Derided but defiant – Fergie the irrepressible Royal

I am 64 and just getting started,” wrote Sarah, Duchess of York, to her social media followers on New Year’s Day. Her words captioned a photograph of her swathed in emerald silk and resting on her bed – defiant and understandably so given the highs and lows of 2023.

The year when she not only was diagnosed and treated for breast cancer (her reconstructed left breast is affectionately named Derek), but also published a second bestselling novel and accompanied the Royal family on their Christmas Day Sandringham walkabout for the first time in nearly 30 years. “I have more stories to tell,” she assured her 680,000 followers.  

Such triumph over adversity seems all the more poignant now that, just three weeks into the new year, the Duchess has revealed she’s poised to battle cancer all over again: during her breast reconstruction surgery her dermatologist suggested that several moles were removed and one of them has been identified as malignant melanoma. 

According to her spokesperson, she is now undergoing further investigations to ensure the cancer has not spread, meanwhile her family and friends are doing all they can to cheer her up. Not that Fergie, who is mother to Princess Beatrice and Princess Eugenie, has ever been one to mope: she’s spent her whole life telling people how lucky she is. “Naturally another cancer diagnosis has been a shock but I’m in good spirits and grateful for the many messages of love and support,” she told her worried followers.

However, even for a warrior princess like the Duchess, these are scary times. Her father, Major Ronald Ferguson, who died in 2003, suffered from skin cancer as well as prostate cancer, and her best friend Carolyn Cotterell, who she lived with before she met Prince Andrew, died from skin cancer in 1999 aged 43 after an 18-month battle – a loss which deeply affected Sarah. 

If the melanoma has spread, this could prove to be the Duchess’s biggest challenge to date but, on the surface at least, she will tackle it with her customary glass-half-full approach. “She’s always more worried about everyone else than herself,” says a former employee of the Duchess. “She’ll be fretting about how the girls are feeling and how she can help them. They’re all incredibly close – Beatrice refers to them as the tripod.” 

What the Duchess can be certain of, however, is that the Royal family – the King and Queen included – will be on hand to assist in any way they can. Relations between the Duchess and the senior royals were frosty for decades, but since 2018, when Prince Harry invited her to his wedding, they’ve been thawing.

open image in gallery

And, today,  she’s firmly on board; friends go as far as to say she has family treasure status. They report that the King has always been fond of Fergie – no one makes him giggle like she can, apparently – and the Queen has a laugh with her, too, and appreciates her loyalty and good humour in a crisis. Meanwhile, William and Harry are both in agreement about her and find her very easy company – warm and funny.

The youngest members of the family all gravitate to her during stuffy family occasions – the Duchess has always had a way with children (and a liberal attitude to sweets certainly helps). 

“Fergie’s the biggest softie you’ll meet, but when it comes to dealing with her own life she’s tough as old boots,” comments a friend of the family. “Onwards and upwards she’ll say. There’ll be no dwelling.”

It's a shame then that it’s taken some in the family so long to recognise how much value she adds, but then Fergie, as she admits herself, has taken a while to find herself. Her upbringing was archetypal Sloane – ponies, ski holidays, private schooling and a secretarial course, which landed her a job in an art gallery. 

She was a perfect match for Prince Andrew, who she started dating in 1985, as she knew how to behave around the Royals: Major Ron was a first cousin of Princess Alice, Duchess of Gloucester, the widow of Queen Elizabeth II’s uncle as well as Prince Charles’s polo manager.

Those who worked with her in her twenties described her as scatterbrained and inclined to turn up late yet Prince Andrew didn’t mind at all that she was, in her own words, “a night owl who enjoys a hoot”. One treasured gift to her was an owl ornament attached to the hood of her blue BMW. On her podcast, Tea Talks with the Duchess, Fergie still maintains that marrying her “handsome prince” was the best day of her life.

open image in gallery

The Duchess didn’t love herself, though, which is one of the reasons why the marriage ended abruptly after the birth of their two daughters. Fergie’s parents divorced when she was young and her mother left the family to move to Argentina with a new husband, polo player Héctor Barrantes, leaving her to spend her teenage years racked with self-loathing, convinced that no man would be interested in her. “When I was younger, I thought the road to happiness was paved with a pretty face and a slim body,” she said. 

