Princess Margaret Was Andrew Before Andrew – HT
January 2022, the palace announces Prince Andrews military titles are being removed and his HR designation suspended, unprecedented for a living royal. The press covers it as a crisis unique to him, his particular associations, his particular failures, the accumulating external pressure that finally made his position untenable.
There is a structural argument the coverage mostly skips. Andrew isn’t an anomaly. He is the second iteration of something the palace created decades earlier, field tested without consequence, and quietly allowed to continue until death resolved the problem for everyone. Tom Quinn, who compiled royal staff accounts across multiple books, made this grouping explicitly.
Those he called the also rans royals like Princess Margaret and Prince Andrew tend in his observation to be more difficult than the working members of the family. He wasn’t being colorful. He was being precise. Princess Margaret is usually remembered as the tragic one, the spare, the beautiful sister who sacrificed love for duty and spent the rest of her life paying for it in installments.
The press liked that story. It had romance and sacrifice and a villain the size of an institution. The people who worked for her remembered something else. They remembered the cigarette holder raised with the specific theatrical economy of someone who understood gesture as power. They remembered standing at formal engagements holding ashtrays for a woman who smoked 60 cigarettes a day.
not placed within reach, not left on a nearby surface, but held by a standing member of staff for the duration of whatever function was happening around them. They remembered insults delivered to guests who had no recourse but to absorb them with fixed expressions. They remembered that even close friends were required to address her as ma’am darling, which managed to be both dimminionative and imperial at once.
Intimacy extended and retracted within the same two words. The tragedy of Princess Margaret is real. So is the rest of it. This is about both halves and about the institution that made the combination possible. Margaret Rose was born on August 21st, 1930 at Glamis Castle in Scotland. The first member of the British royal family born in Scotland in more than 300 years.
Her parents were the Duke and Duchess of York, a quiet couple unlikely ever to need the full weight of the crown. Her sister Elizabeth was four years older. For the first six years of her life, Margaret’s position was entirely legible. younger daughter of a minor royal, modest expectations, a family role that was supporting rather than central.
Then in December 1936, her uncle Edward VIII abdicated the throne to marry Wallace Simpson and everything reshuffled overnight. Her father became George V 6th. Her sister Elizabeth became heir presumptive, and Margaret became, in the formal language of royal succession, the spare, second in line, close enough to the throne to require a full ceremonial existence, far enough from it, that no one needed to prepare her for anything specific.
She was 6 years old. The architecture of her entire adult life was decided before she could have had any opinion about it. What followed was the systematic construction of two very different women from the same household. Elizabeth received one-on-one constitutional education, meetings with prime ministers, parliamentary briefings, the serious grooming for sovereignty that the role required.
According to Anne Edwards’s biography, Royal Sisters, Margaret was excluded from these studies entirely. She attended the coronations and the public occasions and the major state events, but the preparation that actually mattered was never offered to her. The exclusion was institutional rather than personal.
Elizabeth needed to understand how to govern. Margaret needed to know how to behave. lived over years, the daily difference would have been palpable. Elizabeth sat with constitutional scholars, learning how parliament functioned, how cabinet government worked, how the relationship between the sovereign and the prime minister actually operated in practice.
Margaret sat through lessons with no particular terminal purpose, learning languages and music and the social graces that would allow her to appear at events without embarrassing anyone. She wasn’t being prepared for a role. She was being maintained in readiness for occasions that would require her presence without requiring her judgment.
There is a specific kind of intelligence that finds this unbearable. And everything about Margaret’s adult behavior suggests she had exactly that kind of intelligence. Craig Brown’s Ma’am Darling, which won the 2018 James Tate Black Memorial Prize, notes that neither sister received anything approaching serious schooling, but Elizabeth’s constitutional education compensated for the gap with professional purpose.
