Princess Margaret: The Original Prince Andrew – HT
At this point, it’s very well known. Princess Margaret wasn’t a good person. She was entitled, rude, and belittled anyone she felt was beneath her. And if that sounds familiar, it should. Because before there was Prince Andrew, there was Margaret. That isn’t a casual comparison. It’s a structural one. Two second-born children of British monarchs, two royal lives built on the full apparatus of privilege, income, title, staff, apartments, public deference, with no constitutional function to justify any of it.
Two documented careers of cruelty directed at anyone who occupied a lower position in the order. The template for everything Andrew eventually became was constructed decades before he screamed at his first maid. The woman who built it knew exactly what she was. She said so herself. “I’m just a bad-tempered old devil who can’t help it.
” Not an apology, a self-portrait. Delivered with the serene certainty of someone who has never been required to be otherwise. Margaret Rose was born on August 21st, 1930, at Glamis Castle in Scotland. The second daughter of Prince Albert, Duke of York, and Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon. In December 1936, her uncle abdicated to marry Wallis Simpson.
Her father became King George VI, and Margaret went from fourth in the line of succession to second overnight, without gaining any of the duties that came with her sister’s position. Elizabeth had a trajectory, a purpose, a throne she was being prepared to occupy. Margaret had a very good title and nothing particular to do with it.
That gap, formalized, maintained, and never resolved for the rest of her life, is the engine of everything that followed. By her early 20s, the photographs show a woman of genuine and striking beauty. Contemporary accounts describe vivid blue eyes, a quality of presence that commanded attention in every room she entered.
BBC Culture, reviewing her legacy, described the young Margaret as dazzling. She moved through London’s most elite social circles, a fixture at the 400 Club and the Café de Paris, photographed across Europe at balls and theater premieres. Her social group, the Margaret set, was tracked closely by the international press. She was at the peak of whatever power a royal who isn’t the monarch can actually hold.
She was also, in documented accounts from this same period, already conducting herself in the ways the sympathetic narrative about her prefers not to examine. Craig Brown’s 2017 biography, Ma’am Darling, 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret, a Sunday Times bestseller published by HarperCollins, draws from diaries, memoirs, interviews, and contemporary accounts.
Brown is explicit that some of the book is anecdotal and composite. He is a satirist and journalist as much as a traditional biographer, and his methodology varies between anecdotes. But the behavioral picture it builds, corroborated by multiple independent sources across its entire timeline, is consistent from the beginning to the end.
The cruelty didn’t develop in response to later disappointments. It was present at the beginning, when she was celebrated and young and at her social peak. Beautiful and vicious were simultaneous states, not sequential ones. This matters for a specific reason. The standard defense of Margaret, that her difficult behavior reflected bitterness, a life denied what it deserved, a romantic wound that never healed, requires the cruelty to arrive after the losses.
The chronology dismantles it. She was at her most lauded, her most beautiful, her most publicly cherished, and she was already organizing the world around her into theaters of humiliation. The behavior was character, not circumstance. The story the world tells about Princess Margaret centers on Group Captain Peter Townsend, decorated RAF officer, Battle of Britain ace, equerry to the late king, divorced man, 15 years her senior.
Their romance became public knowledge at the June 1953 coronation, when a tabloid reporter spotted Margaret brushing lint from Townsend’s jacket in front of the assembled press. Two years of national speculation followed. In October 1955, she issued a statement declining to marry him. It cited the church’s teachings that Christian marriage is indissoluble and her duty to the Commonwealth.
The world took it as sacrifice. A love story ended by institution. Official government papers released in 2004, two years after her death, told a different story. Those documents show that Anthony Eden’s government had negotiated a private arrangement. Margaret could retain her HRH title, keep her civil list income, and still marry Townsend.
The conditions were that she would surrender her succession rights and marry in a register office rather than a church. That was it. She could have been HRH Princess Margaret, Mrs. Peter Townsend, with her title, her income, and the man she said she loved. The BBC confirmed the terms when the papers were released. She declined anyway.
What she kept by declining? Her HRH title, her annual civil list allowance, £6,000 per year in 1952, rising over subsequent decades, her Kensington Palace apartments, her place in the line of succession. What she surrendered? A man she claimed to love. Townsend himself, speaking to the BBC on Valentine’s Day 1978, framed his own position in material terms.
He was hardly enough, he acknowledged, to compensate for the very serious material losses the princess would have had to suffer. He believed the losses were larger than the 2004 documents revealed. She had apparently run the calculation more accurately than he had. The Townsend romance was a negotiation conducted through the language of romance.
