The Queen Mother Was WORSE Than Princess Margaret – HT
Why is anybody surprised? The stories about Princess Margaret, the cruelty, the entitlement, they’re well-known. Staff called her Her Rude Highness. She demanded even her closest friends address her as “Ma’am Darling.” She once erupted in a brutal row with dinner guests that witnesses documented in detail. At parties, she was legendarily picky, demanding bottled Malvern water, disparaging host-prepared dishes, expecting servants to perform personal tasks as though they existed solely for her convenience.
You know all of this. You’ve heard the stories. You’ve seen the documentaries that try to explain her away. The Peter Townsend heartbreak, the second daughter syndrome, the Cinderella in reverse tragedy of a woman who could have been queen but wasn’t. Here’s what nobody talks about. Her mother was even worse.
Not worse in the sense of being ruder at dinner parties. Not worse in the sense of making cutting remarks to staff. The Queen Mother was worse in a way that matters more. She was systematic. She was institutional. And she sustained her cruelties for decades. Where Margaret snapped at servants and changed TV channels on her mother out of petty spite, the Queen Mother waged deliberate campaigns of destruction against anyone who crossed her.
Where Margaret was impulsive, the Queen Mother was strategic. Where Margaret was rude, the Queen Mother was ruthless. And the nation loved her for it. Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon wasn’t born royal. She was the daughter of a Scottish earl, a commoner who married into the Windsor family in 1923 when she wed Prince Albert, Duke of York.
The stammering second son nobody expected to become king. She would have lived out her days in the comfortable obscurity of country houses, dogs, and shooting parties. She never did learn to operate a pedestrian crossing. She didn’t need to. The world arranged itself around her. Then her brother-in-law fell in love with Wallis Simpson.
Edward VIII’s abdication in December 1936 changed everything. Albert became King George VI, and Elizabeth became Queen Consort, a role she claimed to have never wanted. She projected the image of a martyr, the woman who sacrificed her privacy, her peace, her husband’s health for a nation that needed them. Britain was grateful.
Britain allowed her to live like a 17th-century empress for the next 65 years. At her dinners, there were pages behind every chair. Her champagne was Krug at £300 per bottle. She maintained four residences simultaneously. Clarence House in London, Royal Lodge at Windsor, Birkhall near Balmoral, and the Castle of Mey in Thurso.
She amassed approximately £35 million in art, including a Monet landscape worth 15 million on its own. Her love of horse racing cost approximately £1 million annually, a cost borne entirely by her daughter, the Queen. And her overdraft at Coutts Bank reached £7 million at its peak. This is the woman they called the nation’s grandmother, the sweet old lady in pastels who waved from carriages and charmed crowds and symbolized British resilience during the war years.
But that public image was manufactured. Behind closed doors, behind the smiles and the waves and the carefully staged photographs, there was someone far more interesting and far more dangerous. The real Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon wasn’t as nice as people thought she was. We know this because people who worked for her said so.
Tom Quinn documented accounts from royal household staff describing a pattern, a sharp temper, cutting remarks delivered with a smile, comments about appearance and competence that were designed to humiliate. She could be surprisingly hard on staff when her comfort was disturbed, including maids and footmen who made the mistake of being visible when they should have been invisible, or invisible when they should have been present.
One staff account described her social control mechanism with precision. If someone displeased her, invitations stopped. A person would simply vanish from her orbit, and soon they would notice doors closing elsewhere, too. She didn’t need to shout. She didn’t need to make scenes. She simply withdrew her approval, and the world withdrew with her.
Sir Roy Strong, the diarist and former director of the Victoria and Albert Museum, confirmed something even more troubling in 2017. He admitted that he had excised references to the Queen Mother’s racial prejudice from his published diaries. The comments were, in his words, too awful to publish. He had hidden them to protect her.
Think about what that means. A respected historian, a man who spent decades documenting the great and the good of British society, encountered language so offensive that he chose to protect the reputation of a dead woman rather than let the public see what she actually said. We don’t know the exact words. Strong didn’t share them.
But the fact that he felt compelled to censor them tells us everything about the gap between the public image and the private reality. The real proof of her character wasn’t in these small cruelties. It was in the long ones. Consider what happened to Marion Crawford. Crawfie, as she was known, served as governess to Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret for 17 years, from 1932 to 1948.
She was there through the war years, through the abdication, through the childhood of the future queen. She was trusted completely. She was part of the family. In 1950, she published a memoir called The Little Princesses. By modern standards, it was remarkably gentle. Affectionate portraits of the two girls, anecdotes about their childhood, nothing scandalous.
