THE Duchess of York disclosed yesterday that she had suffered a nervous breakdown when her six-year marriage to the Queen’s second son ended in separation.
In an interview with a US magazine the Duchess implied that the Duke of Edinburgh, whom she described as “very frightening”, had been partly responsible for the wrecked marriage, by forbidding her to join her husband during his tours of duty at naval bases.
When the couple announced their separation in 1992, Buckingham Palace went out of its way to stress that the Duchess had initiated the proceedings, and did its best to heap blame on her. The separation ended in divorce, initiated by the Duke of York, in 1996.
Talking to Rosie magazine, the Duchess said she was “probably” clinically depressed when she separated from the Duke of York, and did not know how she had survived. “I had out-of-control debts, an out-of-control lifestyle that I couldn’t keep up any more. I had now ruined my marriage.”
In spite of needing medication, the Duchess said, she did not take it. “I don’t know how I’m sitting here.”
Things went wrong only a week after her wedding to Prince Andrew in Westminster Abbey in 1986, the Duchess said: “I had been working in London and living in a flat with my best friend, and suddenly I married a prince and was on the public stage. Look, when I married Andrew I was told I could go and live in the ports with him, wherever he was. But one week after we got married the Duke of Edinburgh said ‘No, you can’t. No, you stay in London and, Andrew, you go to the port’. Because there’s no security.”
She added that if she were in the same situation today, she would have defied her father-in-law and said that, in recent conversation with her ex-husband, he had agreed with her.
The Duchess, who is spokesman for Weight Watchers in America, said she had eaten to excess most of her life because her mother had abandoned her while Sarah was in her teens, forsaking her father, Major Ronald Ferguson, for Hector Barrantes, an Argentine polo player: “She never came back, and I never understood why I wasn’t taken with her; I ate to comfort myself.”
One aspect of the Duchess’s lifestyle during her marriage, which came to light when photographs were discovered in a London flat, was her affair with Steve Wyatt, a Texan businessman. When her separation was announced, Palace sources memorably and uncharacteristically told journalists: “The knives are out for Fergie.”
Now the Duke and Duchess of York are frequently seen in public together with their two children, Princess Beatrice and Princess Eugenie.