Sarah Ferguson Lectures Six-Year-Old Eugenie About Making Terrible Life Choices, Apparently Forgetting She Married Prince Andrew
Princess Eugenie's childhood complaint about uncomfortable shoes exposes the greatest contradiction in royal parenting: a family with centuries of terrible decisions believes it is qualified to offer advice.
LONDON — The British monarchy has survived wars, divorces, abdications, financial scandals and Prince Andrew. But according to a parenting anecdote HELLO! magazine revisited on 10 October, the royal family once faced an emergency so serious that it required a mother-daughter conference about shoes.
The incident involves six-year-old Princess Eugenie and a pair of shoes her mother, Sarah Ferguson, considered lovely. Eugenie didn't wear them. A week later she explained that she didn't like them and that they were too small, which, for a child, amounts to a full statement of grievance.
Ferguson sat her down. As she later told it to Canadian television host Dini Petty, shortly after her divorce, the message was that she didn't want her daughter repeating the mistakes mummy had made by 37. “I want you to learn now at 6,” she said. She added that Eugenie was no longer frightened to speak her mind.
This was extraordinary advice from a woman who had married Prince Andrew at Westminster Abbey in 1986, a decision that suggests her own mind should occasionally have been prevented from speaking.
Eugenie told her mum the shoes didn’t fit and she listened. Imagine if anyone had tried that with the title. -- Ingrid Gustafsson,
Observations About Royal Parenting and Uncomfortable Shoes
- You ever notice that the royal family's idea of a crisis is a shoe? Regular people have a crisis, it's the rent. These people had a crisis where the footwear didn't fit, and it's the one they actually solved. In a week. With no lawyers.
- Six years old and she's already giving feedback to management. I know grown adults who've worn the wrong size for a decade because telling the salesman felt rude. They'll say “no, these are great” while their toes file a formal complaint.
- Thirty-seven is a strange age to be handing out life wisdom. At thirty-seven you're still negotiating with yourself about the second bag of chips. You're not wise. You're tired with a better haircut.
- “Learn from my mistakes” is a great parenting line until you look at the mistakes. It's like a guy at a casino handing you his last chips and saying, “Here, watch how this works.”
- The shoes got dealt with in a week. The marriage took ten years to come back to the store, and nobody got a refund.
Princess Eugenie's Shoe Complaint Gives the Royal Family a Scandal It Can Actually Fix
For the first time in generations, the House of Windsor had a scandal with an obvious solution. The shoes were uncomfortable. Remove the shoes. Nobody needed a parliamentary inquiry, twelve solicitors, a public relations consultant or a confidential financial settlement. Within royal circles, this qualified as a miracle.
Buckingham Palace has traditionally handled difficult questions the way a restaurant manager handles a rat in the soup: by announcing that soup is no longer available. The footwear crisis was different. It had an actual victim, an identifiable problem and a fix that cost the taxpayer nothing. The household could finally tell the public that lessons had been learned. They were lessons about shoes, but they were lessons.
Sarah Ferguson's Parenting Advice: Learn From Mum's Mistakes at Six
Ferguson's central principle was simple: children should learn from their parents' mistakes. In most British households that means avoiding credit card debt, remembering to service the car and not marrying someone who owns seven guitars. In the York household, the syllabus ran longer.
Eugenie was six and her mother was 37, which gave Sarah a 31-year head start on collecting examples of what not to do. The first lesson was presumably that uncomfortable shoes should be rejected. The second was that unsuitable husbands deserved the same treatment. The family had already shown a tendency to keep the husband long after discovering he was considerably less comfortable than the shoes.
Royal historians may eventually settle whether Sarah's greatest mistake was marrying Andrew or believing that marrying into the British monarchy was a reliable form of financial planning. Either way, the marriage left a useful principle behind: examine the person with at least as much care as the wedding invitations. A sensible parent tells a child to look both ways before crossing the road. A Windsor parent should probably add: look both ways before accepting an invitation to a billionaire's dinner party.
Palace Braces for Royals Speaking Their Minds
The dangerous part of Sarah's advice was the encouragement to express herself honestly. Speaking one's mind is not a traditional royal activity. The monarchy runs on the principle that everyone has an opinion but nobody finds out what it is until the memoir comes out.
Imagine the rest of the family catching on. A royal could attend an official function and announce that the speeches were boring. Someone might admit that cutting a ribbon isn't particularly demanding employment. A palace official might confess that opening a hospital is a bit easier than working in one. Eventually somebody would ask Prince Andrew what exactly he had been doing for a living.
The constitutional consequences would be serious. The monarchy depends on a delicate arrangement in which the public pays attention, the royals receive attention, and nobody looks too closely at the arrangement. Eugenie's complaint put that bargain at risk, because it established that being uncomfortable is a legitimate reason to object. Apply that principle to the whole institution and half the royal household would resign before breakfast.
Royal Honours Proposed for Complaining About Uncomfortable Shoes
Commentators have long celebrated acts of courage within the monarchy. There are medals for military service, decorations for public duty and honours for people who have spent 40 years in meetings without visibly falling asleep. Eugenie's footwear complaint deserves a commemorative medal of its own. She identified something uncomfortable, said so honestly and got a result. By royal standards, that is practically a revolution.
Compare that with the country's decades-long effort to persuade Prince Andrew to embrace the concept of ordinary employment. The average British worker gets up at seven, travels through miserable weather, answers emails and spends eight hours pretending to enjoy being managed. Andrew's former royal duties largely involved attending functions where other people thanked him for attending functions. Even after stepping back from public life, he achieved something most Britons can only dream about: leaving work without anyone being entirely certain what the work had been.
The Mistake Eugenie Could Never Avoid: Being Born a Windsor
Ultimately, Sarah Ferguson's advice contained one unavoidable flaw. Eugenie could avoid uncomfortable shoes. She could avoid unsuitable boyfriends, embarrassing interviews, questionable acquaintances and expensive mistakes. She could not avoid being born into the House of Windsor, because that decision was made on her behalf before she could speak.
The good news is that Eugenie apparently took the lesson about personal independence to heart. The bad news is that her family has spent centuries demonstrating what happens when everybody ignores it. Britain can still take comfort in one genuine achievement. At least one member of the royal family worked out that when something doesn't fit, the sensible thing is to take it off.
If only somebody had explained that to Sarah before the wedding.
What the Funny People Are Saying About Sarah Ferguson
Vivienne Pratfall, a stand-up comedian who works the London comedy club circuit, said: “Fergie told a six-year-old to learn from her mistakes. Love, the child hadn’t finished learning from the shoes.”
Roper Penberthy, a stand-up comedian who performs in comedy clubs between deadlines, said: “The Palace sorted the shoe problem in seven days. Andrew’s been a problem for decades and they’re still checking if it comes in a different size.”
Morag Sinclair, a stand-up comedian who closes comedy club bills and hosts the video bulletins, said: “Six years old and complaining about the fit. That’s not a princess, that’s the only Windsor who ever read the terms and conditions.”
Siobhan O’Donnell, a stand-up comedian shaped by London’s comedy club scene, said: “Thirty-seven, divorced, handing out life lessons to a six-year-old. In my house that’s called a Tuesday.”
Disclaimer: This is satirical commentary. The royal dialogue, institutional reactions and proposed honours are humorous constructions rather than reported events. This story is entirely a human collaboration between two sentient beings: the world's oldest tenured professor and a philosophy major turned dairy farmer.
SOURCE: HELLO! magazine https://prat.uk/sarah-ferguson-lectures-six-year-old-eugenie/
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