The photograph from that morning in June 1953 would define the rest of her life. In Westminster Abbey, as the eyes of the Commonwealth fixed on her sister’s coronation, the 22-year-old Princess Margaret leaned toward a man in RAF dress uniform and brushed a piece of lint from his lapel. The gesture was caught by photographers, recognized by editors, and by the next morning it was on front pages from London to New York. The man was Group Captain Peter Townsend, 38 years old, divorced, and completely unsuitable for a princess.
The ten-year drama that came to define Princess Margaret’s life had its opening scene. Margaret Rose was born on 21 August 1930 at Glamis Castle in Scotland, the second daughter of Prince Albert, Duke of York, and his wife Elizabeth. Her sister Elizabeth had been born four years earlier. At birth, Margaret was fourth in line to the throne, and no one expected that to change.
Her father was a second son, and second sons traditionally remained second sons. Margaret could have expected to grow into adulthood as the niece of a king and the cousin of his heirs, marrying into the aristocracy, living quietly in the background of royal life. Her childhood in the early 1930s was pleasant and unremarkable: governesses at 145 Piccadilly, lessons at Royal Lodge in Windsor, stories read by J. M.
Barrie, music and dance teachers, and an affectionate father who called Elizabeth his pride and Margaret his joy. She was spoiled in the particular way of second children of indulgent parents, praised for being amusing, and she learned early that attention came through performance. Everything changed in December 1936. Her grandfather King George V had died at the start of that year.
Her uncle became King Edward VIII and then abdicated to marry the American divorcee Wallis Simpson. Margaret’s father, who had never wanted to be king and who stammered at public speaking, became King George VI. Elizabeth became the future heir. Margaret, at six years old, was now second in line to the throne, and the phrase used inside the household was that Elizabeth was the heir and Margaret was the spare.
It was a phrase that would echo through the rest of her life. The war years were spent at Windsor Castle, where the two princesses staged pantomimes for the Queen’s Wool Fund and lived through the Blitz in a castle whose drinking water sometimes froze by their bedsides. Elizabeth, as heir, began taking on official duties as soon as she was old enough. Margaret, the wrong daughter for serious preparation, was given no role.
In 1947, when she was 16, the family went on a state tour of Southern Africa. Her chaperone was a Royal Air Force officer who had joined the King’s household three years earlier as an equerry. He was 32, married with two young sons, had flown in the Battle of Britain, and was by every account extraordinarily good-looking and kind. His name was Peter Townsend.
He treated her firmly, as the slightly indulged 16-year-old she was. The girl took notice of the man who treated her firmly, and by his own later admission, the man was already noticing the girl. In 1952, King George VI died of lung cancer at 56. Margaret, his favorite, was 21 and prescribed sedatives to help her sleep.
Her mother became the Queen Mother. Her sister became Queen Elizabeth II. Margaret, who had been the daughter of the sovereign, was now merely the sister of the sovereign. Within months, the romance with Townsend was operational.
In 1953, the Townsend marriage ended in divorce, and Margaret and Townsend quietly became engaged. Then she brushed the lint off his uniform in front of the world’s photographers, and the secret became a public scandal. The Royal Marriages Act of 1772 required that until age 25, any descendant of George II obtain the sovereign’s permission to marry. Margaret was 22, and she needed her sister’s approval.
The Queen, as Supreme Governor of the Church of England, which did not recognize the remarriage of divorced people, was in an impossible position. Prime Minister Winston Churchill, the cabinet, and the Archbishop of Canterbury all opposed the marriage. The Queen’s solution, after consultation with Churchill, was to ask Margaret to wait. Townsend would be sent to Brussels for two years until Margaret turned 25 and the formal restriction lifted.
Margaret agreed. Townsend left in July 1953. The two years that followed were documented by a sympathetic press that speculated constantly about a reunion. Polling showed that only 17 percent of the British public actively objected to the marriage.
The political and ecclesiastical establishments, however, did not move with the public. Margaret continued her social life, attended openings, visited her regiments, and drank through it. Her whiskey habit, Famous Grouse with a dash of Malvern water, was established during this period. In October 1955, Townsend returned to Britain for several days of agonized discussions.
The choice was stark: if Margaret married him, she would have to renounce her rights of succession, leave the royal household, and lose her income, status, and title—the terms her uncle Edward VIII had been given in 1936. On 31 October 1955, she released a public statement announcing that she had decided not to marry Group Captain Peter Townsend, mindful of the church’s teaching that Christian marriage is indissoluble and conscious of her duty to the Commonwealth. The story the British press told about her for the rest of her life was that she had given up love for duty. Biographers have argued ever since about whether the choice was as constrained as the public statement implied, and the participants never settled the question.
Townsend went back to Brussels, later married a young Belgian woman who reportedly resembled Margaret, and died of cancer in June 1995. Margaret received the news at Kensington Palace and, by accounts from those with her, could not maintain her composure for the rest of the day. In early 1958, Margaret met a young photographer named Antony Armstrong-Jones at a dinner party in Chelsea. He was witty, moved in a creative London world of theater people and musicians, and represented the 1960s arriving slightly early.
