Word: royals
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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That was before the children came. Before the royal duties and stately protocols began weighing as heavily as maternal pounds around the hips. Before the couple's enforced separations, then separations by choice: Fergie's impulsive flyaways to Alpine ski slopes and Mediterranean beaches, parties with dubious friends and displays of desperate merriment. Before Andrew began to slam her pals as "poncey philistines," and she to knock his sometimes boorish behavior as "terribly gauche...
...Duchess of York's marriage was for practical purposes over. They had agreed to separate formally, with the option of divorce after two years. According to scornful palace officials, the woman increasingly mocked by the press as Freebie Fergie and Duchess Do-Little was "unsuitable for public life, for royal life...
...upstaged news about the nation's deepest slump since World War II demonstrated one value of the House of Windsor today: as a distraction. At a time of anguish over Britain's national direction, a Hollywood-style cult of celebrity surrounding Queen Elizabeth II's offspring has endowed the royal clan with a more modern relevancy. The Queen's second son and his wayward wife provided everything in the way of gossip-page dramatics that their 1986 wedding seemed to herald. But in the end, the couple proved to be unsuitable for each other...
Though Britons relished Fergie's outgoing nature, they nonetheless expect members of the royal family to behave with dignity. The new duchess could never manage that for long. When the tabloids were not feasting on rumors of marital stresses between Diana and Prince Charles, heir to the throne, they were sniping at Andrew's spouse for her idleness, her "materialism" and, well, her behavior that was Not Quite His Class, Dear -- reproofs that were said to reflect Buckingham Palace's views. Britons high and low agreed: their revered sovereign and her family deserved better...
...royal family at first tried to patch things up but by last week was in high dudgeon. "The knives are out for Fergie at the palace," said Paul Reynolds, BBC Radio's court correspondent. "I have never known such anger here." Reason: suspicions that the duchess had engineered a leak of the separation story. Fergie's friends denied it, but the upstart had already angered the Queen by hiring her own lawyers. "Unheard-of impertinence," huffed a senior palace official...