Princess Margaret: The Original Andrew ht

 

 

At this point, it’s very well known that Princess Margaret wasn’t a good person. That comment appeared under a YouTube documentary about Princess Margaret and earned hundreds of up votes. The thread below it filled quickly. People calling her entitled, rude, and nasty, using the exact vocabulary they felt the video itself had been too diplomatic to apply.

They were right on every count. But they were stopping short of the most useful connection available. Princess Margaret was the original Andrew. Not as an insult. As a structural diagnosis. The British monarchy’s second-born child doesn’t accidentally become a dysfunction machine. The institution builds them through a specific, repeating set of conditions that has never been corrected because doing so would require acknowledging the pattern exists.

Full privilege, full title, full public income, no defined constitutional purpose, no meaningful accountability. Every generation, the crown deposits a person into this position and watches them curdle. Margaret was the first recognizable modern prototype. Prince Andrew was the next. The behavior is too consistent across too many generations to be coincidence, and patterns have causes.

 This is the argument that sympathetic biographers don’t want to make because making it implicates the institution rather than the individual. But the individuals are the evidence, and the evidence, across decades, is overwhelming. August 21st, 1930. Glamis Castle, Scotland. Princess Margaret Rose is born.

 Second daughter of the Duke and Duchess of York. Her father isn’t the king. He doesn’t expect to be. Nobody in that room is calculating constitutional succession because the line seems clear. The reigning monarch, his brother, his brother’s heirs. Margaret arrives as the daughter of a second son, a comfortable remove from anything requiring preparation.

December 1936 resets everything. Edward the VIII abdicates to marry Wallis Simpson, the American divorcee his household deems unacceptable. Margaret’s father becomes King George VI. Her older sister, Elizabeth, 10 years old, becomes heir presumptive overnight. The machinery of preparation that follows, constitutional education, revised public duties, the specific weight of being watched as a future monarch, belongs entirely to Elizabeth.

Margaret is 6 years old. She gains nothing functional from the abdication except proximity to power with no road that leads through it. That is the trap. At 6, you can’t understand it. By the time you understand it, you’ve already been shaped by it. The palace, the staff, the ceremonial presence at every state occasion. Margaret has all of these.

What she doesn’t have is the answer to what any of it’s for. The 1937 Regency Act did carve out a formal constitutional role for Margaret as a counselor of state, one of six senior royals empowered to deputize for the monarch in limited, specific circumstances. On paper, that sounds like accountability.

 In practice, it was the spare’s version of significance, conditional on the monarch being unavailable, dependent on multiple other named individuals also being absent, and quietly revocable whenever the family’s arithmetic changed. In 1985, when Prince Edward turned 21, Margaret was removed from the six-person list.

 This happened, reportedly, just days after she had asked her sister for additional responsibilities. The institution’s answer to that request was to make her formally less relevant, not more. The structural gap this creates is specific. The heir gets purpose-driven formation from childhood. Every public action is observed as practice for a defined future role.

 Every misstep carries consequences because the role is real and the stakes are visible. The spare gets the same privilege, the same deference, the same ceremonial access, but none of the same weight. Entitlement without accountability isn’t a character flaw waiting to emerge. It’s a predictable output of a specific environment.

 Princess Anne, technically the third child and also a spare, is the counterexample this argument has to acknowledge. She accumulated 457 official engagements in a single year by 2023. She competed in equestrian events at the 1976 Montreal Olympics, becoming the first British royal to compete at Olympic level. She became president of Save the Children and built decades of substantive charity work around patronages with measurable deliverables.

Anne found external accountability structures to substitute for the constitutional vacuum. She imposed purpose from outside because none was built in. No comparable scandal attached itself to her across a 50-year public life. Margaret never built that substitution. She had the gilded cage and no route out of it.

 And nobody with authority over her seemed particularly interested in providing one. Craig Brown spent years researching Princess Margaret’s life for his biography, Ma’am Darling, 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret, published in 2017. His conclusion about her as a social presence was precise. She was the world’s most difficult guest. The book documents her as bossy, demanding, volatile, and petty.