The American magazine Ladies’ Home Journal had approached her. She was retired, living on a small pension in a cottage. They offered her $80,000, tax-free. For a former servant, it was a fortune. The Queen Mother’s response was total war. Crawford was cut off completely. The palace orchestrated a campaign ensuring she would never work in respectable circles again.
Her crime was simple. She had spoken without permission. She had told stories that belonged to the institution, not to her. It didn’t matter that the stories were kind. It didn’t matter that she had served loyally for nearly two decades. She had broken the rule of silence, and for that, she was destroyed. Crawford lived another 38 years after the book was published.
The royal family never spoke to her again. When she died in 1988, no one from the palace attended her funeral. The woman who had raised the Queen was erased as thoroughly as if she had never existed. This wasn’t a hot temper. This wasn’t a bad day. This was institutional destruction carried out with patience and precision over decades.
But even the Crawford affair was nothing compared to the masterwork of the Queen Mother’s cruelty, her treatment of Wallis Simpson. The vendetta lasted 50 years, from December 1936 when Edward VIII abdicated the throne to marry the twice-divorced American socialite, until Wallis’s death in April 1986. The Queen Mother never relented, never forgave, never forgot, and never stopped punishing.
The formal cruelty began immediately. The Queen Mother ensured that Wallis Simpson was denied the title Her Royal Highness, a designation that would have granted her the same courtesies and recognitions afforded to other royal wives. For five decades, every occasion where titles mattered became a reminder of this exclusion. Every receiving line, every formal dinner, every state occasion where precedence was observed, Wallis was placed lower than she would have been, treated as less than she should have been, reminded that she wasn’t truly
family and never would be. The Queen Mother never spoke her name. She referred to her only as that woman. In a letter written around August 1940, the Queen Mother described Wallis Simpson as the lowest of the low. She famously stated, with apparent sincerity, that the two people who had caused her the most trouble in her life were Wallis Simpson and Hitler.
That comparison bears examination. Whatever one thinks of Wallis Simpson, and there is plenty to criticize, placing her alongside Adolf Hitler as a source of personal trouble reveals something about the Queen Mother’s priorities. The woman who stole her brother-in-law’s heart ranked alongside the architect of the Holocaust.
The abdication crisis, in her mind, was a catastrophe comparable to the Second World War. The cruelty continued past death. When Edward the VIII, now the Duke of Windsor, died in Paris in May 1972, his widow was brought to Buckingham Palace for the funeral. The Queen Mother’s behavior toward her was described by witnesses in terms that deserve attention.
She treated Wallace with a correctness so precise and so cold that it constituted its own category of cruelty. Correct on every visible metric and entirely devoid of warmth. Every protocol was observed. Every courtesy was technically extended. And in the gap between the form and the feeling, Wallace Simpson was made to understand one final time that she wasn’t welcome, not forgiven, and never would be.
Wallace Simpson, according to those who knew her, never forgave the Queen Mother for this treatment. She considered it cruel and heartless. She was right. But why? Why this level of sustained, deliberate malice toward a woman who had, after all, handed Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon the crown? Without the abdication, she would have remained the Duchess of York, wife of a second son, forever in the shadow of her brother-in-law’s reign.
Wallace Simpson’s relationship with Edward the VIII made Elizabeth Queen. By any rational calculation, she should have been grateful. The Queen Mother’s public position was that she had never wanted to be Queen, that the burden of sovereignty had killed her husband. King George the VI died in February 1952 at the age of 56 after years of declining health exacerbated by stress and a lifetime of heavy smoking.
The Queen Mother was convinced that the strain of kingship, a role he had never been prepared for, never wanted, and was never suited to, had shortened his life. She blamed Edward for abandoning his duty. She blamed Wallace for making him do it. This narrative isn’t entirely unreasonable.
George the VI wasn’t built for the throne. He struggled with a severe stammer, with crippling social anxiety, with the crushing weight of public expectation. He worked himself into exhaustion during the war years. He died young. These facts are true. But the narrative also served the Queen Mother’s purposes beautifully. It positioned her as a martyr, a woman who had sacrificed her husband’s health and her own privacy for the nation.
It justified her lavish lifestyle, the four houses, the pages behind every chair, the million pounds a year on horses, as merely the compensation owed to someone who had given so much. And it provided moral cover for a 50-year campaign of personal vengeance against a woman whose only real crime was being loved by the wrong man.