For Margaret, there was no equivalent substitution. The preparation ended and left nothing behind it. The Civil List Act of 1952 encoded this with almost perfect clarity. Section 5 specifies provision for her royal highness, the Princess Margaret, in the event of her marriage, £9,000 annually, contingent on acquiring a husband.
Parliament had written a financial framework for her adult life that assumed the organizing principle would be a man. There was no salary for service, no budget for independent work, no structure that acknowledged a Princess Margaret who remained single or who wanted something productive to do with her considerable energy. The father’s fondness made things worse in the way that indulgent affection often does. George V 6th adored Margaret.
A cordier close to the family put it plainly. Sometimes people around her just wanted to give Princess Margaret a good slap because she was just being so difficult or spoiled. But her father would laugh at whatever she did. That laughter communicated something very specific about consequences. The pattern was established before she was 10 years old.
The palace simply formalized it afterward. What filled the vacuum left by purposelessness was glamour. By the mid 1950s, Margaret was a fashion icon of genuine force, not a passive recipient of coverage, but an active presence in the cultural world. She wore Paris couture when British designers were the patriotic expectation.
She sat for Cecile Beaton, who had documented her childhood and continued to shape her public image across decades. Norman Parkinson photographed her for the Tatler and the Bystander. She appeared in Vogue. She moved through London’s social scene with ease that read as confidence because glamour was the one performance the palace both sanctioned and never questioned. She had real wit.
Margaret once told a journalist who sought an interview, “I have no intention of telling people what I have for breakfast.” When a different journalist was refused access, Margaret passed on a specific message. tell her that everything I could tell her would be better understood by reading P. The wit was fast, it was precise, and it was armor.
You can’t be pied if you’re that clever. You can’t be marginalized if you’re that dazzling. But by any honest accounting, it was also a cage with very good lighting. One reading of her later life states the case without ceremony. There’s always a role the palace can create if it wants to create one. Margaret was offered roles by this account and simply didn’t want them.
That is one reading. Another is that a woman of Margaret’s documented intelligence, her genuine love of music, her real social wit, her cultural curiosity, her ability to hold a room with her personality alone, had been told from the age of six that the highest purpose available to her was showing up looking beautiful.
Whether she internalized that message or resented it, the practical result was the same. Importance without function. visibility without consequence. A woman trained for a role that didn’t fully exist, circling the institution that defined her without being able to touch its actual levers. The glamour filled the space that purpose would have occupied. It was better than nothing.
It was considerably less than enough. By the time Margaret was 22, she was the most famous woman in Britain besides her sister. Structurally, she was accountable for nothing. In 1947, on a royal tour to South Africa, Margaret began spending significant time with Peter Townsend. He was 32 and she was 16.
He was her father’s equiry, a decorated Battle of Britain pilot, a trusted military officer who had joined the Royal Air Force at 19, and described in a 1978 BBC interview the toll the air campaign had taken on those who flew it. By the end of the war, with his nerves shattered, Townsend had landed on his feet with a posting in the royal household.
He lived in the grounds of Windsor Castle. He accompanied the princesses on public engagements. He was close to the whole family. He was also married with two children. His divorce from Cecil Rosemary Paul was finalized in November 1952. 4 months later in April 1953, he proposed to Margaret. She was 22. At Queen Elizabeth’s coronation on June 2nd, 1953, a tabloid reporter noticed Margaret brushing lint from Townsen’s jacket.
The gesture lasted seconds. The coverage lasted years. What followed was 2 years of managed separation organized by palace officials who weren’t in practice interested in finding a workable path through. Sir Alan Lels, the Queen’s private secretary, a man whose service went back to the abdication crisis of 1936, told Townsend he must be mad or bad to consider marrying the king’s sister.
Townsend was dispatched to Brussels as heir attaches. He understood the posting as deliberate punishment and said so, describing it to the BBC in 1978 as a slightly disciplinary measure. He couldn’t set foot on British soil. Under the Royal Marriages Act of 1772, Margaret needed Elizabeth’s permission to marry before age 25.
