On June 14, 1953, 12 days after the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, Group Captain Peter Townsend was summoned to the office of Sir Alan Lascelles, the Queen’s private secretary. Lascelles, 65, had served the crown for 32 years across four monarchs. He looked at Townsend and said, “You must be either mad or bad.”
Townsend records the meeting in his memoir, Time and Chance, published in 1978. He does not reproduce Lascelles’ exact words at length. He describes instead the verdict. A group captain with a decorated war record, twice shot down, awarded the Distinguished Service Order and the Distinguished Flying Cross and Bar, was being told that his feelings for Princess Margaret were not a private matter. They were a constitutional problem.
The response to a constitutional problem in this particular institution was not sympathy. It was removal. Townsend was posted to Brussels as air attaché. Fourteen days after that conversation, the posting was announced quietly. There was no press conference, no palace statement. Townsend simply left.
What Lascelles’ intervention in June 1953 actually started was a pattern. A pattern that accumulated across five decades, across four different men, and that cost the crown something it never quite got back: the ability to control what people who loved Princess Margaret were willing to say about her.
The men who came into her life between 1952 and 1981 are, taken together, a catalog of the palace’s methods. Each one was handled differently. Each one was given a different instrument of silence. Townsend was sent abroad. Robin Douglas-Home had his letters sought after he died at 36 with a bottle of sleeping pills and a drawer full of debts. Anthony Armstrong-Jones received a title, a career, and eventually a settlement. Roddy Llewellyn received no formal arrangement that anyone has identified, and he has maintained silence for more than 40 years.
The word “secret” in this story is not sensationalism. Several of these relationships were secret for years before the press found them. One of them never became fully public until after both parties were dead. The word “paid” is used with deliberate precision. Not every payment was financial. Some came in the form of continued social inclusion, of decorations maintained, of careers not obstructed.
Each of the men who moved through Margaret’s inner circle between the early 1950s and the early 1980s was offered some form of the palace’s usual currency. The currency said, “We can make your life pleasant or we can make it difficult, and what we ask in return is your discretion.” Most of them took the offer. Some struggled with it. One of them did not survive it.
To understand any of these men, we need to understand what they were walking into when they walked into Margaret’s world. That requires going back to a house in Scotland and a six-year-old girl who had just been told that everything was about to change.
Margaret Rose was born at Glamis Castle in Angus, Scotland, on August 21, 1930. Her parents were the Duke and Duchess of York. Her father was Albert Frederick Arthur George, the second son of King George V, a quiet man with a stammer. Her mother was Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, a woman whose social gifts were famous even then. The older sister was Elizabeth Alexandra Mary, born in April 1926 in London. She was four years ahead.
By 1930, Elizabeth was already the one who understood what it meant to be the heir. Margaret did not have that clarity. She had something else instead. She had the run of the house. The biographies agree on this. Craig Brown’s Ma’am Darling, published in 2017, describes a child who was quick, musically gifted, and aware of herself in a way her parents found both delightful and sometimes difficult.
She could sing before she could reliably read. She did impressions of people she had just met, caught something true about them, and delivered it with a timing that made adults stop and pay attention. She understood which gap to find between what a person said and what they meant. She was also the second, the spare, the one around whom the future was not arranged.
For six years, this was fine. The family lived in a comfortable, almost private way for people of their rank. The main residence was 145 Piccadilly, an agreeable Regency townhouse rather than a palace. There were country weekends at the Royal Lodge in Windsor Great Park. There were summers at Birkhall and visits to Glamis.
Then in December 1936, Edward VIII abdicated, and everything the family had arranged itself around was gone in 48 hours. Her father became King George VI. Her mother became queen. Elizabeth became heir. And Margaret became the sister of the heir, a very specific position, one with enormous privileges and no formal purpose.
She was six years old. Tim Heald, in his biography Princess Margaret: A Life Unravelled, published in 2007, describes the effect of the abdication on Margaret’s childhood in terms of what it removed rather than what it gave. It removed the ordinary domestic arrangements that had made the family feel stable. It removed the father who had been genuinely available and replaced him with a king.
After December 1936, Elizabeth was being prepared for a future that had a shape. Margaret’s future had no shape at all. What she did with that shapelessness was characteristic. She turned it into performance. The impressions got better. The singing got more serious.
Marion Crawford, the governess who later wrote The Little Princesses, the 1950 memoir that made her a pariah at court, describes a child who could hold a room with an anecdote and who understood the power of an audience before she understood very much else. The awareness was not vanity. It was survival. When the shape of your future is unclear, you lean on what you can do in the present. And what Margaret could do in the present was make people pay attention to her.
The war came when she was nine. They spent most of it at Windsor. The castle was cold, and the public appearances her sister was beginning to take on were not yet her responsibility. By the time the war ended in 1945, Elizabeth was 19 and being fitted into the public apparatus of an heir. Margaret was 14.
What she did have by 1945 was a father she was genuinely close to and a social life that was beginning to take shape. The parties at Windsor and at Balmoral had started to include young men. She was quick and funny and beautiful, and the young men paid attention. Several of them fell for her.