 Someone who exploited to the full the royal protocol of guests not being allowed to sit down to dinner or leave or even go to bed until the royal party had done so themselves. Nor could anyone carry on eating after Margaret had stopped. Her mornings, as documented in the same book, began at 9:00 with breakfast in bed, followed by 2 hours in bed listening to the radio and reading newspapers, which she left scattered across the floor while chain-smoking.

At half past noon, she went downstairs for a vodka pick-me-up. She sometimes had her hair done twice in a day just to fill the time. That was the routine of a woman with nowhere particular to be. At dinner parties, she was unfathomably late. Nancy Mitford, the author, documented one gathering in which Margaret’s hairdresser arrived at 8:30 in the evening, the scheduled dinner time, and everyone sat waiting through whatever construction he was assembling before Margaret appeared.

 The following morning, she claimed illness to avoid a planned group excursion. That afternoon, she was at Dior fittings. On Mustique, where she kept a villa called Les Jolies Eaux, on a 10-acre plot she’d received as a wedding gift in 1960, guests were expected to bow or curtsy when she entered a room, not at state events, but in their private homes, where she was the visitor.

Waiters swam out into the ocean to deliver cocktails to her while she floated in the water. She was easily bored and required the service to follow her wherever she happened to be. She had the same chauffeur for 26 years and barely spoke to him. When visiting sheltered housing for elderly residents, she was offered a carefully prepared dish of coronation chicken and told the person who’d made it that it looks like sick.

 She dismissed a precious 1836 Madeira as tasting like petrol. Sir Roy Strong, a regular at dinner parties where Margaret was a guest, wrote in his diary that she was so inconsiderate and that he really couldn’t stand any more of it, summarizing her as someone who never seemed to think of anything other than everyone’s role to fulfill her slightest whim.

Sting, the musician, encountered her at a social gathering and recalled her opening gambit to him. Does your mother call you Sting? The question is itself the violation. She’s dismissing his public identity while positioning herself as above needing to engage with it on his terms. Then there’s the Twiggy incident.

Twiggy, Lesley Hornby, one of the most visually recognized women in Britain during the 1960s and 1970s, attended a dinner at which Margaret was present. Margaret ignored her for the entirety of the meal. After approximately 2 hours, she finally acknowledged her. The exchange, documented in Brown’s biography, Who are you? Twiggy replied, I’m Lesley Hornby, ma’am, but people call me Twiggy.

Margaret said, How unfortunate. Then she turned away and didn’t speak to her again. This is the princess at a dinner table spending two hours performing deliberate ignorance of another guest, then delivering a parting insult as if it were a courtesy, and then withdrawing attention as if she’d granted something by speaking at all.

At one private dinner at Rules Restaurant, documented by the diarist James Lees-Milne, Lady Elizabeth Cavendish left momentarily to say goodbye to Prince Charles, leaving her shoes by her chair. Margaret picked them up and placed them on Cavendish’s dinner plate. Lord Snowdon found this unfunny. Margaret sulked.

Judy Garland had a more direct experience. Margaret sent a message requesting Garland perform at a Beverly Hills Hotel gathering. Garland’s documented response, “Go and tell that nasty rude little princess that we’ve known each other for long enough. She should skip the ho-hum royal routine and just pop over here and ask me herself.

” Judy Garland, who spent her entire career accommodating the demands of studio executives and impossible production schedules, found Margaret’s entitled approach too much to absorb without pushback. The words Garland chose, “nasty” and “rude”, are the same vocabulary the YouTube comment thread reached for 60 years later.

Elizabeth Taylor, at a social function, heard Margaret describe Taylor’s Krupp diamond as “the most vulgar thing I’ve ever seen.” Taylor offered it to Margaret to try on. Margaret tried it on. She looked at it on her own hand and said, “Doesn’t look so vulgar now, does it?” She insulted the possession, then appropriated it, then retroactively justified the appropriation.

