Princess Margaret: The ‘Only Square Inch’ That Was Gifted Twice – HT
As the story goes, at a high society party in New York, someone asked Princess Margaret how the Queen was doing. She replied, “Which one? My sister, my mother, or my husband?” That’s the Margaret they leave out of the documentaries. Sharp, wry, entirely at ease with the architecture of her own predicament. And according to what the financial records and property transfers actually reveal, not remotely poor.
The standard telling is familiar by now. A brilliant woman condemned by birth order to a life of gilded purposelessness. Four seasons of The Crown gave the character beautiful suffering in every episode. Craig Brown, whose biography Ma’am Darling is the best modern account of her life, framed her arc as Cinderella in reverse.
It’s hope dashed, happiness mislaid, life mishandled. The tragic princess story has circulated so smoothly for so long that it has taken on the quality of established fact. There is a quote that turns up in almost every account of Margaret’s relationship with Mustique, the five-bedroom villa she maintained on a private Caribbean island.
She reportedly called it, “The only square inch in the world I own.” It gets deployed as exhibit A for the deprivation narrative. All of this royal life and nothing truly, materially hers. The land was gifted. The house was built on someone else’s money. Her estate at death, after years of legally redistributing assets to reduce her children’s tax exposure, still came to 7.7 million pounds gross.
Her children auctioned 800 of her possessions at Christie’s in 2006 to pay the inheritance bill and raised nearly 14 million pounds. The only square inch was gifted twice and she knew it was funny. Princess Margaret Rose of York was born at 9:22 p.m. on August 21st, 1930 at Glamis Castle in Angus, Scotland.
Her parents were the Duke and Duchess of York. Her father was the second son of King George V, not the heir. Her arrival placed her fourth in the line of succession. And the reasonable expectation was that she would be a minor royal, pleasant at the edges of official photographs, married off to an appropriate titled person at a sensible age.
That calculation didn’t survive December 1936. Her uncle Edward VIII abdicated to marry Wallis Simpson. Her father became King George VI and her sister Elizabeth became heir to the throne. Margaret, at 6 years old, came second. Permanently second. Second in succession, second in the constitutional machinery, second in the direction of the family’s educational resources.
She later expressed resentment about this gap her whole life. Elizabeth received tutors from Oxford and Cambridge to instruct her in constitutional history and the architecture of governance. Margaret had the same governess as before and a mother whose stated educational philosophy, as she summarized it to Queen Mary, was that nice behavior and good marriages were the relevant outcomes.
Queen Mary disagreed. Her daughter-in-law replied that she and her sisters had all been educated by governesses and one of us very well. What Margaret got instead of a rigorous curriculum was time. Time to play the piano from the age of four and then to play it exceptionally well. Time to read widely, though without direction.
Time to become funny in the particular way that operates as both charm offensive and precision instrument. Her governess, Marion Crawford, despaired of directing social invitations exclusively to the older sister, writing to friends, “Princess Margaret does draw all the attention and Princess Elizabeth lets her do that.
” Elizabeth appeared genuinely untroubled by this. “Oh, it’s so much easier when Margaret’s there,” she said. “Everybody laughs at what Margaret says.” Their father described Elizabeth as his pride and Margaret as his joy. That distinction was probably meant warmly. It also described their respective positions with some accuracy.
After the war, once the public machinery of royal life resumed, Margaret became something the tabloids hadn’t encountered, a young, glamorous, unpredictable royal who appeared genuinely to be enjoying herself. A French magazine editor of the period reportedly observed that putting her name on a cover increased sales by 30%.
The press christened her circle the Margaret Set, young aristocrats who filled the 400 Club, the Café de Paris, and the Mirabelle Restaurant in the early 1950s. She attended balls and nightclubs and theater premieres and charity performances. In July 1949, she performed the can-can at a fancy dress ball at the American ambassador’s residence, accompanied by 11 other costumed girls, generating a press frenzy that lasted days.