Then in February 1952, her father died. George VI had been ill since 1949. A cancerous lung had been removed in September 1951. He was 56 years old. On the morning of February 6, 1952, his valet found him dead in his bedroom at Sandringham. He had died in his sleep during the night.
Margaret was 21. She had been expecting this, but expecting a death and receiving it are different things. Elizabeth was now queen. Margaret was now the queen’s sister, a distinct position from being the heir’s sister. She was no longer second in the line of succession. She was a private person, more or less, with a civil list allowance and a set of apartments in Kensington Palace and a role that nobody had written a job description for.
What she had in February 1952, apart from grief, was Peter Townsend. He had been her father’s equerry since 1944, which meant he had been part of the household for eight years. He was known to both girls as a fixture of the household, a tall, composed RAF officer who moved through the palace with the particular calm of someone trained to perform under pressure. He was 37. She was 21.
During the period of the king’s illness, he had been present for many of the private family moments that illness creates. Townsend writes in Time and Chance that he and Margaret did not fall in love in a single moment. He describes an accumulation of time and proximity and recognition across the months following the king’s death.
Anne Glenconner, who was a close friend of Margaret from the 1950s onward, makes clear in Lady in Waiting, her 2019 memoir, that the feeling was visible to people around them before anyone said anything. Glenconner describes a Margaret in 1952 and 1953 who was for the first time in her adult life genuinely occupied. Not performing. Occupied.
Then the coronation happened, and then a photograph was taken, and then Lascelles made his call. The photograph is famous now. Princess Margaret on the steps of Westminster Abbey on June 2, 1953, leaning toward Peter Townsend and brushing what appeared to be a piece of lint from the lapel of his RAF uniform. The gesture was small. The intimacy of it was not.
Courtiers noticed it. Press photographers captured it. Within the week, the foreign press had begun to run stories. The Daily Mirror and The People ran them on June 14, the same day Lascelles had his conversation with Townsend. The timing was not coincidental. The decision to post Townsend to Brussels had been made before the press ran the stories, not because of them.
Lascelles’ memo to the cabinet outlined the constitutional position with precision. Under the Royal Marriages Act of 1772, no member of the royal family could marry without the sovereign’s consent before the age of 25. After 25, the family member could only proceed if Parliament did not object. Margaret was 22. She needed the Queen’s consent.
The Queen, whatever her private feelings, was being advised by Lascelles that granting consent would create a constitutional crisis, a Church of England crisis, and a Commonwealth crisis simultaneously. Townsend was a divorced man. The Church of England, whose head was the sovereign, did not recognize divorce. The Archbishop of Canterbury was Geoffrey Fisher.
Townsend left for Brussels on June 29, 1953. He was posted as air attaché to the British embassy. The role was real, but the posting was management. He knew it. He later said he knew it at the time. What he received in exchange was the continued respect of his rank, his decorations, and his status as a gentleman. Nobody called him a predator in official communications. He was simply moved.
The two years of Townsend’s exile in Brussels are sometimes described as a waiting period, two people counting the days until October 1955 when Margaret turned 25 and the Royal Marriages Act’s consent requirement technically expired for her. This framing underestimates what those two years actually were.
Townsend was in Brussels. Margaret was in London. They wrote to each other, though the full correspondence has never been published and remains in private hands. What Glenconner records in Lady in Waiting is not the content of the letters, but the mood they created in Margaret during this period. She was not patient. She was not serene about the arrangement. She was, in Glenconner’s description, someone doing the work of a public life while waiting for a private one.
In October 1955, Townsend was permitted to return to Britain. He came back on October 12. He and Margaret spent the following 16 days seeing each other at various private locations. During those 16 days, they had a conversation the content of which neither ever fully disclosed, and from which Margaret emerged with a decision.
On October 31, 1955, she issued a statement through the Press Association. “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.”
The statement is 27 seconds long to read aloud. It was broadcast on the BBC’s 9 o’clock news that evening and reprinted in every national newspaper the following morning. It ended in a single paragraph the most publicly discussed romance in Britain since the abdication.
Most accounts of this moment frame it as a sacrifice, as Margaret giving up the love of her life for duty. That framing is not inaccurate exactly, but it is incomplete. Once she issued the statement, Townsend was no longer a problem. He was a man who could be allowed to exist comfortably, to write his memoir, to give his interviews, to live well in France, because nothing he said would change anything that had already been decided.
He went back to Brussels. In 1959, he married Marie-Luce Jamagne, a 19-year-old Belgian woman who bore, as several observers noted at the time, a resemblance to the princess he had not been permitted to keep. He wrote Time and Chance in 1978, 23 years after the statement, and it is a scrupulous and careful book, protective of everyone named in it.
He described Margaret as “the most wonderful woman I have ever known.” He died on June 19, 1995, in his house in the Normandy village of Le Mesnil-le-Comte. He was 80 years old. Margaret was still alive. She outlived the relationship by 40 years and the man who had made it by seven.
To understand why the palace needed to manage Margaret’s relationships at all, you have to understand what kind of woman she was by her early 20s. By 1952, Margaret was 21 years old and already understood to be a problem in the particular way that brilliant women with no official purpose were problems in postwar Britain.
