Princess Margaret, Countess of Snowdon

• 1. Introduction

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  On the 21st of August 1955, the world waited for Princess Margaret, Countess of Snowdon. Three hundred journalists stood outside Balmoral that day, four times as many as would later trail Diana, Princess of Wales. It was Margaret's 25th birthday, and the newspapers wanted an answer. Two days earlier, the front page of the Daily Mirror had begged her to "please make up your mind!" Margaret was the younger daughter of King George VI and the only sibling of Queen Elizabeth II. She died in 2002 at the age of 71, remembered as one of the most glamorous and controversial members of the British royal family. What was the question that crowds, ministers and bishops were asking her to settle? Why did a princess celebrated for her wit and fashion become a symbol of scandal as well as modernity? And how did a life lived so publicly leave behind a legacy she never intended?

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• 2. Margot Of Glamis

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  At 9:22 in the evening on the 21st of August 1930, Margaret was born by Caesarean section at Glamis Castle in Scotland, her mother's ancestral home. Her family called her "Margot". No British prince or princess had been born in Scotland since Robert Stuart, Duke of Kintyre, in 1602. The royal obstetrician Sir Henry Simson delivered her, while the Home Secretary, J. R. Clynes, attended to verify the birth. Registration was put off for several days so that she would not become number 13 in the parish register. She was baptised in the private chapel at Buckingham Palace by Cosmo Lang, the Archbishop of Canterbury.

  Her mother, then the Duchess of York, had hoped to call the baby Ann Margaret, because "Ann of York sounds pretty". King George V disliked the name Ann but accepted Margaret Rose. By the end of 1948, the princess had stopped using her middle name.

  The Yorks divided their time between 145 Piccadilly, their London town house, and Royal Lodge in Windsor. The public saw an ideal family, yet rumours that Margaret was deaf and mute lingered until her first major public appearance, at her uncle Prince George's wedding in 1934.

  Marion Crawford, a Scottish governess, taught Margaret alongside her sister, Princess Elizabeth. Their mother supervised the lessons, and Randolph Churchill said she "never aimed at bringing her daughters up to be more than nicely behaved young ladies". When Queen Mary stressed the value of schooling, the Duchess answered that she and her sisters had only had governesses. Margaret later resented how little she was taught and blamed her mother. The Duchess, however, told a friend that she "regretted" not sending her daughters to school, and George V may have insisted on a governess. J. M. Barrie, author of Peter Pan, read stories to the sisters.

  In January 1936, Margaret's grandfather George V died, and her uncle became Edward VIII. By December 1936 he had abdicated to marry Wallis Simpson, a twice-divorced American whom neither the Church of England nor the Dominion governments would accept as queen. Margaret's father took the throne, and she became second in line with the title The Princess Margaret. The family moved into Buckingham Palace, where her room overlooked The Mall.

  When war began in 1939, the sisters were at Birkhall on the Balmoral estate. Nights were so cold that the water in the carafes by their beds froze. After Christmas at Sandringham, they settled at Windsor Castle for much of the war. Lord Hailsham wrote to Winston Churchill suggesting that the girls be evacuated to Canada. Their mother replied, "The children won't go without me. I won't leave without the King. And the King will never leave." At Windsor, the princesses staged Christmas pantomimes to raise money for the Queen's Wool Fund, which bought yarn for military garments. In 1940, Margaret sat beside Elizabeth for a BBC Children's Hour broadcast to evacuated children and wished the listeners goodnight.

  Unlike the rest of the family, Margaret had no public duties during the war. She worked at singing and the piano, often performing show tunes. Contemporaries thought her spoiled, especially by her father, who let her stay up to dinner at the age of 13. Crawford fretted that "Princess Margaret does draw all the attention and Princess Elizabeth lets her do that." Elizabeth did not mind, saying that life was easier with Margaret around because everyone laughed at her remarks. Their father called Elizabeth his pride and Margaret his joy. When Elizabeth joined the Auxiliary Territorial Service in 1945, Margaret was jealous and lamented, "I was born too late!"

