X Close

Princess Margaret sacrificed herself She is the perfect target for sneering elites

It's easy to make her appear to be a monster. (Getty)


February 9, 2022   5 mins

Poor old Princess Margaret, who died 20 years ago today, will probably always be remembered as a snarling, selfish, supercilious old bag. Her failings were so public, and make such good copy, that hardly anyone who writes about her gives the impression that they are talking about a real person.

Christopher Hitchens, that unthinking man’s iconoclast, once called her “an averagely-volatile woman from a disadvantaged family”. He was almost being nice, but like so many others, he only really used her as an excuse to tell hideous anecdotes. Craig Brown published a whole book that pasted together the worst stories that people recorded about her in their diaries. It was a sure and sorry way to ensure your letters were published after you were gone: put in an anecdote about Princess Margaret being difficult or looking, as Nancy Mitford had it, “excessively common”.

Remember, these are not tabloid reports. This isn’t the rough and tumble of a free press. We are quoting public intellectuals. Despite Margaret being awful, as they saw it — trashy and appalling, rude and condescending, and, frankly, low brow — the elites found her irresistible. Few of us are too classy for gossip, too clever to mock an appearance instead of imagining what lies beneath it. Margaret’s punishment for projecting upper-class indifference, privileged selfishness, is to be seen as more of a soap-opera character than a woman. Perhaps that says more about us than her.

Her husband, horrible bully that he was, once set her dress on fire. “Good thing too, I hate that material,” he said. To which Margaret replied: “Material is a word we do not use. We call it stuff.” This sort of thing gets held up as inexhaustible snobbishness. Really, it’s a stiff upper lip, splendid resilience in the face of abuse. And anyway, can’t we live with a little high handedness in our princesses? Consider her nephew’s current reputation and Margaret’s blue-blooded insistence on calling scrambled eggs buttered eggs starts to look rather appealing. It’s a small price to pay for a stable and enduring monarchy: that a king’s daughter’s might occasionally be too royal.

But living off the public purse makes you fair game for voyeuristic bitching: there is an assumed public ownership of Royal lives. The story of Margaret and the Queen, along with the Queen Mother, getting the giggles when T. S. Eliot read The Waste Land at Buckingham Palace is often reference to show what a bunch of philistines the Royal Family is — as if Modernist poetry has anything to do with constitutional monarchy. (And as if most of the rest of us wouldn’t have done the same. Eliot was a terrible reader.) When people enjoy that story, I am reminded of the painter Francis Bacon, who once booed Margaret off stage at a party because her singing wasn’t very good; the poor woman ran out in tears. Somehow when you are born into the Royal cage, many intelligent people think it is acceptable, maybe even clever, to treat you like you’re an animal.

People like Christopher Hitchens did this because they had a bigger target: the institution of monarchy. He could happily paint the Windsors as emotionless bastards without caring very much about their so-called victims. But the old saw about Margaret being the lamb sacrificed for the good of The Firm needs investigating. It fits the narrative of heartless Hanovarians to say that the Princess wasn’t allowed to marry Peter Townsend out of cruelty or myopic traditionalism or whatever. It’s a simplification, though, to see it as a case of the establishment crushing young love for the sake of expediency.

Sarah Bradford reports a friend saying “Princess Margaret was very religious, much more than you would think”. Yes, her desire to marry a divorcé was a moral and constitutional dilemma: the Queen was the head of a church that didn’t allow such things. But in the story about the institutional thwarting the individual, Margaret and her feelings have been ignored. As Bradford says: “Asked whether, as the general public perceived it, she had been sacrificed on the altar of the monarchy, the queen’s private secretary replied simply, ‘She sacrificed herself’.”

Margaret defies the stereotype, then, of a selfish, useless celebrity. Jonathan Freedland once said of her: “Five decades before Paris Hilton, there was the current Queen’s sister, Princess Margaret — an object of glamour and gossip, permanently on vacation, internationally famous yet achieving nothing at all.” (If only she had written book reviews for the New York Review of Books!) If you are more interested in bourgeois tattle-rags than humdrum duties, it’s easy to share his view that she did nothing at all. But in reality, Margaret was a great charity worker. She was a patron of the London Lighthouse, an AIDs charity more famous for its association with Princess Diana, and she used to visit patients there and make them laugh. (She did her work without any media attention and before Princess Diana was involved.)