The truth is simpler. Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon hated Wallace Simpson because Wallace Simpson had humiliated her. When Elizabeth first entered royal circles, she had hoped to attract the Prince of Wales, the glamorous, popular heir to the throne who would later become Edward the VIII. According to her biographer, Hugo Vickers, he brushed her off.
She married his younger brother instead, the stammering, shy Duke of York who nobody thought would ever be king. Then Edward fell for someone else. And then Edward gave up everything for that someone else. And in doing so, he proved that the crown Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon had worked so hard to join was worth less to him than the love of a divorced American.
The abdication was a public rejection of everything Elizabeth valued, and she never got over it. Now consider Princess Margaret in this light. Margaret Rose Windsor was born at Glamis Castle in August 1930, the younger daughter of parents who adored her. King George the VI famously said of his children, “Lilibet is my pride, and Margaret my joy.
” She was witty, sharp, beautiful, and spoiled. By the time she was a teenager, she excelled at mimicry and was known for her cutting humor. Her governess, Marion Crawford, noted that she could also be extremely tiresome. She grew up watching her mother. She watched her mother treat servants as invisible when convenient and targets when not.
She watched her mother weaponize social exclusion, cutting people off for minor offenses and watching them vanish from polite society. She watched her mother maintain a decades-long vendetta against a woman who had done nothing to her personally. She watched her mother spend lavishly on herself while the nation believed she was a model of wartime sacrifice.
She watched her mother project warmth and charm in public and dispense cruelty in private. And she learned. But here’s what the historical record actually shows. Margaret’s cruelty and her mother’s cruelty weren’t the same. They differed fundamentally in nature, scope, and motivation. The Queen Mother’s cruelty was institutional, strategic, and sustained.
She used formal mechanisms of exclusion. She maintained grudges for 50 years. She orchestrated campaigns. She weaponized royal protocol itself as a tool for inflicting pain. Her targets were punished not by outbursts, but by systematic, cold, deliberate action. Margaret’s cruelty was impulsive, personal, and reactive.
She snapped at servants. She made cutting remarks at parties. She demanded attention and threw tantrums when she didn’t get it. She was petty, volatile, and frequently rude. But she didn’t destroy careers. She didn’t maintain half-century vendettas. She didn’t use the machinery of the state to grind down her enemies.
The mother was a strategist. The daughter was a brat. And their relationship, contrary to what you might expect, wasn’t close. The evidence on this point is consistent and well documented. Lady Anne Glenconner, who served as Princess Margaret’s lady-in-waiting and knew both women intimately, described their relationship as slightly strained.
She documented petty conflicts that speak volumes. One would open all the windows only for the other to go around shutting them. One would suggest an idea and the other would dismiss it immediately. They lived one floor apart at Clarence House for years, but would often communicate through letters rather than speaking directly.
Margaret visited the Castle of Mey, her mother’s Scottish retreat, purchased in 1952 and lovingly restored over decades, exactly once as an adult. Once in 30 years. When she complained about it, “I can’t think why you have such a horrible place.” The Queen Mother replied, “Well, darling, you needn’t come again.
” Margaret didn’t. William Shawcross, the Queen Mother’s official biographer, who was granted full access to the royal archives, put it plainly. Although Margaret loved her mother, she wasn’t always kind to her. Indeed, she could be rude. She criticized her mother’s clothes. She changed the television channel if the Queen Mother was watching something Margaret disapproved She mocked and undermined her in front of guests.
When asked about Margaret’s treatment of her, the Queen Mother’s response was revealing. “I’m quite used to it.” Perhaps they were, as Lady Glenconner speculated, too similar. Two strong-willed women, both convinced of their own importance, both accustomed to getting their way, both unwilling to defer. They clashed not because they were different, but because they were alike in all the worst ways.
This matters because it complicates the simple narrative of transmission, the idea that Margaret learned cruelty at her mother’s table and simply copied what she saw. The relationship wasn’t close enough for that kind of direct modeling. They weren’t confidants. They weren’t allies.
They were two difficult women trapped in adjacent orbits, each grating against the other. What they shared wasn’t learned behavior. It was something deeper, a disposition, an entitlement, an absolute conviction that the world existed to serve them. Both women expected their comforts to be arranged without effort or gratitude. Both treated servants as lesser beings.
Both wielded social power without conscience or restraint. Margaret didn’t copy her mother’s cruelty. She expressed her own version of the same underlying disease, and the system protected them both. When Margaret wanted to marry Peter Townsend, the divorced equerry who had comforted her after her father’s death, she was told that she couldn’t do so and remain a working royal.