She was not going to be the queen. She was not going to be prime minister. She was not going to run a company. She was going to be a princess. And a princess’s function in the 1950s was to appear at the right events, marry the right person, and decline to have opinions about anything that mattered.
Margaret had opinions about everything. She had opinions about music, particularly jazz and musical theater, and they were educated opinions. She played piano to a standard that professional musicians found genuinely good. She knew the American songbook with the kind of precision that comes from actually listening.
Noël Coward, who was her friend from the time she was a teenager and who was not in the habit of flattering people to their faces when he didn’t mean it, told her in a letter in 1955 that her voice was effortlessly accurate in a way that most people who study singing for ten years never achieve. She had opinions about painting, about literature, about film. She read broadly and she retained what she read.
The people who were brought to dinner at Windsor or Clarence House to provide intellectual stimulus for the royal family during the 1950s found that the younger sister was the one who had already read the book, already seen the film, already had a position she was prepared to defend across the table.
And she had opinions about men. Marion Crawford in The Little Princesses describes a teenage Margaret who assessed the young men who came to Windsor with a clarity that was sometimes uncomfortable for the young men being assessed. She was not cruel about it. She was accurate, which was worse.
The royal family as a system is not designed for women with accurate opinions. It is designed for women who can channel what they know into the appropriate performance at the appropriate moment and otherwise maintain a composed silence. Queen Elizabeth II mastered this requirement so completely that 60 years of biographers have struggled to find the person underneath it. Margaret never mastered it and never wanted to.
What she wanted, and what the biographies and memoirs of people who knew her well make consistently clear, was a life she had chosen. Not the Kensington Palace apartment the Queen’s household had arranged, not the civil list allowance that came with it, not the schedule of public engagements that arrived with her name preprinted on them. She wanted the same thing any intelligent 22-year-old with strong preferences and a lot of energy wants. A life organized around what she actually cared about, with a person she had actually chosen to be with.
There is something else about the period before Townsend that gets underweighted in most accounts of her life. Her relationship with her sister. Elizabeth and Margaret were close in the way sisters who share an unusual world are close, with a closeness that contains inevitably a good deal of unspoken comparison.
Elizabeth was the one the country had organized itself around. Elizabeth was the one the newspapers wrote about when they wrote about the future. Margaret was the one who, when she appeared in public, got the second paragraph. This was not Elizabeth’s fault. It was not a dynamic either of them had chosen, but it was real and it was persistent.
When Elizabeth became queen in February 1952, the new queen’s primary concern was the functioning of her role. She was 25 years old and she had just inherited overnight the full administrative and ceremonial weight of the British monarchy. The queen dealt with the Townsend situation the way she dealt with most complicated human situations in this period. She referred it to the men whose job was to manage such things.
Margaret heard the verdict through intermediaries. That detail matters. She was not called into a room and told by her sister directly. She heard it through the apparatus, which means she understood from this early point that when the family had something difficult to communicate to her, it would arrive through channels rather than across a table.
The years between October 1955 and May 1960 are not empty in her record. They are full. She traveled. She attended an extraordinary number of parties in London and in the country and abroad. She was photographed at nightclubs, at the theater, at private houses in the country. She was the most photographed woman in Britain for much of this period.
She came very close to marrying Billy Wallace in 1956. Wallace was a friend, an heir to substantial money, and someone who had been in her social circle for years. She may have accepted a proposal from him or something close to it in early 1956. Then Wallace went on holiday and slept with someone else and told her about it, and Margaret ended whatever arrangement they had reached with an abruptness that friends of both parties later described as total.
There were others she allowed close before keeping a distance. John Turner, Mark Bonham Carter fleetingly. The biographies name several men in this period, and what they have in common is that the connections were never formalized and never sustained past the point where they might have required a decision.
She was waiting for someone who did not fit the approved category. She was 30 and she was running out of time in the way women in her position in 1960 understood they were running out of time, when a man she had barely registered in her social circle sent her a note inviting her to dinner, and everything changed.
The man was Anthony Armstrong-Jones. The dinner was in February 1958 at the house of Lady Elizabeth Cavendish in Chelsea. He was 27. She was 27. They had met before briefly at a party the previous year. At the dinner, they talked until long after the other guests had gone.
There is a version of the Armstrong-Jones story that is tidy. Boy meets girl. They are both unconventional, both creative, both drawn to the same world of art and music and bohemian London. They marry. The marriage is brilliant on the surface and privately combustible. And after 18 years, it ends in the first royal divorce since Henry VIII. The tidy version treats the marriage as a misadventure. The truth is not tidy.
Anthony Charles Robert Armstrong-Jones was born on March 7, 1930, in Kensington. His father, Ronald Armstrong-Jones, was a barrister who eventually became a King’s Counsel. His mother was Anne Messel, the daughter of Leonard Messel, whose country house at Nymans in Sussex had one of the great garden collections in Britain. His mother later married Michael Parsons, the sixth Earl of Rosse.
His parents divorced when he was five. He was sent to Sandroyd School in Wiltshire and then to Eton. At Eton, he had a bout of polio that left him with a weakened right leg and which required him to wear a built-up shoe for part of his life. He was not, by his account or by the accounts of people who knew him at school, particularly interested in conventional success. He was interested in making things.