Margaret’s friend Lady Glenconner had a son with AIDs at the height of the epidemic; Margaret turned up and gave the boy a big hug as if nothing had changed. But while Diana was hugely — rightly — praised for shaking AIDs patients’ hands, Margaret remained in the shadows. Of course, Margaret didn’t want attention for her good works, but that doesn’t mean we should dismiss them.

In the stories told about Margaret, style so often comes before substance. It’s easy to use anecdotes to make someone look bad, but there are plenty of stories that make Margaret seem not just nice but remarkably normal — the opposite of the character drawn by gossipy republicans. Gore Vidal reported how he and she once saved a number of bees from drawing in a swimming pool at Windsor. “Go forth and make honey,” the charming and humorous Princess said, in what Vidal called “a powerful Hanoverian voice”. When she visited Lady Glenconner, she would do her friend’s hair and lay fires in the grates. On these visits, she showered out of a bucket, ate tinned food, and went scrambling up mountains. Away from people who were desperate to say something shocking and scathing about her, Margaret appears to have been quite ordinary. Likeable, even.

One of the few people who seems to really understand Margaret is the biographer Selina Hastings, who said that the Princess,

“looked at the world outside between the bars of her extremely comfortable cage. She was inquisitive and she was courageous, and sometimes she ventured halfway out. But the moment it looked as though there may be difficulties, back she flew into her cage, slamming the door behind her.”

Margaret was forced into public life, and when she was expected to accept people’s offensive intrusions into her life, she sometimes refused. She wasn’t perfect; but she was goaded and cornered. As Ferdinand Mount said, “being ghastly is so much expected of her that it becomes her party piece”.

Craig Brown called her life “Cinderella in reverse”, in a classic example of our inability to see Margaret as anything but a character out of a story. “Nothing is as thrilling as they said it would be; no one is as amusing, as clever, as attractive or as interesting,” he wrote. He could have been talking about all the journalists, biographers, diarists, and so on, who used her to fill their pages.

Margaret, unlike Cinderella, was never destined to be a queen; she was first and foremost a sister. There was a constant, silent presence in her public life — a gold standard of decorum — against which she was judged. Elizabeth and Margaret are, like Kate and Meghan, presented as stereotyped female opposites: the good wife and the wayward celebrity, the modest Queen and the flagrant Princess. Such reductions make for a lonely life.

For Margaret, this perpetual isolation began at her sister’s coronation. According to Sarah Bradford, Margaret had “very mixed feelings because I adored my father and he was dead and yet I felt I had to be pleased for Lillibet being crowned Queen though I knew that in a way I’d lost her.” She was only 23 when that happened.


Join the discussion


Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber


To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.

Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.

Subscribe
Subscribe
Notify of
guest

16 Comments
Most Voted
Newest Oldest
Inline Feedbacks
View all comments
William Murphy
William Murphy
2 years ago

I am prepared to forgive Margaret anything short of mass murder, just for the countless anecdotes she generated. I recommend Kitty Kelly’s “The Royals” for having a splendid collection in one volume. Fergie fares even less well in the same book. OK, the Royals cost us a fortune. But, on a per capita basis, they are far better value than a ticket for a woke comedian.

The ban on her marrying Townsend looks bizarre beyond belief, looking back from 2022 and the marital disaster zone of the Windsor clan and the Church of England being pushed to the edge of celebrating gay marriage. As one cruel colleague observed decades ago, the C of E exists only because Henry VIII wanted to get his end away.

Lesley van Reenen
Lesley van Reenen
2 years ago
Reply to  William Murphy

I have used that example of Henry VIII often – I called it the whims of a syphilitic king.

SULPICIA LEPIDINA
SULPICIA LEPIDINA
2 years ago

Henry needed a legitimate male heir, and Catherine of Aragon appeared to be “firing on blanks”.
Syphilis or no syphilis she had to be replaced.

