October 20, 2025 • 11 mins
Following Andrew’s downfall, Sarah Ferguson has been stripped of the style “Duchess of York,” ending an era for the once-glamorous royal couple. Biographers revisit Fergie’s scandal-filled history — from tabloid toe-sucking photos to emails with Jeffrey Epstein — while experts say King Charles has finally drawn a line. Royal commentators add that Prince William pushed for tougher action to restore dignity to the monarchy and move on from “the Andrew problem.”
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👑 Follow our hit series Crown and Controversy! Season 1 is fully available now for everyone. Season 2 has new episodes every Sunday on the regular feed. GET THE FULL SEASON 2 BEFORE REGULAR LISTENERS as a subscriber! Hit that "UNINTERRUPTED LISTENING" Banner on the top of the Apple player. AND listen to Crown and Controversy "NORWAY'S ROYAL REBELS" here and get the full season as a premium subscriber now.
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Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:03):
Caalarougus Shark Media.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
Hello and welcome through Palace Intrigue. I am your host,
Mark Francis. Prince Andrew's decision to surrender all of his
royal titles has also brought renewed attention to his former wife,
Sarah Ferguson, whose own status with the royal family will
now change following Andrew's announcement that he will no longer
use my title or the honors which have been conferred
upon me. The Telegraph reports that Sarah will no longer
(00:37):
use the style of Duchess of York and will instead
be known officially as Sarah Ferguson. The title originally granted
on her nineteen eighty six marriage to Prince Andrew, was
retained after their divorce in nineteen ninety six, but will
now be relinquished in keeping with the King's decision to
strip Andrew of his honors. The change comes just weeks
after Ferguson was dropped from her remaining charity patronages when
(01:01):
it emerged that she had once sent emails to Jeffrey
Epstein following his conviction, referring to him as a steadfast,
generous and supreme friend. While Andrew retains his private lease
on Royal Lodge in Windsor. Royal observers say Sarah Ferguson's
position at future family events may now depend more on
personal goodwill than protocol. She is expected to remain close
(01:22):
to her daughters, Princess Beatrice and Princess Eugenie, who continued
to hold their royal titles, and will be welcome at
Sandringham for Christmas. A new account from royal biographer Andrew
Lowney revisits the whirlwind start and her relationship with Andrew
and the doubts that trailed it. He writes, even Sarah's
own family we're not sure about the relationship. She's either
(01:44):
in love with Andrew or in love with the Royal family,
and I think it's the latter. The pair first met
at Ascot in June nineteen eighty five, became engaged in
February nineteen nineteen eighty six, and married at Westminster Abbey
on July twenty third that year. One friend told Lowney,
while she was enormously happy, she was petrified about what
she was letting herself in for. Lowney says the response
(02:05):
inside the palace was far from uniform. 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, even charades.
Compared to Diana, she was easy going and clearly made
Andrew happy, But according to a well connected source, Fergie
(02:26):
couldn't stop talking and inappropriately. There were also concerns there
might be scandals in her private life. As for Andrew,
Lowney suggests family expectations and emotions both played apart. He
was feeling under pressure from his family to settle down
and driven by a strong physical attraction to Ferguson and loneliness.
(02:46):
The marriage was stormy, separation in ninety two, divorce in
ninety six, yet the domestic arrangement endeers. In the Telegraph,
Gordon Reyner writes, the fall of the House of York
has been a long time coming, and Prince Andrew and
Sarah Ferguson, as they will henceforth being known, made equal
contributions to its sorry end. At first, Fergie, as the
(03:07):
tabloids loved to call her, appeared to have brought welcome
energy to the royal family, with her informality and humor.
When she was filmed giving her husband a playful smack
on the bottom in an engagement interview, it seemed that
Randy Andy, the womanizing Falkland's war veteran, had met his match.
By nineteen ninety they had two daughters, Princess Beatrice and Eugenie,
making them a perfect family unit, but beneath the surface,
(03:29):
cracks in their relationship were starting to appear. Sarah privately
complained that she was only spending forty days each year
with her husband because of his naval service, and rumors
of an affair with Texas millionaire Steve Wyatt surfaced in
early ninety two. She would later claim that she and
Andrew had an open relationship. In March of ninety two,
after just six years of marriage, Buckingham Pallace announced the
(03:52):
couple were separating. In the hint of what was to come,
The Queen also announced that she would not be taking
responsibility for Sarah's debts. Can be done with dignity, which
was the least that could be expected of a couple
whose expensively celebrated marriage had lasted for such a short time. Instead,
the pair seemed determined to outdo each other in their
efforts to humiliate the monarchy. In August of ninety two,
(04:16):
just five months after the separation announcement, a topless Sarah
was photographed on holiday with her financial advisor, John Bryan,
now her lover. Photographs of him sucking the toes of
Elizabeth's second daughter in law appeared on the front pages
of newspapers and magazines around the world, which so infuriated
Prince Philip that he effectively banned her there and then
(04:36):
from taking part in future family occasions. Princess Margaret reportedly
wrote to her, saying, you have done more to bring
shame on the family than could ever have been imagined.