The outcome tells you who she was. Now for what Margaret actually did with the comfortable position she chose to protect. She required everyone in her social world, not just household staff, but personal friends, to address her as “Ma’am.” Not as a formality observed at formal occasions, but as a constant enforced ritual.
Those who failed it were corrected. Those who persisted were corrected in front of others. Courtiers described her ability to reduce a room to silence with a single raised eyebrow. Guests at her dinners recalled evenings punctuated by withering remarks, deliberately delivered to wound. A description from accounts gathered in Brown’s biography.
Nancy Mitford, novelist, aristocrat, identified and named witness, provides one of the more precisely calibrated exhibits. In 1959, Mitford organized a dinner in Paris in Margaret’s honor. She set dinner for 8:30 p.m. At 8:30 p.m., Margaret’s hairdresser arrived. Everyone waited for hours while he worked. Nobody said anything.
Nobody began eating. The only schedule that mattered was hers, and everyone present understood this without needing to be told. The Selina Hastings incident is cleaner. Hastings, a journalist identified by name, is documented in Brown’s biography as the recipient of a particular commission from the princess, to remove a piece of chewing gum from Margaret’s shoe.
Not a request, an instruction to a journalist who complied. The Trivial Pursuit incident, documented by biography.com and corroborated across multiple accounts, involves a dinner party dispute over the answer “Mulligatawny.” Margaret insisted the card was wrong. It was, she maintained, just curried soup. When corrected by the host, she got so furious that she tossed the whole board in the air, sending all the pieces flying everywhere.
Then everyone cleaned it up. Because what else were they going to do? Her dietary requirements extended to her hosts’ hospitality. She only drank bottled Malvern water and openly disparaged food that had been carefully prepared for her. During her 1965 Hollywood visit, she deliberately arranged the seating at a Beverly Hills dinner so that Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, the most famous couple in the world at that moment, were placed near the kitchen.
Burton got drunk and left. Margaret danced with Fred Astaire until the early hours of the morning. She also insulted Judy Garland directly through a royal aide, demanding she perform on the spot. The visit caused enough diplomatic chaos that British officials banned her from returning to Los Angeles in 1973.
Not a tabloid characterization, a formal diplomatic decision by officials who had to manage the aftermath. By her later years, the social arithmetic had shifted. biography.com notes that officials at Sotheby’s were reportedly bribing fellow guests with inducements to spend 5 minutes talking with her. The woman who had once controlled every room she entered now required external incentives to maintain company.
Peter Russell, palace aide, 1954 to 1968, 14 years of professional service in the royal household. His word for her, a nightmare to work for. When she died in February 2002, the people who had provided that service found out what it had been worth. Within weeks of her death, 10 members of her household were made redundant and ordered out of their Kensington Palace Grayson Favor apartments.
David Griffin, her chauffeur for 30 years. Kevin Martin, her chef. Harold Brown, her butler. Three decades of individual working lives cleared out in 3 weeks. The institution needed the space. The people were logistics. Tom Quinn, whose 2025 book, Yes, ma’am, the secret life of royal servants, gathers accounts from staff who served multiple royals across decades, draws an explicit connection between Margaret’s household culture and what followed it.
A former royal servant quoted in the book described Andrew’s behavior in terms that shouldn’t be passed over quickly. A bit like his aunt Margaret, Andrew always behaved as if he was frustrated about not being the firstborn and therefore destined to become king. This frustration made him a bit of a bully in private.
A bit like his aunt Margaret. A servant inside the household, not a YouTube theory. A witness. Hillsborough Castle, Northern Ireland, July 2005. A storm has passed through. Some trees are damaged. David Anderson, the head of household, a named individual with a documented career in royal service going back to 1984, is briefing Prince Andrew on the damage.
He mentions a tree planted by the Queen Mother. He called her the Queen Mother. Not Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, not the required designation. Andrew Lownie documents what followed in his 2025 biography entitled The Rise and Fall of Prince Andrew, corroborated by reporting in The Times. A withering silence.
Then, “And you still don’t know the proper way to refer to my grandmother? You [ __ ] imbecile. Get out.” David Anderson, head of household, not a junior new hire unfamiliar with the family’s expectations, the senior person responsible for running the castle with over 20 years of royal service behind him, called a [ __ ] imbecile, told to leave.
The structure is Margaret’s structure, played a register louder. A protocol requirement exists. The requirement is failed. The failure becomes the pretext. The person is publicly diminished. The prince confirms his position at the top of every hierarchy in the room. This isn’t rage. This is management technique.