After that, she would need parliamentary approval. Prime Minister Anthony Eden decided privately that if she insisted on marrying Townsend, she would be stripped of all royal privileges and income. Margaret never forgave Lels for the part he played. On August 21st, 1955, Margaret turned 25. Townsend returned from Belgium.
The 19 days that followed were described by Townsend in his BBC interview. He was in a London flat lent to him by a friend. Outside, 50 to 100 press photographers maintained permanent positions. It was in these conditions with the world’s press discussing this situation and with us being discussed in every capital of the world, we had to come to this decision.
On October 31st, 1955, BBC News reader John Snag interrupted normal programming to read her statement. 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 teaching that Christian marriage is indissoluble and conscious of my duty to the Commonwealth, I have resolved to put these considerations before any others.
That statement became the foundation of the Margaret mythology. The woman who loved and lost, who gave up the most personal thing she possessed for an institution that would spend the next four decades offering her approximately nothing in return. The grief in that story is genuine. Townsend himself believed in 1978 that she had made the right decision, but added, “I was hardly enough to compensate for these very serious, admittedly material losses that the princess would have to suffer.
” He was describing his own inadequacy as a prize. Coming from him, the statement has weight. What the mythology tends to omit is a document not released until 2004, 2 years after Margaret’s death. Confidential government papers reported by the Guardian revealed that Downing Street had quietly given Margaret a categorical assurance that even if she married Townsend, she could retain her HR title and her civil List income.
The only conditions were renouncing succession rights and marrying in a register office rather than a church ceremony. The total devastating sacrifice the myth requires turns out to have been more negotiable than the official story admitted. There was also a letter Margaret wrote to Eden in August 1955, 2 months before the public announcement.
She told the prime minister she planned to see Townsend in October. It’s only by seeing him in this way that I feel I can properly decide whether I can marry him or not. Former BBC royal correspondent Paul Reynolds reviewing the letter in 2016 concluded that her determination to go through with the marriage may not have been as ironclad as the public story required.
None of this erases genuine loss. The pressure was real. The exile was real. The grief was real. Former Archbishop of Canterbury, George Kerry, said Margaret spend her final days reminiscing about Townsend with a deep sadness. A wound explains a person. It does not exempt them from accountability for what they then do to people who had nothing to do with inflicting it.
In 1954, a man named Peter Russell joined the household of Princess Margaret. He wasn’t a footman or a cook. He was senior household staff, close to the center of her daily life, witness to the routines and rituals and private conduct that never appeared in the Tatler. He would stay for 14 years. Russell published a memoir titled Butler Royal through Hutchinson in London in 1982 and gave testimony in the television documentary Royal Servants.
What he documented wasn’t a princess in occasional bad humor. It was a household operating according to specific rules. The rules of someone who understood rank as an instrument that required constant maintenance. Start with mornings. Margaret’s day, according to accounts collected by Craig Brown in Ma Darling, began at 9:00 a.m. with breakfast in bed.
Then two hours in bed, listening to the radio, reading the newspapers, which she left scattered across the floor, chain smoking, not reading them tidily and leaving them folded. Scattered. At 12:30 p.m., vodka. Not wine, not tea, not something that politely acknowledged that it was still before lunch. Vodka. The day was organized around her biological rhythms and her preferences, and the household organized itself around the day.
For Russell and the staff who maintained this routine, the practical weight of it was constant recalibration. You couldn’t schedule anything with precision because there was no moment when she was guaranteed to have finished reading. You couldn’t begin preparations for afternoon engagements until she’d emerged from bed.
You worked in her wake, organizing the afternoon around whenever the morning happened to end. The household wasn’t an institution with a schedule. It was a service extended indefinitely in whatever direction she was currently moving. The form of a dress was absolute. Even Margaret’s closest associates called her ma’am darling.
