At Kensington Palace, apartment 1A, the breakfast tray was prepared each morning at 8:00 sharp. Toast, cut precisely, eggs done exactly as instructed, a pot of coffee kept at temperature. The footman carried it to the corridor outside the princess’s bedroom and waited. He did not knock. He was not permitted to knock.
He stood, holding the tray until summoned, and the summons could come at 9:00 or 10:00, or sometimes not until nearly 11:00. The toast by then was inedible. The eggs had gone cold and needed to be remade entirely. The footman’s arms ached, but he said nothing because the protocol was understood. Princess Margaret rose when Princess Margaret chose to rise, and the household arranged itself around that fact.
Craig Brown, in his 2017 biography, Ma’am Darling: 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret, documented this ritual through interviews with former staff who served at Kensington Palace across three decades. Not one of them described it as unusual. It was simply how mornings worked. Margaret Rose Windsor was born on the 21st of August, 1930, at Glamis Castle in Scotland, the first royal baby born in Scotland in over 300 years.
She arrived into a world that had already assigned her a role. Second daughter, never queen, forever the spare. Her father was the Duke of York, a shy man with a stammer who had no expectation of the throne. Her mother Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, later the Queen Mother, a woman whose warmth with the public concealed a will of hammered steel.
When Edward the VIII abdicated in December 1936, everything changed. Margaret was 6 years old. Her father became King George the VI against his wishes. Her sister Elizabeth became heir presumptive. And Margaret became what she would remain for the rest of her life, the other one, the one who was not going to be queen.
The constitutional settlement of 1936 gave her proximity to power without purpose, privilege without function, fame without a job description. She was, in the assessment of the historian Ben Pimlott, who wrote the definitive biography of Elizabeth II, published in 1996, the first truly modern royal.
Modern in the sense that she had almost nothing official to do. That gap between her position and her purpose would define everything that followed. The British public adored her in the 1950s. She was glamorous, sharp-witted, and photogenic in ways the royal family had not previously produced. She smoked through a long cigarette holder.
She stayed out late at nightclubs in Mayfair. She danced. She drank. She said things that were funny and occasionally devastating. Noël Coward, who knew her socially throughout the 1950s and documented his impressions in his published diaries, described her as “surprisingly witty, with a talent for the cruel observation.
The public image was one of rebellious glamour, a princess who broke the mold. The private reality, documented by those who worked for her and lived alongside her, was considerably more complicated. In the spring of 1955, at a reception hosted by the British ambassador in Paris, Margaret arrived 90 minutes after the scheduled start time.
The guests, a mixture of French diplomats, cultural figures, and members of the Anglo-French business community, had been standing with drinks in hand since the reception was called to order. Canapés had been circulated twice and cleared. The ambassador’s wife had made two rounds of apologies. When Margaret finally appeared, she offered no explanation for the delay.
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She entered, surveyed the room, and said to no one in particular that she hoped the champagne was decent. Theo Aronson, in his 1997 biography, Princess Margaret, A Life of Contrasts, sourced the account from a diplomata memoir kept in the diplomata of black. Search Margaret was mating regulated for Princess Margaret of Life, and just make it this that the next the described delay.
Theo Aronson, in his 1970 before, she also perfect ordered in the room, which made her first way to being treated in the prince. The life of contrasts who had started from a very queen and developed. Margaret explained the room. He believed in the person of gem when the drake back of wise. Theo Aronson, in his 1970 power, the second Margaret was provided her appeared more disciplined.
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The great back at least provide in another Scott. The drape back of great, but one they done from her appear to make this a plant. The great back was changed rate a range over the world. Margaret said was original logical different. From a diplomatic memoir kept by a junior attaché present that evening. The French press reported the lateness the following morning, though British papers still differential to the crown in that era did not mention it.
The incident captures something essential. Lateness for Margaret was not a lapse. It was a prerogative. She arrived when she decided to arrive. And the world adjusted accordingly. Because the world had been adjusting to her family for centuries. In 1962, during a tour of East Africa that included official engagements in Uganda and Tanzania, Margaret’s lady-in-waiting, Lady Elizabeth Cavendish, was tasked with ensuring the schedule ran smoothly.
On the third day, the princess was expected at a children’s hospital in Kampala at 2:00 in the afternoon. At 1:45, Margaret announced she needed her hair redone entirely. The hairdresser was summoned. The car waited. The hospital staff, who had lined up children in freshly pressed clothing along the entrance corridor, kept them standing for over an hour in the heat.