He went up to Cambridge at Jesus College, where he had gone to read natural sciences but left without completing his degree. After Cambridge, he had a brief period of uncertainty before deciding with a confidence that turned out to be justified that he would be a photographer.
By the late 1950s, he was one of the best photographers working in London. His portraits for Vogue and for the society press had a quality that the field’s practitioners recognized and that the subjects themselves often found uncomfortable. He did not flatter. He found something true about a face and put it on the page.
What is also clear about this period of his life is that his social world contained a significant number of gay men and that his relationship to that world was not simply proximity. Jeremy Fry, who was announced as his best man when the engagement to Princess Margaret became public in February 1960, was withdrawn before the wedding with the explanation that he had a medical condition. The actual reason, which emerged later, was that Fry had a 1952 conviction for a homosexual offense. Fry and Armstrong-Jones remained close friends.
Craig Brown’s research for Ma’am Darling is careful about this subject but does not elide it. The picture that emerges is of a man whose emotional and erotic life did not fit comfortably into the available categories and who had found in the London art and theater world of the late 1950s a circle where the categories were loose enough to accommodate him.
What Princess Margaret offered him when their connection deepened after February 1958 was not a retreat from that world. She was part of it. She was the most famous person in it, but she was genuinely of it. Someone whose interest in theater and photography and design was real rather than patronizing. She was also someone who understood the performance requirements of public life at a level that most of the people around him did not, and who shared his preference for a private self that did not match the public one.
The courtship was conducted in serious secrecy for two years. He had a studio at 59 Rotherhithe Street, a converted warehouse on the south bank of the Thames, which could be reached by water and which the press for most of this period did not know existed. Margaret visited it.
The engagement was announced on February 26, 1960. The press had not anticipated it. The wedding was set for May 6 at Westminster Abbey. It was the first royal wedding to be televised, and an estimated 300 million people watched it.
The marriage worked in its fashion for about eight years. What that means in the context of two highly intelligent, highly competitive people who both needed to be the dominant presence in a room is that it worked at the level of shared life, shared interests, shared social world. They built something real together. The way Kensington Palace 1A was decorated, the people they had to dinner, the holidays in Mustique, where Margaret’s friend Colin Tennant had established a private retreat on a Caribbean island that had not yet been discovered by mass tourism.
Their children, David and Sarah, were born in 1961 and 1964. The photographs from this period taken by people other than Armstrong-Jones show two people who were often in the same room, often watching each other, sometimes with pleasure and sometimes with something sharper. From about 1967 onward, it was sharper more often than not.
The cruelty in the marriage has been documented by multiple sources. Armstrong-Jones by various accounts composed written insults he stored in a drawer and retrieved when he wanted to wound his wife at a specific point. Glenconner describes witnessing exchanges between them that she records as wounding in a way that was different from ordinary marital argument, calculated rather than reactive, as though both of them were operating from a list of each other’s vulnerabilities they had spent years compiling.
The affairs on both sides were known within the circle before they were known outside it. Armstrong-Jones had his own life alongside the marriage for much of the 1970s. The most significant long-term relationship being with Lucy Lindsay-Hogg, an Irish actress and former wife of the film director Michael Lindsay-Hogg, whom he eventually married in 1997. Margaret had hers: Douglas-Home in 1967, Roddy Llewellyn from 1973.
The formal separation came on March 19, 1976. The divorce was finalized on May 24, 1978. It was, as the headlines noted at the time, the first divorce in the senior royal family since the 16th century.
The financial settlement has never been fully disclosed. What is publicly recorded is that Armstrong-Jones retained his title, the Earldom of Snowdon, which the Queen had created for him in 1961, and which was his to keep regardless of the marriage’s fate. He retained his career. He retained the apartment the couple had used in Kensington Palace until a mutually agreed point after the separation.
What the palace arranged in practical terms was the management of a man who knew a great deal about a member of the royal family and who had the profile, the wit, and the professional standing to make that knowledge extremely public if he chose to. He did not choose to. The memoir he did not write has been noted by several journalists over the years.
He died on January 13, 2017, aged 86. In his last years, it became known that he had fathered a daughter with Melanie Cable-Alexander, born in 1998, a relationship and a child that had been kept from the public for nearly 20 years.
The palace’s management of Armstrong-Jones was different in character from its management of Townsend because the circumstances were different. Townsend was removed before the relationship formalized. Armstrong-Jones was already the husband when the management became necessary, which meant the instruments available were different. He could not be exiled to Brussels. He could be given a title and a career and a separation agreement and the understanding that the alternative to a well-managed divorce was a badly managed one.
He understood the calculation. He had been making calculations of that kind his entire professional life. The photographs he chose to publish and the ones he chose not to had always been an exercise in understanding what power a given image contained and what the consequences of releasing it would be. He chose in the end to keep most of what he knew.
There is one more thing about the Armstrong-Jones marriage that the official record does not fully contain. During the marriage, while Tony had his long-term involvement with Lucy Lindsay-Hogg, and while Margaret’s friendships with various men in her circle were in various stages of seriousness, there was a man named Robin Douglas-Home.