The phrase sounds almost affectionate until you parse it. Darling, which implies you are an equal and she has chosen intimacy with you, attached directly to ma’am, which instructs you that she hasn’t. Intimacy extended and retracted within the same two syllables. The hierarchy wasn’t something she set aside in private moments.
It was the constant atmospheric condition of being near her. The smoking was 60 cigarettes a day, documented explicitly in the research, noted with a particular sharpness against the fact that her father, George V 6th, had died of lung disease. The cigarette holder was famous enough that when Helena Bonham Carter was cast to play Margaret in The Crown, Lady Anne Glenn Connor, who had served as Margaret’s lady in waiting for 30 years, offered her a specific piece of guidance.
The instruction, as later recounted in People magazine, was this. Remember that. This is a big note. The cigarette holder was as much a weapon for expression as it was for smoking. Not a prop, not a habit, a weapon. At formal engagements, staff were required to stand beside her holding ashtrays, not set a tray nearby, not position one within reach, stand with it for the duration of whatever function was happening around them.
The staff member holding the ashtray wasn’t performing a service that required skill or judgment. They were demonstrating that their time and physical presence were entirely at her disposal for as long as she required. And Dorsy, writing in Vanity Fair, interviewed household staff and aids and documented that Margaret treated those who looked after her inconsiderately and with maddening demands that often caused endless extra work.
The word endless is doing specific work in that sentence. Not occasional extra work, not proportionate demands, not the reasonable friction of serving a complex person in a complicated role. Endless. Tom Quinn’s research for Yes, Ma’am, the secret life of royal servants gathered accounts from staff who described Margaret as extremely demanding and badteered and crucially as someone who would berate a servant in front of others, which could be humiliating.
That distinction matters. Berating a servant privately might be frustration finding a release valve. Berating a servant in front of other staff is a performance. The audience is the point. The other staff members were meant to watch, to understand their own position in the hierarchy through the demonstration being made of someone else’s.
Now consider the dinner at Nancy Mittford’s Mittford. The novelist, the aristocrat, the woman whose letters are among the most precisely observed documents of the British social world of the midentth century, recorded the evening in her correspondence, and Brown includes it in Ma’am darling. Dinner was set for 8:30. At 8:30, Margaret’s hairdresser arrived.
Not Margaret, her hairdresser, to begin the quaffure that would eventually precede her appearance. Picture the room. The table set, the candles lit, the guests gathered in the drawing room with their pre-dinner drinks, smiling at each other and choosing topics carefully, glancing occasionally toward the door. 8:30 becomes 9. 9 becomes 9:30.
Nobody sits down because protocol dictated that dinner couldn’t begin until she arrived, which meant dinner couldn’t begin at all with the table incomplete. The food in the kitchen is either going cold or being kept warm past the precise window at which it was intended to be served.
The host, Mittford, is managing the collision between the meal she planned and the timeline she can’t control. The guests are managing their own positions, which require them to behave as though nothing is unusual. This isn’t a story about a hairdresser running late. The hairdresser arrived precisely on schedule for the time Margaret had decided he should arrive.
The guest’s inconvenience was a structural feature of the evening built into the invitation the moment Margaret was included. The lateness wasn’t carelessness. It was the exercise of the one power she could deploy without restriction. The power to make other people wait. And nobody said anything. This is the thread that runs through every account.
The detail that transforms individual incidents from rudeness into a system. Not only what Margaret did, but what happened in the silence that followed. The trivial pursuit incident makes it stark. At a dinner party documented in Brown’s research, a guest gave a correct answer to a trivial pursuit question. Margaret became furious.
She picked up the board and threw it. Sent the cards and plastic pieces scattering across the room in whatever direction they happened to go. Then nothing. The guests presumably picked up the pieces or the staff did. The game was over. Nobody asked her why. Nobody left in protest. The evening continued in whatever altered shape it took after a princess had thrown a board game because someone else had known the right answer.