She attracted enormous public attention while operating structurally in a position that required her to do essentially nothing. She was aware of this. She was also aware that the system had invested considerably less intellectual preparation in her than in her sister. Lady Anne Glenconner, who knew Margaret from age five and served as her lady-in-waiting for 30 years, wrote in her 2022 memoir, Whatever Next, that the only thing Princess Margaret complained about was that she wasn’t educated as well as the Queen. Her elder sister had
people from Oxford and Cambridge come and teach her things, while Princess Margaret didn’t. Not money, not property, not the loss of Townsend, education. That was the grievance that lasted. Lady Anne Glenconner, née Coke, daughter of the fifth Earl of Leicester, met Princess Margaret when Glenconner was 3 years old and Margaret was five, when Queen Mary brought the royal children to Holkham Hall.
In her 2023 Newsweek essay, published under the headline, “I was Princess Margaret’s lady-in-waiting. The Crown got us wrong.” Glenconner described their first meeting. Both of them riding tricycles through a marble hall they’d been forbidden to enter. The late Queen came down the steps, told them they were very naughty.
They shrieked with laughter and pedaled off. Glenconner served as Margaret’s lady-in-waiting from 1971 until Margaret’s death in February 2002. Three decades of official and unofficial proximity. She was also married to Colin Tennant, who bought Mustique and gave Margaret the land on which Les Jolies Eaux was built.
Her first memoir, Lady-in-Waiting: My Extraordinary Life in the Shadow of the Crown, published in 2019 by Hodder and Stoughton, is the closest first-hand account we have of what Margaret’s private life actually looked like. The second memoir, Whatever Next, appeared in 2022 and addresses The Crown’s inaccuracies directly.
When a Guardian interviewer asked Glenconner in 2022 about Margaret’s difficulties during the marriage to Lord Snowdon, her answer was, “She had some of the same problems herself. I saw how Tony behaved and it was worse for her because she was in the public eye.” The problems were marital infidelity. That is a different category of problem from financial constraint.
Glenconner lived with Margaret at Kensington Palace for an entire year while her own flat was being renovated. The evenings they spent together, she wrote in Lady-in-Waiting, were among the best of her life. Margaret calling her into the sitting room, “Get into your dressing gown, Anne, and come and have a drink with me.
” They’d talk over the day, laugh, have a genuinely good time. That’s what 30 years of close observation produced. When Glenconner describes the specific complaint Margaret made about her position, the education gap, not the income gap, she was recording it from the inside. She would have noticed financial hardship if it had been present.
It wasn’t the thing Margaret talked about. The financial picture across Margaret’s lifetime requires precision to read correctly because the brief’s original framing of millions tax-free contains errors that need clearing away before the actual picture can emerge. The brief attributed an inheritance to King George V in 1936. King George V died January 20th, 1936, when Margaret was 5 years old.
She received no documented inheritance from George V. The relevant king was her father, George VI, who died February 6th, 1952. Margaret was 21. She received inheritance from his estate. The personal amount directed to her isn’t documented in available sources, which is instructive. Royal estate distributions at that level moved quietly.
Dame Margaret Greville died and her primary jewelry collection, the famous diamonds, the pieces that now appear in exhibition catalogs, went not to Princess Margaret, but to the Queen Mother. Greville’s will explicitly names Queen Elizabeth as the beneficiary of the jewels, describing them as the Queen’s private property.
What biographer’s analysis suggests, based on how the estate was distributed, is that Margaret received a separate monetary bequest from the Greville cash assets. One academic source on female collecting and philanthropy describes the estate as directing large sums to Princess Margaret and the Queen. An estimated 20,000 pounds, roughly 3 million pounds in current purchasing power terms, circulates in accounts of the will as Margaret’s share.
That figure is biographer’s analysis, not a primary document. Queen Mary died on March 24th, 1953, having asked beforehand that the coronation not be postponed on her account. She left Margaret a legacy of art and antiques. Queen Mary’s total formal estate was assessed at 406,407 pounds at death, which sounds modest for a senior queen consort, but the formal estate figure excluded the considerable lifetime gifting of jewelry and objects she’d been directing toward family members for decades.
What this picture describes is a woman who received multiple significant inheritances across her lifetime from different sources, held substantial private assets in art and antiques, and lived in financial comfort without ever needing to earn a commercial income. It doesn’t support millions tax-free cascading in, but it doesn’t support destitution, either. Not remotely close.
