Prologue
"I don't think before I act."
— SARAH, DUCHESS OF YORK
HER ROYAL HIGHNESS, SARAH, DUCHESS OF York repeated the words so often they were virtually a mantra:"I am my own person," she said."I want to be myself." The problem was that Sarah, the woman beneath the top-heavy title which weighed her down like an over-jewelled tiara, did not know who she really was once she joined the Royal Family.
"You will tell me if I ever become too royal, won't you?" she begged someone who knew her well. When he later suggested she was becoming a trifle grandiose, she denied she had ever said it. She larked about with shopgirls in a designer's salon, then pulled rank with a ferocity that wiped the smiles off their faces. So often labelled headstrong and rebellious, she was misunderstood because, ultimately, she did not understand herself."I just trust too many people, I'm too spontaneous and I don't think before I act," she said after four years of marriage."I'm less spontaneous than I was, but only because I'm more aware of my responsibilities."
After five years, she knew what she definitely did not want and, in a very public fashion, she broke away from Prince Andrew and what she called the System. In the last interview she gave before the separation in March 1992, she told writer Georgina Howell:"I just wanted to get away. To get away from the System and people saying 'No, you can't, No, you can't, No, you can't.' That's what the System is."
"She seemed to me to be very crestfallen," Georgina Howell told the authors."I got the impression that she had been trying very hard and hadn't got the credit due for her efforts. I thought she was very crushed."
At first scrutiny, Sarah Ferguson had seemed the perfect candidate to give Prince Andrew a thoroughly merited come-uppance after his years of philandering. She was his equal in so many ways and demonstrably his better in others. Even the natural advantage Andrew enjoyed as part of his birthright was not insurmountable. Sarah was elevated to Her Royal Highness the moment the Archbishop of Canterbury had pronounced the couple man and wife in Westminster Abbey on 23 July 1986. In terms of royal precedence, she outranked Anne, the Princess Royal, and Princess Margaret, and stood fourth only to the Queen, the Queen Mother and the Princess of Wales among women in all England and Wales.
Instant royalty, though, entailed even more dangers than instant fame alone because it embodied the power and privilege of a very real prerogative tha