Colin Burgess, a former equerry to the Queen Mother, describes Andrew’s operational catchphrase for staff in Lownie’s account. “I want this done, and I want this done now. Do it.” That is how he communicated requirements, not requests, commands issued in advance of any explanation of what was actually needed. Valentine Low, in his book Courtiers, The Hidden Power Behind the Crown, documents a separate incident in which Andrew confronted James Roscoe, the Queen’s press secretary, over an umbrella.
According to Low’s account, Andrew pointed in Roscoe’s face and said, “Who the [ __ ] are you to ask these men to find you a [ __ ] umbrella? You go and find your own [ __ ] umbrella.” A press secretary, an umbrella. Paul Burrell, Diana’s former butler, a footman to Queen Elizabeth II for years, described witnessing Andrew’s conduct over years of household service.
He told Fox News Digital, “He would tell people to [ __ ] off. Get out of here. [ __ ] off.” Which was obscene, really, the way he treated people. Burrell also documented the late-night dinner parties Andrew and Sarah Ferguson held in their Buckingham Palace apartments, keeping the Queen’s own kitchen staff up until midnight to serve elaborate multi-course meals for private guests.
The Queen herself eventually had to intervene, telling Andrew directly, “These are my staff. They’re not yours, Andrew, and you must treat them with respect.” Andrew absorbed the instruction, then continued. Charlotte Briggs was 21 when she started at Buckingham Palace in 1996. Within 6 months, she had been assigned as Andrew’s maid, the job nobody wanted, as she put it.
She described to The Mirror the training required before she could take the position. There were approximately 72 stuffed toys on his bed. A laminated card in a drawer showed their exact positions. Before making the bed, Briggs had to consult the card. After making it, she verified the arrangement. “It took me half an hour to arrange them,” she said.
“Most bizarre thing to be paid for.” On one occasion, she was summoned over a gap in his curtains. Small gap, curtains within yards of where he was sitting. She ran up and down the stairs correcting the gap as he shouted at her. “Can’t you [ __ ] do anything right?” She ran up and down until it was correct. “This man fought for his country in the Falklands,” she said.
“But couldn’t stand up to close his own curtains.” He did serve in the Falklands in 1982, flying helicopters. The military record is real and shouldn’t be dismissed. Genuine courage in one context and consistent cruelty in another aren’t mutually exclusive. The Falklands was 1982. Charlotte Briggs’s tears were 1996. 14 years of documented personal development pointed clearly in a particular direction.
Lownie’s biography contains two staff reassignments that function as exhibits by themselves. Andrew had a member of his household removed because he couldn’t bear to look at a mole on the man’s face. A separate staff member was reassigned for wearing a nylon tie. Not incompetence, not misconduct. A mole, a nylon tie. The faces and clothing of the people around him were subject to his personal preferences, and when the preferences weren’t met, the person was moved.
He dispatched his taxpayer-funded police protection officers, trained professionals assigned to keep him safe, to collect golf balls he had driven down the fairway. He summoned maids from four floors below to open curtains in his room rather than standing up and closing them himself. A former senior courtier quoted in Lownie’s account offered a psychological frame.
“The fact that he lashed out and was very rude to advisers like me was down to a total lack of self-confidence.” Paul Burrell was more direct. “He was always entitled, always, because he had his mother’s protection. Maybe our dear late Queen was to blame for that because she never said no to her favorite son, Andrew.
” Paul Page worked in the Royal Protection Command from 1998 to 2004, 6 years. He personally filed three formal complaints against Andrew’s conduct during that period. He told The Sunday Mirror he was aware of at least a dozen additional complaints filed by colleagues during the same years. “Those complaints,” he said, “were ignored by palace officials who wanted to avoid agitation.
” 12 complaints, 6 years, all ignored. The monarchy runs on an implicit exchange. The royal family receives public money, public housing, public deference, and the apparatus of the state in return for representing the crown, conducting official duties, and sustaining the institution’s public legitimacy. The deal has always been informal.
It has always existed. Privilege in exchange for function. Margaret’s side of the ledger deserves examination. Her civil list allowance began at 6,000 pounds per year in 1952. By 1990, parliamentary records confirm it had risen to 219,000 pounds. Her estate at death in February 2002 was valued at over 7.6 million pounds net.
She maintained Kensington Palace apartments at public expense throughout her adult life. She spent significant portions of every year on Mustique, the Caribbean island where she kept her villa on land gifted as a wedding present by her friend Colin Tennant. Against that, fewer public engagements than comparable working royals.
