Divorce, scandal, devastating fire: the Queen’s annus horribilis

By the end of 1992, Queen Elizabeth was forced to realise her failings in her role as monarch, as she faced a furious public questioning about the very worth of both her and her family.

The Windsor Castle fire razed St George’s hall and engulfed the Brunswick Tower. Picture: Getty Images.

Queen Elizabeth began 1992 no doubt wondering where she had gone wrong as a mother. By the end of that year, her “annus horribilis”, she was forced to realise her failings in her role as monarch, as she faced a furious public questioning the very worth of her and her family.

The Queen introduced the phrase that has forever come to symbolise that year, in a November speech at London’s Guildhall, at a dinner to mark her 40th anniversary as monarch.

“(This) is not a year on which I shall look back with undiluted pleasure,” she told the Lord Mayor of London and dinner guests with typical understatement. “In the words of one of my more sympathetic correspondents, it has turned out to be an annus horribilis. I suspect that I am not alone in thinking it so ….”

The year had seen, in quick succession, the separation of Prince Andrew and Fergie, her favourite son and daughter-in-law, Princess Anne and her husband Mark Phillips divorce after a messy separation and infidelity on both sides (including Phillips’ love child), Andrew Morton’s brutally revelatory book Diana: Her True Story, publication of salacious photographs of Fergie having her toes sucked by “financial adviser” John Bryan in the South of France, the cringe-worthy “Squidgygate” tapes of Princess Diana and her lover James Gilby, the devastating fire at Windsor Castle and, by December, the formal separation of Prince Charles and Diana.

It is no wonder the Queen wondered, in her Guildhall speech, “how future generations will judge the events of this tumultuous year.”

Princess Diana and Prince Charles were going in different directions by the end of 1992

The divorce of Princess Anne and Mark Phillips was long expected and unsurprising; they had already been separated for three years, the infidelities of both the gossip of Fleet St bars, if they didn’t always make it into print. Anne’s affair with Timothy Lawrence, the Queen’s equerry, began while she and Phillips were still married, and she married him within months of her divorce. Princess Margaret wasn’t the only person to regard Anne’s divorce and remarriage with some irony. Forty years earlier, the Queen had refused to allow Margaret to marry Group Captain Peter Townsend because he was a divorcee and now nobody turned a hair at the divorce and almost immediate remarriage of her only daughter.

If the Queen was saddened at the breakdown of Anne’s marriage, the separation of Andrew and Sarah Ferguson was more distressing. Andrew was her favourite child; he was easier to understand than the sensitive, complicated Charles and, like the Queen herself, not given to introspection. She also loved “Fergie”, whom she and Prince Philip (a fan of Fergie’s earthy sense of humour) regarded as a breath of fresh air. Fergie, the daughter of Prince Charles’ polo manager Ron Ferguson, went riding with the Queen and loved the royal pursuits of grouse shooting and fishing on their summer holidays at Balmoral and Sandringham.

But by the early 1990s Fergie had become bored with Andrew, whose interests consisted of playing golf and watching videos, and she was repelled by his boorish behaviour at dinner parties – particularly his non-existent table manners.

She was also frustrated by the constraints of her royal role; like Diana she had been thrown into the deep end of royal life with no real support and, unlike Diana, she was regarded with contempt by courtiers who made no attempt to help smooth her way.

On holiday at Balmoral in 1991 the family had expressed their concern at Diana and Fergie’s behaviour when they raced each other around the estate in the Queen Mother’s Daimler and a four-wheel drive estate vehicle. Fergie stalked off in a temper and it was left to Diana to impress on the Queen and the rest of the family that they needed to give Sarah more leeway. She tried to explain how hard it was to marry into this family, and told them her sister-in-law – and friend – was at the end of her tether.

Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson wave to the crowds from the balcony of Buckingham Palace after their wedding.

The Prince and Princess of Wales watch Indonesian tribal dancers in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. in 1989. Picture: AFP.

