Princess Margaret is remembered as the glamorous one, the cigarette holder, the island in the Caribbean, the sister who got to misbehave while Elizabeth carried the crown. The official record suggests the freedom was a consolation prize. She was second in line to the throne at the age of six and watched that number slide away with every royal birth that followed.
At 25, she was told the man she loved was the wrong man and handed a choice. the establishment had quietly shaped behind her. She married a photographer who would spend 16 years cutting her down in private. In 1978, she became the center of a divorce the palace had no procedure for. And for four decades, she filled a position the British Constitution makes no provision for at all.
This is the story of the princess the monarchy had no place for and never said so out loud. Please subscribe if you haven’t already. Now, let’s begin. On the 21st of August, 1930, in a bedroom at Glamis Castle in the Scottish County of Angus, the second daughter of the Duke and Duchess of York arrived during one of the worst electrical storms the region had seen in years.
The registration of her birth was delayed by several days and for a short time the newspapers could not agree on her name. She would be Margaret Rose. And for the first 6 years of her life, almost nobody outside the family thought she mattered very much at all. That was not an insult. It was arithmetic.
When Margaret was born, her grandfather, King George V, sat on the throne. Ahead of him in the public imagination stood his eldest son, Edward, the Prince of Wales, the most famous bachelor in the world. After Edward came Margaret’s own father, Albert, the Duke of York, a shy man with a stammer, who had never expected and never wanted to be anything more than a royal second son.
After her father came her elder sister, Elizabeth, born 4 years earlier, and only then, fourth in a line that everyone assumed would be filled in from the top by Edward’s future children, came Margaret. She was, in the cold language of succession, a contingency upon a contingency. The household adored her precisely because nothing was expected of her.
She was the funny one, the quick one, the mimic who could reduce a room of courters to helplessness with an impression of a visiting dignitary. Her father, biographers agree, made little secret of the fact that she delighted him. Where Elizabeth was beautiful and watchful, Margaret was a performance. Then, in December of 1936, the arithmetic broke.
Edward VIII, king for less than a year, announced that he intended to marry Wallace Simpson, an American woman in the process of obtaining her second divorce. The Church of England, of which the king was supreme governor, did not recognize the remarage of divorced people whose former spouses were living. The government would not accept her as queen.
And so Edward abdicated, the only British sovereign ever to surrender the throne voluntarily and walked out of public life to marry the woman the establishment had refused him. It is worth holding that sentence still for a moment because the whole of Margaret’s later life turns on it. The defining trauma of her family, the scandal that reshaped the monarchy in her childhood, was a man being told that the person he loved was forbidden to him because of a divorce.
Margaret was 6 years old when that lesson was administered to the House of Windsor. She would receive it again in person less than 20 years later. The abdication made her father king. He took the regal named George V 6th partly to signal continuity with his own father and partly to bury the memory of the brother who had left. Overnight the shy Duke of York became a monarch he had not been raised to be and the family moved from a comfortable house at 145 Piccadilli into the vast machinery of Buckingham Palace.
And overnight the line shifted under Margaret’s feet. Her sister Elizabeth, now the daughter of the reigning king, became heir presumptive. Margaret moved up to second in line. It was the highest she would ever stand. From that day forward, every direction the succession moved was a direction away from her.
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She did not understand this yet. She was a child of six, suddenly living in a palace, suddenly the sister of a future queen. What she understood was that the warm, anonymous family she had been born into had been replaced by an institution, and that the institution had a place reserved for Elizabeth and a place reserved for their father, and that the place reserved for her was simply the space left over.
The first time anyone is recorded asking her what her own role would be, she was still small enough to need it explained. The answer she received was the one the system always gave to the second child of a sovereign. There was no answer. There was only the throne and the person standing nearest to it and everyone else.
On the 12th of May 1937, George V 6th was crowned at Westminster Abbey and his two daughters were dressed in matching robes to watch their father become king. The detail that biographers have returned to ever since concerns the trains of their gowns. According to several accounts, Elizabeth as heir was given a longer train than her younger sister.