By twenty twenty three, King Charles felt that Sarah Ferguson
deserved to be given a second chance, and she joined
the royal family at Christmas in Sandringham for the first
time since ninety two. In September of twenty twenty five,
(04:58):
it emerged that in April of twenty eleven, a month
after claiming to have several ties with Jeffrey Ebstein, Sarah
wrote to him and said that from the truth of
my heart, she wanted to humbly apologize for denouncing him.
On Friday, the King decided enough was enough, more balance
in just a moment. In The Guardian, Marina Hyde writes,
(05:21):
if you are going to have a royal family and
believe them unique and other, then surely you have to
take them as you find them. It's deliberately the opposite
of a meritocracy. After all. If you get into pseudo
managerial ideas about hiring and firing, then you just make
it all sound like any other small business Who cares
about that. Britain is full of small businesses, despite the
(05:41):
Chancellor's efforts, and the royal family must be something different
and special. Plus business is the one thing we all
realize that the rarefied royals know absolutely nothing meaningful about
the slim down firm we keep hearing about from Charles
and Williams courtiers honestly sounds like a week four task
from the Apprentice, andremen in the Telegraph took it a
step further under the headline Prince Andrew has embarrassed the firm,
(06:04):
but at least he isn't a Nazi. Lahman writes. The
former Duke now joins a small and unmeritorious club of
members of the royal family. Who have either lost their
titles or had them stripped from them. The most high
profile case of royal demotion in recent years was Diana,
Princess of Wales, who had to give up her HRH
Honorific after her divorce from Prince Charles as he was
(06:25):
known back then. It was suggested that Charles wanted her
to lose the Princess of Wales's title as well to
make her sense of expulsion from the royal family complete,
and that the Queen had to intervene to broke a compromise.
This proved a canny move in terms of limiting the
bad pr that Diana directed towards the firm after her departure,
and suggested that not for the first time. Elizabeth the
(06:47):
second was an adroit observer of how protocol could be
adjusted in the best interests of the institution that she
reigned over. Earlier in the twentieth century, there were rather
more existential reasons to strip members of the extended Royal
family of their titles. They were fighting against Britain in
the First World War. George the Fifth passed the Title's
(07:09):
Deprivation Act in nineteen seventeen in order to deprive various
peers who had taken the German side in World War I,
of any chance of taking their seats in the House
of Lords after the end of that conflict. He had
already removed the Order of the Garter from seven relatively
obscure German and Austrian nobles in nineteen fifteen, but this
(07:29):
required an Act of Parliament to deprive the likes of
Charles Edward, Duke of Albany, Earl of Clarence, and Baron
r Clough of his own position. The one time Duke
of Saxe Coburg was a grandson of Queen Victoria, but
he was also an unapologetic member of the German regime
who would later go on to be closely involved with
the Nazi Party, indicating that his estrangement from the country
(07:52):
of his birth was complete. Still, it is one thing
to ostentatiously strip titles from a member of the aristocracy,
and quite another to take them from one of the
central parts of the firm. As Andrew contemplates life without
his dukedom, he may take some grim comfort from the
knowledge that his fate is not as egregious as that
of the Duke of Windsor, who not only ceased to
(08:12):
be king of both the United Kingdom and the British
dominions when he abdicated the throne in nineteen thirty six
in order to marry Wallace Simpson, but also had to
abandon his standing as Emperor of India, with only the
hastily created Dukedom offered to salvage what remained of his dignity.
His mother, Queen Mary, looking sadly at what her son
had lost, was said to have remarked to give up
(08:33):
all this for that Simon Jenkins' rights in The Guardian,
the Royal Family was always a disaster waiting to happen.