  On the night the war ended in 1945, the sisters first stood on the palace balcony with their parents and Churchill. Then they slipped into the crowd outside, chanting "We want the King, we want the Queen!" They danced the hokey cokey, the Lambeth Walk and the conga, and both were terrified of being recognised. Elizabeth later remembered lines of strangers linking arms down Whitehall, swept along by happiness and relief. Within a few years, the press would no longer let Margaret vanish into any crowd.

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• 3. The Margaret Set

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  In November 1947, Margaret was a bridesmaid when Elizabeth married Philip Mountbatten. The births of Prince Charles and Princess Anne over the next three years moved Margaret further down the line of succession. Around the time of the wedding, newspapers began following the "unconventional" younger sister and her reputation for vivacity and wit. In 1950, her former governess Marion Crawford published an unauthorised book, The Little Princesses, describing Margaret's "light-hearted fun and frolics".

  Sharman Douglas, daughter of the American ambassador Lewis Williams Douglas, was one of the young aristocrats and socialites around Margaret. Her friends became known as the Margaret Set, and the press pictured them at balls, parties and nightclubs. Their favoured haunts included The 400 Club, the Café de Paris and the Mirabelle restaurant. Margaret's official duties grew too, with a tour of Italy, Switzerland and France and a rising list of charities that named her president or patron.

  In February 1948, Margaret watched Danny Kaye perform at the London Palladium, and the American entertainer was soon welcomed into royal social circles. In July 1949, at a fancy-dress ball at the American ambassador's residence, she danced the can-can on stage with Douglas and 10 other costumed girls. A press frenzy followed, and Kaye denied having taught her the steps.

  Attention could turn intrusive. During a private visit to Paris in 1951, Margaret and Prince Nicholas of Yugoslavia were followed into a nightclub by a photographer. British detectives had to remove him physically.

  The papers called her "the world's most eligible bachelor-girl" and linked her with more than 30 men. Among them were David Mountbatten, Michael I of Romania, Colin Tennant and the future Canadian prime minister John Turner. Most had titles and almost all were rich. In 1948, international rumours claimed that her engagement to the Marquess of Blandford would be announced on her 18th birthday. Blandford and Lord Dalkeith, both sons of dukes, were seen as the likeliest husbands. Her family reportedly favoured Dalkeith, but she had no taste for his outdoor pursuits. Billy Wallace, sole heir to a £2.8 million fortune, was reportedly her favourite companion in the mid-1950s.

  In May 1953, Margaret met the singer Eddie Fisher at the Red, White, and Blue Ball and invited him to her table. They fell out in 1957. In June 1954, the set staged Edgar Wallace's play The Frog at the Scala Theatre. Judy Montagu organised it, with Margaret as assistant director. It raised £10,500 for charity, though critics found the acting amateurish.

  By the mid-1950s, the set had thinned as its members married. As Margaret neared her late twenties without a husband, the papers stopped predicting whom she would wed and began suggesting she might stay single. At her 21st birthday party at Balmoral in August 1951, photographers had managed to catch her only beside one man, the equerry Peter Townsend.

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• 4. The Equerry

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  Peter Townsend arrived at Buckingham Palace in 1944 as the new equerry, and Elizabeth reportedly told her 13-year-old sister, "Bad luck, he's married". The King had wanted highly qualified military men among his aides, not only aristocrats. Townsend's three-month loan from the RAF became a permanent post. The King and Queen were fond of him, and the King is said to have seen the calm war veteran as the son he never had. Townsend was neither titled nor wealthy, and Margaret was infatuated early. After a party, the King reportedly watched him reluctantly obey her order to carry her up the palace stairs.

  On the 1947 tour of Southern Africa, which began on the 1st of February, Margaret took her first trip abroad. She later said she remembered "every minute of it", including rides with Elizabeth on horses lent by locals near the royal train. Townsend chaperoned those rides and could be sharp with her. Margaret told friends she fell in love with him on that tour. Her biographer Craig Brown recorded a National Trust curator's claim that Townsend asked for the bedroom next to hers on a Belfast trip that October.

