SARAH DUCHESS OF YORK : STANDING BY HER MAN NO MATTER WHAT : DIVORCED TO HER EX HUSBAND PRINCE ANDREW : HONORARY MISTRESS OF THE MONTH

The news that Sarah, Duchess of York, has had surgery and is determined to heal from breast cancer, with ex-husband and best friend, Prince Andrew of York, by her side, sparked me to make Sarah, and her exemplary relationship with Andrew, the subject of this months posts.

I always think of memoirs and autobiographies as the best resource when I'm researching.  Oh, I know that many memoirs are written to promote a personality and their reputation.  I expected Sarah Ferguson's memoir to be full of apologies, an attempt to regain her reputation after being called out for various misdeeds - cheating on Andrew or running up debt.  I was surprised to find that Sarah Ferguson's memoir was intelligent, insightful, and eloquent. It certainly rings true. She is a far more substantial person than I imagined. Had my notions about her been too influenced by tabloids? Well, this book gives the details of the media as friend and then enemy, but worse, the way she was treated by The Firm. With co-author Jeff Coplan, the Duchess of York, long happily divorced from Prince Andrew, third child of the late Queen Elizabeth II of Great Britain and Prince Andrew of Greece, created a well written and interesting book.

Was Sarah ever a Mistress?  Well maybe, in the first serious relationship she had with an older man, Paddy McNally. A man who graciously let her go when she fell in love with Andrew, then Duke of York, Prince Andrew.  Paddy and Sarah stayed friends.  

Daughter of divorced parents, raised more by her strict father, the emotional man who loved her, whom she called Dads, than her mother who went into another and long distance relationship, Sarah found herself floundering.  She was an insecure girl who aimed to please in order to be accepted while often missing the point. Her mother followed her heart and moved to Argentina to be with the man who would be her second husband, taking leave as a parent. Sarah also followed her heart into her first serious relationship with Paddy. Was she concerned with preserving her virginity?  Not as her generation came into adulthood. She was not holding out in hopes of being eligible to marry a King or a Prince. She was a commoner who was expected to marry very well, someone from her own set, not in the peerage but adjacent.

Sarah tells the story of a childhood filled with determination and spunk, though she experienced being a misfit time and time again. With curly red hair, hips she thought of as too wide, and a tendency to do first and think about it later, she found her athletics, her love of horses and riding them, to be the very activity that kept her going. Dads was involved in the sport of Polo. She lived for riding horses and country life. Meeting in childhood because of Dads's link to the Royal family, Andrew and Sarah encountered each other growing up. The teenage Sarah was aware that she was not the most slender, the most academic, or a member of the peerage but Sarah was destined to marry Prince Andrew, who clearly found her companionable.  He loved Sarah's fun. The two became friends first and forever. 

With mom across the world, Sarah was sent to a boarding school.

Excerpt page 47: "Never was a fish more out of water.  I was a country girl, a sporting girl, a wild thing who loved fresh air and running free.  And here I was plunked into a rambling old mansion in the middle of town, with no grounds to speak of, pressed to keep pace with kid sophisticates from show business families. I used to run for miles, but now I never ran because the urban fumes choked me. I had always slept with my windows open, cocooned by layers of bedclothes, but here it wasn't safe to open windows at night, and so I parboiled in the bed and cursed central heating. ....  When you have an adolescent weight problem, ballet school is not quite the place to be,  Hurst Lodge (her boarding school) was populated by a colony of sylphlike creatures, impossibly slim and supple as they did their splits, with mirrors everywhere and here came good old Fergie Form, bobbing along, wincing at her own reflection." ......

Though Sarah knew her strict father had the best intentions raising here, her grandmother, Honorable Doreen Wright - her mom's mom, was the one who came to help on weekends.  Sarah says on page 53, "Unconditional love was a core principle for Grummy, and I was a prime beneficiary.  She had been a hard, unyielding mother with Mum, and there still was no getting one over on her, but we could talk about anything, from religion to the Poll. When I got older she'd be okay with all my boyfriends, in contrast to Dads's stern disapproval. Because she never judged me, I confided in her freely, even let the real Sarah peep out now and then."

After graduating from boarding school, Sarah was given little choice in what more education her Dads was willing to afford. She could either go to a finishing school called Winkfield Place to learn to cook and arrange flowers and become a good homemaker or Queen's Secretarial College, which is what she did. After graduation, to get a start, she got a monthly stipend from her dad and took a temp job with a public relations firm In Knightsbridge, London, with a starting salary of $6,000 a year. She was eighteen years old and began to work hard and play hard. Sarah's weekends were consumed with a repetition of house parties and after-work cocktail parties and shoot weekends, the typical entertainments of the young upper class.  She rented with a roommate in humble circumstances. When she took a different job working for an art gallery, she also had to work a second job on the weekends as a salesclerk in a maternity store.

Sarah was still considered to be a Sloan Ranger, which she defines on page 60 as "that well connected set of smug, socially ambitious preppie." But even when she didn't have the money to go shopping, Sarah was experiencing her independence.  On page 70: Sarah wrote "The Sloanes are quite an astounding species -- they will give our future anthropologists a run for their money  What makes them special and distinct is that they think they are frightfully upper class when actually they are not, and so they must try harder than those at the very top.  The Court at Buckingham Palace is full of them....  They all went to the same boarding schools, where little Muffy and Daphne played frightfully well together and became lifelong chums or muckers.  Their dress code was ridged, if eccentric: Laura Ashley shirts, with a frill up top and pearls over the frill; a cardy over the shoulders, tweedy skirts, trailing down near the calf; navy blue tights; practical shoes without heels.  Lightly scruffy, in other words, but expensive.