Other biographers, including William Shaw Cross in his official life of the Queen Mother, note that both girls wore trains and that the difference was modest. The precise length is less important than what the family remembered of it. Margaret, the story goes, noticed. And what she noticed was not vanity. It was rank expressed in fabric in front of the whole of the abbey.
This is the moment many writers point to as the place where Margaret first understood in a way a child can feel before she can articulate that she and her sister were not the same. They had been raised almost as twins. Their mother dressed them alike well past the age when most siblings would have rebelled. They shared a governness, a nursery, a private shortorthhand, but one of them was being prepared for a throne, and the other was being prepared for nothing in particular, and the coronation made the difference visible. The Second World
War, when it came, briefly erased the distinction. The two princesses spent most of the conflict at Windsor Castle away from the bombing of London, and Margaret later joked that they had packed for a weekend and stayed for 5 years. They staged amateur pantoimes to raise money for wartime charities, with Margaret invariably taking the showier role.
She was, by every contemporary account, the more naturally gifted performer of the two. She sang. She played the piano well enough that professional musicians took her seriously. She had what people who met her in those years described as electricity. The war also gave her something the rest of her life would not. A sense that she was useful.
The princess’s presence at Windsor, their broadcasts, their visible ordinariness in a frightened country mattered. For a few years, being a royal child was itself a kind of job. Then the war ended. Elizabeth married Philip of Greece in 1947 and the gap between the sisters opened again, this time permanently.
Elizabeth had a husband, a household, a defined trajectory toward the crown. Margaret, now in her late teens, had glamour, intelligence, a sharp tongue, and no occupation that anyone could name. She became, in the language of the post-war press, the most exciting young woman in Britain. Photographers followed her to nightclubs. She set fashions.
She was quoted, imitated, gossiped about. The country that had just survived rationing and bombing was hungry for someone bright and modern to look at, and Margaret obliged. She was sometimes called the first celebrity royal, a princess famous less for what she did than for who she was and how she looked doing it.
Her authorized biographer, Christopher Warwick, has pushed back hard on the caricature that grew out of those years, arguing that beneath the image of the good time princess was a woman seriously devoted to her charitable patronages and above all to her sister. Both things were true at once. She worked. She also partied, and the press, which had decided early that Elizabeth was the good one, found it convenient to cast Margaret as the wild one.
As Margaret herself reportedly put it, her sister had been made out to be the goody goodie, which was boring. So, the papers tried to make her out to be wicked as hell. There was a cruelty in the arrangement that the cheerful coverage obscured. A young woman of real gifts was being handed fame in exchange for purpose. She was photographed, quoted, and adored and asked to do nothing in particular with any of it except remain decorative and available.
The press built her a pedestal and called it a career. She accepted the attention because it was the only currency the institution offered the second daughter and she was clever enough to spend it well and lonely enough even then to need it. The role was being written for her by people she had never met.
And she was about to fall in love with a man who would force the country and her sister to decide exactly what a princess of the blood was allowed to want. Of all the people in Margaret’s life, the one who seems to have given her a settled place in the world was her father. The relationship between George V 6th and his younger daughter is one of the few uncomplicated bonds in this story.
He was by temperament a nervous and dutiful man, burdened by a crown he had not sought, and a stammer that made public speech an ordeal. Margaret made him laugh. She sat with him in the evenings, played the piano for him, teased him out of his anxieties. Where Elizabeth was being trained hour by hour in the work of monarchy, Margaret was simply allowed to be his daughter.
In a family organized entirely around succession, she occupied the one position that asked nothing of her except company. It suited them both. It is also, in retrospect, the source of the problem that defined the rest of her life. As long as her father lived, Margaret had a function inside the family that had nothing to do with the line of succession.
She was the king’s companion, the light in his private rooms, the person who could disarm him. That role was real, and it was hers alone, and it depended entirely on one man being alive. On the 6th of February, 1952, that man died. George V 6th had been ill for some time. He had lost a lung to cancer the previous year, though the public was told only that he had undergone a serious operation.