And the altered shape was exactly as before minus the board game. That silence is the evidence. A person behaving this way at a friend’s dinner, at a colleague’s gathering, anywhere outside a royal household would face some version of a response. They would be asked to calm down or they would find themselves quietly not invited back or the relationship would simply end.
There was no mechanism for any of that. The people around Margaret couldn’t ask her to calm down. They couldn’t disinvite her. She couldn’t be removed from the situation. If she was there, the evening arranged itself around her. Author Selena Hastings, entering a car with Margaret, was asked to remove chewing gum from the princess’s shoe.
Not by a footman, not by a household aid. Hastings, a writer, a guest, a social equal by any reasonable external measure, was asked to peel gum off a royal shoe, and did so, because what else do you do? The request wasn’t practical. A footman could have handled it. The request was status deployed casually as a demonstration of what the relative positions actually were.
The Elizabeth Taylor exchange is the exception that clarifies the rule. When Taylor arrived at an event wearing the corrupt diamond, 33.19 carats purchased by Taylor for $35,000, Margaret looked at it and delivered her verdict. It was the most vulgar thing I’ve ever seen. Taylor reportedly invited Margaret to try it on, then observed, “It doesn’t look so vulgar now, does it?” The exchange survived into history because Taylor could answer back.
She was a movie star with global leverage and no professional dependence on Margaret’s goodwill. Most people Margaret addressed that way had none of those advantages and went home and wrote it down in diaries instead. Twiggy at a dinner party was asked who she was. She answered, “I’m Leslie Hornby, ma’am, but people call me Twiggy.
” Margaret’s response, “How unfortunate.” Judy Garland received similar treatment. So did Grace Kelly, which requires a specific degree of confidence given that Kelly was a princess in her own right by the time of most of their encounters. Margaret also apparently hated squirrels. Upon seeing a woman feeding them in a public park, she walked over and began hitting the squirrels with her umbrella.
This detail is in brown, and it doesn’t fit neatly into any argument about power structures. It’s simply a fact about who she was when no one was watching. Someone who found a small animal mildly irritating and responded with a weapon. Brown documented another detail from her domestic routines. She had apparently glued tumblers to matchboxes so she could strike a match while simultaneously holding a drink.
The ingenuity in this is real. So is what it reveals. The smoking and drinking were so constant and so simultaneous that she needed to engineer a specific solution to manage them at the volume she required. This wasn’t someone who smoked and drank at social occasions. This was someone for whom smoking and drinking were the organizational architecture of every waking hour and the household arranged itself accordingly.
One former employee, unnamed in the source, described working for her as serving a human ashtray, meaning she treated staff as a surface for her habits rather than as people with their own time. The source is anonymous and the script notes it as such, but it arrived from inside the household and it’s consistent with everything Russell and Quinn and Dorsy documented under their own names from their own positions.
What is notable across all of these accounts, across the named sources and the specific incidents and the decades of documented behavior is the absolute absence of any successful correction. No confrontation that changed anything. No aid who refused a request and retained their employment.
No dinner host who said simply, “This has gone on long enough. The table is getting cold. We are sitting down now.” The behavior was absorbed, logged in memoirs and published books and letters, and continued without institutional interruption for nearly five decades. The question that absence creates isn’t only about Margaret.
It’s about the structure surrounding her. The palace didn’t protect Princess Margaret through any active conspiracy. No committee managed her reputation. No policy suppressed testimony. What it provided was something considerably more durable, a culture in which the behavior of royals was simply not the kind of thing that generated institutional response.
She kept her Kensington Palace apartment for the duration of her life. Her title was never reviewed. Her civil list income continued. The staff she required were maintained at public expense. No record in the public domain shows that the palace ever formally examined how she was running her household or treating the people in it.
The structure of royal household employment made this predictable. Staff who worked for the royal family understood as a condition of entering that world that hierarchy ran in one direction. You could leave. Leaving was always an option. But raising a formal complaint about a working royal while employed by the palace wasn’t navigable in any meaningful sense.