 All of that in under a minute. The Trivial Pursuit incident is documented because Margaret reported it herself. During a game, the correct answer to a clue about a curried soup was mulligatawny, rather than simply curried soup. Margaret was told she was wrong. She threw the entire board into the air, scattering pieces across the room.

She told this story to her biographer, Christopher Warwick. She wasn’t embarrassed by it. That’s the detail that matters. The entitled person doesn’t notice the entitlement. They just perform it, then describe it later as if the board had it coming. Mark Bonham Carter, the publisher who danced with Margaret as a teenager at Windsor Castle when she was 13, found her full of character and very tart in her criticisms.

The pattern was there before she was old enough to vote. Andrew Morton, in his 2021 book Elizabeth and Margaret, documented her missing the Queen’s 10th wedding anniversary celebration without apology, present, or even a card. This was her sister. The person who controlled her income, her housing, and her ceremonial position.

No card. None of this is a collection of bad days. The behavior is a consistent texture running across six decades, touching virtually everyone who spent extended social time with her. The romanticized version of Princess Margaret’s life rests on one foundational claim. She sacrificed love for duty, forced to choose between Peter Townsend and her position, and chose the crown over her own happiness.

The Crown dramatized this across two seasons as genuine tragedy. Sympathetic documentaries have reinforced it ever since. It’s a powerful story. The classified government documents released in 2004, two years after Margaret’s death, substantially undermine it. Here is the documented timeline of what actually happened.

1947. Peter Townsend, RAF Group Captain and Equerry to King George VI, meets Margaret at Windsor. He is 32. She is 17. 1952. The King dies. Elizabeth II becomes Queen. Townsend stays on as Equerry to the Queen Mother. June 1953. At the coronation, watched by over 20 million British viewers, Margaret is seen brushing a piece of lint from Townsend’s uniform jacket.

 The intimate gesture in a formal setting is enough to alert the press. Behind the scenes, Sir Alan Lascelles, the Queen’s senior private secretary, a man whose experience of royal scandal stretched to the 1936 abdication, moves immediately. He tells Townsend he must be mad or bad to think a marriage with the Church of England’s Supreme Governor’s sister is possible for a divorced man.

Townsend is sent to Brussels as air attaché, what he later described to the BBC as a slightly disciplinary measure. He and Margaret wrote to each other almost every day for two years. August 21st, 1955. Margaret turns 25. Under the Royal Marriages Act of 1772, she can now technically marry without the sovereign’s consent if she gives Parliament 12 months notice, but at a cost.

The question is what that cost would actually be. October 28th, 1955. Prime Minister Anthony Eden finalizes the government’s position. According to documents declassified under the 30-year rule and released at the National Archives in January 2004, Eden provides Margaret with a categorical assurance. She can marry Townsend and retain her HRH title.

 She can retain her civil list allowance, her 6,000 pounds annual base, plus the additional 9,000 pounds she would receive on any marriage, totaling 15,000 pounds. She can continue public duties. She can remain a member of the royal family. Eden wrote to Commonwealth prime ministers that exclusion from the succession wouldn’t entail any other change in Princess Margaret’s position as a member of the royal family.

The government had also indicated that after some years, Townsend himself might receive a title and official allowance. The entire life on the other side of this decision had been mapped out, and it looked remarkably like the life she already had, minus one succession position she was never realistically going to need.

Elizabeth had two children by 1955. Margaret was third in line. The Times, when those documents were released in 2004, ran the headline, “Margaret could have kept title, money, and man.” October 31st, 1955. Margaret issues her statement. “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.” Read it carefully. She names succession rights as the sacrifice. Not her title, not her income, not her status, not her position in the family. Because Eden had already confirmed in writing that she would keep those. Her statement acknowledges the final actual terms with precision.

Precisely because what she was giving up was less than the popular myth required. Three days elapsed between the October 28th assurance and the October 31st statement. Townsend published his autobiography, Time and Chance, in 1978. On the BBC’s nationwide program on Valentine’s Day, he said, “She would have been stripped of practically everything.