He died in his sleep at Sandringham, his Norfolk estate, at the age of 56. His elder daughter, away in Kenya at the start of a Commonwealth tour, became Queen Elizabeth II in the space of a night, learning of her accession in a hunting lodge thousands of miles from home. For Elizabeth, her father’s death was a catastrophe that came wrapped in a destiny.
She had lost a parent and gained a throne in the same hour. The grief was real. So was the work that immediately swallowed it. For Margaret, there was only the loss. She was 21. The one role she had held without competition, daughter and companion to the king, had been abolished by his death. Her sister was now the sovereign, surrounded by private secretaries and red boxes and the entire apparatus of state.
Her mother was a widow in deep mourning and Margaret found herself for the first time with no defined place at all in a household reorganizing itself around a new queen. She moved with her mother out of Buckingham Palace and into Clarence House, the two of them keeping each other company in the wreckage. Biographers describe Margaret in this period as a drift, devastated by her father’s death in a way that the busy machinery of the new reign had little room to accommodate.
The court’s attention necessarily was on the queen, and it was precisely here, in the empty months after her father’s death that Margaret turned for comfort to a man who had been a fixture of the royal household for years. He was older than her, steady, decorated, kind. He had helped her father through the war. He understood the family from the inside.
He was exactly the sort of man a grieving young woman might lean on. There was only one difficulty with Peter Townsend, and it was the same difficulty that had cost Margaret’s uncle his throne 16 years before. He was divorced. Group Captain Peter Townsen was a war hero of the kind the public adored. a battle of Britain fighter pilot and equir to George V 6th later comproller of the queen mother’s household he was handsome modest and embedded in the royal family’s daily life he was also 16 years older than Margaret and by the
early 1950s divorced from his first wife. The romance between Townsend and Margaret was an open secret inside the household long before the public knew. It became public on the 2nd of June, 1953 at the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. In the crush of the day, photographers caught Margaret reaching out to brush a piece of fluff from Townsen’s uniform.
It was a small, intimate, unmistakably tender gesture. The kind of thing only a woman comfortable with a man would do in public. The press understood it instantly. Within days, the story was everywhere. What followed was a slow public institutional crushing of a relationship. And it is here that the channel’s framing matters most.
The villain of this chapter is not the queen, who appears to have been genuinely torn between love for her sister and her duties as sovereign and supreme governor of the church. The villain is not the queen mother nor Townsend, nor Margaret. The villain is the machinery itself, a constitutional and religious structure that had already destroyed one royal romance over a divorce and was incapable of bending to accommodate a second.
The popular version of what happened next, repeated in countless retellings, is brutally simple. Margaret was forced to choose between the man she loved and her royal status, and she chose duty. In 1955, she issued a statement renouncing Townsend, declaring herself mindful of the church’s teaching that Christian marriage is indisoluble and conscious of her duty to the Commonwealth.
But the documentary record is more complicated than the legend, and an accurate account has to say so. When classified government papers were released by the National Archives in 2004, they revealed that the choice presented to Margaret was not quite the stark ultimatum of popular memory. The queen and her prime minister had in fact worked out a plan that would have allowed Margaret to marry Townsend while remaining a princess, keeping her title and her income and her public duties.
The single thing she would have had to surrender was her place in the line of succession. Marriage to Townsend was not in the end made constitutionally impossible. It was made costly. Why she ultimately walked away remains genuinely uncertain and any honest account leaves it uncertain. Some biographers point to her deep personal faith and the church’s position on divorce.
Some point to the dawning suspicion that the marriage conducted under that much pressure and scrutiny might not survive. The historian Robert Lacy wrote that she laid herself on the altar of duty in the best traditions of her family. Others suspect the truth was quieter and sadder. That by the time the obstacles were finally cleared, the relationship had already been worn down by 2 years of waiting and surveillance, and there was less left to save than the public believed.
What is not uncertain is the effect. Margaret was 25 years old. She had been in love publicly, and the structure she had been born into had made that love a problem to be managed. She had watched the same structure exile her uncle. She had now experienced in her own body what it cost to want something the institution had not authorized.
