Photo: Georges De Keerle/Getty Images
Now a newPeoplespecial edition,Royal Women: Inside the Windsors’ Lives Today,revisits the complex friendship between Princess Diana and Sarah Ferguson, from the unique and necessary bond they formed as sisters-in-law, to their year of silence prior to Diane’s death in 1997. Dubbed “The Merry Wives of Windsor” in the press back then, Diana and Sarah enjoyed stirring up trouble together from the start.
On the eve of Sarah and Andrew’s July 1986 wedding, the two women dressed as police officers, planning to crash Prince Andrew’s stag party but instead hitting the posh London club Annabel’s, where they sat at the bar until patrons caught on and the pranksters fled. Traditionalists worried that the antics of these two twentysomethings—giggling at public events, sitting in one another’s lap at Ascot—could destroy the crown. “That way lies ruin for the royal family,’’ huffedPrince Charles’s biographer Penny Junor at the time.
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But the monarchy survived and arguably thrived as a result of these two spirited members of the family. Today the way Diana’s daughters-in-law, Kate and Meghan, are viewed seems awfully familiar to Sarah Ferguson. “Women, in particular, are constantly pitted against and compared with each other in a way that reminds me of how people tried to portray Diana and me all the time as rivals, which is something neither of us ever really felt,”she wrotein a recent essay inHello!Magazine. In this newPeopleissue, learn how the next generation, including Kate and Meghan and Sarah’s daughters,Princesses Eugenieand Beatrice, are doing things their way.
People’s new special editionRoyal Women: Inside the Windsors’ Lives Todayis available now onAmazonand wherever magazines are sold.
source: people.com