Sarah would rather go skiing at Verbier, Switzerland. In 1982 it was there that she met Paddy McNally. Sarah, adored him because he was so down to earth, not posh or putting on the social graces. He was the father of two boys.

Page 73  Paddy was probably Dads' worst nightmare: not the right age, not in the Household Calvary, just a man named McNally in motor racing.  Here she goes again....  But I loved Paddy for all the things he wasn't; for the phony graces he rejected, the airs he'd refused to put on, even after he had done quite well for himself.  He had a sharp, practical mind, a large and open heart --- he was just himself, straight down the line.

Sarah wanted to marry Paddy but the age difference meant they were at different times in their lives and though he said he needed to do the right thing, she didn't bring marriage up. Because of Paddy's connections Sarah was able to get a dream job in London. In 1984 she became an acquisitions editor for fine art books. Her salary was still not much - no more than *18,000 a year. But it was a creative job  and included travel.

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So why have I elected Sarah Ferguson, Duchess of York as an Honorary Mistress this month here at Mistress Manifesto - BlogSpot, not because of her relationship with Paddy, but because of her marriage with Prince Andrew?  It's because she's lived with and stayed best friends with her ex-husband. Aren't we all aware of the divorced who won't give up torturing each other?  The ones who put their children in the middle of an ongoing battle?  While so many wonder when exactly they should give up and accept the situation, Sarah has been exemplarity. There was no reason that their daughters, Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie, both who married commoners, should suffer the kind of shunning Sarah suffered until, I hate to say it, her father-in-law, Prince Phillip, who apparently hated her, had died. The Princesses had the advantage of, in effect, an intact relationship between their parents. Though Royal Lodge is huge and has many bedrooms, home was the same house for Sarah and Andrew and their daughters. More recently included in the doings of the Royals, perhaps at her daughter's insistence, I have in the past felt sadness for Sarah who was punished for years with isolation and exclusion.

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The Jeffery Epstein sex trafficking scandals have included Prince Andrew, once called Randy Andy, who may have been targeted for grooming himself by the ambitious Epstein who was no doubt a sex addict as well as chronic molester and rapist of women too young to give consent. I've researched Epstein, including the involvement by the now imprisoned Ghislaine Maxwell in locating nubiles for her once-boyfriend and boss. She was friends with Prince Andrew first and both Epstein and Maxwell befriended the Prince.

I strongly feel that Epstein was setting up honey-traps, offering forbidden and illegal sex with girls to powerful men, leaders of the world and in finance, as well as celebrities, in order to blackmail them for money.  The money furthered his reputation as mysteriously rich. As time goes by more and more is revealed about his connections but the question is who took the bait or who dealt with him only for business or charity causes.

I watched the interview Prince Andrew did, trying to clear himself from cooperation with Epstein or charges that he had sex with a seventeen year old.  The media called it a "train wreck" interview but I believed the Prince that he did not recall having sex with the woman when she was seventeen. I believed him until he said he never sweats. (We all do, some more than others.) Do I think Andrew has slept around?  I sure do!  But what of Sarah, the devoted ex-wife, raising the Queens grand-daughters with Andrew and now the carer of the deceased Queens's precious Corgi dogs? She believes he is innocent. She says he's been great father and is a good man.

Sarah has stood by her man, the love of her life, the father of her children, and a man who stood by her when she was going through her own scandals... For while she became a person who quit the Firm, she never quit finding love for Andrew.  And I think he knows this, as he enters his senior years, and her love for him is what has and will give him reason to live.

Sarah and Andrew announced their separation in 1992 after six years of marriage. By then she had become infamous when photographed with another man, one she did not actually have an affair with.  Then, while separated, Sarah had an affair with for some time with the man who was supposedly sucking her toes. I say this was goof-balling around and the photos had a bit to do with being stalked and spied upon by unethical journalists and probably only the photos that could be taken as sexy were reproduced. Still, the Queen was furious with her. 

Andrew had barely been home during their marriage, averaging forty two days a year - one day in ten.  They had managed two children.  Four years later, after the separation, the divorce was finalized. Yet after moving houses with the girls, the two of them settled into co-existance. Neither has ever remarried, leading to rumors that before their lives on earth are over, perhaps now that Prince Phillip has died, and Queen Elizabeth has also, they might remarry.  Sarah says no, she is happy with their relationship as it is. They have been a consistency in each other's lives for over forty years.

Sarah Ferguson has run up debt and also attempted to earn her own money, through writing children's books and romance novels, and diet plan advocacy. It's estimated she's earned a million or more just from those books.  Though not university educated she has managed to work in the publishing business, and to write other books, including romance novels.

Sarah was shunned from family events for years and as a divorced woman did not expect to be included in state affairs such as the Coronation of King Charles III.

This month I'll excerpt from Sarah's book and perhaps together we will come to understand her relationship with Prince Andrew that began when she was just launched into the adult world and how it has endured.

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Interested in more about Great Britain's Royal's and their Mistresses?  Try clicking on the label Great Britain, or search for King's Mistresses!

A Note: In July Sarah was diagnosed with breast cancer and had surgery and is undergoing treatment. Andrew is by her side.  I don't know what these two have been through but I feel as if they have a karmic relationship. 

There must be a million ways to love and one of those ways is theirs.