The estate at death requires no hedging at all. Margaret died on February 9th, 2002. Her gross estate, 7.7 million pounds, confirmed in The Guardian and The Telegraph. Inheritance tax owed, approximately 3 million pounds at the standard 40% rate. Her children, David Linley, now the second Earl of Snowdon, and Lady Sarah Chatto, auctioned 800 of her belongings through Christie’s in November 2006.
The Poltimore Tiara, made in 1870, worn by Margaret at her 1960 wedding, famously photographed on her head while she reclined in the bath, sold for 900,000 pounds. The auction as a whole raised nearly 14 million pounds. Lord Snowdon reportedly wrote to his children asking them to stop the sale. David Linley said publicly, without sentimentality, “When people die, taxes need to be paid.
” An estate generating a Christie’s auction of nearly 14 million pounds, after years of pre-death transfers specifically designed to reduce its size, isn’t the financial profile of someone who had nothing. The property Margaret called her only square inch, gifted in its entirety at no cost to her at any stage, sold for approximately 2 million pounds 2 years before her death.
Her son bought and sold it without her paying for it. That is where the story needs to go. Colin Tennant was born in 1926, educated at Eton, and by 1958 had sold a family estate in Trinidad for 44,500 pounds. He immediately spent almost exactly that sum buying an island he had never set foot on. Mustique, the name derived from the French word for mosquito, was 3 and 1/2 miles long.
It had no running water, no electricity, approximately a dozen acres under cotton cultivation, and 1,300 acres of scrub that the Caribbean sun had frazzled brown. The island had been on the market for 5 years. Everyone who had looked at it had concluded it was a non-starter. Tennant sailed around it. Then he bought it for 45,000 pounds.
His wife Anne’s response to seeing Mustique for the first time, as she records in Lady in Waiting, was immediate. “Colin, this is sheer madness.” He looked at her. “You mark my words, Anne. I will make Mustique a household name.” They collected rainwater to shower with. They hunted for lobsters in holes in the rock.
They brought their children out in the early years. It took a long time before anything resembling infrastructure arrived. For years, the lighting ran from Tilly lamps. The food came largely from tins, and the bucket of water suspended from a tree constituted the shower. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, Tennant and Margaret had been part of the same aristocratic social world.
Wikipedia lists him among the men the press linked to her in the early 1950s. Tennant later told Philip Hoare for The Independent’s 2010 obituary profile that he had concluded Margaret would have been an impossible wife. He married Anne Coke in 1956. The friendship continued regardless, as the friendships in that social world tended to.
Tennant’s contribution to Margaret’s story wasn’t romantic. It was architectural. On May 6th, 1960, Princess Margaret married photographer Antony Armstrong Jones at Westminster Abbey in the first royal wedding to be broadcast on live television. They departed London on a 6-week Caribbean honeymoon aboard the Royal Yacht Britannia, the 412-foot royal yacht that served as a floating palace for state travel.
The itinerary carried them south through the islands. Near the end of their time at Mustique, they went ashore. The island in May 1960 still had no electricity. The food was largely tinned. There was a modest rum supply and a most disgusting sour hibiscus mixer, as Lady Glenconner described it in her Sydney Morning Herald piece.
The Tennants had almost nothing to offer as refreshment. A smart little boat had come ashore from Britannia earlier in the day with an invitation to dine aboard. The Glenconners had declined, explaining, with what one imagines required considerable diplomatic tact, that they hadn’t had a bath in about 2 months and thought it best the royal couple were spared the proximity.
A second message came back saying they were quite understood, but their company was desired regardless, and would they please make use of a cabin for bathing. They did, at length. The following day, the Tennants took the newlyweds on a tour of the island. Near the end of the last evening, over drinks, whatever drinks were available, Tennant turned to Margaret.
As Lady Glenconner records it, “Ma’am, we haven’t given you a wedding present. Would you like something in a little box or a piece of land?” Some accounts describe this as Tennant offering a jewel from Asprey’s as the alternative. Others describe him simply gesturing at the island around him. All accounts agree on what Margaret did next.