There was no independent body to raise it to, no process that acknowledged the complaint’s validity, no outcome other than reassignment to a less desirable position, or the quiet end of a career built on confidentiality as its central promise. Queen Elizabeth II maintained private views on her sister’s behavior. Christopher Warick, Margaret’s authorized biographer, describes Elizabeth as privately disapproving of the Rody Llewellyn relationship while simultaneously maintaining that her sister’s happiness was paramount, holding both positions without resolving
the tension between them. Elizabeth held both positions simultaneously for years, which is a form of calculated inaction that serves an institution stability considerably better than confrontation ever does. The indulgence traced back to childhood. George V 6 laughed at Margaret when courters wanted to intervene.
The queen mother, documented as a heavy drinker herself, was in no position to impose limits she had never modeled. The relationship between the Queen Mother and Margaret was strained in the biographical record without producing, as far as any available source shows, any documented change in Margaret’s conduct. And the cost wasn’t borne by the palace.
The cost was borne entirely by the people around her, the staff who held ashtrays and waited through delayed dinners and absorbed public beradings in front of witnesses. the friends and guests who went home and wrote it all down in diaries because there was nowhere else to put the experience. The institution noticed none of this as a problem requiring action.
It called the arrangement normal within the context of the British royal household in the decades stretching from the 1950s through the 1990s. It was completely normal. That is the structural indictment. less about Margaret personally than about the system that produced her, sustained her, and then attributed the result to personality.
In January 2022, Andrew’s military titles and HR designation were removed. The palace described it as unprecedented. In one sense, that was accurate. No living royal had been stripped of those designations before. The structural parallel between Margaret and Andrew isn’t about the nature of Andrew’s conduct.
His specific legal situation, his association with Jeffrey Epstein, the civil settlement with Virginia Guprey is categorically different from anything documented about Margaret. The comparison is institutional, not ethical. Both were second children. Both were spares close enough to the throne to carry all of its protections. too far from it to carry its full obligations.
Both treated staff in ways that staff documented and couldn’t address during their service. Both were sustained by a system that absorbed the cost of their behavior rather than confronting it. Both were shielded by the direct affection of the reigning monarch in ways that made formal intervention structurally unlikely.
Colin Burgess, who served as equiry to the queen mother and spent time around Andrew, described his manner with staff as identical to that of an officer commanding subordinates. Andrews habitual instruction, according to Burgess, was, “Do it.” Burgess added with the understatement characteristic of longtime palace staff that in his honest assessment, Andrew wasn’t a particularly nice person.
Paul Burell, Diana’s former butler, documented Andrew telling staff to f off in what Burell described as entitled outbursts. When bullying allegations against Meghan Markle became public, reports noted that Buckingham Palace braced itself for historic complaints about Prince Andrews bullying, profanities, and impossible demands.
That the palace was bracing implies it already knew what the complaints would contain. Tom Quinn in Yes Ma’am explicitly grouped Margaret and Andrew as a category. Royals positioned too far from the central function of the monarchy to bear its responsibilities close enough to inherit all of its protections. His word was also Rans. The palace’s word for them functionally was something closer to untouchable.
The question the parallel raises isn’t whether these two people were equivalent. They weren’t. The question is whether an institution that produced both of them, that built the conditions for both, protected both, absorbed the cost of both, ever learned anything from the first case before the second arrived.
The public record suggests it didn’t. The second case required a legal crisis of historic proportions to produce consequences. The first required only the passage of time. Margaret retained her apartment, her title, her allowance, and her staff until she died on February 9th, 2002. The palace never formally moved against her. It waited her out.
Mystique is a private island in the Grenardines, purchased in 1958 by Colin Tenant, the British aristocrat who had once courted Margaret himself. When she married photographer Anthony Armstrong Jones at Westminster Abbey in May 1960, Armstrong Jones became the Earl of Snowden on their wedding day. Tenant gave her a 10acre plot on the island as a wedding present.
