Prince Philip reportedly did not want anything more to do with Sarah Ferguson after photographs of her with John Bryan were published in 1992. Charles Rae said the late Duke of Edinburgh drew a line after the images appeared, even as the Queen still kept Ferguson around at Balmoral.
The photographs showed Ferguson and her financial adviser sucking her toes and frolicking by a pool in St Tropez. Rae said the pictures, splashed across the front page of the Daily Mirror, would have hit the royal household hard when they arrived at Balmoral.
Balmoral after March 1992
Ferguson was staying at Balmoral with the royals when the pictures were published, creating a direct clash between a public scandal and a private family setting. Rae said he imagined the papers landing there and the Queen and Prince Philip seeing the images for the first time.
He said Philip wanted nothing more to do with Ferguson. On the same podcast, Rae said, "The Queen wasn't as brutal. She still had Fergie around. We used to say she was 'the outlaw in the outhouse'."
Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and Sarah Ferguson
The break came after a marriage that had already started to fray. Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and Sarah Ferguson announced their separation on March 19, 1992, after being introduced by Diana in June 1985 and marrying at Westminster Abbey on July 23, 1986.
They had two daughters, Princess Beatrice, born in August 1988, and Princess Eugenie, born in March 1990. Their divorce was finalised on May 30, 1996.
What the split changed
Rae said philandering does not help a marriage, and Jack Royston said both Ferguson and Andrew needed a "rock" to stabilise each other but ended up destabilising one another instead. The photographs gave a public mark to a private rift, but the family response was not uniform: Philip shut Ferguson out, while the Queen still saw her at Balmoral or Sandringham.
That split in treatment is the clearest result of the scandal in this account. It left Ferguson inside one part of the family circle and outside another, with the difference drawn by Philip rather than by the divorce itself.