She turned briefly to Armstrong Jones, then made up her mind without waiting for his answer. “Oh,” she said, “I think a piece of land would be just wonderful.” Armstrong Jones developed his views on Mustique over the years that followed and expressed them in a single word, “mistake.” He called it “Misstake,” a deliberately mangled version of the name.
That was his first and last visit to the island. For Margaret, it was the beginning of 30 years. The land transferred, approximately 10 acres on a headland at the southern tip of Mustique, on a promontory above the Gelliceaux beach, chosen partly because steep cliffs on the approach made the position difficult to reach uninvited and therefore private.
Margaret now had the plot. She also had a grace and favor apartment at Kensington Palace in London and a diary full of official engagements. She wasn’t in immediate need of somewhere to build. The land sat there for 8 years. Those 8 years weren’t static. The marriage to Armstrong Jones, publicly presented as a glamorous modern coupling, a photographer, a princess, the swinging ’60s, was deteriorating beneath the surface at a pace that accelerated through the 1960s.
Lady Glenconner, who had become Margaret’s lady in waiting in 1971, described Snowdon’s behavior during the marriage in her memoirs in terms closely parallel to how she described her own husband, Colin’s temperament. Unpredictable, given to mood swings, prone to affairs. It was worse for her, Glenconner told The Guardian in 2022, because she was in the public eye.
During a year when Glenconner’s own flat was being renovated, Margaret had simply said, “Come and live with me at Kensington Palace.” She did, for an entire year. In the evenings, as Glenconner describes it in Lady in Waiting, Margaret would call her into the sitting room, “Get into your dressing gown, Anne, and come and have a drink with me.
” They’d sit and talk about the day, laugh, have a good time. >> [snorts] >> Margaret made all the fires herself in that apartment, as she’d learned to do in the Girl Guides, and occasionally surprised guests by cleaning their cars with rubber gloves when she came to stay in the country.
The apartment was grace and favor. The house in Scotland at Balmoral season was the family’s. What Margaret didn’t have was a door she could close that was entirely, privately, unchallengeably hers. In early 1968, she rang Tennant. “Did you really mean it about the land?” Tennant confirmed he had. “And does it come with a house?” This exchange is documented in The Independent’s 2010 obituary of Lord Glenconner, drawn from Philip Hoare’s extended interviews with Tennant in his final years in St. Lucia.
Tennant’s account. “I said, ‘Yes.’ And she said, ‘Does it include a house?’ I said, ‘Yes.’ I couldn’t really say anything else, could I?” Lady Glenconner’s Daily Mail serialization of Lady in Waiting in 2019 records the same moment. Colin, not wanting to disappoint, replied that he would build her a house. She arrived at Mustique a few months later later to inspect the site.
The island in 1968 still had no proper furniture, plastic and wicker chairs, Tilly lamps, tinned food, a bucket of water suspended from a tree for the shower. Glenconner found her a pair of Colin’s cotton pajamas for the site walk. She tied string around Margaret’s ankles and wrists to keep the brambles and mosquitoes off.
Margaret put on a straw hat and a pair of wide sunglasses, and they started up the hill. “There she was,” Glenconner wrote in the Daily Mail, “clambering up the hill, wearing Colin’s pajamas, with string tied around her ankles and wrists to stop the brambles scratching and the mosquitoes biting.
She wore wide sunglasses, a straw hat, and a big smile, not minding it all. She wasn’t vain. She just got on with things.” At the top, on the headland, they showed her where the house would go. She became, as Glenconner records it, increasingly excited. She was delighted. She looked at a scrubby hillside covered with dense tropical vegetation and saw, apparently with considerable vividness, the house that would eventually stand there.
Oliver Messel designed it, theatrical set designer, Lord Snowdon’s uncle by marriage, which made him Margaret’s uncle-in-law at the time of the commission. Tennant had suggested Messel, partly hoping it might make Armstrong-Jones more interested in visiting. It didn’t. Messel produced a neo-Georgian design, pale green, set on the headland overlooking the Caribbean.