Lady Elizabeth, according to an account later given to the journalist and royal biographer, Anne de Courcy, and published in de Courcy’s 2008 book, Snowdon: The Biography, attempted to suggest that perhaps the hair could be finished en route. Margaret’s response was a single, measured sentence. I do not arrive anywhere looking incomplete.
The children continued to wait. The staff continued to stand. When Margaret did arrive, she was charming, attentive, and warm with every child she met. The contrast was the point. She could be magnificent in the role. Once she had decided the role was ready to begin. The household staff at Kensington Palace operated under a set of unwritten rules that were, in practice, absolute.
Nicky Haslam, the interior designer who moved in social circles adjacent to Margaret’s throughout the 1960s and 1970s, described the atmosphere in his 2009 memoir, Redeeming Features. He recalled visiting the apartment and watching a footman stand motionless in a hallway for what he estimated was 45 minutes, waiting for a bell that had not yet rung.
Haslam asked the man if he might sit. The footman explained quietly that sitting was not permitted while the princess was in residence, whether or not she required anything. Haslam recorded his own reaction as a kind of stunned admiration, not for the rule itself, but for the absolute conviction with which it was enforced.
No one had written the rule down. No one needed to. Margaret’s expectations permeated the household like weather. You did not question the weather. You dressed for it. In 1969, at a private dinner at the home of Jocelyn Stevens, then editor of Queen magazine and a close friend of Margaret’s husband, Lord Snowdon, Margaret took exception to the seating arrangement.
She had been placed next to a businessman she considered dull. Before the first course was served, she instructed Stevens to rearrange the table so that she was seated beside the actor Peter Sellers, who was also present. Stevens, a man not known for timidity, complied. The guests shuffled their chairs. The businessman, who had been visibly pleased by his proximity to the princess, found himself relocated to the far end of the table without explanation.
And Coursey documented the evening in Snowden, the biography, drawing on interviews with guests who were present. The businessman’s wife later told friends she had never been so embarrassed in her life. What the incident reveals is not simply rudeness. Many powerful people are rude. But the expectation that her comfort would be prioritized over every other person’s dignity in the room.
And that this expectation would be met without resistance. A more revealing episode occurred in the summer of 1972 on the island of Mustique in the Caribbean. Where Margaret had been given a plot of land as a wedding present by her friend Colin Tennant, later Lord Glenconner. She had a villa built there, Les Jolies Eaux, and used it as a retreat from royal life.
Lady Glenconner, Colin Tennant’s wife, later described the household arrangements in her 2019 memoir, Lady in Waiting, My Extraordinary Life in the Shadow of the Crown. Margaret expected meals to be served at precise times, but she herself did not observe those times. Lunch would be called for 1:00, and Margaret would arrive at 2:30, having spent the morning on the beach.
The cook, a local Mustique resident hired for the season, would prepare the food, watch it cool, and prepare it again. Lady Glenconner writes that she once gently suggested that perhaps the cook might be told a later time, so the food would at least be fresh. Margaret’s reply, delivered without apparent malice, was that 1:00 was the correct time for lunch, and that was the time it would be prepared, regardless of when she intended to eat it.
The logic was circular and complete. The schedule existed to serve her idea of how things should be, not the practical reality of when they would be. But the private tyrannies of Princess Margaret existed alongside a genuine and documented loneliness that complicates any simple verdict. In the autumn of 1953, Margaret was forced to publicly renounce her relationship with Group Captain Peter Townsend, a divorced man whom she had loved since she was at least 22 years old.
The Church of England, of which her sister was the supreme governor, would not sanction the marriage. The cabinet, under Prime Minister Anthony Eden, himself divorced, a fact not lost on observers, advised against it. Margaret issued a statement on the 31st of October 1955 that read in part, “Mindful of the Church’s teaching that Christian marriage is indissoluble, and conscious of my duty to the Commonwealth, I have resolved to put these considerations before any others.
” Ben Pimlott, in his biography of Elizabeth II, notes that the statement was drafted with the assistance of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s office. Margaret’s own preference, expressed to friends in the weeks before, was considerably less formal. She told a confidant, later quoted in Craig Brown’s account, that she felt she had been handed a script and told to read it.
The loss of Townsend marked her permanently. Those who knew her well dated a change in her temperament from that point forward, a hardening, a withdrawal into formality and demand, as though if she could not control her own heart, she would control everything else within reach. Her marriage to Antony Armstrong Jones, later the Earl of Snowdon, in May 1960, was the first royal wedding to be televised, watched by an estimated 300 million people worldwide.
The early years were by many accounts genuinely happy. Snowdon was creative, unconventional, and unimpressed by protocol, qualities Margaret found liberating. But the marriage deteriorated through the 1960s, poisoned by mutual infidelity, jealousy, and what Anne de Courcy describes as a fundamental incompatibility of ego.