He was not, by most measures, the most significant man in Margaret’s life. He was not Townsend, who was the great passion of her 20s. He was not Armstrong-Jones, who was the father of her children and the husband of 18 years. He was not Roddy Llewellyn, who was the last person she loved in the way she understood love. He was instead the man who died for it.
Robin Archibald Douglas-Home was born on September 1, 1932. He was the son of Henry Montague Douglas-Home and Margaret Ogilvie, and the nephew on his father’s side of Alexander Frederick Douglas-Home, who would become prime minister in October 1963. Robin Douglas-Home did not have his uncle’s political aptitude or his uncle’s comfort with institutional life.
What he had was a musical gift, a social fluency that came naturally rather than strategically, and a capacity for spending money he did not possess on a scale that accumulated debts faster than his income could address them. By the time he came into Margaret’s orbit in 1967, he owed approximately £36,000, which in 1967 was a serious sum.
He had been married once to Sandra Paul, who later married Michael Howard, the Conservative politician. They divorced in 1962. By 1967, he was living in London, playing piano at private events, writing occasional journalism, and circulating in the society that Margaret moved through. He had been around the edges of her world for some years before 1967. The friendship became something else during 1967, when the Armstrong-Jones marriage had settled into its Cold War phase.
The love letters that came from this period are by the accounts of the few people who have seen them or been told their content by those who have among the most unguarded documents Margaret ever produced. She was 37 years old. She was writing to a man she trusted with something that was in the context of her position an extraordinary act of private expression.
She wrote about what her life felt like from the inside. She wrote about the protocol and the pressure and the permanent sense of being managed. She wrote in at least one passage that has been described by people with knowledge of the letters about feeling as though her actual self existed somewhere the institution could not reach and that Robin was the person she could send it to.
These letters were hers in the sense that she wrote them. They were also in another sense the property of a woman whose correspondence was understood by everyone in her circle to carry constitutional weight. Meaning that what she put in writing was never entirely private, because the institution she was part of did not make full provision for private.
In 1967 or early 1968, Robin Douglas-Home approached Neue Revue, a German illustrated magazine, with an offer. He had material he said that would be of interest. He was understood to be offering either the letters themselves or information derived from them. The exact nature of the approach has been described differently by different sources over the years.
What is consistent across the accounts is that the British establishment learned of it and that the learning of it had consequences. Whether the palace’s response to Douglas-Home’s approach contributed to the final state he was in when he died on October 15, 1968, is something no inquest and no subsequent investigation has definitively established.
What is established is the sequence: the approach to Neue Revue, the establishment response, the continued deterioration of his finances, the debts at £36,000, the flat in Berkshire, the bottle of sleeping pills, the open verdict at the inquest. He was 36 years old.
There was no formal relationship to manage afterward because the relationship had never been public. There was no wife to whom arrangements needed to be explained because he was unmarried when he died. There were the letters, and the letters required attention.
The management of those letters after Douglas-Home’s death has never been fully documented. What is known is that some material was acquired by parties with an interest in its suppression and that some material survived in private hands and has been referenced by researchers and journalists without being published in full.
The nature of the Royal Archive, which is administered at Windsor Castle and which controls access to a significant portion of the historical record of the 20th-century monarchy, means that documents touching on matters of this kind can be effectively restricted from public view for periods long enough to outlast the people most directly concerned.
Craig Brown was given access to more material on Margaret’s life than most writers have been in preparation for Ma’am Darling, and his account is the most careful and complete available. He does not publish the letters. He does not claim to have read them. He describes their existence and their general character from secondary sources.
What remains is not the letters but the shape they leave. A woman who was by all accounts of people who knew her in the late 1960s in genuine distress about the state of her marriage and her life found someone she could write to without the performance. The performance was what the institution required. The letters were the alternative to it. And when the alternative was threatened, the institution moved as it always moved to contain the exposure.
There is one more dimension to this story that has been largely absent from the accounts written in Douglas-Home’s lifetime and for some years after: the piano playing. He was described by people who heard him as genuinely talented, not professional concert level, but better than good in the way that people who have spent years making music seriously are better than good. He played jazz and he played popular songs and he played classical pieces by Chopin and Satie with the touch of someone who had been playing since childhood.
It is a small detail, but it matters because it is part of what Margaret recognized in him. She was a serious pianist herself. The musical conversations they could have were real conversations, not the performances that social conversation about art so often becomes. When she described the relationship to Anne Glenconner, as Glenconner records in Lady in Waiting, she described it in terms of connection rather than passion. He understood what she was actually saying. He could hear what she was actually playing.
The cruelty of what happened to him is not the palace’s cruelty exactly, because the palace did not tell him to accumulate £36,000 in debts, and the palace did not tell him to approach a German magazine. The cruelty is the structure. The structure of a world in which a person could love a princess genuinely and find themselves at 36 in a room alone with an outcome that felt like the only available exit.
In August 1973, Colin Tennant held a house party at Glen, his family estate in Peeblesshire in the Scottish Borders. Tennant was the third Baron Glenconner, one of Margaret’s oldest and closest friends, and the owner of the island of Mustique in the Caribbean. He had given Margaret a plot of land on Mustique as a wedding present in 1960, and by 1973 she had a villa there, Les Jolies Eaux.