” He also said, “I was hardly enough to compensate for these very serious, admittedly material, losses that the princess would have to suffer.” He believed this. But what Townsend remembered in 1978 reflected the harder terms of the 1953 to 1954 period before Eden substantially revised them. The government had moved the goalposts in Margaret’s favor in the final days of deliberation.

His understanding of the sacrifice was based on outdated information. Craig Brown’s biography notes that when the Queen Mother fretted about where a future Mrs. Townsend might live, Prince Philip replied with what Brown describes as heavy sarcasm, that it was still possible, even nowadays, to buy a house. Even within the family, the supposedly catastrophic loss of home and security wasn’t being treated as settled fact.

What followed the October 31st statement is itself revealing. Townsend relocated to France, married a Belgian woman, and lived, by most accounts, quite comfortably. Margaret, according to people who knew her, decided to marry Anthony Armstrong Jones, at least partly because she heard Townsend plan to remarry.

She wasn’t going to be the one left standing. That isn’t a woman who chose crown over love. That is competitive wounded pride in formal eveningwear. Their marriage descended across the 1970s into what Armstrong-Jones’ biographer Anne de Courcy called the most serious marital drama in the royal family since the abdication.

In February 1976, paparazzi photographs of Margaret and Roddy Llewellyn, a landscape designer 18 years her junior, appeared in the British tabloids, taken on Mustique during what was meant to be a private stay. Members of Parliament called her a royal parasite. Snowdon separated the same year. They divorced in 1978, the first senior royal divorce in four centuries.

During the worst of the Mustique coverage, Llewellyn sold a photograph to the Daily Express for 6,000 pounds. Coincidentally, the same figure as Margaret’s annual base civil list allowance in the years when the Townsend decision was being made. The institution covered what it could. By 1976, it couldn’t cover enough.

The question that recurs when people discuss Princess Margaret is the one captured in a comment that received 24 likes under the original video. She was a nasty character, just like her horrid mother. How Queen Elizabeth II became the woman she was with these two in her close family, I’ll never know. The answer is structural, not psychological, structural.

The Queen Mother, Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, carries a public reputation of warm eccentricity. The gin and Dubonnet grandmother, the wartime spirit, the last great figure of an older monarchical style. Former servants recorded something more complicated. A woman of sharp temper and sharper tongue, capable of cutting remarks delivered with a smile.

After the 1936 abdication, she maintained what biographers have described as a deliberate 50-year vendetta against Wallis Simpson, refusing to grant Simpson the HRH title for the entirety of both their lives, ensuring every formal occasion where titles were acknowledged served as a reminder of that refusal. When Marion Crawford, the family’s former governess who wrote about her years with the royals, published her account, the Queen Mother organized a campaign to ensure Crawford would never find respectable employment again.

She wasn’t without ruthlessness. She simply aimed it with more precision than Margaret did. What she gave Elizabeth that she didn’t give Margaret in equivalent measure was purpose-driven formation. She specifically trained Elizabeth in emotional control, a skill she described as learned from her own mother.

 That training had real stakes attached to it because Elizabeth was going to be queen. Every restraint practiced was preparation for a specific, real future role. The discipline held because the purpose was clear. Margaret received the same household, the same modeling, the same exposure to the Queen Mother’s behavior, but without the same stakes attached.

 Elizabeth learned that entitlement has a cost because her role made that concrete from childhood. Margaret learned it didn’t because in her structural position for most of her life, it genuinely didn’t cost her anything. The civil list is the mechanism by which the crown budgets for its own structural failure. In 1952, the Civil List Act established Margaret’s income, 6,000 pounds per year base, rising to 15,000 pounds upon a suitable marriage.

By 1978, the New York Times was reporting her allowance at approximately 106,000 dollars. By 1985, Hansard, the parliamentary record, shows her receiving 113,100 pounds annually. The 1990 Civil List Order, an actual piece of UK legislation available in the public record, raises her allowance to 219,000 pounds.