She did not marry Peter Townsend, and the next time she chose a man, she chose one nobody could object to on paper, and it nearly destroyed her. His name was Anthony Armstrong Jones and he was everything Peter Townsen was not. He was young, almost exactly Margaret’s age. He was not divorced. He was not a soldier or a cordier but an artist, a society photographer with a studio in Pimlo and a reputation for charm, talent, and a restless magnetic energy.
He photographed actresses and aristocrats and had an eye that made everyone he shot look more interesting than they were. He was, in the language of the moment, modern. And in 1960, the year their engagement was announced. Modern was exactly what the monarchy wanted to be seen embracing. The match seemed on its surface like a happy ending.
After the public heartbreak of the town’s end affair, here was a man Margaret had chosen for herself. A man with no constitutional impediment, a man who shared her love of the arts and the night and the company of clever people. The country which had watched her give up Townsend was relieved to watch her win something instead.
They married on the 6th of May 1960 at Westminster Abbey. It was the first royal wedding to be broadcast live on television and the audience was vast. Estimates of the worldwide viewership ran to around 300 million people, according to figures cited by Smithsonian magazine. For a brief, brilliant season, Margaret was not the spare who had lost her love.
She was a bride watched by a third of a billion people marrying a glamorous man of her own choosing. The following year, her husband was created Earl of Snowden, a title invented to give a commoner photographer a place in the periage befitting the Queen’s brother-in-law. The institution that had refused to bend for Townsen bent easily for Armstrong Jones, because this time the man on Margaret’s arm threatened nothing.
Their two children came quickly. David, who took the courtesy title Viccount Lley, was born in November of 1961. >> [clears throat] >> Lady Sarah followed in May of 1964. For a few years, the Snowdens were the most fashionable couple in Britain. Photographed everywhere, hosts to artists and writers and film people, a bridge between the stiff old court and the swinging decade exploding outside the palace gates.
It is the one stretch of Margaret’s adult life that looks from the outside like the life she might have had. But the foundation was already cracking, and the cracks ran in a direction the public could not see. Two people of equal force, equal vanity, and equal need for attention had married each other, and the marriage had no room in it for two stars.
Snowden’s career took him away constantly. Margaret’s status meant she could never be merely his wife. Each resented in the other exactly the qualities that had drawn them together. The glamour was real. The cameras did not lie about that. What the cameras could not photograph was what happened when the couple went home and the doors closed.
And behind those doors, according to the biographers who later reconstructed the marriage, something cold and corrosive had already begun. The decline of the Snowden marriage is one of the better documented private disasters in modern royal history. Largely because both participants eventually talked and because biographers chiefly Anne Dorsy in her life of Snowden and Craig Brown in his study of Margaret pieced together what the public had been spared.
The portrait they assemble has to be handled with care because almost every source in it has an interest. Margaret’s friends blamed Snowden. Snowden’s friends blamed Margaret. What survives is a record of two people making each other miserable with one of them by most accounts considerably cruer about it than the other.
According to Dorsy’s biography, Snowden developed a habit of leaving small wounding notes for his wife around their apartments in Kensington Palace. One often cited listed the things he hated about her. He mocked her in front of guests. He disappeared for long stretches on assignments and affairs, and he made certain she knew about them. A man of genuine talent and ferocious ego, he appears to have found something intolerable in being permanently the lesser royal in his own marriage, the commoner whose title had been invented, and he took it out on the woman who
outranked him. Margaret, for her part, was not a passive victim, and an honest account does not pretend she was. She had affairs of her own. She could be imperious, demanding, difficult to live with, exacting about her status in ways that exhausted the people around her. The marriage was a war with two combatants.
But it was a war in which one side, the biographers agree, fought dirtier. The deeper problem underneath the personal cruelty was the same problem that had shadowed Margaret since her father’s death. She had no role of her own. Snowden had a profession, a craft, a body of work, a reason to leave the house in the morning.
Margaret had her patronages, which were real and which she took seriously. But she had no career that could absorb her energy or give her an identity independent of the family. She was a princess. That was the whole of the job. And the job had no content. So she poured everything she had into the one arena that was supposedly hers.
