Fergie's Scandal That Got Her Uninvited From William & Kate's Wedding: 'I Wanted to Be There'
Sarah Ferguson’s recent fall from grace, which saw her being left to fend for her own, has many looking back on her relationship with senior royals over the years. One such episode was her painful experience of not being invited to Prince William and Princess Kate’s 2011 wedding, again over a scandal of her own doing. She later shared in an interview that being left off the guest list made her feel ‘totally worthless.’ While she agreed that the day was a ‘difficult’ pill to swallow, she also accepted that the Prince and Princess of Wales had been right not to include her, as at the time she was knee-deep in another controversy that painted the monarchy in a bad light.
Speaking to Oprah Winfrey in 2011, Ferguson admitted that being excluded from the royal wedding cut deeply. "I was not invited, and I chose to go and be in Thailand in a place called Camelia and... the jungle embraced me," she said. She said the decision by William and Kate, however, was 'quite right,' given she had traded introductions to her former husband, Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, for a sum of $654,000. The emotional strain, Ferguson recalled, stemmed from watching her daughters, Princess Beatrice and Princess Eugenie, take part in the celebrations without her.
"It was so difficult. I wanted to be there with my girls, and to be getting them dressed and to go as a family," she explained. "And also, it was so hard because the last bride up that aisle was me,” she told Winfrey. The former Duchess also revealed that at the time, Mountbatten-Windsor, from whom she had long been separated, had tried to reassure her. He apparently told her that their own 1986 wedding day had been 'perfect,' a memory she clung to at a time when she felt judged by her past mistakes. She lamented, "I felt that I ostracized myself by my behavior, by the past, by living with all the regrets of my mistakes... I sort of wore a hair shirt and beat myself up most of the day, thinking and regretting, 'Why did I make such a mistake?'"
Ferguson found some comfort in a comparison that, in her view, softened the moment. Reflecting on Princess Diana’s absence from the wedding, she said, "I really love the feeling that sort of Diana, and I both weren't there. But I'm here to say how proud she would have been, and Kate looked utterly beautiful."
While she candidly accepted the weight of her past mistakes, the ‘cash for access’ scandal cast a dark shadow over the monarchy and, by extension, over Queen Elizabeth’s efforts to protect the institution from further embarrassment.
The Queen reportedly saw the controversy as an ‘utter betrayal’ and was left fuming when she first learned about what Ferguson had done. It marked a turning point in the late Queen’s private opinion of her former daughter-in-law, whom she reportedly referred to as ‘The Duchess of Deceit.’