 That same 1990 document is worth examining directly. It’s a list. In order, the Queen Mother moves from 334,400 pounds to 643,000 pounds. Prince Philip moves from 186,500 pounds to 359,000 pounds. The Duke of York, Prince Andrew, moves from 50,000 pounds to 249,000 pounds. The Princess Margaret, Countess of Snowdon, moves from 113,100 pounds to 219,000 pounds.

Margaret and Andrew, on the same legislative page in the same year, receiving public money to sustain what are functionally the same structural conditions. Neither allowance is tied to an engagement minimum, a behavioral standard, or a defined constitutional performance requirement. Both are unconditional income streams for people occupying undefined positions.

Margaret’s accommodation at Kensington Palace was maintained at public expense. Her Mustique villa gave her a private retreat financed in various indirect ways by the lifestyle the public income made possible. Members of Parliament calling her a royal parasite in 1976 were observing, accurately, that the arrangement runs in one direction.

The checks kept arriving regardless. For Andrew, the parallel runs along the same track. His annual allowance from the royal family reportedly ran to approximately 1 million pounds before King Charles terminated it following Andrew’s removal from working royal life. Security costs for Andrew and his family reportedly accumulated into the tens of millions over the years.

His documented use of the Queen’s household resources, including, according to Paul Burrell, commandeering the palace’s staff and chefs for private dinner parties at Buckingham Palace as if it were an a la carte restaurant, mirrors Margaret’s use of the institution’s infrastructure across decades. Different specifics, identical dynamic.

The crown doesn’t just fail to correct the dysfunction. It underwrites it. Prince Andrew was born in 1960, the year Princess Margaret married Lord Snowdon. He is Elizabeth II’s third child, second son, positioned in his generation exactly as Margaret was positioned in hers. Full privilege, full title, no defined constitutional trajectory toward the throne, no external accountability structure equivalent to an heir’s formation.

His post-naval formal role was deliberately vague, special representative for international trade and investment, a designation with no clear deliverables attached. He resigned it in 2011 when the first sustained wave of Epstein-related press attention made the position untenable. His naval service in the Falklands in 1982, flying helicopters on genuine combat operations, was real, and his defenders have cited it consistently.

 What that service didn’t provide was the same accountability architecture as an heir’s constitutional training because nothing in the institution provides that architecture for a spare. The behavior documented around his working royal years matches the Margaret pattern closely enough to function as a checklist. Paul Burrell wrote in his book, The Royal Insider, that Andrew repeatedly told household staff to f off over multiple years, behavior the Queen became aware of and addressed directly.

Her reported words to him, “This must stop. These are my staff. They’re not yours, Andrew, and you must treat them with respect. They’re here to look after us. It’s their duty to look after us, and we must appreciate that.” According to Burrell, Andrew received this correction. The behavior then continued.

 Staff wouldn’t be allowed into rooms to make beds. Andrew and Sarah Ferguson commandeered palace catering for their private dinner parties. The Queen intervened each time she was informed. The pattern required repeated intervention because no single correction fully took. Royal staff reportedly had a nickname for Andrew that press accounts described as too rude to air on television.

A former press adviser gave a description that could apply word for word to the accounts of Margaret’s social behavior. Arrogant, rude, bumptious. He reportedly complained to the Queen that staff were being nasty to him when they failed to absorb his demands without pushback, using the same word Judy Garland had applied to Margaret, now deployed by the target of the behavior as self-defense.

One former adviser provided the clearest structural explanation on record. The fact that he lashed out and was very rude to advisers like me was down to a total lack of self-confidence and an awareness that he couldn’t justify his role. That sentence is the structural argument in 15 words. He couldn’t justify his role.

 The role had no built-in justification, no constitutional purpose, no defined accountability, no mechanism to distinguish between performing the position adequately and failing at it. The entitlement fills the vacuum that purpose should occupy. Margaret’s entitlement filled the same vacuum in the same way. The behavioral output is identical because the structural input is identical.