Her marriage and her household. And when that arena turned hostile, she had nowhere else to put herself. This is the institutional failure at the heart of her life. And it is worth naming plainly. The monarchy knew exactly what to do with an heir. It had centuries of machinery for producing and training and occupying a future sovereign.
It had no idea what to do with the sibling. There was no department, no portfolio, no defined purpose for the brilliant, restless, unhappy woman who happened to have been born second. She was given a title, an income, and a calendar of ribbon cutings. And then she was left to fill the enormous remaining hours of her life however she could.
She began increasingly to fill them somewhere far from London on a small private island in the Caribbean in the company of people who did not care what the British press thought and one man in particular who was 17 years younger than she was. The island was called Mystique, a speck in the Grenardines that her friend Colin Tenant, later Lord Glenn Connor, had bought in the late 1950s with the idea of turning it into a private retreat for people rich and grand enough to want to disappear.
As a wedding gift, Tenant gave Margaret a plot of land on it. On that plot, she built a villa called Leoli’s O. And over the following two decades, it became the one place on earth where she could be more or less free. Mystique is where the public image of Margaret as the hedenist princess was born, and it is also where the loneliness underneath the image is easiest to see.
On the island, she swam, drank, smoked, hosted, stayed up late, and lived without the suffocating supervision that governed every hour of her life in England. She was the queen of a tiny kingdom that existed precisely because it had no constitutional meaning. There were no engagements on mystique, no precedents, no red boxes, no sister with a country to run.
There was only Margaret doing as she pleased in the one role she had ever invented entirely for herself, hostess of a paradise. The detail that the gossip columns never quite grasped is how much of the indulgence was a substitute for occupation. A woman with a real job does not need to build a private island.
Into the center of her existence, Margaret made mystique her kingdom because England had given her none. The famous late nights, the long lunches that ran into evenings, the court of artists and friends she gathered around herself in the Caribbean were the improvisation of a person who had been handed enormous time and no instructions for filling it.
The island was a stage she could finally direct herself in a life where every other stage had been blocked out by someone else. It was on Mustique in the early 1970s that she became close to Rody Llewellyn. He was a landscape gardener born in 1947 which made him 17 years younger than the princess.
He was gentle, unworldly, a little lost himself, and the relationship that developed between them lasted by most accounts the better part of a decade. to Margaret. By then, trapped in a marriage that had become openly hostile, Llewellyn offered something Snowden no longer did, tenderness, ease, and the uncomplicated company of someone who wanted nothing from her position.
To the British tabloid press, he offered something else entirely. He offered a scandal. In 1976, the News of the World published photographs of Margaret and Llewellyn together on Mustique in swimwear, plainly intimate. The images detonated. A married princess, sister of the queen, photographed with a man 17 years her junior on a private Caribbean island was precisely the story the press had been waiting two decades to print.
Within weeks, the formal separation of Margaret and Snowden was announced. The reaction at home was savage. Margaret was denounced in the press and even on the floor of Parliament where one member of the House of Commons reportedly called her a royal parasite living in luxury at public expense.
The woman who had given up Peter Townsend out of duty to that same public was now being flayed by it for finally seeking happiness on her own terms. The double standard was almost perfect. When she had sacrificed her love for the institution, the institution had let the marriage to Snowden curdle in private without lifting a finger to help her.
When she sought comfort after that marriage failed, the institution’s outriders in the press tore her apart in public. Llewellyn would in time marry someone else and go quietly back into private life. And to his considerable credit, he never sold the story of their relationship, turning down lucrative offers to do so for the rest of his life.
But the photographs had done their work. The separation was now public, irreversible, and headed somewhere the royal family had not gone in living memory. It was headed for a divorce, and nobody in the palace had any idea how to handle one. In 1978, Princess Margaret and the Earl of Snowden were divorced. The bare fact is easy to state and easy to underestimate.