The Glen house party in August 1973 brought together a collection of Tennant’s friends that included several people in their 20s and 30s whose connection to the aristocracy was more social than ancestral. One of them was Roddy Llewellyn, 25 years old, the son of Sir Harry Llewellyn, the Olympic showjumper who had won gold at the 1952 Helsinki Games on his horse Foxhunter.
Roddy Llewellyn by 1973 had not yet found what he was for. He had a good family, a good education at Shrewsbury, and an interest in gardens that had not yet crystallized into a profession. He was pleasant and gentle and possessed by the accounts of everyone who knew him at the time of the kind of manner that makes people feel attended to.
He was not in any conventional sense a man who would have attracted attention in that particular company on his own merits. He was pretty and he was kind and he was 25 years old and he was almost nothing like Peter Townsend, which may be part of what Margaret found when she looked at him across a room in Peeblesshire that August. She was 43. He was 25.
Glenconner describes the beginning of the friendship with a care that protects both parties without being evasive about what it was. He had an ease about him that the men in Margaret’s life since Townsend had largely not had. Townsend had ease of a military kind. Armstrong-Jones had a different kind of ease, the controlled assurance of a man who understood how he appeared in a room and managed the appearance.
Roddy Llewellyn had something older than either, an unstudied goodness that is rarer than either composure or assurance, and that is almost impossible to fake. Margaret recognized it. She had been surrounded for the better part of 20 years by people who were performing in one way or another. Roddy Llewellyn in a Scottish house in August 1973 was simply someone who was glad to be where he was and who found her funny. She found this startling. She found it, if the accounts of people around her during this period are to be credited, something close to restorative.
The relationship that developed between 1973 and 1976 was conducted on Mustique, in London, in private houses, and at various country locations with the assistance of the same network of friends who had been helping Margaret arrange private time for the previous 20 years. Glenconner was the primary facilitator because Mustique was his island and the villa was his arrangement.
What made Mustique work as a location was not simply its remoteness. It was a private island owned by a private individual who controlled who came and went. The British press in 1973 and 1974 and 1975 could not land a correspondent at Mustique without Tennant’s agreement, and Tennant did not agree. The villa Les Jolies Eaux, which means “pretty waters,” was set on a hillside above a beach called Gelliceaux. It was in practical terms as close to invisible as a royal residence could be.
This worked until February 1976, when it stopped working. The Sunday People is a British tabloid newspaper. On February 22, 1976, it published a photograph on its front page. The photograph showed Princess Margaret and Roddy Llewellyn on the beach at Mustique. They were in swimwear. They were not touching, but they were together. The photograph had been taken by a reporter who had arrived at Mustique by boat without Tennant’s knowledge or permission.
The response was immediate. Within 48 hours, the story had been picked up by every major newspaper in Britain and by international press across Europe and North America. The specific character of the story, a separated princess in an apparent romantic relationship with a man 17 years her junior, was exactly the material the British tabloid press of the mid-1970s was structured to amplify.
Willie Hamilton, the Labour MP for Fife Central who had been the most consistent parliamentary critic of the civil list for years, called for Margaret’s civil list allocation, which was £55,000 per year, to be reviewed in light of what the photograph suggested about how it was being spent. Hamilton’s criticism found an audience beyond his usual one.
The formal separation from Armstrong-Jones was announced in mid-March 1976, three weeks after the photograph. The timing has attracted comment from biographers and journalists ever since, because the question of which came first, the decision to separate or the photograph that made a continued fiction of the marriage impossible, has never been definitively answered.
Roddy Llewellyn’s response to the exposure was characteristic of everything that was said about his character by the people who knew him. He did not sell a story. He did not give a press conference. He did not attempt to leverage what he knew into anything. He went through a period of considerable personal difficulty in the years immediately following 1976, spending time at a place called Seredell Farm in Wiltshire, a small holding run by a group of people attempting, with varying success, the kind of communal rural life that attracted certain people in mid-1970s Britain.
He was not happy at Seredell Farm. He was not suited to it. He left. What he found in the late 1970s was gardens. He trained at the Chelsea Physic Garden, the four-acre botanical garden on the Embankment that has been teaching horticulture in one form or another since 1673. He became a landscape garden designer, and he became a good one, building a practice that in the 1980s and 1990s was genuinely successful in the commercial world of private garden design.
He married Tatiana Soskin on July 9, 1981, a few months after his relationship with Margaret had come to its natural end. They had two daughters. He was, by the accounts of people who knew him in his professional and personal life after 1981, happy in a way that was accessible and calm and not contingent on anything the palace or the press could give or take away.
He attended Margaret’s funeral at Windsor Castle on February 15, 2002. He was photographed arriving. He made no statement to the press. In the years between 1976 and 2002, he gave a handful of interviews about the relationship, always measured, always warm, never exploitative. He described her as someone he loved and whose company was genuinely one of the great pleasures of his life. He said she had the best laugh of anyone he had ever met.
He is in his late 70s now, living in England, still practicing as a garden designer in some form. He has not written a memoir. He has not sold his archive. He has not spoken at length about the relationship for many years. Whether this sustained silence reflects a private calculation, a continuing affection for Margaret’s memory, a natural preference for a life outside the spotlight, or some combination of all three, is not something anyone outside his household can say with certainty.