The institution protected Andrew from the consequences of this for decades. His connection to Jeffrey Epstein was generating press attention from at least 2011. He resigned the trade envoy role that year. The palace continued to maintain his working royal status in various forms for eight more years.

 When Emily Maitlis secured a Newsnight interview in November 2019, the 49 minutes of television Andrew produced, including the claim that he possessed a physiological inability to sweat and a Woking pizza restaurant as alibi for one of the dates in question, destroyed the institution’s capacity to maintain its protective posture.

The palace stripped his military titles and royal patronage is in January 2022. King Charles removed what remained following further legal developments. The institution held the line until holding it cost more than withdrawing. That is exactly how it managed Princess Margaret. Fleet Street’s deference to the palace had been eroding through the late 1960s and early 1970s.

And by February 1976, the mystique photographs were simply more valuable published than suppressed. The protection held until the moment it couldn’t hold. For Margaret, that was one specific tabloid edition. For Andrew, it was a live BBC broadcast. The mechanism is the same. Margaret died in 2002 at 71, having never sat across from Emily Maitlis.

Archbishop George Carey, who visited her on her deathbed, later described her as carrying a deep sadness, a woman who longed for love and commitment, and the love of her life was forbidden from her. Andrew is still alive, living on a smaller property on the Sandringham estate, having been displaced from Royal Lodge in 2025.

She largely got away with it. He largely didn’t. The difference isn’t character. It’s era. And the specific events that forced the institution’s hand in each case. The romantic tragic version of Princess Margaret, sustained by the crown, by sympathetic documentaries, by a press culture that finds more audience in sadness than in indictment, requires considerable editorial effort to maintain.

It requires treating the 1955 decision as genuinely impossible when the archived government files show the terms had already been softened in her favor. It requires treating her documented behavior across six decades as colorful eccentricity rather than a consistent pattern of entitled cruelty. It requires treating the structural position she occupied as an unfortunate circumstance rather than a predictable system for manufacturing exactly the kind of person she became.

She chose the gilded life over Townsend in full knowledge of what she was choosing, 3 days after being told in writing that she could have both. She was rude to her chauffeur of 26 years, and to Judy Garland, and to Elizabeth Taylor, and to Twiggy, and to the elderly residents of sheltered bungalows who’d made her coronation chicken.

She received 219,000 pounds a year from Parliament in 1990 with no performance conditions attached. She threw a Trivial Pursuit board across a room because she was corrected about soup, and then reported this story on herself. None of it cost her anything. That is the institutional point. The crown manufactures people like Princess Margaret not by accident, but by persistent structural failure.

Full privilege, no defined purpose, no accountability mechanism. The spare receives all the deference and none of the discipline, all the income and none of the conditions attached to it. The entitled behavior that would have consequences anywhere else in human life runs for decades without correction because the institution has every incentive to manage the appearance and no mechanism to address the underlying condition.

Prince Andrew is the confirmation that this pattern is structural and repeating. The 1990 civil list order places both of them on the same legislative page. The Queen Mother’s equerries, serving in the same household ecosystem that had orbited Margaret’s behavior for decades, described Andrew as a rude, ignorant sod.

The institution provided identical cover for both until covering became more expensive than exposure. Nobody fixed this after Margaret. Nobody has fixed it after Andrew. The structural position still exists. The constitutional vacancy at its center has never been formally addressed. The BBC, citing academic commentary on the monarchy’s future, has noted that a modern institution should either find better defined roles for such individuals or else the sentence trails off in the academic paper, but the implication is obvious to anyone paying

attention. The next spare is already occupying the position with the same absence of defined purpose, drawing from the same public funds, observed by the same institution that has always found it easier to manage the headlines than to change the conditions. Margaret was the original Andrew. Andrew was Margaret with a worse decade and worse luck.

The crown built both of them. It will keep building them until it stops. Subscribe for more stories like this.