Construction went on for several years. The final cost came to approximately 25,000 pounds, more than Tennant had envisaged when he’d agreed, in that phone call, that yes, the land came with a house. In the months before completion, Margaret rang Glenconner several times from London to organize shopping trips for the interior.
Glenconner had expected something grand, Colefax and Fowler, perhaps, or a high-end decorator with a strong point of view. Margaret always chose Peter Jones on the King’s Road. White furniture, Laura Ashley-type curtains. She was furnishing the one space in her life that was privately hers, and she chose quietly, without performance.
In February 1972, she came to stay for the first time. She named it Les Jolies Eaux, a French pun on the local name Jalousie, meaning beautiful waters. Five bedrooms, two swimming pools, a dining pavilion open on all four sides to the Caribbean Sea, a headland above a beach accessible only to those who knew about it.
Lady Glenconner, writing in her memoir, “It was the only house she ever owned, and it made her very happy, because apart from being beautiful, it provided her with an independent base from her husband.” The first gift was the land. The second was the house. Neither cost Princess Margaret a penny. She came twice a year for 30 years, without significant variation, February and late autumn.
The famous Grouse whiskey was required. It couldn’t be purchased on the island. “You had to make sure you had it when she came to your house,” Tatiana Copeland, an American who went to Mustique with her husband from the early 1980s onward, told Town & Country. “If you didn’t have her whiskey, then that was probably the last time she would go to you.
” The protocol followed her everywhere, even to the beach. English guests curtsied when they encountered her, whether they were in swimwear or not. Americans were exempted. Nobody was exempted from addressing her as “Your Royal Highness” on first encounter, and “Ma’am” after that. “You had to know your boundaries,” Copeland said.
“No hugging and kissing.” And yet, Copeland also described Margaret at the piano in the evenings singing what she called somewhat off-color songs with what she termed a very ribald sense of humor, which, around the right people, was pretty bad. She liked dressing up, as most of the island’s social life required.
Colin Tennant kept trunks full of costumes for his parties, and Margaret participated without visible reservation. At his 50th birthday party in 1976, Tennant painted the trees gold, sprayed the grass gold, covered the beach in gold glitter, and arranged oiled-up local young men wearing nothing but strategically placed painted coconuts.
Margaret arrived and joined in without apparent discomfort. He had declared himself king of Mustique, she crowned him. Glenconner’s account of daily life on the island with Margaret is one of the most quietly affecting passages in Lady in Waiting. They swam together for miles, Margaret always doing breaststroke, keeping her head above the water.
Glenconner swimming sideways and erratically alongside, so the conversation could continue. They collected shells to bring clean at Les Jolies Eaux, then use them as table decoration. They sat at Basil’s bar in the evenings watching for the green flash over the sea at sunset. Sundowners, company, laughter. “Some of the happiest times that Princess Margaret and I shared were on Mustique,” Glenconner wrote, “and we went there every February for 30 years.
” The island became properly famous to the wider world in 1976, when the News of the World published photographs of Margaret there with Roddy Llewellyn, a landscape gardener 17 years her junior, with whom she had been involved since 1973. She was still married to Armstrong-Jones at the time the photographs were published.
The exposure contributed directly to the end of the marriage. They separated in 1976, and the divorce was finalized in 1978, making Margaret the first senior member of the royal family to divorce in 77 years. Llewellyn himself married someone else in 1981. Margaret and Glenconner continued going to Mustique every February regardless.
In February 1998, at the age of 67, Margaret suffered a mild stroke while dining with friends on the island. She was treated by the island’s doctor, walked back to Les Jolies Eaux under her own power, and was flown by air ambulance to Barbados the following morning for examination. Her lady-in-waiting told The Times it had been a minor stroke, but nothing totally terrifying.
She recovered and came back. The following year, she scalded her feet in a shower at the Jalousie Hilton in St. Lucia, another Tennant property. The burns were serious. That accident, combined with two further strokes, marked the beginning of the physical decline that ended with her death on February 9th, 2002, in London.
She gave Les Jolies Eaux to her son, David Linley, in 1996, 6 years before that death, specifically to remove the property from her taxable estate. This is the behavior of someone who understands their financial situation and is managing it intelligently, not someone unaware of their own assets. Linley sold the villa in 2001 to an American businessman named Jim Murray for approximately 2 million pounds.