The Church of England didn’t approve of remarriage while a former spouse was still living. Margaret chose protocol over love, issuing a public statement in October 1955 that she wouldn’t marry Townsend. It was framed as a sacrifice, a painful duty, a choice that proved her commitment to the institution. The sympathy narrative writes itself.
Poor Margaret, forced to give up true love for the sake of appearances. Cinderella in reverse, as Craig Brown put it in his biography, hope dashed, happiness mislaid, life mishandled. But the audience for this narrative has always been smaller than the establishment hoped. People watched Margaret’s subsequent decades, the parties, the affairs, the drinking, the demands, the cruelty to staff, and they noticed that the tragedy frame didn’t quite explain everything.
Plenty of people suffer romantic disappointment. Most of them don’t spend the next 40 years being awful to everyone around them. >> Royal biographer Christopher Warwick denied that Margaret suffered from second daughter syndrome, the pop psychology explanation that frames her behavior as the inevitable result of growing up in her sister’s shadow.
There is no evidence that she was eaten up by jealousy of the Queen. The sisters remained close throughout their lives. Elizabeth visited Margaret regularly during her final illness, sometimes sweeping into her bedroom, throwing back the curtains, and insisting she get up. Margaret’s cruelty wasn’t the result of thwarted love or sibling rivalry.
It was the result of being raised in an environment where cruelty was normal, where entitlement was assumed, and where the consequences of bad behavior were absorbed by the institution rather than by the individual. She didn’t need to learn specific techniques from her mother. She just needed to grow up in that house.
The financial picture completes the portrait. The Queen Mother’s spending habits were legendary within the household, though the public rarely heard the details. Her overdraft at Coutts Bank reached 7 million pounds at its peak. In spring 1999, Queen Elizabeth II personally assisted in reducing it to 4 million pounds, a private bailout that the taxpayer never voted on and Parliament never debated.
The Queen reportedly joked that Coutts would have folded long ago but for her mother’s overdraft. In her final year of life, the Queen Mother’s spending exceeded her official income by 4 million pounds. She was receiving 643,000 pounds annually from the civil list, taxpayer money allocated to senior royals for the performance of their duties, but her lifestyle required far more than that.
The horses alone cost a million a year. The champagne, the art, the staff, the four residences, the entertaining, all of it added up. When she died at Royal Lodge on March 30th, 2002, at the age of 101, she left an estate valued at approximately 50 million pounds. The debts were paid. The art collection remained intact. The Monet wasn’t sold.
The horses weren’t dispersed. The lifestyle had been maintained to the very end, and the bills were settled by her daughter. The inheritance passed to her great-grandchildren, including Princes William and Harry, through a trust she had established in 1994 with 19 million pounds of her own money, money she apparently had access to even while maintaining a 7 million pound overdraft at the bank.
The accounting of royal finances has always been opaque. The exact mechanics of how someone can be millions in debt while simultaneously setting aside millions for future generations remains unclear. What is clear is that no one ever told her no. No one ever required her to economize. No one ever suggested that four residences might be three too many, or that million pound racing habits were inappropriate for a woman supported by public funds.
The institution absorbed every excess, covered every shortfall, and maintained the fiction of the beloved grandmother who waved from carriages and symbolized British resilience. The same institution that protected the Queen Mother protected Princess Margaret. And when Margaret died in February 2002, 7 weeks before her mother, the institution continued its protective function in a particularly telling way.
Princess Margaret burned correspondence between Princess Diana and the Queen Mother. This fact emerged years later through Andrew Morton’s reporting. The letters, whatever they contained, were destroyed. The historical record was altered. Something that Diana had written to the Queen Mother or that the Queen Mother had written to Diana was deemed too revealing to preserve.
What did those letters contain? We will never know. But the destruction itself tells us something. The Queen Mother had played, according to Morton’s documentation, an integral role in isolating Diana from the rest of the royal family following the separation from Charles. She had shown utter abhorrence at Diana’s decision to participate in Morton’s 1992 biography, that book that blew open the fairy tale and exposed the reality of Diana’s marriage.
The Queen Mother believed that it was always a mistake to talk about your marriage. Diana violated that rule, and the Queen Mother, true to form, responded not with forgiveness, but with institutional exclusion. She helped ensure that Diana was pushed further and further from the family that had made her a princess and a mother and a global icon.