To understand why it mattered, you have to understand what the monarchy had spent the previous 40 years pretending. The institution that Margaret belonged to had built its modern identity in large part on not being divorced. The whole crisis of 1936, the abdication that put her father on the throne and rewired her childhood, had been about a king who wanted to marry a divorced woman and was told he could not and remain king.
The monarchy of the 1950s had refused for the same reason to bless Margaret’s marriage to Townsend without cost. Divorce was the thing the royal family did not do. It was in a sense the founding taboo of the House of Windsor as the public knew it. And now the Queen’s own sister was getting one.
It is genuinely difficult to overstate how unprecedented this was for a royal so close to the throne in living memory. There had been royal divorces earlier in the century, but not at the very center of the family, not involving the sovereign’s only sibling. The palace had no procedure, no script, no precedent. it was comfortable invoking.
It had spent decades managing the divorce taboo by simply never confronting it from the inside. Now it had to. The institution’s response was characteristically to manage rather than to feel. The separation had been announced with the minimum of comment. The divorce when it came was processed with the same cold efficiency. There was no acknowledgment anywhere in the official machinery that a woman had reached the end of a marriage that had been making her wretched for the better part of a decade.
There was only the careful, anxious work of containing the damage to the institution. This is the cruelty that is easy to miss because it wears the costume of dignity. Margaret was not punished with banishment or stripped of her titles. The narrative that she was somehow exiled from royal life after the divorce does not survive contact with the record. She remained a working royal.
She kept her apartments at Kensington Palace. Her income, her patronages, her place at the great state occasions when her nephew Charles married Diana Spencer at St. Paul’s Cathedral in 1981. Margaret was there, seated in the official family photograph between Princess Anne and the Queen Mother, exactly where the Queen’s sister belonged.
But the divorce confirmed in the most public way possible what her whole life had quietly demonstrated. The institution would keep her. It would house her, fund her, photograph her on the balcony, and seat her in the family portrait. What it would never do was give her a reason for being there. She was retained, not deployed, present, not used.
She was in the end the proof of concept for everything that came after. Decades later, the same institution would struggle again and again with the same insoluble problem. What to do with the talented, restless, unhappy people it produces who are near the throne [clears throat] but not on it. Margaret was the first modern case. The palace managed her divorce the way it would manage every crisis to come by protecting the structure and leaving the human being to absorb the cost.
The cost in her case was about to start coming due in her body. For the last quarter century of her life, Margaret did what she had always done. She worked in the narrow sense the job allowed and she filled the rest of the time as best she could. The work was not nothing. She was a counselor of state authorized to act for the queen when the sovereign was abroad.
She held more than 80 patronages and presidencies and she took several of them seriously. none more than her long association with the Royal Ballet, an art form she loved with real expertise. Her authorized biographer, Christopher Warwick, has insisted correctly that the lazy caricature of a princess who did nothing but smoke and sunbathe is a slander on a woman who carried out thousands of public engagements over her lifetime and was, in his words, totally dedicated to her sister as the queen.
All of that is true and all of it sits on top of the central unfixable fact of her existence. The engagements were real, but they were the same engagements any minor royal might perform. The patronages were real, but they were honorary. None of it amounted to a role. There was no version of Margaret’s life in which her particular intelligence, her wit, her musicianship, her formidable presence were put to any structural use.
Cabinet ministers did not seek her counsel. No department reported to her. She opened buildings and attended gallas and represented the crown at functions too minor for the queen. And then she went home to Kensington Palace where she lived alone and to must where she lived freely. And the enormous gap between her capacities and her function never closed.
The freedom that the public envied was looked at squarely. The shape of that gap. She could go to Mystique for weeks because nobody needed her in London. She could stay up until dawn because there was nothing she had to be awake for. The famous hedonism was not the opposite of duty. It was what rushed in to fill a life that duty had been allowed to occupy only at the edges and the body kept the score.
Margaret had been a heavy smoker since adolescence, 60 cigarettes a day at the peak, and the habit was steadily destroying her. In January of 1985, surgeons removed a portion of her left lung. The operation was described publicly as a precaution, a check [clears throat] for cancer, and the family let it be understood that the growth was benign.