What Margaret did not know, or chose to overlook, was that he had an active and complicated personal life, including an illegitimate daughter who would be born three weeks after his marriage. In October 1959, Margaret learned that Townsend was about to marry his young Belgian. By her own later account, she received the letter in the morning and decided that evening to marry Tony. The engagement was announced in February 1960, and the wedding took place on 6 May 1960 at Westminster Abbey, the first royal wedding to be televised, watched by an estimated 300 million people.
Armstrong-Jones was created the first Earl of Snowdon. The couple were given an apartment at Kensington Palace, which would be Margaret’s home for the rest of her life. They had two children, David in 1961 and Sarah in 1964. For the first several years, by every account, the marriage worked.
Then the cracks appeared. Snowdon worked long hours as a magazine photographer and traveled constantly. There were women and rumors of men. The witty banter between them curdled into something more pointed, described by friends as combat with cutlery.
Snowdon left sharp notes around the apartment aimed at her weaknesses, sometimes photographs of women he had taken, as a particular kind of message. Margaret’s drinking got worse. The daily routine at Kensington Palace, built around her habits, began with breakfast in bed, two hours of radio and newspapers, a long bath, chain smoking, a vodka pick-me-up before lunch, a four-course lunch with wine, and more cigarettes, whiskey through the afternoon and evening. The newspapers had to be ironed.
The whiskey had to be Famous Grouse, the water Malvern, the cigarettes Chesterfield. In 1973, Margaret met Roderick Llewellyn, a gentle 25-year-old, entirely unlike her husband. The relationship lasted eight years. In February 1976, the News of the World published a photograph of Margaret in swimwear on a beach in Mustique with Llewellyn, described in the tabloids as her toy boy.
The marriage collapsed. The separation was announced in March 1976, and the divorce was finalized in July 1978, the first divorce by a senior member of the British royal family in 77 years. Snowdon married his mistress the same year and would later divorce her as well. The later decades were a long decline.
Margaret had part of a lung removed in 1985. In 1989, she suffered a mild stroke on Mustique. In 1993, she had pneumonia, which the staff credited with finally getting her to give up cigarettes, though at least one ashtray remained in the apartment. In February 1998, she suffered another stroke on Mustique.
In 1999, at the villa Les Jolies Eaux, she stepped into a bath of scalding water. A faulty thermostat had allowed the heater to deliver water far hotter than it should have been. She struggled to get out, her feet remained in the water for several minutes, and her calls for help went unanswered for what was estimated at fifteen minutes. The burns were severe; parts of her skin separated from her feet.
She survived and physically recovered, but she would never walk normally again. For the rest of her life, she required a wheelchair for sustained movement. Reports attributed the accident to the faulty thermostat and bad timing. The villa was sold soon after, with Margaret reportedly devastated.
In March 2001, she suffered a major stroke that left her partially paralyzed on her left side and substantially affected her vision, requiring full-time nursing care. She was largely confined to a single floor of her Kensington Palace apartment. On the afternoon of 8 February 2002, she suffered a final stroke, followed during the night by cardiac complications. She was transferred to King Edward VII Hospital in central London, and at 6:30 on the morning of 9 February 2002, she died there, with her son and daughter present.
She was 71 years old. The Queen Mother, sitting up in bed at Sandringham, was told the news. She died herself seven weeks later. The funeral took place on 15 February, the fiftieth anniversary deliberately chosen of her father’s funeral.
She was cremated, the first senior member of the British royal family to be cremated since cremation was legalized a century earlier. Her ashes were interred in the King George VI Memorial Chapel at Windsor, alongside the father she had loved most. The staff who had managed her household for decades eventually began to talk. They described a woman who had been told at six that she was the spare and had spent the next sixty-five years living inside that designation.
They poured her whiskey and lit her cigarettes and ironed her newspapers, and they watched the slow destruction of a woman whose body could not sustain the demands of her habits. There was a 1974 overdose that she denied for the rest of her life, depression treated at the Priory, and a nervous breakdown connected to the end of her marriage. The wit was real, and so was the occasional cruelty. She was rarely alone in the empty sense, but the staff accounts return again and again to her loneliness.
The princess in the small hours of the morning would ring for the night staff simply to have a person in the room. She was not Elizabeth, and everything she was had been measured against her sister for seventy-five years. In the final months, after the strokes had taken most of what they were going to take, Margaret asked her staff whether her hair had been done. The hairdresser would come in and reset hair that had already been done four times that day.
She would inspect the result in a hand mirror and indicate her satisfaction. The staff did not tell her the truth. They told her the hair looked lovely. She had wanted in the end to be near her father, and by being cremated, she could be.
The urn was small enough to fit in the chapel where his coffin had been waiting for her since 1952. The staff cleared the bottles, closed the apartment, and went home. The heir and the spare were finished on 9 February 2002, with the long arrangement that had been made for them in December 1936.