Stephen Beresford
Stephen Beresford
2 years ago

I know I’m straying from the topic of the article, but this view of Henry VIII is so lazy and unhistorical that I have to do a bit of corrective nagging. Forgive me. Henry was a fervent (if rather complicated) Roman Catholic who had been talked into marrying his dead brother’s wife for the purpose of political expediency. As a 16th century man with a world view entirely concomitant with the moral framework of the time, he would have believed he was committing a mortal sin (as laid out in Leviticus 20:21) by marrying her. He would have been told that it was all okay because she’d never actually had sex with his brother, and anyway the treaty with Spain was more important – so shut up. Then – apart from one dynastically useless girl – every child they conceive dies. (Just as the Bible predicts for that sin.) The C of E doesn’t ‘exist because he wants to get his end away.’ It exists because the moral authority of Rome crumbled when its realpolitik bumped up against unfortunate real events. Henry ‘got his end away’ all over town. Including with Anne Boleyn’s sister. His decision to leave Rome, and his decision to marry Anne Boleyn, are only seen in the context of what happened after. But that doesn’t mean his motives were completely cynical. Or whims. And the Syphilis (if it existed) came long after. (Wouldn’t Princess Margaret be furious that we’ve stopped talking about her?)

Giles Chance
Giles Chance
2 years ago

I once sat next to Princess Margaret at a lunch party. After having been very short with her neighbour on the other side (a self-made entrepreneur with a chauffeured Rolls whom she thought was too big for his boots), she turned to me and interrogated me about my background. She suddenly stopped talking and looked into the far distance. Then I realised her fundamental sadness: her sister married the man she loved, but Princess Margaret was not allowed to marry the one she wanted – Group-Captain Townsend. That was her tragedy, and her life ceased to have meaning after that.

Russell Hamilton
Russell Hamilton
2 years ago
Reply to  Giles Chance

Lots of people don’t get to marry the person they would like to without it being a tragedy. Did her mother really want to marry her father? Did her grandmother really want to marry her grandfather? I always thought that Margaret inherited the worst traits of her parents – her father’s bad temper and her mother’s sense of entitlement (especially entitlement to a good time). The Queen might have had them too but she, as future Queen, was trained to suppress that under a massive sense of duty – she had to behave better! (Imagine having to meet Queen Mary’s standards!). Margaret was allowed to express herself more freely, but the sense of entitlement that could pass in her parent’s day was just too much out of fashion in Margaret’s day. Fortunately, Roddy seemed to amuse her for awhile.

Last edited 2 years ago by Russell Hamilton
Charles Lawton
Charles Lawton
2 years ago

I think it is far more complex than that.

Alan Thorpe
Alan Thorpe
2 years ago
Reply to  Giles Chance

Margaret did have a choice. She preferred privilege over love.

Giles Chance
Giles Chance
2 years ago
Reply to  Alan Thorpe

The Palace courtiers stopped her getting engaged to Townsend, because he was divorced. At that time, divorce was not respectable.

SULPICIA LEPIDINA
SULPICIA LEPIDINA
2 years ago
Reply to  Giles Chance

It still isn’t, just expedient, nothing more.

Tom Watson
Tom Watson
2 years ago
Reply to  Giles Chance

Probably because I did most of my growing up after she died, but that reputation completely passed me by. She sounds quite admirable.

Ferrusian Gambit
Ferrusian Gambit
2 years ago
Reply to  Tom Watson

Like you I was in my teenage years when she died, so my only real cultural reference to her is how she is presented in Spitting Image reruns.

Christopher Barclay
Christopher Barclay
2 years ago
Reply to  Giles Chance

Margaret could have married Townsend as long as she gave up her position as a Royal. This she wouldn’t do. The money and status mattered more to her than her ‘love’ for Townsend.

Charles Lawton
Charles Lawton
2 years ago

The trouble is as Edward VIII and Prince Harry found out, there is no halfway house, if you are out it’s exile rather than being non royal and there is the nastiness that goes with it. There were many lies told about the Duke of Windsor Princess Margaret’s uncle just to make him look bad.

Denis Slattery
Denis Slattery
2 years ago

Margaret Armstrong-Jones was an ignorant and stupid drunkard. Her “All Irish are pigs” remark was made to the Mayor of Boston Jane Byrne an Irish American.

Mark Gourley
Mark Gourley
2 years ago

Princess Margaret was at once an intensely tragic and a deeply comic character – as reflected in Craig Brown’s entertaining book ( not quite a biography). It is worth recalling, though, that in her latter years she regularly attended Anglican worship in the company of Sir John Betjeman and his partner (see A N Wilson’s biography of JB). “Mindful of the Church’s teaching” !? Her words which could easily be a line from a hymn.