Princess Margaret was born on August 21, 1930, at Glamis Castle in Scotland, the second daughter of the Duke and Duchess of York. She was christened Margaret Rose and known within the family as Margo. At the time of her birth, she stood fourth in line to the throne, a minor royal expected to live a comfortable life at a slight distance from the crown.
That life lasted six years. In December 1936, her uncle King Edward VIII abdicated to marry Wallis Simpson, and the crown fell unexpectedly onto her father’s shoulders. He became King George VI, her sister Elizabeth became heir to the throne, and six-year-old Margaret was lifted to second in line. She reportedly asked her sister what that made her. It was the question of her life, and it never received a satisfying answer.
The family moved into Buckingham Palace, and during the Second World War, the two princesses were sent to Windsor Castle. Elizabeth was the serious one being trained for a destiny. Margaret was the funny one, the mimic, the performer. The roles were set early.
After the war, Britain was gray and exhausted, hungry for glamour. Margaret came of age at exactly the right moment. She was small, with a tiny waist, porcelain skin, and vivid blue eyes. She wore couture with a confidence her sister never had. She was quick, funny, flirtatious, and openly alive. The newspapers christened her social circle the Margaret Set, and she moved through the smart nightclubs of postwar London, smoking through a long cigarette holder and dancing until the early hours.
She had real talent. She could sing, play the piano well enough to silence a room, and mimic anyone. In another family, she might have made a career on the stage. Instead, she had the applause and the wardrobe and the endless free hours of a woman with nothing she was required to do. Her sister married in 1947 and began the apprenticeship of a future queen. Margaret was expected to be decorative.
Into that emptiness walked a man in a Royal Air Force uniform. His name was Peter Townsend. He was a Battle of Britain fighter pilot, 16 years older than Margaret, employed by her father, and married with two young sons. He joined the royal household as an equerry in 1944, when Margaret was 14. On a royal tour of South Africa in 1947, an attachment began to form.
Townsend was steady, serious, and gentle. He treated her as a person, not a prize. His own marriage was failing under the strain of royal service. When King George VI died in 1952, Townsend was one of the few people who shared that private world of grief with Margaret. What had been affection deepened into love. He proposed. She accepted.
There was a wall in the way. Margaret was the sister of the queen, and the royal family sat at the head of the Church of England, which held that a divorced person could not remarry while a former spouse still lived. Townsend was divorced. The establishment was terrified of a second scandal like the abdication of 1936.
On June 2, 1953, at the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, Margaret reached out and brushed a piece of fluff from Townsend’s uniform. The photographers saw it. Within days, the secret was running in newspapers around the world. The palace moved quickly to separate the lovers. Townsend was posted to Brussels as air attaché. It was exile.
There was a legal clock ticking. Under the Royal Marriages Act of 1772, Margaret could not marry without the queen’s consent until she turned 25. The advice was to wait. They waited two years, kept apart by letters and carefully managed meetings. The whole country followed the drama of her heart.
On August 21, 1955, Margaret turned 25. In theory, she was free. Townsend returned from Brussels, and the country held its breath. But the law had a second half. At 25, she no longer needed the queen’s consent, but she had to give notice to Parliament, and the Parliaments of Britain and the Commonwealth could object. The government made it brutally clear what would follow if she went ahead.
To marry a divorced man, Margaret would have to renounce her rights of succession. She would lose her royal title, her official position, and her income. She would very likely have to leave the country. She had never in her life bought her own groceries or paid her own rent. She was being asked to give up everything for love.
The church stood immovable. The Archbishop of Canterbury held firmly to the doctrine that marriage was indissoluble. The prime minister of the day, Anthony Eden, was himself a divorced and remarried man, but even he would not clear the way. There was no compromise. There was no version in which she kept both the man and the life.
On October 31, 1955, Margaret issued a statement. She announced she had decided not to marry Peter Townsend. She wrote of being mindful of the church’s teaching and conscious of her duty to the commonwealth. She was 25 years old. She chose the throne, the title, the family, and the country over the man she loved.