Declining further as her health, compromised by decades of smoking beginning around age 15, and heavy drinking, deteriorated. She underwent left partial pneumonectomy in January 1985, a serious lung surgery at 55. The BBC’s institutional summary of her life’s work was restrained but precise. Margaret was less into royal duty and more into drinking, smoking, and living her very best life.
Tim Heald’s biography, written with access to the royal archives at Windsor, recorded the assessment that had attached itself to her name at death. When she died in 2002, Princess Margaret was vilified in many quarters as a hard-living, capricious parasite. He goes on to offer a more balanced view, but the phrase is present in a book with archival access because the verdict was the real institutional reaction.
Capricious parasite. In a biography written with royal archive access, Andrew’s equivalent calculation is starker because his stripping was public. He was removed from his military titles and patronages in January 2022 amid the Virginia Giuffre civil lawsuit, which settled for an undisclosed amount with Andrew acknowledging Giuffre had suffered as an established victim of abuse.
>> [snorts] >> He had stepped back from public duties in 2019 following his BBC Newsnight interview about Jeffrey Epstein. He retained palace housing, staff, and security throughout while contributing nothing to the public institution that funded it. Full privilege, zero function. One side of the deal honored with precision.
Neither Margaret nor Andrew developed this behavior in isolation. They came from a specific family with specific patterns. And at the head of that family’s behavioral inheritance, the generation before Margaret, the model she grew up watching, was Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, the Queen Mother. The Queen Mother’s public image is one of the great marketing achievements of the 20th century.
Wartime courage, she genuinely refused to leave London during the Blitz, genuinely visited bombed communities, genuinely sustained public morale at real personal risk. The smile, the horses, the hats, the wave, none of it’s fabricated. The private accounts are more complicated. Tanya Gold, writing in The Guardian in 2009, described the Queen Mother explicitly as the Queen of unkindness.
Named journalist, named publication, dated assessment, a reported conclusion, not a rumor. Staff accounts described a woman capable of cutting remarks delivered with a smile, the same operational mode as Margaret’s cruelty, the same architecture Andrew would later run without the smile. Warmth as the surface presentation, unkindness as the substrate.
The financial situation was its own record. The Queen Mother maintained a permanent overdraft at Coutts Bank that reached several million pounds, documented across multiple sources. Specific figures vary between accounts, ranging from 4 million pounds to 7 million pounds at different points. Her annual civil list income in her final years was approximately 643,000 pounds.
Her spending regularly and significantly exceeded it. She maintained a vintage champagne collection, racehorses, and a permanent household staff of around 100 people. The gap between income and expenditure wasn’t her concern. It was the bank’s concern. Beyond that, the system’s. Queen Elizabeth II apparently found the situation more amusing than alarming.
She reportedly told friends that Coutts would have folded long ago but for Mummy’s overdraft. The Queen of England making a joke about her mother’s relationship with the bank holding her overdraft. As characterizations of entitlement go, this one carries fairly good sourcing. The Marion Crawford episode reveals something additional.
Crawford, Crawfie, was the royal governess who wrote a memoir about the princesses childhood without authorization. The Queen Mother’s response, documented in The Guardian in June 2000, was to orchestrate a campaign to ensure Crawford would never work in respectable circles again. The Queen Mother’s offense at Crawford’s behavior, sharing private royal anecdotes with the public.
The irony, that this was precisely what the Queen Mother herself did regularly in private social settings, the exact thing she was punishing Crawford for doing, was noted by contemporaries and has been noted since. Destroy anyone who exposes the family. Do exactly what you’re destroying them for doing. Keep the smile in place throughout.
Margaret learned these rules in the household where they were practiced. Her adult relationship with her mother was, as Lady Glenconner, Margaret’s former aide, described it, slightly strained. This doesn’t complicate the transmission, it confirms it. You don’t always get along with the person who taught you your worst habits.
The behavior was in the air. Margaret breathed it. Andrew breathed what Margaret and the institution around him had already normalized. Paul Burrell’s framing of Andrew’s entitlement points back to this lineage without sentimentality. Maybe our dear late Queen was to blame for that because she never said no to her favorite son, Andrew.
Three generations of the same pattern carried by different people produced by the same conditions. Patient minus one, patient zero, patient one. Harry put the word in a book title on January 10th, 2023. He called it what it was, Spare. The British monarchy has always operated on the heir and the spare framework.
