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.

Suggested reading

How to honeypot a nerd

By Helen Thompson

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’.”

More from this author

The snake who saved the monarchy

By Henry Oliver

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.

Suggested reading

It's the Queen or tyranny

By Mary Harrington

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.

This man was Alan “Tommy” Lascelles, former Private Secretary to George VI and Queen Elizabeth II, and the Assistant Private Secretary to Edward VIII when he was Prince of Wales. He had lived, grace-and-favour, at the Old Stables at Kensington Palace (he thought it was one of the nicest houses in England) since he retired in 1953. Having been a courtier, on and off, from 1920-1953, he gives a fascinating insight into how to preserve a monarchy in a democracy.

Lascelles gets caricatured as a stiff-arsed, hard-bristled, curmudgeonly enforcer of horrible rules in The Crown, forever thwarting true love’s course. As well as playing a role in Edward VIII’s abdication, Lascelles is seen as one of the Establishment men who decided Princess Margaret couldn’t marry Peter Townsend. But despite this crucial role in modern Royal history, the real Lascelles remains slightly out of sight to us. There is no biography. His archives in Churchill College, Cambridge are largely closed — especially material relating to the monarchy. Edward Owens, who recently wrote a book about the royal family and the mass media, was denied access to them. His diaries, although excellent, were selectively edited by his friend Rupert Hart-Davis; they reveal a much more emotional, sensible, likeable man than the popular image.

There is no consensus, then, on Lascelles’s true character. To Edward VIII, living in exile as the Duke of Windsor, Lascelles was always “that snake”. The feeling was mutual. When Harold Nicolson had lunch with Lascelles three days after the Abdication, the courtier said the former King was “like a child in the fairy stories who had been given every gift except a soul”. He was also spitting with rage about the fact that Edward VIII was not patriotic enough: “He never cared about England or the English.” Ferdinand Mount remembers Lascelles visiting his school, where Mount “was startled by his explosion of venom against the Duke of Windsor … He was memorably unpleasant.”

Suggested reading

Can the monarchy survive?

By Ed West

But Lascelles wasn’t just a stickler for arcane and snobbish standards, nor did he take a cruel pleasure in enforcing them. He stood for fair play and pragmatism. When Noël Coward was recommended for a knighthood, Lascelles advised George VI against. The King was constantly approving courts-martial against young RAF officers who had written dud cheques, and Coward had recently been fined for cheating his Income Tax. It would have been wrong for those young men to be punished while Coward was honoured.

Essentially honourable, then, despite being memorably unpleasant. Lascelles understood that although monarchy must be staged, that doesn’t mean it can be fake. The public spectacle has to be a true enough expression of the values it upholds. That is why the knighthood had to be refused, and why Wallis Simpson couldn’t be Queen. (In one of his more venomous moments, Lascelles wrote that the King’s subjects would not tolerate “a shop-spoiled American, with two living husbands and a voice like a rusty saw”.) That is why, after the abdication, Lascelles went to some lengths to keep Edward out of the country, to try and eradicate the whole affair from the public mind. It is also why, irrespective of the way it happened, Lascelles came to believe the abdication was inevitable. Edward, he said, was “habitually ready to sacrifice truth to his personal likes or dislikes”; Edward’s celebrity wasn’t enough to maintain the monarchy.

Lascelles believed in the institution but said, “I have never idealised any member of the House of Windsor”. When Harold Nicolson was commissioned to write George V’s biography, Lascelles told him it would be the biography of an institution, and that there would be no need to “descend into personalities”. This isn’t just bluster. The night the abdication was announced, Lascelles walked round and round St James’s Park, thinking about James II. The stability of the monarchy mattered to him. He described the abdication as “a real tragedy in my life”.