As of 2024, it rents for between $33,000 and $47,000 per week depending on season, including a live-in chef, butler, and housekeeping staff. The quote attributed to Margaret in the Wikipedia article on Les Jolies Eaux, “This is my house and the only square inch in the world I own.” circulates widely across biographical accounts, treated as authentic by those who knew her, though no named biography with a page number has been located as its original source.
The sentiment is consistent with what Tatiana Copeland described in Town & Country. Margaret telling her that Les Jolies Eaux was the only property she had ever owned in her entire life. That she felt inordinate love and pride that this wasn’t from the royal family. It wasn’t her sister’s. It wasn’t grace and favor.
She loved the fact it was her own. It was her own. It was also entirely gifted. Both were true simultaneously and Margaret’s refusal to notice the contradiction or her decision to find it funny is the sharpest thing about her relationship to the place. Peter Townsend was born in 1914, joined the Royal Air Force at 19, and became one of the most decorated fighter pilots of the Battle of Britain.
He helped shoot down the first German bomber on English soil. Later shot down himself largely unscathed physically. By the war’s end, with his nerves badly worn, he secured a position as equerry to King George VI, a trusted military officer charged with the smooth running of royal engagements. He was good-looking, calm, intelligent, and entirely the right age to have had his life shaped by the war in ways Margaret had not experienced and couldn’t replicate.
She told a confidant that she fell in love with him during the 1947 royal tour of South Africa. They rode together every morning in the extraordinary open country. “That’s when I really fell in love with him.” she said. She was 17. He was 32, married, and the father of two sons. Nothing happened that left any documentary trace.
He was simply present in a way that registered. The relationship became public knowledge at the worst possible moment, the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, June 2nd, 1953, in front of the first live television cameras trained on a royal ceremony. Margaret picked a piece of lint from Townsend’s lapel. It was a small gesture and an intimate one, visible to everyone who was watching, which was a very large number of people.
A tabloid reporter noticed and published. By that point, Townsend had proposed and Margaret had accepted informally and privately. But the constitutional machinery had not yet been engaged and the Queen had asked them to wait. That machinery was formidable. Under the Royal Marriages Act of 1772, passed because George III objected to his brother’s marriages to commoners, every descendant of George II required the sovereign’s permission to marry before the age of 25.
Margaret was 22 at the coronation. Her sister was also the supreme governor of the Church of England, which didn’t permit remarriage after divorce and regarded such marriages as invalid. Townsend’s first wife had divorced him for adultery, his adultery, in 1952. He was a divorced man. Sir Alan Lascelles, the Queen’s private secretary whose institutional memory stretched back to the abdication crisis of 1936, told Townsend directly that he must be mad or bad to think of marrying the Queen’s sister.
The consequence was swift. Townsend was transferred to Brussels as air attaché to the British Embassy. He later described it to the BBC as a slightly disciplinary measure. They wrote to each other almost daily for 2 years, from Brussels to Clarence House, letters crossing in the post. On August 21st, 1955, Princess Margaret turned 25.
The legal obstacle the Royal Marriages Act had imposed dissolved that morning. She no longer needed the sovereign’s permission. She was free in the strictly legal sense. What remained were the consequences. As publicly understood in October 1955, when Townsend returned from Brussels on October 12th, the choice appeared stark.
Marry Townsend and forfeit her HRH title, her civil list income of 6,000 pounds a year, her place in the royal family, and go into effective exile from England, or keep everything and end the relationship. Then the National Archives opened. In January 2004, nearly 2 years after Margaret’s death, declassified government papers from 1955 became public.
The Guardian reporting on January 3rd, 2004. Princess Margaret was secretly given a categorical assurance by Downing Street that she could keep her HRH title and a civil list income if she married Group Captain Peter Townsend, declassified documents show. The BBC’s coverage of the same documents was equally unambiguous. The Queen and Eden drew up a plan in 1955 under which Princess Margaret could marry Townsend while keeping her royal title and her civil list allowance.