She built a villa called Leoli, the beautiful waters. At Mystique, there were no formal obligations, no official function, no press on the beach. What there was in their place were Margaret’s own rules operating without institutional constraint or diplomatic necessity. Among them, nobody left before the princess.
At official functions, this was standard protocol. No one could depart before a working royal. At Mystique, there was no function. The rules survived anyway because it was hers and she chose to bring it. If she was in the mood to entertain, the entertainment continued on her timetable. If she wanted to sing, she had a wobbling soprano that Brown describes as a recurring feature of her late night parties, delivered while guests arranged themselves into the audience they had not planned to become.
She sang. If the evening stretched past 3 in the morning, guests and staff alike stretched with it. The mechanism that required waiting for her to arrive at dinners elsewhere became on Mystique a requirement to wait for her to retire. The location changed. The power structure didn’t. Her marriage to Armstrong Jones had sustained genuine glamour through the 1960s.
They were for a period legitimately the most interesting couple in Britain. Connected to the arts and the cultural world in ways the rest of the royal family wasn’t. By the early 1970s, they were living largely separate lives. Snowden conducted multiple documented affairs. Margaret met Rody Llewellyn in September 1973 when Anne Tenant introduced them.
He was a landscape gardener and aristocrat, 17 years Margaret’s Jr. Ant Tenant’s immediate reaction on making the introduction according to her account to biographers was, “Heavens, what have I done?” In 1976, tabloid photographs of Margaret and Luwellyn together on Mystique were published.
Snowden used them as the mechanism to formally exit the marriage. The news reached Margaret through her private secretary, Lord Napier, communicated in coded language on an insecure phone line. her reported response. Thank you, Nigel. I think that’s the best news you’ve ever given me. She suffered a nervous breakdown in 1974 before the divorce was formalized.
She divorced in 1978, the first senior royal to divorce in 77 years, which carries its own specific irony given that she had cited the indisolubility of Christian marriage as the reason she hadn’t married Townsend in 1955. Craig Brown in conversations about Ma’am Darling offered what he considered the most accurate description of her central problem across these decades. Boredom.
Not melancholy exactly, not the poetic grief the Townsend myth requires, but the specific unstructured boredom of someone with enormous energy and nothing purposeful to direct it toward. She had been trained for display and trained for glamour and not trained for anything else.
And by the 1970s, the glamour required more maintenance, and the social world was contracting, and the boredom was finding expression in the only language available to her, controlling what she could, starting with the people in immediate range. The health decline was the direct product of decades of choices made in the context of a life that had been given everything except purpose.
multiple strokes beginning in the 1980s, 50 years of heavy smoking, 60 cigarettes daily for decades, and heavy drinking compounding into the specific consequences those habits produce at scale. By her final years, she was largely immobile, living out her days at Kensington Palace in a condition described in various accounts as semi paralyzed.
The Guardian noted on the day of her death that her final years had been dogged with ill health. Through all of it, through the divorce and the strokes and the contracting social world and the diminishing physical capacity, her behavior toward those around her continued in the form it had always taken.
Lady Anne Glen Connor, who had the longest documented relationship with Margaret of anyone in the available record, served her for 30 years and continued after Margaret’s death to speak of her with real warmth and specific fondness. In her 2025 memoir, Manners and Mischief, Glen Connor describes a terrifying flight through a thunderstorm.
Margaret patted Glen Connor<unk>’s hand and said, “Don’t worry, Anne. We’ll either die or we’ll live, and that’s that. No point worrying about it. But I think perhaps we ought to have another drink.” The nerve behind that line is genuine. The warmth in the hand padding is genuine. Glen Connor<unk>s 30 years of service, chosen, renewed, maintained through many years of documented difficulty, is itself evidence that something more complex was happening than a simple indictment would allow.