The nation admired her decision. The newspapers praised her sacrifice. Townsend went back to Brussels and eventually remarried a young Belgian woman who reportedly bore a striking resemblance to the princess he had lost. Margaret stayed behind the palace walls with everything she had bought at the cost of her happiness.
Something in her hardened. Something in her came loose. She had done the right thing, and her reward was an empty apartment and a lifetime of being watched. The lesson she took was that duty ran only one way. It took everything and gave nothing back.
Five years later, she married a man she barely knew. His name was Anthony Armstrong-Jones, a photographer, young, sharp, ambitious, and unconventional. He came from outside the aristocracy and had made his own name with his own talent. Margaret conducted the courtship almost entirely out of sight.
In the autumn of 1959, only weeks after Peter Townsend wrote to tell her he was marrying his Belgian bride, Margaret accepted Armstrong-Jones’s proposal. The wedding took place at Westminster Abbey on May 6, 1960. It was the first royal wedding ever broadcast live on television, watched by an estimated 300 million people. Margaret wore a gown of white silk organza and a diamond tiara she had bought for herself at auction.
For a while, the marriage seemed to work brilliantly. Armstrong-Jones was created Earl of Snowdon. They set up home in a grand apartment inside Kensington Palace. They mixed with film stars and artists and threw sharp, brilliant parties. A son, David, was born in 1961. A daughter, Sarah, followed in 1964.
But the marriage had been built on a wound. Both were quick, proud, sharp-tongued, and easily bored. Both wanted to be the most interesting person in the room. By the middle of the 1960s, they had begun to tear each other apart.
Both took lovers. Margaret was linked to a wine producer named Anthony Barton and to a nightclub pianist named Robin Douglas-Holm, who took his own life some months after their affair ended. Snowdon pursued a string of women. He is said to have left cutting notes around the apartment listing the things he hated about his wife. She pulled rank on him and froze him out.
The drinking grew heavier. Margaret smoked constantly, as many as 60 cigarettes a day. The famous wit turned sour and unpredictable. The marriage was over in all but name by the early 1970s.
She had one place of escape. On the Caribbean island of Mustique, Margaret owned a ten-acre plot on a headland at the southern tip. As a wedding present in 1960, her friend Colin Tennant had given her the land. She built a villa called Les Jolie Eaux, the pretty waters. It was finished in 1972.
Margaret loved it as she loved almost nothing else. She said of it that it was the only square inch in the world she owned. On Mustique, she could be something close to an ordinary woman. She went without stockings. She cooked. She swam and sunbathed and drank rum punch on the terrace.
It was there that a young man walked into her life in the autumn of 1973. His name was Rody Llewellyn. He was a gentle, well-mannered garden designer, the son of an Olympic showjumper. He was 17 years younger than Margaret. She was 43. He was 25.
What grew between them was, in Margaret’s own careful words, a loving friendship. He began to visit her on Mustique. Her friends noticed the change in her. The brittleness softened. Years later, the queen herself is said to have remarked that Rody Llewellyn had made her sister truly happy.
In February 1976, a single photograph ended everything. It showed Margaret and Llewellyn together in swimsuits at the edge of the sea. A British Sunday newspaper splashed it across its pages. The newspapers had a name for him readymade. They called him her toy boy.
The effect was atomic. Here was proof of everything the rumors had whispered. The queen’s sister, a married mother of two, was on a tropical island with a lover 17 years her junior. The world had changed since 1955. The tabloids were hungrier, and the long lens had made privacy almost impossible.
Within weeks, Buckingham Palace issued a formal announcement. The princess and the Earl of Snowdon had agreed to live apart. Their marriage had irretrievably broken down. Snowdon emerged from the wreck with his reputation largely intact. Margaret was cast as the guilty party.
The divorce was finalized in the summer of 1978. It was the first divorce of a senior member of the British royal family in the modern era. Snowdon remarried within months. Margaret never remarried.