Anthony Eden had replaced Churchill as Prime Minister in April 1955. He had himself divorced and remarried. He wasn’t unsympathetic. The plan he and the Queen’s advisers had developed offered Margaret a path. Give up her place in the line of succession and marry in a civil register office rather than a church ceremony.
Those were the conditions. By October 1955, Margaret was third in the line of succession behind Charles and Anne. The succession sacrifice was constitutionally significant and practically irrelevant. The civil ceremony question was more complicated. The Church of England’s position on remarriage after divorce was its genuine institutional position and Margaret’s relationship to that institution wasn’t merely formal.
Being barred from Holy Communion from marrying a divorced man was a real consequence for someone raised within the Church of England royal tradition at the depth at which Margaret had been raised. That wasn’t a technicality. It was something she cared about. But the title and the income were secured.
The government had privately guaranteed them. The classified papers also contained a letter from Margaret herself sent to Eden in August 1955, in which she says she will see Townsend in October and that it is only by seeing him in this way that she feels she can properly decide whether she can marry him or not. Former BBC royal correspondent Paul Reynolds, analyzing these documents years later, noted that this phrasing suggests Margaret’s determination to marry Townsend may not have been as settled as the romantic myth requires.
Townsend returned on October 12th. They spent what he described to the BBC in his 1978 Nationwide interview as 19 really rigorous, painful days inside a borrowed London flat, 50 to 100 reporters outside with the world’s press discussing this situation in every capital of the world. He said, “We had to come to this decision.
” Not that it was forced upon them, that they had to reach it. On October 31st, 1955, BBC newsreader John Snagg interrupted normal broadcasting to read a statement from Clarence House. Its core, “I would like it to be known that I have decided not to marry Group Captain Peter Townsend. I have been aware that, subject to my renouncing my rights of succession, it might have been possible for me to contract a civil marriage.
But mindful of the Church’s teachings that Christian marriage is indissoluble and conscious of my duty to the Commonwealth, I have resolved to put these considerations before any others.” And then, “I have reached this decision entirely alone.” Active voice, first person, entirely alone. Townsend’s own memoir, Time and Chance, published in 1978, described the conclusion differently.
“We had reached the end of the road. Our feelings for one another were unchanged, but they had incurred for us a burden so great that we decided together to lay it down. She says alone. He says together. Both were shaping what the narrative needed to be from their respective positions.
The most probable truth lies between those two framings. A mutual recognition given formal expression through Margaret’s faith, her reading of the political situation, and her calculation of what she was and wasn’t prepared to give up. She was 25, legally free. The government had privately guaranteed her title and income. She was writing to the Prime Minister in August, 2 months before the decision, about not yet being certain she wanted the marriage.
What she chose in October was her church, her duty, and her assessment of the situation. Townsend himself believed until the end of his life that he hadn’t been enough to compensate for these very serious, admittedly material losses that the princess would have to suffer. He was still calculating from the public version of the situation.
He still believed she’d traded love for title and income. The trade turned out to be narrower than he knew, and he never found out. She married Anthony Armstrong Jones on May 6th, 1960. One account, persistent but single source and unconfirmed, suggests that when she heard Townsend was planning to remarry, she said, “I received a letter from Peter in the morning, and that evening, I decided to marry Tony. It was no coincidence.
” The emotional logic makes sense, with or without the quote being verified. The timeline is confirmed. Whatever the private weight of Townsend’s memory, she didn’t let it stop her from getting on a royal yacht and, at the end of a Caribbean honeymoon, accepting 10 acres of scrubland on an island with no running water.
Three Margaret quotes deserve their space here, each from a different source, each doing distinct work. From The Wicked Wit of Princess Margaret, compiled by Marion Body Evans and published by Michael O’Mara Books. A journalist once requested an interview through official channels. The reply came back through Lady Prue Penn, Margaret’s lady-in-waiting at the time.
The message: “Tell her that everything I could tell her would be lies.” The line is simultaneously funny and precise. Margaret had been a tabloid character since before she was 20. She understood perfectly how a public-facing interview operated, what it selected, what it excluded, how it would be read. Every answer would have been filtered through institutional requirements, the journalist’s expectations, and her own fully developed sense of how her words would be weaponized.
