The most photographed woman in Britain was born in a thunderstorm at a haunted Scottish castle, the second daughter of a man never meant to be king. Princess Margaret arrived at Glamis Castle in Angus on August 21, 1930, the first royal born on Scottish soil in more than 300 years. Her family called her Margo. She was fourth in line to the throne, and everyone assumed she would stay there.
Her uncle, King Edward VIII, changed that in December 1936 when he abdicated to marry the divorced American Wallis Simpson. The crown fell on her shy, stammering father, who became King George VI, and six-year-old Margaret was suddenly second in line. She asked her sister Elizabeth what that made her, a question that defined her life and never received a satisfying answer. Margaret grew into the glamorous counterpoint to her serious sister.
Small, with a tiny waist and vivid blue eyes, she wore couture by Norman Hartnell and moved through postwar London’s nightclubs with a fast, bright circle the papers called the Margaret Set. She smoked through long cigarette holders and danced until dawn. She was the most envied young woman in the world and had almost nothing she was allowed to do with her gifts. Her sister married in 1947 and began the apprenticeship of a future queen.
Margaret had no role, no purpose, only proximity to the throne and all its rules. Into that emptiness walked Group Captain Peter Townsend, a Battle of Britain fighter pilot 16 years her senior, employed by her father as an equerry. He was married with two sons at the time, and Margaret was 14 when he first arrived. His marriage broke down in 1952, the same year the king died, and in their shared grief the attachment deepened into love.
At her sister’s coronation on June 2, 1953, Margaret reached out and brushed a piece of fluff from Townsend’s uniform. Photographers captured the gesture, and the secret was out. The palace moved quickly, posting Townsend to Brussels as an air attaché, an exile dressed as a promotion. The government, still haunted by the abdication, made clear the match was a crisis for the monarchy and the Church of England.
Margaret was 22 and subject to the Royal Marriages Act of 1772, which meant she could not marry without her sister’s consent until she turned 25. The couple waited two years, separated by the English Channel, allowed only letters and carefully managed meetings. When her 25th birthday arrived on August 21, 1955, the trap became clear: she was free of the queen’s consent but would face the Commonwealth parliament, and marriage to a divorced man meant renouncing her succession rights, her royal title, her income, and her country. On October 31, 1955, Margaret issued a statement that she had decided not to marry Townsend.
She was mindful of the church’s teaching that marriage is indissoluble and conscious of her duty to the commonwealth. She chose the throne over love at 25, and those who knew her said she was never the same again. Townsend eventually remarried a young Belgian woman who reportedly bore a striking resemblance to the princess he lost. Five years later, Margaret married someone else.
Anthony Armstrong-Jones was a sharp, ambitious photographer from outside the aristocracy. Their courtship was secret, and she accepted his proposal only weeks after learning Townsend was to marry. Their wedding at Westminster Abbey on May 6, 1960, was the first royal wedding broadcast live on television, watched by an estimated 300 million people. She wore a Hartnell gown and the Poltimore Tiara, a sunburst of diamonds she had bought for herself at auction, the one thing she could claim as hers.
The marriage seemed brilliant at first. Armstrong-Jones was created Earl of Snowdon, and they became the most glamorous couple in Britain, filling a 20-room apartment in Kensington Palace with artists and film stars. Two children, David and Sarah, were born, and Margaret proved a warmer mother than her rank required. But the marriage had been built on a wound, and both partners were proud, sharp-tongued, and easily bored.
By the mid-1960s, the marriage had become a war. Both took lovers, and neither took much trouble to hide it. Margaret was linked to a wine producer and, more sadly, to a nightclub pianist named Robin Douglas-Holm, who took his own life about 18 months after their affair ended. Snowdon, by many accounts, developed a genius for wounding his wife in private, leaving cruel notes for her to find and humiliating her in front of guests.
She gave as good as she got, pulling rank on him. The drinking grew heavier, and she smoked as many as 60 cigarettes a day. Margaret found one refuge. In 1960, her friend Colin Tennant gave her a 10-acre plot on the Caribbean island of Mustique as a wedding present.
She built a villa called Les Jolies Eaux, finished in 1972, and called it the only square inch in the world I own. There, away from cameras and courtiers, she could be something close to an ordinary woman. And there, in 1973, she met Rody Llewellyn, a gentle garden designer 17 years her junior. She was 43.
He was 25. The queen herself is said to have remarked that Llewellyn made her sister truly happy. In February 1976, a photographer with a long lens captured Margaret and Llewellyn together in swimsuits on the beach. A Sunday newspaper splashed the photograph across its pages.
The tabloids called him her toy boy, and the scandal was atomic. Unlike 1955, the press no longer feared the palace, and the story could not be contained. Within weeks, Buckingham Palace announced that Margaret and Snowdon had agreed to live apart. The divorce was finalized in July 1978, the first divorce of a senior royal in the modern era.
Snowdon remarried within months. Margaret never did. The public turned on her, and the anger reached the floor of the House of Commons, where Labour members called her a royal parasite and an expensive kept woman. The woman praised in 1955 for her noble sacrifice was now condemned as a cost to the taxpayer, flying to a private Caribbean island while ordinary people struggled.
Llewellyn drifted out of her romantic life and married a younger woman at the start of the 1980s. The depression that had shadowed her since 1955 never fully lifted. Her health began to fail. In January 1985, at 54, she had part of her left lung removed, a growth that was not cancerous but a warning.
She was walking the same road her father had walked to an early grave. In 1998, she suffered a mild stroke at her villa on Mustique. The next year, she scalded her feet badly in a bath, leaving her in lasting pain and increasingly confined to a wheelchair. More strokes followed.
By 2001, she was partially blind and paralyzed down one side. She made her last public appearances that year, at her mother’s 101st birthday in August and her aunt’s 100th birthday in December, a frail figure in dark glasses barely recognizable. Princess Margaret died in her sleep at King Edward VII’s Hospital in London on February 9, 2002, at age 71. She died three days after the 50th anniversary of her father’s death.
She had asked to be cremated, and her ashes were placed beside her father in the King George VI Memorial Chapel at Windsor. Her mother, the Queen Mother, died just seven weeks later at 101. Four years after her death, her children sold her personal collection at Christie’s in London to meet inheritance tax. More than 800 lots went under the hammer in June 2006, raising £13,658,728.
The Poltimore Tiara, the crown she had bought for herself and worn on her wedding day, sold for £926,400 to a private buyer and has never been publicly seen since. The villa on Mustique, given to her son David in 1996 to soften death duties, was sold in 1999 for a reported £2. 4 million and is now a luxury rental. Margaret had the palaces, the jewels, the fame, and the freedom.
She was denied the one 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.