the waste, the press attention, the globe-hopping, the selfishness, the Yorks had contrived to remain married. Now the dam broke, the strain of it all too much for the Royal Family.

The Queen had ‘finally lost patience with the Duchess’, according to a Palace insider, and the public humiliation of her son. ‘It all had to end.’ Andrew was told to divorce the woman he still loved.

He was torn, believing their relationship could still be saved, but many felt Sarah was using him. ‘She’s very manipulative and can twist him any way she wants,’ said one official figure, putting it down to his naivety. ‘Many people have urged him to put his foot down but instead of doing something he just gets angry that the matter is even being raised.’

In mid-April 1996, the announcement of the divorce came. It included the stipulation that she would lose her title of HRH, which was a blow for her. (She pretended it had been her choice, but it wasn’t.) At the Palace, Andrew took down the lapel badge saying ‘I love my Fergie’, given to him at the factory making Massey Ferguson tractors, which was pinned to his office door.

Yet still they seemed unable to shake the hold they had on each other. The duchess continued to put a brake on his romantic life. According to one friend: ‘If he did meet a girl, Sarah would always find fault with her and put him off.’

He dated Henriette Peace, a former model, and apparently fell head over heels for her. Yet after six months she ended the relationship after she felt continually sidelined in favour of his ex-wife. Andrew had chosen to go to Tuscany with his family rather than take her to Barbados.

Fergie was still pulling the strings. In an interview to mark her 40th birthday she hinted she had not ruled out remarrying Andrew and even suggested she would like to try for a third child – though at the time she was in a deepening affair with an Italian count.

But the Royal Family were having none of it. Among those most opposed to remarriage were Prince Charles, Princess Margaret, Prince Edward (who had not invited Sarah to his wedding, in spite of her daughters being bridesmaids) and Prince Philip, who accused her of ‘living in the land of Nod’. A source said: ‘I think that if his father had not been so set against it, he would have remarried her at one stage.’

Princess Anne, Sarah, Duchess of York, and Sarah’s mother Susan Barrantes at a memorial service in 1990

Instead he simply took her into his home. When, after the death of the Queen Mother in 2002, Andrew took over the tenancy of Royal Lodge, her home in Windsor Park, and eventually took up residence three years later, Fergie also moved in – to a luxurious four-bedroom apartment, from where she continues to run her office in the billiard room. ‘You couldn’t shift her with dynamite,’ said one family friend.

That same year, Sarah was invited to Balmoral – for the first time since her divorce – to join the Royal Family on their Scottish holiday, partly so she could join in celebrations for Beatrice’s 17th birthday and partly to keep her onside. This was a long-term strategy because Fergie possessed many secrets which would not benefit the House of Windsor by their retelling.

It was this power that had allowed her to remain firmly within the embrace of the Royal Family. They found themselves between a rock and a hard place, which the duchess knew. As one source suggested: ‘It is better to keep Sarah close than let her loose to do even more damage. And at the end of the day, she is still Bea and Eugenie’s mother, they can’t just abandon her.’

The visit, though, was not an unqualified success. According to a highly placed source, the Queen was driven to distraction by her ex-daughter-in-law continually spouting New Age ‘mumbo jumbo’.

But the timings were never right for a full reconciliation of Andrew and Sarah. After the separation and divorce, he at first remained half in love with her but he also relished his freedom to enjoy casual sexual flings while still retaining the security of apparent married life. ‘He has the family side and the playboy side and he’s been able to balance the two for decades.’

But it left Sarah confused. She complained: ‘He says he wants me back, then he goes off with girls.’

The duchess equally appreciated the attention of various lovers and the escape from the constrictions of royal life, while also enjoying the status and trappings that royal life brought.

Though they have been divorced for 28 years, the couple continue to share a house and take holidays together. But they also live their own lives and the arrangement does not reflect them getting back together romantically.

A source claimed Andrew was enjoying life too much to be tied down but that he was ‘extraordinarily attached’ to Sarah: ‘She makes him feel guilty for the break up of the marriage. She says it is his fault that she strayed when they were married – that it was because he neglected her.

‘And he feels terribly guilty because there is a bit of truth in it. Maybe that’s her hold over him and why he is always there to pick her up when she falls.’

As for Fergie, ‘she has a lot of regrets about a lot of things but I don’t think freeing herself of Andrew was one of them,’ said an old friend, who blamed the prince’s ‘serious attitude problem’ for the difficulties in the marriage.

But in spite of their differences and problems the two need each other. As one friend remarked: ‘Andrew is nothing without a woman. He’s sweet, but also rather clunky and gauche. He needs someone who can navigate his life for him.’

Guilty about his initial neglect of his ex-wife, he remained loyal and supportive, even when Sarah publicly cuckolded and humiliated him. In turn, after Andrew’s fall from grace over Jeffrey Epstein, Sarah has proved to be his most loyal supporter.

A former courtier explained that what was between them was not romance but ‘more the deepest form of friendship, a very unusual relationship for a divorced couple, especially to the outside world, but they’re utterly devoted and would defend each other to the death’.

Amid talk of remarriage, though, Andrew told a friend: ‘Given Sarah’s weaknesses, she wouldn’t make an appropriate royal any more.’

• Adapted from Entitled by Andrew Lownie (William Collins, £22), to be published 14 August. © Andrew Lownie 2025. To order a copy for £18.70 (offer valid to 16/08/25; UK P&P free on orders over £25) go to www.mailshop.co.uk/books or call 020 3176 2937.