Diana slept at the Queen Mother’s house before her wedding. She received the Queen Mother’s jewelry. She was welcomed into the family with apparent warmth, and then, when she stopped playing by the rules, when she committed the unforgivable sin of speaking truthfully about her pain, the warmth vanished as completely as if it had never existed.
This was the pattern. This was always the pattern. Welcome, then withdrawal. Charm, then cold exclusion. The Queen Mother’s cruelty was never hot. It was ice. And now consider Prince Andrew. Andrew was the Queen Mother’s favorite grandson. She was keen on her sensitive grandson, according to biographers.
She indulged him. She saw in him, perhaps, something of herself, the charm, the social ease, the conviction that the world owed him deference. When the Queen Mother died, Andrew took over the lease of Royal Lodge from the Crown Estate. He moved in during 2004 after spending more than 7 and 1/2 million pounds on renovations.
The property, with its 30 rooms, seven bedrooms, and 40 hectares of grounds, became his country residence. He has lived there ever since. The story of Andrew’s entitlement, his protection by the institution, his persistent belief that rules apply to other people, this story is familiar to anyone who has watched the news in recent years.
The Epstein connection, the Newsnight interview, the stripping of his military titles, the quiet removal from public life while remaining, somehow, at Royal Lodge. The institution that created the Queen Mother protected the Queen Mother. The institution that created Princess Margaret protected Princess Margaret.
And the institution that created Prince Andrew continues to protect Prince Andrew even now, even after everything. This is what no moral compass looks like when it becomes hereditary. The phrase appears in commentary about Margaret again and again, no moral compass, no sense of right and wrong, no internal governor limiting behavior.
But a compass has to be set by someone. A sense of right and wrong has to be taught, and Margaret’s moral education came from a woman who maintained a 50-year vendetta against her sister-in-law, who destroyed a loyal servant’s career for writing a gentle memoir, who spent millions of pounds she didn’t have on luxuries she didn’t need, and who isolated a young mother from her children because that mother had the audacity to tell the truth.
The Queen Mother wasn’t Margaret’s excuse. She was Margaret’s template. But she was worse than Margaret in one crucial way. Margaret’s cruelties were petty, impulsive, forgettable. She snapped at servants and alienated guests and demanded constant attention. She was difficult to work for and unpleasant to be around.
But in 50 years, she didn’t destroy anyone the way the Queen Mother destroyed Marion Crawford. She didn’t maintain decades-long vendettas. She didn’t use the machinery of monarchy as a weapon. The Queen Mother did all of these things. She did them deliberately, consistently, over the course of a long life, and she did them while being celebrated as the nation’s grandmother, the symbol of wartime courage, the sweet old lady in pastels who represented the best of British values.
The public loved the Queen Mother because the public saw what the Queen Mother wanted them to see. They saw the carefully staged photographs, the gracious waves, the visits to bomb sites during the Blitz. They saw a woman who refused to leave London during the war, who declared that her children wouldn’t go without her, and she wouldn’t leave the king, and the king would never leave.
They saw resilience and duty and sacrifice. They didn’t see the pages behind every chair. They didn’t see the 7 million pound overdraft. They didn’t see the racism that Roy Strong felt compelled to excise from his diaries. They didn’t see the ice-cold treatment of Wallis Simpson at her husband’s funeral. They didn’t see Marion Crawford’s career ending because she published a book of fond memories.
The Queen Mother understood something that Margaret never did. Image is everything. Margaret made her cruelties public. She snapped at people in front of witnesses. She alienated guests at dinner parties. She was visibly, flagrantly difficult. The Queen Mother kept her cruelties private. The public saw warmth. The public saw charm.
The public saw exactly what they were supposed to see. And behind closed doors, where no cameras watched and no reporters listened, she was as calculating and as cold as any monarch who ever sat on the English throne. She just never bothered to sit on it herself. She had her daughter for that. The institution continues.
The pattern holds. The moral compass was never installed in that family, and no one has installed it since. Andrew lives at Royal Lodge. The bills get paid. The awkward questions get deflected. The machine protects its own. Margaret was rude. Margaret was entitled. Margaret was frequently unbearable.
Her mother was all of these things and more. She was worse in the ways that matter, more deliberate, more sustained, more effective. She destroyed lives while being celebrated as a national treasure. She spent public money on private pleasures while being honored for her wartime sacrifice. She punished people for telling the truth while being praised for her honesty and charm.
Why is anybody surprised by Princess Margaret? Look at her mother. Subscribe for more stories like this.