Sarah Ferguson’s Mom Once Claimed Her Daughter Was Ready to Air Unpleasant Royal Secrets
Sarah Ferguson's mother once claimed the former Duchess was ready to reveal royal secrets in 1992 if she lost custody of her daughters amid Andrew split.
Sarah Ferguson and Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor have shared a good relationship in recent years despite their 1996 divorce. But the same was not the case when their formal separation was first announced to the public in 1992. Behind Palace walls, the former Duchess of York was fighting a battle she feared could cost her Princess Beatrice and Princess Eugenie. According to her mother, Susan Barrantes, Ferguson believed custody was never guaranteed for a woman who had fallen out of royal favor. However, instead of giving up, Barrantes claimed her daughter was ready to sacrifice everything to protect her daughters, even if it meant airing the royal family’s dirty laundry.
In Entitled: The Rise and Fall of the House of York, biographer Andrew Lownie recalled an interview Barrantes gave to Italian magazine Gente during Mountbatten-Windsor and Ferguson’s split. She hinted at a darker bargaining chip if negotiations turned ugly. “Sarah will not accept easily to lose her children and if she does, she is prepared to tell stories that are not very pleasant about the English Crown,” she told the outlet, framing it as a mother’s last defense. Lownie argued that the threat was not theatrical posturing but learned history, noting that Fergie was determined to avoid the fate of her mother and sister Jane.
Lownie wrote in his book, “Fergie was determined to avoid the fate of her mother and sister Jane who had both lost custody of their children when their marriages broke up.” In his telling, "her trump card" was that she "could always sell a kiss-and-tell memoir." That possibility, he adds, meant that for Queen Elizabeth II "the threat was ever present, and the Royal Household knew it always would be." Years later those fears were echoed by royal author Tom Quinn in Channel 5’s When Fergie Met the Monarchy.
In his assessment, Quinn said that Ferguson being "pushed away" from her daughters "was put forward as a serious suggestion by the House of Windsor, by the Royal Family, largely because they feel they should always be in control, that they, or rather Andrew, would have custody of the children." Ultimately, a joint custody agreement was reached, and the feared tell-all never arrived in the aftermath of their divorce. Ferguson waited until 1996 to publish My Story, followed by Finding Sarah in 2011, both focused more on personal survival rather than royal secrets. Still, following the recent stripping of her titles, the possibility of another memoir is not entirely off the table.
Apart from speaking about Ferguson’s determination to protect her daughters, Barrantes also delivered a brutal verdict on her former son-in-law. She told Gente that Mountbatten-Windsor is a “good-looking boy and has a heart of gold to the point where he would be without any money himself to help someone, but he just hasn't got any character...absolutely none.” She further suggested that it was the absence of this quality that ultimately doomed his marriage with Fergie. "If only he had character," she said, "perhaps his marriage wouldn't have broken up."