By the early 1970s, the couple were living largely separate lives under the same roof at Kensington Palace. Snowdon left notes for Margaret, cruel, pointed messages placed where she would find them. One, documented by de Courcy through interviews with household staff, reportedly read, “You look like a Jewish manicurist, and I hate you.
” The viciousness of their private war was known to the household, but invisible to the public for years. Margaret bore the humiliation in silence publicly, while exercising increasingly rigid control over the domestic sphere she still commanded. The staff bore the consequences of a woman whose private life was collapsing, but whose public mask could not slip.
In the late 1970s, Margaret’s relationship with Roddy Llewellyn, a landscape gardener 17 years her junior, became public knowledge. Photographs of the two together on Mustique appeared in the News of the World in February 1976. The scandal was immense by the standards of the time. Margaret became the first senior royal to divorce since Henry VIII, with the decree absolute from Snowdon granted in May 1978.
Lady Glenconner’s memoir describes the Mustique period as one in which Margaret was, for stretches, genuinely happy, swimming, socializing, free of the constraints that had defined her life in London. But the happiness was always shadowed by the knowledge that it came at a reputational cost. Her civil list allowance, public money, was debated in Parliament.
Questions were asked about whether a divorced princess who holidayed with a younger boyfriend deserved taxpayer support. Margaret, according to Glenconner, followed the parliamentary debates closely and was wounded by them in ways she rarely showed. Her health declined steadily from the late 1980s onward.
She was a heavy smoker. Famous Grouse whiskey and cigarettes were staples of her daily routine, documented by virtually every source who spent time with her. In 1985, she had part of her left lung removed. In 1998, she suffered a severe stroke while staying on Mustique. A second stroke followed in 1999, and a third, the most debilitating, in early 2001, which left her with significantly impaired vision and mobility.
Craig Brown recounts that in her final years at Kensington Palace, Margaret was largely confined to her rooms, attended by a reduced household staff who found in their accounts considerably gentler than the woman they had served in earlier decades. The imperious demands softened. The insistence on precise ritual eased.
Whether this was the result of physical frailty or something closer to acceptance is impossible to know from the outside. She died on the 9th of February 2002 at the King Edward the VII Hospital in London. She was 71 years old. Her mother, the Queen Mother, died 7 weeks later at 101. The pattern that emerges from the documentary evidence is not one of simple cruelty, though cruelty was certainly present in individual moments.
It is the pattern of a woman who was given everything except the one thing that might have made the rest of it bearable. A purpose. Margaret was born into the most visible family in the world, raised in palaces, dressed by couturiers, attended by servants, and provided with a civil list income that freed her from any material concern for her entire life.
What she was not given was a reason for any of it. Her sister had the crown. Her mother had the role of consort and later the cult of widowhood. Margaret had engagements, ribbon cuttings, hospital visits, charitable patronages, but no constitutional function, no portfolio, no domain that was truly hers. The control she exercised over her household, the lateness, the demands, the insistence that the toast be prepared at 8:00 even though she would not eat it until 11.
These were the behaviors of someone who had been denied agency in the things that mattered and so asserted it absolutely in the things that did not. That does not excuse the footman standing in the hallway with aching arms. It does not excuse the children waiting in the Kampala heat. But it locates the behavior in something more specific than mere entitlement.
It was, in the assessment of the historian Hugo Vickers, who knew Margaret personally and wrote extensively about the Windsor family, the tragedy of the spare played out over an entire lifetime. The royal system created her predicament. She inhabited it with the tools she had. If this account has offered something you had not considered before, subscribing to the channel costs nothing and it does make a difference.
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The breakfast tray was prepared each morning at 8:00 sharp at Kensington Palace. The toast was cut. The eggs were done precisely as instructed. The coffee was kept at temperature. And the footman stood in the corridor holding the tray waiting for a summons that might not come for 3 hours. He did not knock.
He was not permitted to knock. He stood and he waited because that was the arrangement. An arrangement that nobody had chosen but everybody maintained. Because to question it would have been to question something far larger than a late breakfast. It would have been to ask why Princess Margaret existed in the form that she did. What exactly her life was for.
And whether the institution that had shaped her bore any responsibility for the shape she took. Those are not questions that footmen are paid to ask. They are not in truth questions that the institution has ever been comfortable answering. Margaret knew that. She had known it since she was 25 years old and read a script someone else had written renouncing the man she loved for a duty no one could precisely define.
The tray was prepared at 8. She rose when she chose and nobody said a word because the silence was the system working exactly as designed.