A few months later, in January 1992, a tip off to the Daily Mail saw the publication of photographs of Sarah with her Texan lover, Steve Wyatt. Amid the ensuing scandal Sarah told the Queen she wanted a separation from Andrew.

The Queen asked Sarah to give the marriage another three months; but in March Sarah and Andrew announced their formal separation. A few months later, Sarah was at Balmoral with the royal family to negotiate the terms of her separation when the Daily Mirror published photographs of her having her toes sucked by her “financial adviser” while on holiday in the South of France.

Excruciatingly for Sarah, she came down to breakfast to find the family reading the expose over their kedgeree, and was then summoned by an angry Queen who was reading the papers in her sitting room.

Royal author Ingrid Seward wrote later: “The Queen was furious, absolutely furious. I think partly because she loved Fergie so much. She just couldn’t believe Fergie could have been so stupid to allow this to happen.”

Courtiers who had never approved of Sarah were hardly surprised. The Queen’s former private secretary Lord Charteris summed up their attitude to her when he called Andrew’s wife “A vulgarian, vulgar, vulgar, vulgar.”

Diana Princess of Wales sits alone in front of the Taj Mahal during a visit to India in March 1992. Picture: Getty Images.

Meanwhile the marriage of Charles and Diana, which effectively ended shortly after the birth of Prince Harry in 1984, was now publicly crumbling. By 1992 Charles had resumed his affair with former girlfriend Camilla Parker-Bowles and he and Diana were leading separate lives. On tour in March 1992 Diana posed for photographs sitting alone and wistful at the Taj Mahal, Shah Jahan’s monument to love, prompting headlines of “royal heartbreak” around the world. Diana, an arch manipulator, had sat for the pictures knowing the headlines would gain her sympathy in her increasingly acrimonious marriage.

But it was the publication of Morton’s biography of Diana in June that shook the royal family to its foundations. Its effect had far more of an impact than Meghan Markle’s complaints to Oprah Winfrey about her treatment by the royal household a quarter of a century later. The public knew the royal family was dysfunctional but now, for the first time, they were told of Charles’ long-term love for Camilla, his dismissive cruelty to his young bride, and of Diana’s resulting bulimia, depression and suicide attempts. Diana told Morton the Queen was present when she threw herself down the stairs at Sandringham while pregnant with William, but did little for her daughter-in-law. “The Queen comes out, absolutely horrified, shaking – she was so frightened,” Diana said. However, she claimed the Queen blamed her depression and self-harm for the strains of the marriage, rather than the other way around, and had supported Charles when he had Diana flown to London for psychiatric counselling.

The Prince And Princess Of Wales on a visit to Ottawa in October 1992. Picture: Getty Images.

Diana denied co-operating with Morton for the book – after her death Morton later admitted she was his source. But while she swore to the Queen and Prince Philip that she had never spoken to Morton, she had taped her revelations and given those tapes to her friend, Dr James Colthurst, who in turn passed them to the writer.

The book had its desired outcome – in Diana’s eyes at least. The public turned against Charles, but the Queen and Philip, depicted as coldly neglectful of their troubled daughter-in-law’s cries for help, were caught in the crossfire. Diana confided that she was “terrified” of the monarch and kept her distance from the royals, although her parents-in- law both supported her, even as the marriage crumbled, when Diana would weep in the Queen’s sitting room as she confided about her unhappiness.

The family had barely begun to recover from the Morton book when The Sun published the so-called Squidgygate tapes – recordings made by a ham radio enthusiast on New Year’s Eve 1989 of a conversation between Diana and Lotus car dealer James Gilby, heir to the Gilbey gin fortune, in which she complained that Charles made her life torture and railed against the way she felt she was controlled by the royals, complainingly, famously: “After all I’ve done for this f***ing family.” Extracts from the tapes also made it clear Diana was in a relationship with Gilby, whose nickname for her was Squidgy, tarnishing her carefully manufactured image as the loyal bride betrayed by her husband.