What it is not is the palace’s doing, at least not in any documented way. The silence of Roddy Llewellyn is the one in this catalog that does not appear to have a financial or institutional arrangement behind it. He simply chose to be quiet. In a story full of people who were paid or pressured or managed into discretion, he appears to be the one who arrived at it himself.
The four men in this account were handled by four different instruments, and the differences are revealing. Exile for Townsend. Pressure and poverty and death in a sequence that cannot be fully documented but cannot be fully dismissed for Douglas-Home. The gilded cage for Armstrong-Jones. And for Llewellyn, nothing formal, or nothing documented, and the voluntary silence of a man who appears to have concluded on his own that discretion was who he was.
To understand why the palace had four different instruments rather than one, you have to understand what the institution is actually managing when it manages these situations. It is not managing scandal. Not primarily. What the institution is managing is institutional legitimacy, which is more specific than scandal and more fragile.
The British monarchy in the 20th century operated on an unusual compact. The country granted the institution an extraordinary level of privilege, social, financial, constitutional, and in return the institution maintained the appearance of a certain kind of life. The appearance was of seriousness, of a family that understood the weight of what it was holding and carried it with the appropriate gravity.
Margaret was the fracture point in this compact, not because she was immoral or even particularly reckless, but because she was honest. Her life was not a life she could make herself perform without the performance becoming visible. And when the performance became visible, the institution’s legitimacy was exposed.
The Royal Marriages Act of 1772, which was the formal instrument that governed Margaret’s situation with Townsend, was itself a measure of how seriously the institution took the management of these situations. George III had passed it because several of his brothers had contracted marriages he found unsuitable. It remained in force with modifications until 2013.
But the act was only the formal instrument. The informal instruments were older and more efficient. Biographer Theo Aronson, in his 1997 study of the royal family, called it the machinery of discouragement: the combination of architectural, social, financial, and reputational pressure that the institution could apply to anyone who came too close to one of its members in a way it considered inconvenient.
Townsend received the architectural and geographical variant: Brussels, then Johannesburg. The machinery moved him to where the problem couldn’t develop. Douglas-Home received something that looks from the outside less deliberate, but may not have been. He was a man with serious debts and a specific thing the institution wanted him not to do. When he approached the German press with an offer, the establishment response came quickly.
What the response consisted of exactly has never been fully documented. What is documented is that he did not proceed with the sale and that his financial situation did not improve and that he died with debts and sleeping pills a year after the approach. The open verdict at the inquest means the coroner found evidence consistent with self-administration of the pills, but no definitive proof of deliberate intent.
Armstrong-Jones received the financial and social variant: a settlement that was adequate, a title that was irreversible, and continued access to the world that had made his career. The machine gave him a reason to stay quiet by making quiet the rational choice. Llewellyn received apparently nothing formal, and yet he has been quiet for 40 years.
The mechanism underneath all four cases is the same, and it is older than the 20th century. It is the mechanism of social credit. Every person who lives inside a certain world accumulates credit in that world through their behavior, their associations, and their adherence to the world’s internal codes. The credit can be spent or it can be maintained, and the choice of whether to spend it is constrained by the knowledge of what happens to people who spend it in ways the world does not endorse.
Townsend understood this. He was a military man, which meant he had spent his career in an institution whose codes were explicit and whose sanctions for violating them were formal. The social machinery of the palace was by comparison gentler in its execution and entirely without formal rules. But the logic was identical. You maintained the code or you lost the world. He maintained the code. He lost, in one sense, the woman. He kept the world.
Armstrong-Jones understood it with even greater sophistication because he had come from outside the world and had watched himself enter it with the analytical eye of a photographer who knew that the image of a thing and the thing itself were different categories of reality. He had entered the royal world without being born into it. He understood its rules not as nature but as convention.
Llewellyn may have understood something simpler: that the alternative to silence was the destruction of the relationship’s meaning. To speak about it commercially, to sell the interviews and the archive and the memoir, was to turn it into something it was not. The relationship had been private. The privacy had been the point. Selling the privacy was selling the thing that made it worth having.
There is a deeper question underneath all of this that deserves to be stated plainly. The palace did not create the conditions that made these men silent by itself. It used conditions that already existed in the British class and social system. The deference to the institution, the understanding that access to the most significant social world in the country was conditional on not embarrassing it, the willingness of individuals to accept the institution’s management of their private lives in exchange for the benefits of proximity. These conditions were not invented by the palace. They were inherited by it.
The result, across 50 years of Margaret’s adult life, was an almost complete absence of the male perspective on what being loved by her actually involved. The memoirs that exist are careful. The interviews that were given are measured. The letters are mostly inaccessible. The man who might have been least careful, who might have said the most, is the man who did not survive to say anything.
What we have instead are the accounts of the women who were closest to her. Glenconner, whose Lady in Waiting is the most valuable primary source available. The women who served as ladies-in-waiting and who wrote or spoke after her death. The biographers who assembled the record from what was left.
By the late 1970s, Princess Margaret was 48 years old, divorced, and in a relationship with a man who was 30 years old, and she understood that the circle she was in was closing. Not because of Roddy Llewellyn, who remained genuinely in her life until the early 1980s, but because of the accumulating weight of the institution’s management of everything she had tried to be.