The refusal was also, in its way, the most honest response available. From Lady Glenconner’s 2019 Daily Mail serialization of Lady-in-Waiting. At Colin Tennant’s 60th birthday peacock ball on Mustique in 1986, an event he had spent 2 years planning, Tennant had a gold dress made specifically for Margaret. She put it on.
Then she said, “For the first time, I feel like a real princess.” She was 56 years old. She had been Her Royal Highness Princess Margaret since her birth. She had been photographed in tiaras, had attended state ceremonies, had stood behind her sister at official functions since 1952. She wore the Poltimore Tiara at her own wedding and, reportedly, in the bath.
And the moment she said something that felt like being a real princess was when a friend put her in a gold dress on a Caribbean island for a birthday party involving painted coconuts. Funny or devastating, possibly both. What it isn’t, in any interpretation, is the statement of someone who doesn’t know what’s happening to her.
On family relations, in a quote attributed to her across multiple compilations, “In our family, we don’t have rifts. We have a jolly good row, and then it’s all over. And I’ve only twice ever had a row with my sister.” She was claiming domestic harmony while simultaneously cataloging its exceptions. The register is precisely hers, affectionate, specific, and structured like a well-crafted disclaimer.
Each of these quotes shows the same thing. Someone who observed the system clearly, had strong views about how it functioned, and found enough of it absurd to comment on. None of them are the voice of a woman being quietly undone by forces beyond her control. Here, then, is the full accounting. Margaret called Les Jolies Eaux the only square inch in the world I own.
The land was gifted in 1960 by Colin Tennant as a wedding present, confirmed across Lady Glenconner’s memoir, her own journalism, Tennant’s interviews recorded for the Independent’s obituary profile, and multiple independent biographical sources. The house was built with Tennant’s money, at approximately 25,000 pounds, when Margaret called him in early 1968 and asked if the gift came with a house.
He said yes because, as he later acknowledged, he couldn’t really say no. First gift, the land. Second gift, the house. She paid nothing for either. She furnished Les Jolies Eaux at Peter Jones. She called it her only property and loved it with what everyone who saw her there describes as genuine, unperformed emotion.
The woman who insisted on the right whiskey, who curtsied in bikinis, who sang off-color songs at the piano until late in the evening, who collected shells from the beach and felt, at 56, for the first time, like a real princess. She gave the property to her son in 1996, specifically to reduce the size of her taxable estate.
David Linley sold it in 2001 for approximately 2 million pounds. The current rental rate is $47,000 a week in high season. The property Margaret called her only square inch costs, in a single week’s rental, more than her entire civil list income from the years when she was supposedly trading love for financial security. Her gross estate at death, 7.
7 million pounds after years of transfers. Her children’s Christie’s auction, nearly 14 million pounds from 800 objects. A single tiara, 900,000 pounds. Peter Townsend believed until his death in 1995 that he hadn’t been enough to counterbalance what Margaret had sacrificed. The 2004 National Archives established that the sacrifice was smaller than he believed.
Her title and income secured by a government that had quietly guaranteed them. What she chose over Townsend was her church and her assessment of what she wanted her life to be. That isn’t victimhood. That is a woman of 25, legally free, privately assured of her material position, making a considered decision, and writing it down in active voice.
She was born at Glamis Castle in 1930 as the second daughter of a second son. Her uncle abdicated 6 years later, and her whole life rearranged itself around a sister who would be queen. She navigated that arrangement with intelligence and wit, and a dry awareness of its absurdities. Inherited a substantial estate.
Received an island headland as a wedding present. Got the house built for nothing. Called it the only thing she owned. And found the whole irony sufficiently amusing to quote herself on. At a New York party, someone asked how the queen was doing. “Which one? My sister, my mother, or my husband?” The punchline is the husband.
The delivery is the point. That is a woman who looked at the full arrangement, the protocol on the beach in bikinis, the famous grouse requirement, the land she was given and the house that came with it, the choice she made in 1955 with full information about what she was and wasn’t giving up, and found it genuinely funny.
The only square inch, gifted twice, and she knew. Subscribe for more stories like this.