  Townsend later admitted there was an attraction by November 1948, though neither spoke of it. His wife Rosemary then had an affair, which ended. The pair seem to have drawn close again from late 1950, as Townsend became Deputy Master of the Household and his marriage failed. By spring 1951, a footman said, most royal staff could see a romantic attachment growing. Townsend and his wife separated in 1951.

  In September 1951, the King underwent surgery for lung cancer, and Margaret became one of the Counsellors of State who handled his duties. He died on the 6th of February 1952, and Elizabeth became queen. Margaret was grief-stricken and was prescribed sedatives to sleep. Of her father she wrote, "He was such a wonderful person, the very heart and centre of our happy family." She leaned on her Christian faith, sometimes attending church twice in a day. In May 1953, she moved with the Queen Mother into Clarence House. Townsend's divorce was finalised in December 1952, and the grief they shared probably brought them closer.

  Sir Alan Lascelles, the Queen's private secretary, wrote that Townsend told him he had proposed shortly before Christmas 1952. Other sources say February or April 1953. Townsend was 15 years older than Margaret and had two sons from his marriage. The Royal Marriages Act 1772 required the Queen's consent, and Elizabeth asked her sister to wait a year and keep the secret until after the coronation. Her words were, "Under the circumstances, it isn't unreasonable for me to ask you to wait a year."

  At the coronation on the 2nd of June 1953, reporters saw Margaret brushing fluff from Townsend's coat. "After that the storm broke", Townsend recalled. The People broke the silence in Britain on the 14th of June with a front-page headline, "They Must Deny it NOW". It called the rumours "utterly untrue". Rab Butler, the acting prime minister, appealed for an end to the "deplorable speculation".

  The Cabinet refused to approve a marriage, and Geoffrey Fisher, Archbishop of Canterbury, would not support Margaret marrying a divorced man. Churchill personally liked the idea of "a lovely young royal lady married to a gallant young airman", but his wife Clementine reminded him of his misjudgement during the abdication crisis. Canada's government warned that altering the line of succession twice in 25 years would hurt the monarchy. Churchill told the Queen that his Cabinet and the Dominion prime ministers all opposed the match. Parliament, he said, would approve it only if Margaret gave up her rights to the throne. Philip was reportedly the royal family member most set against Townsend. Money was another problem, since Margaret lacked her sister's wealth and relied on a £6,000 annual allowance, plus £15,000 Parliament had set aside for a suitable marriage.

  Elizabeth refused Lascelles's advice to post Townsend abroad and moved him instead into her own household, though he did not go with Margaret to Southern Rhodesia. Lascelles still hoped distance would end the affair, and Churchill arranged a posting at the British Embassy in Brussels. Townsend left on the 15th of July 1953, and the ambassador learned of his arrival from a newspaper. Margaret did not return from Rhodesia until the 30th of July.

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• 5. The Long Wait

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  In Brussels, Townsend held a post with so few duties that it was abolished after he left. He improved his French and his riding, joined a Belgian show jumping club and raced across Europe. He avoided parties and kept away from women. Asked about Margaret, he would say only, "The word must come from somebody else."

  Margaret was told by the Church that she could not take communion if she married a divorced man. Three quarters of Sunday Express readers opposed the match. Mass-Observation recorded complaints about the "silly little fool" who set a poor example to young women. Other polls disagreed, and 97 per cent of Daily Mirror readers favoured the marriage.

  In January 1955, Margaret began her trips to the Caribbean, perhaps as a distraction. Townsend meanwhile slipped back to Britain for nights and weekends, reportedly at Clarence House, where her apartment had its own front door. That spring he told the press, "I am sick of being made to hide in my apartment like a thief." In March 1955, perhaps the most famous man in the world, he was a puzzle to Dan Ranfurly, Governor of the Bahamas, who asked a press conference, "Who is Peter Townsend?" On the 29th of May, the Daily Express demanded that the palace confirm or deny the rumours.