The heir gets preparation, constitutional function, a defined role to grow into. The spare gets something different. Full title, full income, full household staff, full public deference, palace apartments, security details, and a civil list payment. What they don’t receive is a function. No role defined precisely enough to impose real accountability.
No purpose that requires sustained expertise or measurable performance. No standard against which behavior is formally assessed. The paradox is structural. The entitlement is real and constant. The accountability is absent. A person raised inside that paradox, given everything the institution can provide, asked for nothing specific in return, develops expectations that the real world can never satisfy, and fury when those expectations aren’t met, even in the protected world that created them.
Royal historian Robert Lacey, writing in 2020, said that the royal system is cruel to spares like Prince Harry. Lacey is describing a real structural condition. The purposelessness is real. The psychological cost of it’s real. What the sympathy framing misses is that the person experiencing the purposelessness isn’t only affected by it.
The people around them, the staff, the subordinates, the journalists commanded to remove gum from shoes, the maids reduced to tears at dawn, are affected by what the purposelessness produces. Margaret, second daughter, born 1930. A lifetime of full privilege, no constitutional function, and a self-described bad temper she never saw the need to address.
Andrew, second son, born 1960. Naval career ended, patronages accumulated and eventually stripped. Palace infrastructure retained long past any public justification for it. Harry, second son of the heir, born 1984. Named his memoir after the condition. Tom Quinn’s book documents that Harry’s former staff described moments of quick, disproportionate anger, out of proportion to the problem, in one servant’s words.
A quieter echo of the same note, Princess Anne is the essential counterargument. Born 1950, second child of Queen Elizabeth II, a spare by every structural definition. She became the Princess Royal. By documented accounts, she is consistently one of the hardest working members of the royal family, performing hundreds of official engagements per year.
She is the proof that the structural condition doesn’t automatically produce the behavioral pathology. She chose differently. The spare framework explains the conditions. It doesn’t excuse the choices made within them. Margaret chose to throw the board. Andrew chose to call the head of household a [ __ ] imbecile.
Both choices were available within a situation that neither of them had created. And both of them used in the same direction for decades. Here is the inventory. A woman who threw a board game across a room because she lost an argument about soup. A man who had a staff member removed from his household because of a mole on his face.
A woman whose chauffeur of 30 years was evicted from his flat within weeks of her death. A man who required a laminated photograph to specify the arrangement of 72 stuffed animals on his bed, and who screamed when the arrangement was wrong. A woman who commanded a journalist to remove gum from her shoe. A man who called the head of household a [ __ ] imbecile over an imprecise title for his grandmother.
A woman who kept a Paris dinner party waiting for hours while her hairdresser worked. A man who dispatched his protection officers to collect golf balls from the fairway. These aren’t random acts of bad character. They are a documented, named, repeating pattern produced by the same set of conditions across three generations.
Full privilege, absent accountability, no defined purpose in person after person raised inside the institution. Margaret received a civil list allowance that reached 219,000 pounds per year by 1990, maintained royal apartments and substantial household staff at public expense for decades, and died with an estate valued at over 7.6 million pounds.
Her chauffeur of 30 years was out of his apartment within weeks. The system continued. Andrew received everything the institution offered, forfeited it through conduct too well documented to survive public scrutiny, and retained residential and financial infrastructure long after any public justification for it had expired.
Before there was Andrew, there was Margaret. Before Margaret, there was the model provided by a woman the Guardian called the queen of unkindness, whose Coutts overdraft ran to millions, whose staff absorbed her sharp tongue while the public waved back at the smile, and who orchestrated the professional destruction of a former governess for doing exactly what she did herself.
The pattern ran through the family before any of these individuals were old enough to develop their own behavior. It transferred. It transmitted. It reproduced. Tim Heald’s biography used the phrase capricious parasite to describe what Margaret looked like at her death to people who had assessed her life against what the institution had provided her.
The biography offers a more generous reading alongside it. But the phrase is there because the assessment was real. And the people who made it had been watching for decades. Andrew is the confirmation. Not the aberration. The confirmation. The Windsor institution produces this outcome when it grants full privilege to people with no defined purpose and no enforced accountability.
It has done so across multiple generations. It hasn’t fixed it. The conditions that shaped Margaret are the conditions that shaped Andrew. The documentation improves with every generation, which means the record of what the system builds is clearer than it has ever been. Princess Margaret wasn’t a tragic romantic figure.
She was the original proof of what the institution constructs when it stops requiring anything back. The founding case. The template. She was, as she acknowledged, a bad-tempered old devil. She just didn’t mention where she learned it. Subscribe for more stories like this.