There is a tendency in accounts of her later life to frame the 1970s and 1980s as a period of decline. The parties that ran too late. The drinking that was real. The cigarettes, 100 a day at her worst, which her doctors told her would kill her. The holidays in Mustique, which the press covered as the holidays of someone who was avoiding the country.
The decline narrative is not wrong about the symptoms. It is wrong about the diagnosis. What was actually happening to Margaret in the 1970s and 1980s was not a personal disintegration. It was the result of 50 years of being managed by an institution that had never given her a function, only constraints.
She had been told at 22 that she could not marry the man she loved. She had been given at 29 a marriage that the institution approved because Armstrong-Jones was, whatever else he was, not a divorced commoner. She had been watched through 18 years of that marriage, had her affairs noted and her movements monitored and her spending tracked, and had been at the end of it the subject of the first royal divorce in 400 years.
She had then found in Roddy Llewellyn something that felt like the private life she had been trying to locate since 1952, and the press had published a photograph of it. The consequence of all this was not a party that ran too late, or a drink that was one more than was wise. The consequence was a woman who had been fighting the institution from the inside for 40 years, and who had in the late 1970s run out of positions from which to fight.
Glenconner, who was with her for much of this period, writes about it with a compassion that does not romanticize it. She describes Margaret in the late 1970s as someone who could still be the most brilliant company in any room she entered and who was outside the rooms struggling with a life she had never chosen.
The smoking killed her slowly. The first stroke came in January 1998 at Les Jolies Eaux in Mustique. She was 67 years old. The stroke affected her vision in one eye but left her otherwise largely functional. The word for it in the official communiqués was “minor.” It was not minor. It was the first in a series of strokes that would across the following four years reduce her from a woman whose physical presence could still command a room to a woman who could barely navigate it.
In 1999, she scalded her feet in a bath at Les Jolies Eaux. The scalding occurred because the stroke had affected her sensitivity to temperature and she did not register the water as too hot until the damage was done. The burns required treatment and left her with permanent skin damage. Her feet, which had been a private vanity of hers, something she had taken care of throughout her adult life, were burned.
Further strokes followed in 2001 and in early 2002. By the last year of her life, she had lost much of the use of her left hand. Her vision had deteriorated substantially. She could no longer play the piano, which was a loss she did not discuss in public, but which the people who knew her understood to be among the most significant things the strokes had taken.
She died at the King Edward VII Hospital in London on the morning of February 9, 2002. She was 71 years old. The Queen was at Sandringham. The announcement was made by Buckingham Palace at noon.
Her funeral was held at St. George’s Chapel, Windsor, on February 15, 2002. It was a private funeral, not the ceremonial state funeral that would follow her mother’s death seven weeks later. But it was attended by the family and by the people who had been her actual circle across 50 years, which included Colin Tennant and Anne Glenconner and the household who had served her. Roddy Llewellyn attended. He was photographed arriving.
Peter Townsend was dead by then. He had died in 1995 in Normandy. Anthony Armstrong-Jones, now the Earl of Snowdon, did not attend the funeral. The official reason given was that his attendance might attract disproportionate media attention on a day that was intended to focus on the family. This is a plausible reason. It is also the kind of reason the palace uses when it has a more complex reason it would prefer not to state.
The accounting of what her managed life cost her is not in the end a financial one. The financial costs to the palace were real. The civil list allocation. The Kensington Palace apartments maintained across decades. The staff. The security. The management of various situations that required various instruments.
The accounting that matters is harder to quantify. It is the accounting of a life that contained in its first 50 years one man she could not have, and two marriages to men the institution approved and found workable for its own reasons. And it is the accounting of what that pattern produced in the person who lived it.
Craig Brown in Ma’am Darling refuses to reduce her to either a victim or a villain, and his refusal is the most accurate position available. She was not a victim of the institution in any simple sense, because she was also deeply embedded in the institution’s privileges and genuinely attached to many of its elements. She loved being a princess. She loved the access and the attention and the rooms it opened. She did not want to give those rooms up. She wanted to have both the rooms and the life inside them.
The institution’s specific cruelty was not that it denied her the rooms, but that it made the life inside them conditional on a managed performance that ate across 50 years the private person it was managing.
What the private person was underneath the performance is what the letters that nobody has fully published would show us. The letters to Townsend. The letters to Douglas-Home. The notes and diary entries and private correspondence that sits in the Royal Archive and in private hands and in the estates of people who were in her circle and who have not yet decided what to do with what they hold.
We do not have those documents. What we have is what survives the management: the public record, the managed memoir, the measured interview. We have the shape of what was silenced, even if we do not have the sound of it.
The sound was a woman who could sing before she could read, who did impressions that made her father laugh, who played piano in a way that professional musicians found genuinely good, who understood which gap to find between what a person said and what they meant, who looked at every room she entered with eyes that were taking the full inventory of everything it contained, and who spent seven decades inside an institution that found all of those qualities easier to manage than to accommodate.
She died on a Saturday morning in a hospital in Millbank. She was the last person to remember the abdication from the inside of the family. She had been watching since she was six years old.