  More than 100 journalists waited at Balmoral on the 1st of October 1955 as Prime Minister Anthony Eden arrived to discuss the marriage. Townsend came back to Britain on the 12th of October. The royal family would not host him, so the couple courted at dinner parties given by friends such as Mark Bonham Carter. A Gallup poll found 59 per cent of Britons approved of a marriage and 17 per cent opposed it. Women in the East End shouted, "Go on, Marg, do what you want." "NOW , THE NATION WAITS" was a typical headline. On the 17th of October, the Daily Mirror showed her bare left hand under the words "NO RING YET!"

  Accounts differ on what Eden told the Queen. One version says his government would have fought in Parliament to keep Margaret's royal status if she married. She would have lost her role as Counsellor of State and her allowance. Eden supposedly urged the pair to leave Britain for several years, as Edward and Wallis had done.

  Papers released to the National Archives in 2004 tell another story. They show Elizabeth and Eden planned to amend the 1772 Act. Margaret and her children would leave the line of succession, but she would keep her title, her allowance and her public duties. Eden wrote that the Queen "would not wish to stand in the way of her sister's happiness". Lord Kilmuir, the Lord Chancellor, estimated that 75 per cent of Britons would accept the marriage.

  So why did it end? In August, Margaret had written to Eden, "It is only by seeing him in this way that I feel I can properly decide whether I can marry him or not." Her authorised biographer Christopher Warwick read that letter as proof her love was less certain than the public believed. On the 26th of October, The Times declared that a divorced husband would disqualify the Queen's sister from her essential royal role. Townsend wrote that he "simply hadn't the weight" to balance everything she would lose. Warwick added that the love of her life was her father. The decision was made on the 24th of October, and Margaret spent a week on the wording. Into the 1980s, she insisted the couple had been given false hope.

  On the 31st of October 1955, Margaret released her statement. "I would like it to be known that I have decided not to marry Group Captain Peter Townsend." She cited the Church's teaching and her duty to the Commonwealth, and said she had reached the decision "entirely alone". She and Townsend wrote it together. When Oliver Dawnay, the Queen Mother's private secretary, asked her to cut the word "devotion", she refused. Newspapers split evenly over the decision. On the 4th of November, Kenneth Tynan, John Minton, Ronald Searle and others signed an open letter in the Daily Express speaking of "our national hypocrisy". Townsend said the couple felt "unimaginable relief".

  Townsend resigned from the RAF and travelled for 18 months, returning in March 1958. He and Margaret met several times but could not avoid the press. In 1993, a friend revealed that she had seen him one last time before he died in 1995. She said he looked "exactly the same, except he had grey hair". Their love letters sit in the Royal Archives, closed to the public until August 2030, a century after her birth.

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• 6. The Photographer Husband

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  In 1956, Billy Wallace proposed to Margaret, and she accepted. The engagement collapsed before any announcement when he confessed to a romance in the Bahamas. "I had my chance and blew it with my big mouth", he said. Margaret did not speak of it publicly until a Nigel Dempster interview and biography in 1977.

  Margaret met the photographer Antony Armstrong-Jones at a supper party in 1958. They became engaged in October 1959, and he offered a ruby ring surrounded by diamonds in the shape of a rosebud. She reportedly said yes a day after Townsend told her he planned to marry Marie-Luce Jamagne, a young Belgian half his age who greatly resembled Margaret. When Margaret announced the engagement on the 26th of February 1960, the press was stunned, because she had hidden the romance from reporters.

  They married at Westminster Abbey on the 6th of May 1960. It was the first royal wedding to be broadcast on television, and 300 million people worldwide watched. Two thousand guests attended. Norman Hartnell designed the dress, worn with the Poltimore Tiara. Eight young bridesmaids followed, led by her niece Princess Anne. The Duke of Edinburgh escorted the bride, Roger Gilliatt was best man, and Geoffrey Fisher conducted the service. The honeymoon was a six-week Caribbean cruise aboard the royal yacht Britannia. Colin Tennant gave the bride a plot of land on his private island of Mustique.