The public fury turned to money. By the late 1970s, Britain was a harder, angrier country. Margaret drew a civil list annuity from the taxpayer. She occupied a 20-room apartment in Kensington Palace done up at public expense. She took long holidays on Mustique.
The question moved onto the floor of Parliament. Labour members rose to denounce her. She was called a royal parasite. She was called a floozy. One Labour member named William Hamilton dismissed her as an expensive kept woman. The sister of the queen sat in her palace apartment and read her name spoken with contempt in the highest chamber of the land.
She had lost Townsend to duty. She had lost Snowdon to mutual cruelty. She had lost Llewellyn, who drifted away and married a younger woman. And now she had lost the affection of the public. The golden girl was 47 years old, divorced, mocked, lonely, and increasingly unwell.
She began to destroy herself. She smoked up to 60 cigarettes a day. She drank steadily through the empty afternoons and long lonely evenings. In the 1970s, around the collapse of her marriage, she suffered what those close to her described as a breakdown.
The body began to send warnings. In the early 1980s, she was treated for a benign growth. In January 1985, at the age of 54, she underwent an operation to remove part of her left lung. The official word was that the growth was not cancerous. Her own father had been a heavy smoker and had died of lung-related illness at only 56. Margaret was walking the same road.
She gave up smoking around 1991, but the harm was deep. In January 1993, she was taken to hospital with pneumonia. The friends of her youth were aging or dying. The woman who had once been the most photographed in Britain increasingly kept to her own rooms.
The strokes began in 1998. In February of that year, at her beloved villa on Mustique, Margaret suffered a mild stroke. Early in 1999, again on Mustique, she stepped into a bath and scalded her feet terribly. The injury damaged her mobility badly and increasingly confined her to a wheelchair.
The last four years of her life were a medical chronicle of decline. A spell in hospital in January 2001, unable to eat. Partial blindness and paralysis down her left side. Two final public appearances in the second half of 2001, each frailer than the last.
She made her last public appearance at the 100th birthday of her aunt, Princess Alice, in December 2001. In the photographs, she is barely recognizable as the golden girl of half a century before.
On the morning of February 9, 2002, Princess Margaret died in her sleep at King Edward VII’s Hospital in London after a final stroke. She was 71 years old. She died just three days after the 50th anniversary of the death of her father. She had asked to be cremated, and her ashes were placed beside him in the King George VI Memorial Chapel at Windsor.
Her mother, Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, died just seven weeks later at the age of 101. Even in death, Margaret was the one who left too soon, and the one the crowds did not queue for.
Four years after her death, everything she had owned was carried into a saleroom and sold. In June 2006, Christie’s in London held a two-day sale of the personal collection of the late Princess Margaret. More than 800 lots went under the hammer. Every single one sold. The sale raised a total of £13,658,728.
Queen Mary’s diamond riviera fetched £993,600. The Poltimore tiara, the sunburst of diamonds Margaret had bought for herself and worn on her wedding day, sold for £926,400 to a private buyer. It has never been publicly seen since.
The villa went the same way. In 1996, Margaret gave Les Jolie Eaux to her son David, partly to soften death duties. In 1999, he sold it for a reported £2.4 million to an American buyer. The sale is said to have wounded Margaret deeply in her last years. Today, the house is rented to wealthy holidaymakers.
So what did the woman who had it all leave behind? Not the jewels, which were sold. Not the villa, which was sold. Not the throne, which was never hers. Not the man she loved, whom she gave up. Not the husband she married, who turned against her. Not even the affection of the public that had once adored her.
She left behind two children who loved her. She left a reputation that has only grown more fascinating with time. And she left a question that will not go away. She was handed almost everything a person can be given, and she was denied the single thing she wanted: the right to love on her own terms.
The world envied her every day of her life. And for most of that life, she was profoundly unhappy. That is the emptiness at the heart of having everything. Princess Margaret lived it more completely than almost anyone who ever wore a tiara.