Sarah “Fergie” Ferguson amassed debts of almost $5 million living a lavish lifestyle while exploiting her royal status to avoid paying bills, according to a new book.
Prince Andrew’s ex-wife, who still lives with the disgraced royal in a palatial Windsor mansion, would “breeze” out of hotels without paying, but ended up being cut off financially by the late Queen Elizabeth II and even got her fuel payment card confiscated.
The allegations are made in the latest extract of Andrew Lownie’s explosive biography, Entitled: The Rise and Fall of the House of York, which landed in the Daily Mail on Tuesday.
Having previously focused on Andrew, the latest extract of the book now turns the spotlight on the unchecked extravagance of Sarah Ferguson, Duchess of York.
While Sarah was deeply unpopular in the U.K., there has always been more sympathy for her in America. Her commercial work, which famously included selling juicers on QVC, was seen in the U.K. as shamelessly trading off her royal connections, but in the U.S, was more often likely to be portrayed as the best, if chaotic, efforts of a scrappy underdog trying to make good.
Lownie’s book, already controversial for its surreal account of Prince Andrew’s sexual debauchery and financial corruption, unapologetically takes the former tack, presenting a forensic catalog of staggering alleged financial irresponsibility and indulgence of Marie Antoinette proportions.
According to the book, by November 1995—three years after her separation from Andrew—Sarah had amassed debts totaling £3.7 million (around $4.9 million) and was in such dire financial straits that her bank had to pre-approve her before she could sign even the smallest of checks.
But rather than reining in her spending, the duchess seems to have adopted a strategy of denial: running up vast bills at high-end stores and simply behaving as though payment was someone else’s problem. This ruse seems to have worked especially well at Harrods, where the store’s owner, Mohamed al-Fayed, a famous royal fan, reportedly allowed her to rack up expenses without ever applying pressure to settle the account.
“These accounts just never got paid,” one former employee tells Lownie. “Somehow the shops didn’t complain—because of who she is.”
The same trick was applied to lavish hotel stays. In New York, Sarah would regularly “breeze out” of five-star establishments like the Four Seasons and the Palace Hotel, acting as though she were too grand to pay her bill.
In 1994, Coutts—the exclusive private banking firm beloved by the royals—lost patience, demanding Sarah pay an overdue sum of £500,000 ($650,000) within 14 days.
The palace reportedly settled the account, but later issued an icy statement insisting that the Duchess’s finances were now nothing to do with the palace and were “matters which the Duchess of York must discuss and resolve with her bankers and other financial advisers.”
According to Lownie, friends were also leaned on, often to their cost. One friend lent the Duchess £100,000 (approximately $130,000) to fund a holiday in the South of France, but threatened to sue when they received just £5,000 in repayment. Sarah allegedly claimed she thought the rest had been a gift.
John Bryan, her former lover famously photographed sucking her toes on a sun lounger, offers perhaps the most astonishing insight into the Duchess’s lifestyle, with Lownie citing him as saying that her annual personal expenditure reached £860,000 (around $1.1 million).
According to Bryan, that included hundreds of thousands on staff, clothing, gifts, flowers, parties, and luxury travel.
Her approach to packing was equally excessive: she allegedly often required two cars to reach the airport—one for herself and another trailing behind with up to ten tissue-lined suitcases. On one occasion, she allegedly arrived with so many cases that she ended up paying several thousand dollars in excess baggage charges.
Staff remember a household run with theatrical wastefulness. One former employee recalls that every night Fergie insisted on an entire side of beef, a leg of lamb, and a whole chicken to be laid out on the dining room table “like a medieval banquet.” Yet often only she and her two daughters, Beatrice and Eugenie, were there to eat. The food was almost always discarded the next day, untouched. “There was no attempt to keep it or serve it cold. It just sat there all night and was thrown away,” the ex-staffer recalled.
At one point, her retinue reportedly included a cook, driver, maid, butler, dresser, nanny, three secretaries, a personal assistant, a lady-in-waiting, two gardeners, a flower arranger, and a dog walker. One employee joked that their sole responsibility was picking up dog poop.
Attempts to make her confront her finances were met with fury. “She would throw an absolute screaming fit if staff even tried to show her a letter from the bank,” one friend said. She was so particular and exacting that her butler reportedly had to rise at 4:30 a.m. to ensure her watercress was correctly iced.
It all came crumbling down in 2009 when her U.S. company, Hartmoor, collapsed. Desperately overextended, even her BP card that was used to buy fuel at local petrol stations was eventually confiscated because of unpaid arrears, Lownie says.
Lownie’s portrait of Sarah Ferguson will, like much of his book, make deeply uncomfortable reading in the corridors of power.
It’s a portrait of a woman living a fantasy of royal grandeur long after the reality had crumbled, propped up at the expense of friends, lovers, and ultimately Queen Elizabeth II herself.
Unfortunately, whether she or her husband will ever be truly held to account for their lifestyles remains, like so much in this saga, an open question.
Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson no longer have official media representation, but a communications professional thought to still be close to them was contacted by The Daily Beast for comment on Lownie’s latest claims.
If you want more on Fergie’s jaw-dropping spending habits, and an account of how Fergie flew into a jealous rage after learning Princess Diana had beaten her to a meeting with her crush, “John-John Kennedy,” head on over to The Royalist on Substack.
The post Prince Andrew’s Ex’s Spending Put Marie Antoinette to Shame appeared first on The Daily Beast.