Its creation is a marketable entity in the nineteen sixties
by the late Queen Elizabeth the Second was meant to
modernize the monarchy for the twentieth century. It worked, but
only up to a point, when in nineteen sixty nine
the late Queen was persuaded reluctantly by her husband Philip
(08:55):
and her Press secretary William Hazeltine to allow a film
to be made Royal Family. It was a constitutional decision.
Elizabeth was not to retreat, like other post war European
monarchs at the time, into an anonymous obscurity. To stick
to their bicycles. She would refresh Britain's semi divine concept
(09:16):
of monarchy as embodied in an ordinary family. It was
portrayed as the firm, a term that originated with Elizabeth's father,
George the six. It worked. The family looked lovely as
the young children picniqu by the Scottish lock. The film
was watched and admired by millions, but there was a
lurking risk. One day the same children would be different.
They would be tormented teenagers, rampaging twenty somethings and matrimonial casualties.
(09:41):
They might be offered grand palaces and safe jobs, representing
the monarch, the length and the breadth of the land.
But then what they will behave? It was like writing
a play when you have already cast the actors. The
children became instant global celebrities. Elizabeth was lucky and Charles
and Anne, who on the whole were impeccable. She then
exp experienced upsets. One was her Annus horribilis of ninety two,
(10:03):
when offspring Charles, Andrew and Anne all broke with their partners. Diana,
Princess of Wales and Squidgygate were broadcast round the world
and windsor Gate was ablaze. Every Aid and Butler could
sell their memoirs, and a Gallop poll that year only
twenty six percent of the British public thought the monarchy
should continue as it was. Another crisis came in nineteen
(10:24):
ninety seven with the death of Diana and It's initially
woful mishandling by the late Queen. Her personal approval ratings
sank to an all time low of fifty seven percent.
Charles fell to forty percent. Serious questions were raised of
the future of the crown. At such times, monarchy has
nowhere to turn for sustenance but to public opinion. Its
image is dependent on the media and the reaction to
(10:46):
how it performs its rituals. And there you have it.
If you'd like to email us our addresses at the
Palace intrig at email dot com. Please follow us on Spotify, Apple,
and were on Facebook and Instagram and all the social hubs.
Don't forget, it's Halloween and we have a couple of
great shows and channels out there for you. One it's
(11:06):
called Halloween pop Up and it's a combination of all
the shows that come from Callaogershark Media. There's Murder Mysteries,
ghost Stories, music trivia, all Halloween themed. Just look for
Halloween Pop Up and our other channel, Ghost Scary Stories,
which is just Scary stories and you can find a
new show every day on there through October, plus hundreds
(11:29):
of others in the library. Check it out wherever you
get your podcasts. Halloween pop Up and Ghost Scary Stories.
I'm Francis my thanks to John mccermot. This is Ballance,
indrigue and good terms.
Caalarougus Shark Media.
Speaker 2 (00:15):
Hello and welcome through Palace Intrigue. I am your host,
Mark Francis. Prince Andrew's decision to surrender all of his
royal titles has also brought renewed attention to his former wife,
Sarah Ferguson, whose own status with the royal family will
now change following Andrew's announcement that he will no longer
use my title or the honors which have been conferred
upon me. The Telegraph reports that Sarah will no longer
(00:37):
use the style of Duchess of York and will instead
be known officially as Sarah Ferguson. The title originally granted
on her nineteen eighty six marriage to Prince Andrew, was
retained after their divorce in nineteen ninety six, but will
now be relinquished in keeping with the King's decision to
strip Andrew of his honors. The change comes just weeks
after Ferguson was dropped from her remaining charity patronages when
(01:01):
it emerged that she had once sent emails to Jeffrey
Epstein following his conviction, referring to him as a steadfast,
generous and supreme friend. While Andrew retains his private lease
on Royal Lodge in Windsor. Royal observers say Sarah Ferguson's
position at future family events may now depend more on
personal goodwill than protocol. She is expected to remain close
(01:22):
to her daughters, Princess Beatrice and Princess Eugenie, who continued
to hold their royal titles, and will be welcome at
Sandringham for Christmas. A new account from royal biographer Andrew
Lowney revisits the whirlwind start and her relationship with Andrew
and the doubts that trailed it. He writes, even Sarah's
own family we're not sure about the relationship. She's either
(01:44):
in love with Andrew or in love with the Royal family,
and I think it's the latter. The pair first met
at Ascot in June nineteen eighty five, became engaged in
February nineteen nineteen eighty six, and married at Westminster Abbey
on July twenty third that year. One friend told Lowney,
while she was enormously happy, she was petrified about what
she was letting herself in for. Lowney says the response
(02:05):
inside the palace was far from uniform. 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, even charades.