London's national newspaper headlines on 21 December, reporting Queen Elizabeth had sent a letter to both Prince Charles and Princess Diana spelling out her "desire for an early divorce". Picture: AFP.

The scandals and revelations were bad enough. But for the Queen the most devastating event of 1992 came that November, when a fire broke out in Queen Victoria’s chapel at Windsor Castle, after a spotlight being used by workmen overheated and ignited a curtain. The fire spread quickly, razing St George’s Hall, the largest of the State Apartments, and engulfing the Brunswick Tower. Invaluable works of art and furnishings were destroyed, but the damage would have been far worse if Prince Andrew, who was at the castle overseeing renovations, had not taken over the operation to save many priceless artefacts. Andrew called the Queen, who was at Buckingham Palace, with the awful news and, he told reporters later, she was “absolutely devastated” when she arrived to see the damage. Windsor, where she spent most weekends, was her favourite residence; she and Princess Margaret had been evacuated to the castle during the war and she had many happy memories associated with it.

After viewing the smouldering ruins, the Queen retreated to the Royal Lodge and spent most of the weekend there with an equally devastated Princess Margaret and the Queen Mother. Prince Philip, who was in Argentina at the time, called and spent hours trying to comfort his wife, assuring her he would oversee restoration of the castle.

Diana would later tell Andrew Morton: “The symbolism of the Windsor Castle fire was not lost on anyone inside the family.”

The Windsor Castle fire devastated the Queen. Picture: Getty Images.

The destruction wrought by the fire wasn’t just restricted to bricks and mortar: it damaged the monarchy itself, and increased the sense of failure Queen Elizabeth already felt over the ruins of her children’s marriages.

The total damage was estimated to be about £60 million (in fact it would cost much less – around £36.5m) but after it emerged the castle wasn’t insured, the Secretary of State for National Heritage, Peter Brooke, announced that the government – i.e. the taxpayer – would foot the bill. The announcement caused outrage; the cost of the royal family’s privileged lifestyle and the Queen’s exemption from tax on her private income came under harsh scrutiny, particularly as Britain was suffering its severest recession since the 1930s. The outcry forced the Queen to re-examine her value to the country and led to her decision to pay part of the cost of restoration – around £2m; and to fund much of the rest of the cost by charging visitors entry to Windsor Castle, and opening Buckingham Palace to the public.

Days after the fire, then Prime Minister John Major also announced that the Queen and Prince Charles had volunteered to pay tax on their private incomes, and the Queen would also reimburse the civil list annuities given to five of the royal family (Anne, Andrew, Edward, Princess Margaret and the Queen’s aunt, Princess Alice).

The announcement backfired, however – it looked as if the Queen, all of whose predecessors, apart from her father, had paid income tax, had been panicked into the decision, and public anger didn’t begin to dissipate for months.

Her anguish over the controversy and realisation of the frailty of her role was made clear in the Annus Horribilis speech when she said, rather plaintively: “I am quite sure that most people try to do their jobs as best they can, even if the result is not always entirely successful.” She added, possibly as a rebuke to her loudly vocal critics: “He who has never failed to reach perfection has a right to be the harshest critic.”

Weeks later, John Major announced the formal separation of Prince Charles and Princess Diana, and the Queen’s annus horribilis was complete.

Worse would come in following years – Charles and Diana’s separate but equally devastating interviews to the BBC, their divorce and Diana’s death and, more recently, Prince Harry and his wife Meghan’s departure from the royal family, and the scandal of Prince Andrew’s friends, paedophile Jeffrey Epstein, who hanged himself in a New York jail in 2019, and Epstein’s girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell.

But no one year has had quite the same cascade of disastrous events, with the dysfunction of the royal family so brutally exposed and the value of the monarch’s role itself brought into question.