  In 1961, Armstrong-Jones became Earl of Snowdon. Their son David was born on the 3rd of November 1961, and their daughter Sarah on the 1st of May 1964, both by Caesarean section at Margaret's request. The marriage drew show business figures and bohemians into her circle, and it seemed to signal that British class barriers were breaking down. The couple tried out the fashions of the 1960s.

  Behind the glamour, both partners had affairs. Snowdon's included a long-term mistress, Ann Hills. A close friend summed him up in a biographer's pages as, "If it moves, he'll have it." Margaret reportedly had her first affair in 1966 with Anthony Barton, a Bordeaux wine producer and her daughter's godfather. The marriage also involved drink, drugs and bizarre behaviour, including Snowdon's habit of hiding lists of "things I hate about you" in her books.

  By the early 1970s, the couple had drifted apart. In September 1973, Colin Tennant introduced Margaret to Roddy Llewellyn, who was 17 years her junior. She invited him to Les Jolies Eaux, her Mustique holiday home, in 1974, and later called their bond "a loving friendship". When Llewellyn left suddenly for Turkey, Margaret was so distraught that she took an overdose of sleeping tablets.

  In February 1976, the News of the World printed a swimsuit photograph of Margaret and Llewellyn on Mustique across its front page. The press cast her as a predatory older woman. On the 19th of March 1976, the couple announced that the marriage had irretrievably broken down. Some politicians wanted her removed from the civil list, and Labour MPs called her "a royal parasite". The decree nisi came on the 24th of May 1978, and the divorce was final on the 11th of July. It was the first divorce of a senior British royal since 1901. Allegedly she had not wanted it. Margaret never remarried. On the 15th of December 1978, Snowdon wed Lucy Lindsay-Hogg, yet he and Margaret stayed close friends, as she did with Llewellyn and his wife Tatiana Soskin, whom he married in 1981.

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• 7. Duty And Dazzle

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  Margaret said her first solo public engagement was presenting a prize at the Princess Margaret Rose School in Windsor when she was 12. In 1947, she launched the ocean liner Edinburgh Castle in Belfast. Her 1955 Caribbean tour aboard Britannia caused a sensation across the West Indies, and calypsos were written for her. As colonies sought nationhood, she represented the Crown at the independence ceremonies for Jamaica in 1962 and for Tuvalu and Dominica in 1978. She fell ill in Tuvalu, possibly with viral pneumonia, and was flown to Australia to recover. Later tours took her to the United States in 1965, Japan in 1969, Australia in 1975 and China in 1987.

  In August 1979, Lord Mountbatten and members of his family were killed by a Provisional IRA bomb. That October, Margaret was in Chicago on a fundraising tour for the Royal Opera House. At a dinner with the columnist Abra Anderson and Mayor Jane Byrne, she mentioned how moved the royal family had been by letters from Ireland. Next day, the rival columnist Irv Kupcinet claimed she had called the Irish "pigs". Margaret, Anderson and Byrne all denied it at once, but the rest of the tour met protests and her security was doubled.

  Margaret's chief interests were children's welfare, music and ballet. She was president of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, the Royal Scottish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, and Invalid Children's Aid Nationwide. She was also Grand President of the St John Ambulance Brigade and patron of the London Lighthouse, an AIDS charity. As president of the Royal Ballet, she helped start a fund for Dame Margot Fonteyn, who was in financial trouble. The Children's Royal Variety Performance helped her raise money for the NSPCC each year. She had joined the 1st Buckingham Palace Brownie Pack in 1937 and served as President of Girlguiding UK from 1965 until she died. Even so, critics sometimes judged her less active than other royals.

  Style set her apart. Her fashion earned the nickname "The Margaret Look", and the press dubbed her a "royal rebel". Against her sister's prim, timeless dress, she wore mod accessories such as brightly coloured headscarves and glamorous sunglasses. Christian Dior became a close friend, and in 1950 he designed the cream gown for her 21st birthday, now cited as part of fashion history. British Vogue said her style "hit her stride" in the mid-1960s, when she was photographed with The Beatles, Frank Sinatra and Sophia Loren. Her hats were famous, from a canary feather hat in Jamaica in 1962 to a peacock feather pillbox at Royal Ascot in 1973. In April 2007, Kensington Palace opened an exhibition, Princess Line, on her fashion legacy, and Christopher Bailey's Spring 2006 collection for Burberry drew on her 1960s look.