Compared to Diana, she was easy going and clearly made
Andrew happy, But according to a well connected source, Fergie
(02:26):
couldn't stop talking and inappropriately. There were also concerns there
might be scandals in her private life. As for Andrew,
Lowney suggests family expectations and emotions both played apart. He
was feeling under pressure from his family to settle down
and driven by a strong physical attraction to Ferguson and loneliness.
(02:46):
The marriage was stormy, separation in ninety two, divorce in
ninety six, yet the domestic arrangement endeers. In the Telegraph,
Gordon Reyner writes, the fall of the House of York
has been a long time coming, and Prince Andrew and
Sarah Ferguson, as they will henceforth being known, made equal
contributions to its sorry end. At first, Fergie, as the
(03:07):
tabloids loved to call her, appeared to have brought welcome
energy to the royal family, with her informality and humor.
When she was filmed giving her husband a playful smack
on the bottom in an engagement interview, it seemed that
Randy Andy, the womanizing Falkland's war veteran, had met his match.
By nineteen ninety they had two daughters, Princess Beatrice and Eugenie,
making them a perfect family unit, but beneath the surface,
(03:29):
cracks in their relationship were starting to appear. Sarah privately
complained that she was only spending forty days each year
with her husband because of his naval service, and rumors
of an affair with Texas millionaire Steve Wyatt surfaced in
early ninety two. She would later claim that she and
Andrew had an open relationship. In March of ninety two,
after just six years of marriage, Buckingham Pallace announced the
(03:52):
couple were separating. In the hint of what was to come,
The Queen also announced that she would not be taking
responsibility for Sarah's debts. Can be done with dignity, which
was the least that could be expected of a couple
whose expensively celebrated marriage had lasted for such a short time. Instead,
the pair seemed determined to outdo each other in their
efforts to humiliate the monarchy. In August of ninety two,
(04:16):
just five months after the separation announcement, a topless Sarah
was photographed on holiday with her financial advisor, John Bryan,
now her lover. Photographs of him sucking the toes of
Elizabeth's second daughter in law appeared on the front pages
of newspapers and magazines around the world, which so infuriated
Prince Philip that he effectively banned her there and then
(04:36):
from taking part in future family occasions. Princess Margaret reportedly
wrote to her, saying, you have done more to bring
shame on the family than could ever have been imagined.
By twenty twenty three, King Charles felt that Sarah Ferguson
deserved to be given a second chance, and she joined
the royal family at Christmas in Sandringham for the first
time since ninety two. In September of twenty twenty five,
(04:58):
it emerged that in April of twenty eleven, a month
after claiming to have several ties with Jeffrey Ebstein, Sarah
wrote to him and said that from the truth of
my heart, she wanted to humbly apologize for denouncing him.
On Friday, the King decided enough was enough, more balance
in just a moment. In The Guardian, Marina Hyde writes,
(05:21):
if you are going to have a royal family and
believe them unique and other, then surely you have to
take them as you find them. It's deliberately the opposite
of a meritocracy. After all. If you get into pseudo
managerial ideas about hiring and firing, then you just make
it all sound like any other small business Who cares
about that. Britain is full of small businesses, despite the
(05:41):
Chancellor's efforts, and the royal family must be something different
and special. Plus business is the one thing we all
realize that the rarefied royals know absolutely nothing meaningful about
the slim down firm we keep hearing about from Charles
and Williams courtiers honestly sounds like a week four task
from the Apprentice, andremen in the Telegraph took it a
step further under the headline Prince Andrew has embarrassed the firm,
(06:04):
but at least he isn't a Nazi. Lahman writes. The
former Duke now joins a small and unmeritorious club of
members of the royal family. Who have either lost their
titles or had them stripped from them. The most high
profile case of royal demotion in recent years was Diana,
Princess of Wales, who had to give up her HRH
Honorific after her divorce from Prince Charles as he was
(06:25):
known back then. It was suggested that Charles wanted her
to lose the Princess of Wales's title as well to
make her sense of expulsion from the royal family complete,
and that the Queen had to intervene to broke a compromise.