The echo of her father, who had lost a lung to cancer, and died at 56, hung over the whole episode, and was not lost on anyone close to her. She gave up smoking in 1993 after a bout of pneumonia, but the damage was long done. In [clears throat] February of 1998, dining with friends on Mystique, she suffered a mild stroke. The following year, on the island that had been her one refuge, she scalded her feet badly in a bath, an accident that left her with serious mobility problems and increasingly confined her to a wheelchair. Further strokes followed in
2000 and again in 2001. The vivid electric woman who had once filled rooms began slowly to be shut inside a failing body. Her public appearances dwindled to almost nothing. By the turn of the millennium, the most famous wild child of the postwar monarchy was a frail woman in dark glasses.
Her sight damaged, appearing in a wheelchair on the rare occasion she appeared at all. Her last public appearance came in December of 2001 at the 100th birthday celebration of Princess Alice, the Daajager Duchess of Gloucester. The photographs from that day show a woman almost unrecognizable from the princess the cameras had chased through the night clubs of the 1950s.
She had 2 months to live. On the 8th of February 2002 at Kensington Palace, Princess Margaret suffered a final stroke and developed cardiac problems through the night. She was taken to the King Edward IIIth Hospital in London in the small hours. Her two children, David and Sarah, came to her bedside.
The queen at Sandringham was kept informed through the night. And at 6 on the morning of the 9th of February, 2002, Margaret died in her sleep. She was 71 years old. The date carried a weight that anyone who knew the family would have felt at once. Her father, George V 6th, the one person who had given her a place in the world that asked nothing of her, had died on the 6th of February, 50 years earlier, almost to the week.
Her death fell at the very start of the Queen’s Golden Jubilee year, casting a shadow over what was meant to be a celebration. And her funeral, held on the 15th of February, fell on the 50th anniversary to the day of her father’s funeral. She had left in her own carefully scripted instructions a final set of choices that were entirely characteristic.
She did not want a burial at Frogmore, the royal ground in Windsor Great Park, which she had told her friend, Lady Anne Glenn Connor, she found gloomy. She wanted to be cremated, and she asked that no members of the royal family attend the cremation itself, which took place quietly at slow crematorium. In choosing cremation, she broke with royal tradition.
By most accounts, she was the first senior royal in living memory to make that choice. Even in death, she did the thing the institution did not do. But the most telling detail is what happened to her ashes. There was no room for her. The royal family’s resting places at Windsor had been allotted, and a space in the vault had been reserved for the queen.
Margaret, who had spent her whole life as the one for whom no place had been planned, had no place planned for her in death either. Her ashes were first set in the royal vault at St. George’s Chapel, a holding place, a waiting room, and there they stayed until her mother died just 7 weeks later at the age of 101. Only then was their room.
When the Queen Mother was laid in the King George V 6th Memorial Chapel, the small annex built to hold the father Margaret had loved. Her daughter’s ashes were finally brought in and placed beside him. It had taken her mother’s death to open a space. And so Margaret came to rest at last, exactly where she had always belonged and never been allowed to remain, next to her father, in the one role that had ever fit her, the king’s beloved daughter, fitted into a space that had been made for someone else.
What she left behind is harder to name than what most royals leave, precisely because the institution never gave her anything to build. She founded no charity that bears her name in the way the great Victorian royals did. She held no office that history records. What she left was an example and a warning.
She was the first modern royal to live out in full public view the impossible position of the one who stands near the throne and is given no purpose by it. Every later royal who has struggled in that same airless space has been walking a path she walked first. The cigarette holder, the island, the glamour, the wild reputation.
All of it was real and all of it was the consolation. The thing that was taken was never replaced. She was second in line to the throne at the age of six. And from that day, the whole machinery of her family moved in one direction away from her toward a destiny that belonged to her sister and a memory that belonged to her father.
In the end, they gave her what she had asked for, a small chapel at Windsor, a black stone slab in the floor. And beside it, her ashes, brought in after everyone else was settled, slipped quietly into the last space left, next to the only man who had ever simply been glad she was there.