  In January 1981, Margaret was a guest on BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs. Her favourite record was Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake, and she said "Sixteen Tons" by Tennessee Ernie Ford had entertained her in a traffic jam. In 1984, she appeared as herself in the radio drama The Archers, the first royal to take part in a BBC drama. She had loved ballet since childhood, enjoyed amateur theatricals, and welcomed actors and film stars to Kensington Palace. Her house on Mustique, designed by her husband's uncle Oliver Messel, remained her favourite holiday retreat.

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• 8. Last Years And Legacy

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  Margaret began smoking in her late teens and smoked heavily for decades. In the 1970s, she had a nervous breakdown and was treated for depression by a psychiatrist from the Priory Clinic. On the 5th of January 1985, surgeons removed part of her left lung, an operation that echoed her father's 34 years earlier. She gave up smoking in 1991 or early 1993, although servants claimed they could still smell it in her apartment. She also kept drinking heavily. In January 1993, she was in hospital with pneumonia.

  On the 23rd of February 1998, she had a mild stroke at her holiday home on Mustique. Early the next year, scalds to her feet in a bathroom accident left her needing support to walk, and she sometimes used a wheelchair. After another stroke, she entered hospital on the 10th of January 2001 with swallowing problems and little appetite. By March 2001, she had partial vision and paralysis on her left side. Her last public appearances were at her mother's 101st birthday celebrations in August 2001 and at the 100th birthday of her aunt, Princess Alice, Duchess of Gloucester, that December.

  Margaret died in her sleep at King Edward VII's Hospital in London at 6:30 in the morning on the 9th of February 2002. She was 71, and the day came three days after the 50th anniversary of her father's death. She had suffered another stroke the previous day, followed by heart problems. At her death she stood 11th in line to the throne. Her funeral on the 15th of February 2002, on the 50th anniversary of her father's funeral, was a private service at St George's Chapel, Windsor Castle. Unlike most royals, she was cremated. Lady Glenconner said Margaret found the Royal Burial Ground at Frogmore "very gloomy". After the Queen Mother died seven weeks later, Margaret's ashes were placed in the King George VI Memorial Chapel beside her parents. A service of thanksgiving followed at Westminster Abbey on the 19th of April 2002, and Elizabeth II attended the tenth anniversary service at Windsor on the 30th of March 2012.

  Margaret left an estate of £7.6 million to her two children, and inheritance tax reduced it to £4.5 million. In June 2006, Christie's auctioned much of it, partly to meet that tax. A Fabergé clock set a world record at £1.24 million. The Poltimore Tiara from her wedding sold for £926,400. Her son bought back Pietro Annigoni's portrait of her for £680,000, more than three times the estimate. The sale raised £13,658,000 in all.

  Observers often painted Margaret as a spoiled snob with a cutting tongue. Others found her charming and informal, and people were bewildered by her swings between frivolity and formality. Marion Crawford argued that remarks taken out of context created a distorted figure that bore "little resemblance to the Margaret we knew". The writer Gore Vidal judged her "far too intelligent for her station in life". Margaret herself told him that with one sister as Queen, the other had to be "the evil sister", the focus of "the most creative malice". Her cousin Lord Lichfield said she was sad near the end because hers was "a life unfulfilled".

  The Independent wrote in Townsend's 1995 obituary that the public emotion over the romance marked a watershed in the nation's attitude to divorce. Gallup found that 28 per cent agreed and 59 per cent disagreed with the Church's refusal to remarry divorced people. Warwick argued that Margaret's most lasting legacy was accidental. Her life made public acceptance of royal divorce easier, and three of her sister's children later divorced without facing the storm she had faced.

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