This proved a canny move in terms of limiting the
bad pr that Diana directed towards the firm after her departure,
and suggested that not for the first time. Elizabeth the
(06:47):
second was an adroit observer of how protocol could be
adjusted in the best interests of the institution that she
reigned over. Earlier in the twentieth century, there were rather
more existential reasons to strip members of the extended Royal
family of their titles. They were fighting against Britain in
the First World War. George the Fifth passed the Title's
(07:09):
Deprivation Act in nineteen seventeen in order to deprive various
peers who had taken the German side in World War I,
of any chance of taking their seats in the House
of Lords after the end of that conflict. He had
already removed the Order of the Garter from seven relatively
obscure German and Austrian nobles in nineteen fifteen, but this
(07:29):
required an Act of Parliament to deprive the likes of
Charles Edward, Duke of Albany, Earl of Clarence, and Baron
r Clough of his own position. The one time Duke
of Saxe Coburg was a grandson of Queen Victoria, but
he was also an unapologetic member of the German regime
who would later go on to be closely involved with
the Nazi Party, indicating that his estrangement from the country
(07:52):
of his birth was complete. Still, it is one thing
to ostentatiously strip titles from a member of the aristocracy,
and quite another to take them from one of the
central parts of the firm. As Andrew contemplates life without
his dukedom, he may take some grim comfort from the
knowledge that his fate is not as egregious as that
of the Duke of Windsor, who not only ceased to
(08:12):
be king of both the United Kingdom and the British
dominions when he abdicated the throne in nineteen thirty six
in order to marry Wallace Simpson, but also had to
abandon his standing as Emperor of India, with only the
hastily created Dukedom offered to salvage what remained of his dignity.
His mother, Queen Mary, looking sadly at what her son
had lost, was said to have remarked to give up
(08:33):
all this for that Simon Jenkins' rights in The Guardian,
the Royal Family was always a disaster waiting to happen.
Its creation is a marketable entity in the nineteen sixties
by the late Queen Elizabeth the Second was meant to
modernize the monarchy for the twentieth century. It worked, but
only up to a point, when in nineteen sixty nine
the late Queen was persuaded reluctantly by her husband Philip
(08:55):
and her Press secretary William Hazeltine to allow a film
to be made Royal Family. It was a constitutional decision.
Elizabeth was not to retreat, like other post war European
monarchs at the time, into an anonymous obscurity. To stick
to their bicycles. She would refresh Britain's semi divine concept
(09:16):
of monarchy as embodied in an ordinary family. It was
portrayed as the firm, a term that originated with Elizabeth's father,
George the six. It worked. The family looked lovely as
the young children picniqu by the Scottish lock. The film
was watched and admired by millions, but there was a
lurking risk. One day the same children would be different.
They would be tormented teenagers, rampaging twenty somethings and matrimonial casualties.
(09:41):
They might be offered grand palaces and safe jobs, representing
the monarch, the length and the breadth of the land.
But then what they will behave? It was like writing
a play when you have already cast the actors. The
children became instant global celebrities. Elizabeth was lucky and Charles
and Anne, who on the whole were impeccable. She then
exp experienced upsets. One was her Annus horribilis of ninety two,
(10:03):
when offspring Charles, Andrew and Anne all broke with their partners. Diana,
Princess of Wales and Squidgygate were broadcast round the world
and windsor Gate was ablaze. Every Aid and Butler could
sell their memoirs, and a Gallop poll that year only
twenty six percent of the British public thought the monarchy
should continue as it was. Another crisis came in nineteen
(10:24):
ninety seven with the death of Diana and It's initially
woful mishandling by the late Queen. Her personal approval ratings
sank to an all time low of fifty seven percent.
Charles fell to forty percent. Serious questions were raised of
the future of the crown. At such times, monarchy has
nowhere to turn for sustenance but to public opinion. Its
image is dependent on the media and the reaction to
(10:46):
how it performs its rituals. And there you have it.
If you'd like to email us our addresses at the
Palace intrig at email dot com. Please follow us on Spotify, Apple,
and were on Facebook and Instagram and all the social hubs.
Don't forget, it's Halloween and we have a couple of
great shows and channels out there for you. One it's
(11:06):
called Halloween pop Up and it's a combination of all
the shows that come from Callaogershark Media. There's Murder Mysteries,
ghost Stories, music trivia, all Halloween themed. Just look for
Halloween Pop Up and our other channel, Ghost Scary Stories,
which is just Scary stories and you can find a
new show every day on there through October, plus hundreds
(11:29):
of others in the library. Check it out wherever you
get your podcasts. Halloween pop Up and Ghost Scary Stories.
I'm Francis my thanks to John mccermot. This is Ballance,
indrigue and good terms.
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