Sarah Ferguson breaks 15-month cover with major public appearance alongside Beatrice and Eugenie

Both her daughters, Beatrice and Eugenie, accompanied her alongside their husbands, forming a protective family unit around the woman once nicknamed the “red setter” within royal circles.

Ms Ferguson had deliberately stayed away from Mr McNally’s funeral back in July, dispatching Beatrice in her place. Yet this memorial offered what many will see as a carefully chosen stage for her return, an event where her attendance could not be questioned.

It has been almost exactly a year since she was stripped of both her position and her title as Duchess of York, while charities and commercial partners scrambled to cut all ties.

Her ex-husband Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, similarly deprived of his princely title and HRH style by the King, was relocated to the Sandringham estate after being compelled to leave Royal Lodge.

Ms Ferguson went on to seek her own accommodation.

Until Thursday, she had been spotted just once during her extended disappearance — at the Mayrlife health clinic in the Austrian Alps, an exclusive retreat.

Her prolonged withdrawal from the public eye has fuelled intense speculation. Some suggested she was working on a third memoir; others claimed she was preparing a revelatory interview.

Last month, her spokesman confirmed: “Sarah Ferguson is not close to signing a multi-million dollar book deal as has been reported. She has no plans to write any tell all memoir.”

Mr McNally was the man in Ms Ferguson’s life before Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor entered the picture. Their relationship began after she was brought in to care for his two young sons, Sean and Rollo, following the death of his wife Anne in 1980. Romance developed, though he never proposed.

Working alongside F1 mogul Bernie Ecclestone, Mr McNally transformed corporate hospitality at racetracks worldwide through his creation of the Paddock Club, accumulating a fortune estimated at £600million.

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His wealth afforded him three chalets in Verbier — one infamously dubbed “Cocaine Castle” — a Scottish grouse moor, Ian Fleming’s former Wiltshire country house, and a villa in St Tropez.

Mr Ferguson’s reappearance comes as the King happened to be thousands of miles away, engaged in a Commonwealth tour of the Caribbean.

Peter Phillips, Princess Anne’s son and a fellow motor-sport enthusiast like Mr McNally, was also among those attending the service.

“Paddy was my father figure, 22 years older than me,” Ms Ferguson once said. “He taught me so much about life. Whenever I wanted advice, I turned to him because he was so worldly wise.”