Her sister Jane was there to console her, but cruel headlines did nothing to buoy her self-esteem. She was dubbed the Duchess of Pork and her size and dress sense were endlessly compared to the slim and glamorous Princess Diana. The Yorks divorced not because they stopped caring for each other, she insists, but because she reached the end of “her royal rope”.  “I'd endured the constant scrutiny of the British press and the barely veiled hostility of the royal household, the courtiers who run the show. Gradually, relentlessly, they had beaten me down.” 

open image in gallery

Fergie the fighter did all she could to earn her crust and prove her worth to the readers of Britain’s tabloids. Her life choices over the coming years, which included campaigns for Weight Watchers and a cameo appearance on the sitcom, Friends – landed her irrevocably in the dog house with Prince Philip but the Queen couldn’t help but hold a soft spot for her impulsive former daughter-in-law.

She was particularly impressed when she turned her hand to writing children’s books and children’s charities. With the horror of the breakdown of three of her children’s marriages behind her (Princess Anne divorced in 1992 and Prince Charles in 1996), she recognised that Fergie, for all her faults, was an incredibly good mother to her two daughters, a hard grafter and infinitely loyal to her former husband.

Rather than playing the victim card, Fergie was busy proving herself as a woman’s woman with a family-minded approach to divorce, choosing to share Royal Lodge with Prince Andrew and sharing family holidays and outings with their daughters. According to Princess Beatrice, they’re the best divorced couple ever.  

In contrast to the stiff-upper-lip attitude of the Royals, the Duchess encouraged Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie to smile at the public. “No one wants to see a grumpy princess,” the Duchess explained as she encouraged them to be open and warm. This has led Beatrice to share her struggles with dyslexia and Eugenie to publicly discuss the scoliosis she was diagnosed with when she was 12. During her wedding to Jack Brooksbank in 2018 she wore a dress that showed the scar from her corrective surgery. 

“Fergie paved the way for the transparency we’re now seeing from the King and the Waleses,” maintains a friend. “She doesn’t wallow in her own self-pity and she’s taught her children not to, either – she genuinely believes that they’re in a privileged position to have a platform from which to help others.” 

It's over the last few years, though, that the Duchess has really found herself: she’s made a name for herself as a successful romantic fiction author and her immediate family has expanded to include two sons-in-law and four grandchildren, who she gushes about regularly on her Instagram feed. 

open image in gallery

It is testimony to her character that her friends have all stuck by her from the beginning too. From Tommy Hilfiger to the late Lisa Marie Presley – and they’re all delighted to see her so happy and offer help wherever they can. Gifting is her love language; she showers presents on her family, friends and staff. 

“For all her scattiness, she never forgets birthdays and anniversaries; she writes to me each year on the anniversary of my mother’s death, which I find incredibly touching,” says one former employee. Other friends joke that she writes thank you letters for thank you letters. “I wrote her a congratulations card for her book and received a four-sided letter back,” the acquaintance continues. 

It’s fitting then that the last thing the late Queen said to the Duchess was “be yourself”.  “She got so annoyed with me when I wasn’t. It’s hard to be yourself, though,” explained the Duchess. She became even closer to the Queen in the final years of her life, regarding her as her “greatest mentor” and the “person who believes in me.” “I think to myself that honestly, my mother-in-law has been more of a mother to me than my mother,” she told Twiggy on her podcast Tea with Twiggy. 

The Queen, meanwhile, was unfailingly grateful to Fergie for her continued loyalty to Andrew after his links to the disgraced Jeffrey Epstein were revealed and felt reassured that Fergie would continue to support him after her death. It is no coincidence that two of her beloved corgis, Muick and Sandy, were taken in by the Duchess.   

History is likely to be kind to the Duchess of York, particularly if rumours are true that the late Queen has specified for her to have her funeral at St George’s Chapel in Windsor Castle and be interred at the royal burial ground at Frogmore. Not that Fergie is planning to bow out any time soon. 

In typical fashion, she’s already using her latest diagnosis to help others and urge people not to waste a second before getting their moles checked. She admits that she nearly didn’t go along for her mammogram last year, which detected her breast cancer – it was her sister Jane, who lives in Australia, who persuaded her. In classic Fergie style, she sees herself as lucky for having cancer – lucky that it was caught, lucky that she has a “Derek” because it saved her life and lucky that she can share her experiences and help save other lives. 

“Afterwards, you have an enormous scar, a badge of office but you like yourself a lot,” she said on her podcast. It’s devastating that she is now battling cancer again – let this new self-acceptance be the extra strength she needs. She's 64 and just getting started.