Suggested reading

It's the Queen or tyranny

By Mary Harrington

And yet for someone with such strong principles, Lascelles lacked a sense of direction. As a young graduate, he was rather louche. Although he was skittling around London dining with what Bertie Wooster would call some of the better elements, his diary never comes alive like it does when he shoots his first stag, or when he’s riding a horse. (He gives thanks that he inherited the “long, flat Lascelles thighs.”) His main interest as a young man — just like Edward VIII’s — was to be active. A series of possible careers — Foreign Office, stockbroker, journalist — were tried, hated, failed or simply never started. Without the war, he would have been edging towards becoming a drifter. Instead, despite a somewhat inactive war, he was awarded the Military Cross.

After the Armistice, he worked for his brother-in-law, the Governor of Bombay. Writing to his uncle Adolphus Liddell (another slightly lost soul) he said: “there is much in all the flummery and ceremonial which, even after a long course of military discipline, irritates me profoundly.” We might be surprised at this lack of admiration for imperial flummery. This is, after all, Alan Lascelles: reactionary, establishment stalwart, slayer of marriages, arch defender of the old order. But it was precisely this slightly detached view that made him such a good courtier.

Lascelles believed in the substance of royalty, not just the display. The day after George V died, nearly 20 years after that complaint about imperial flummery, the King’s body was taken to a little church at the end of the garden at Sandringham for a small private ceremony ahead of the large, public spectacle:

“The guardsmen, with scarcely a sound, slung the coffin on their shoulders and laid it before the altar; and there, after a very brief service, we left it, to be watched for thirty-six hours by the men of the Sandringham Estate. I daresay when all the tumult and shouting dies, that little ceremony will remain in my mind as the most impressive of all.”

Lascelles was not the sort of Royalist who was in it for the memorial plates and days out at the park. He was a genuine believer. He could talk of the King as a Deity with little exaggeration. He was burying the head of his tribe. This is why there was such a kerfuffle with the new King. Edward VIII wanted to run a very different sort of tribe.

Suggested reading

Introducing Charles III

By Tanya Gold

Lascelles’s history with Edward VIII is essential to understanding later events. When he returned from India in 1920, his friend Letty Elcho brought him a letter offering a job with Edward VIII, then Prince of Wales. Lascelles was attracted to the job partly because St. James’s Palace was half a mile from his house and a quarter of a mile from his club, but mostly because “I have got a very deep admiration for the Prince, and I am convinced that the future of England is as much in his hands as in any individual”. Remarkably, had this job not come along, he would have signed on as an apprentice to a printing firm.

This deep admiration would not last, and Lascelles’s ability to see the ridiculous in the Royal was important to his role as a courtier. After nine years of watching the Prince drink, gamble, womanise, neglect his duties, be rude to members of the British establishment, and — shockingly for the feudal Alan — show very little interest when there was a scare that George V might die, he stormed out in 1929, in the sort of resignation so many of us have dreamed of making:

When he asked me why I wanted to leave him, I paced his room for the best part of an hour, telling him, as I might have told a younger brother, exactly what I thought of him and his whole scheme of life, and foretelling, with an accuracy that might have surprised me at the time, that he would lose the throne of England.

Most of us, after such an exit, would never go back. And Lascelles had only drifted into the role. Quitting it, he called himself “an inverted Falstaff” (because he was thin, just as thin in middle age as when he was young), leaving Prince Hal to “work out his own damnation”. But, after two years of reading and gardening with his family in the country, and a stint working for the Governor General in Canada, he was asked to re-join the Royal staff.

At first, he refused. The job was with George V, who he once described as “the godhead” — but Lascelles had said in his resignation letter: “Very few men can go on being private secretaries all their lives, and I am not one of them.” And besides, he pointed out, when the king died, he would be in a very difficult position, to put it mildly, having told the next-in-line exactly what he thought of him. Clive Wigram, George V’s Private Secretary — who was hiring Lascelles to be his assistant — told him not to worry. The King was in splendid health and had years left in him. Lascelles wrote to his wife Joan saying he was going to take the job: “It is no use going about the world singing ‘God Save the King’ if one isn’t prepared to assist the Deity when called upon.”