Margaret’s capacity for loyalty toward people she chose to include, her real wit, her genuine cultural interests. None of this disappears just because the pattern of behavior toward others is also real and consistent and decades long. Complexity doesn’t cancel accountability. It just insists on being part of the account.
Princess Margaret died on February 9th, 2002. She was 71. Less than a month later, the palace began clearing her household. 10 members of her staff were made redundant and ordered out of their Grace and Favor apartments at Kensington Palace. The speed of the process was its own statement.
These were people who had organized their housing and their professional identities around positions that were being terminated while they were still absorbing the news of their employer’s death. Among them, David Griffin, who had been her chauffeur for 30 years. He had driven her to public engagements and private functions and hospitals in her final years.
30 years of navigating London traffic with the particular constraint that the passenger in the back couldn’t be delayed, couldn’t be made to wait, couldn’t be inconvenienced by anything as ordinary as a traffic queue. Kevin Martin, a chef who had spent 10 years at Buckingham Palace before 2 years with Margaret. After his redundancy, Martin was forced to seek council accommodation.
He had nowhere else to go. Harold Brown, her butler, none of the three appear in any available account, as having received extraordinary provisions or extended transitions. The institution that had absorbed the cost of Margaret’s behavior for her entire adult life processed her household like a logistical problem the moment she was no longer present to require maintenance.
This is what the machinery looked like from the other end of it. The protection ran in one direction toward the royal, and the people who had provided the service being protected, standing with ashtrays, waiting through delayed dinners, absorbing whatever arrived without being able to put it anywhere, were simply a cost the institution stopped paying when the original expenditure was no longer required.
Princess Margaret was wounded by the palace. This is the baseline, not a concession placed at the end to soften a harder argument. She was born into a position that gave her importance without purpose, trained her for visibility without function, and spent decades providing a large and carefully lit stage on which she had nothing specific to perform.
The Townsend affair stripped away the one private arrangement she had made for her own happiness under pressure from an institution that then offered her nothing in return except continued membership in the institution that had done the stripping. The grief attached to that loss appears to have been genuine and permanent.
The sadness reported in her final days, the correspondence with Townsend maintained for years after 1955. the fact that she was still talking about him when she was dying. The wound was real and she was handed power over people with fewer protections than she had and she used it. The staff who stood with ashtrays and waited through delayed dinners and absorbed beridings in front of witnesses had no functional mechanism to stop what was happening to them.
She knew this. The hierarchy wasn’t a secret. It was the premise of every interaction. The palace, confronted with this combination, a wounded royal and a workforce she could treat as she chose, absorbed the cost, called the arrangement normal, and continued until death resolved the problem for everyone involved.
The first time it waited for death. The second time with Andrew, it required a legal crisis of historic proportions before the institution moved. The conclusion that follows from Andrew’s case that his behavior persisted because he was never disciplined because he knew he could behave exactly as he wished describes a system that extracted no lessons from the first iteration because the first iteration imposed no costs on the institution itself.
The cost of Margaret’s behavior was paid entirely by the people around her. The palace paid nothing. Margaret has been framed as the tragic spare, and she was. She has also been framed as a monster, which she wasn’t. Glen Connor<unk>’s 30 years of affectionate service, the genuine wit and nerve running through even the most critical accounts, the complexity of a personality that could be cruel and funny and genuinely warm toward the people she chose to protect.
None of that disappears just because the pattern toward others is also real. What she was precisely was a person the palace genuinely harmed and then gave power over people the palace would never protect. And the institution looked at both facts simultaneously and called the whole arrangement someone’s personality.
She signed her checks simply as Margaret. No title, no last name, just the one word which contained by then everything. the birthrank, the decades of glamour, the grief, the wit, the cruelty, the parties that ran until 4 in the morning because no one had the standing to leave. The palace gave Margaret a cage.
Then it gave her servants and called it compensation. Subscribe for more stories like