Suggested reading

The moment the monarchy nearly toppled

By Mary Harrington

And so, in January 1936, he travelled to Norfolk to start his new job. He had found a first-class carriage reserved for him at Liverpool Street. Once the journey was underway, “a young man appeared in the doorway of my carriage. I was about to tell him to go away when I recognised him as the Duke of York.” It was a good thing he recognised him. The young man would accede as George VI within 12 months, and Lascelles would become his Private Secretary in 1943. The Duke of York said to him halfway through the journey, “What’s all this about the King not being well?” George V died within four days. The soulless Edward was king.

And so, from a combination of lassitude, duty, and blue-blooded patriotism, Lascelles ended up as Assistant Private Secretary to a man he was morally repulsed by. Gentlemen do not just drop out of Royal service because they dislike the new King. It is perhaps surprising that Edward kept Lascelles on. But it seems obvious from this distance — as it seemed to Lascelles then — that Edward had never planned to make it that far and wasn’t going to stay long.

The royal family is meant to bring spectacle to our lives by displaying theirs: a glittering pageant of Births, Deaths, and Marriages. As the monarchy lost power through the nineteenth century, they replaced it with performance. Public engagement became Queen Victoria’s way of maintaining her relevance. And this new mode of royal existence is part of what made Edward VIII such a star as Prince of Wales: his tours of America, Canada, and South Africa were massive successes. But by the end of George V’s reign, British royalty had consolidated a new covenant with the people: “private probity, public spectacle.”

Lascelles was the high priest of the Georgian model and had seen first-hand that Edward was all public spectacle and no private probity. A courtier out of duty (and because he found nothing else to do), he realised that unless the royal family stuck to its principles — to the principles forced on it by a changing world — it would suffer. To the extent that he was a propagandist, an enemy of Edward VIII, a reactionary, and everything else he is claimed to be, it was because he realised the royal family had very little choice. Much of what Lascelles is said to have brought about may well have been inevitable as monarchy adjusted to democracy.

He had always been a slightly unwilling courtier. (He told his daughter long after he retired that, if he could have his life again, he would breed horses. “Racehorses, or cart-horses: any sort of horses.”) He was good at it, though. It remains to be seen whether he will eventually be remembered as the last of the old school who helped the monarchy transition to its modern function — or as a crusty old reactionary who needlessly destroyed a clutch of happy lives. But when his archives are eventually dusted off, I doubt we will find any dark secrets in there. We already know the fundamentals. He was a man who believed in royal morals underpinning royal spectacles.

Suggested reading

The immortal Princess Diana

By Tom Holland

What would he make of the modern monarchy? In his 1990 review of Philip Ziegler’s Edward VIII, Christopher Hitchens observed that “the magic of the throne is now inextricable from Charles and the Annenbergs, Diana and Donald Trump — the extension of Edward’s international white-trash habit into modern showbiz and celeb culture.” This line might stand as a eulogy for the Lascelles’s school: that there is little point in having a Royal Family unless they adhere to certain difficult and sometimes out-of-date principles. For Lascelles, as for the public at that time, those principles were about marriage. One of the last things he did was sit in the garden of Kensington Palace to watch the firework celebrations of Charles and Diana’s wedding. The next day, he asked for news about the event every few minutes, anxious it should all be going well. He died two weeks later.

Undoubtedly, the sort of revelations we have heard about the Royal Family since would have been anathema to his sense of decorum. But Tommy didn’t speculate. A young man from the BBC once tried to persuade him to appear in what Lascelles called “a television orgy on The Future of the British Monarchy”. Lascelles gave a forthright reply: “I told him I would as soon walk stark naked down Piccadilly.” We might find it easy to dismiss him as an old fogey. But how confidently can we say that we are beyond his concerns about private probity? Are we above worrying about what makes an acceptable royal spouse?