Princess Margaret Was ‘A Nightmare’ as a Mother — And How Her Daughter Survived – HT

 

 

She would come into the nursery at 6:00 in the evening, scented and shimmering, on her way out to a party, and she would scoop up her two small children for exactly as long as it amused her, and then she would be gone, sometimes for days. She was Princess Margaret, the most glamorous woman in Britain, the Queen’s younger sister, and she was, by the accounts of nearly everyone who watched it happen, a spectacularly difficult mother, doting one hour and glacial the next, capable of dazzling warmth and sudden freezing cruelty, a

woman who ran her own children the way she ran her staff, by mood. Her son, David, learned to keep his distance, but it is her daughter, Sarah, born in 1964, who tells the more remarkable story. Because Lady Sarah Chatto grew up in the wreckage of her parents’ marriage, the affairs, the screaming, the famous house parties on Mustique, the drinking, the breakdowns, and she did something almost no one in that family has ever managed.

She got out clean, no scandal, no memoir, no bitterness. She simply, quietly, walked away from the chaos that made her and built a life her mother never could. Begin with what that portrait is and what it is not. The image of the 6:00 mother, scented, shimmering, gone by morning, is not a dated entry in anyone’s diary.

It is a composite, the texture of household memory, the way the people who worked in those rooms have described the rhythm of the place. And here is the part the photographs could never show. The witnesses who built that picture were the staff, the friends, the diarists who collected Margaret the way other people collect porcelain.

 They were not the children. David and Sarah have, across their entire adult lives, said almost nothing about their mother as a mother. So, when you hear that Princess Margaret was a nightmare to be raised by, understand the shape of the claim. It is the view from the corridor and the dinner table. It is not a confession from the nursery.

 That distinction is going to matter more and more as this story goes on. Because the silence of those two children is in the end the loudest thing in it. What the household saw was a woman of weather. There was no malice in the mornings. There was simply no telling which Margaret would arrive. The biographer Tim Heald, who was given the cooperation of the family and access to the royal archives for his life of the princess, did not describe a monster.

 He described in plain words a dutiful mother who was seriously religious. The royal editor Ingrid Seward went further. “Margaret,” she said, “prided herself on being a good mother, and it gave her the feeling that she had at least managed to get one thing right.” Unlike her sister, who put her husband before her children, Margaret, by this account, put the children first.

 Hold that beside the other portrait, the rationed affection, the freezing exits, and you begin to see the real subject here. Not a wicked woman, a volatile one. A mother who loved her children genuinely and governed them by her own internal climate, so that the love, when it came, came in bursts, and the cold came without warning.

 And the small child learned very early to read the barometer of an adult’s face. The drinking sat underneath all of it, and it has to be named carefully. Margaret’s tipple was famous Grouse whiskey with a dash of Malvern water, and she drank it at a steady rate from late morning onward. And she smoked untipped cigarettes by the packet, as many as 60 a day.

 The habit that would eventually take part of her left lung. The staff anecdotes are specific and consistent. She would grow sharp with a footman who was slow to pour. She could tell at one sip if the wrong brand had reached her glass, and she would refuse it. This is the household run by mood that the witnesses describe, but the link between the drink and the mothering belongs to the observers, not to any doctor.

 Watching from the edges, the people around her connected the moods to the glass. That is an association reported by people who were in the room. It is not a clinical finding, and this account will not pretend it is one. What is documented is the drinking and the weather, and the fact that the two so often arrived together.

 There is one more correction the record demands before we go any further, and it cuts against the easy version of this story. The cruelty in that house, the documented, written down, hidden in the drawer cruelty was not hers. It was her husband’s. And to understand the daughter who walked away, you first have to understand the house she walked out of, and the man who set it alight.

 The house, for most of their childhood, was always on fire. Margaret married Antony Armstrong-Jones, the photographer, on the 6th of May, 1960, at Westminster Abbey. And for a few years, they were the most dazzling couple in London, the princess and the commoner with the camera. Bohemian, modern, photographed everywhere. Then it curdled.

 The biographer Sarah Bradford documented the form the curdling took. Snowden, as he became after he was made an Earl, did not row in the ordinary way. He left notes. He would write something cold and exact and hide it where his wife would find it alone. Tucked into a book she was reading, slipped into the drawer of her dressing table.

 One was a list. He titled it, “24 Reasons Why I Hate You.” Another, when she opened it, read, “You look like a Jewish manicurist and I hate you.” This is the documented cruelty of that marriage, and it It worth being precise about it because the lazy telling makes Margaret the architect of the household’s misery. The written record points the other way.

The mockery was his craft. The notes were his weapon. The volatility was hers. The cruelty in ink was his, and both of them strayed. The marriage became a public ruin in slow motion. Snowden conducted his own affairs. Margaret, lonely inside it, eventually found Roddy Llewellyn, a man some 17 years her She was 43, he was 25 when it began in 1973.

The photographs that surfaced in 1976 of the princess and her young companion on the island of Mustique were the catalyst that ended the thing in public. The separation was announced that March. The divorce came through in July of 1978, and it made her the first senior member of the royal family to divorce since Henry VIII split from Rome four centuries before.

 But here is what the timeline leaves out. The marriage did not end on a single day in 1976. It had been ending for years in front of two children in rooms where a list of 24 reasons sat folded in a drawer. That was the weather Sarah and David were raised inside. Not a single storm, a climate. And there was Mustique, the island that became Margaret’s refuge, and in the public mind, the symbol of everything wild about her.

The villa was called Les Jolies Eaux, the beautiful waters, five bedrooms on a slope above the Caribbean, built on a plot of land that Colin Tennant, Lord Glenconner, had given her as a wedding present. As the marriage failed, the island became the place she went to be someone other than a wife. It was the one address where the princess could stop being the queen’s sister and the earl’s wife, and simply be a woman in a caftan with a drink and a view of the water.

The parties there are legend now. Long, sun-drunk, famous. The cast are rolling mixture of aristocrats and pop stars and the merely beautiful. And here is what the legend tends to flatten. A child does not see a glamorous holiday. A child sees a mother who is here and then somewhere else. Present and then absent.

 Warm in the Caribbean sun and cool again the moment the plane lands at home. The island that healed Margaret’s nerves, and her friends believed it genuinely did soothe her, was also one more place she could go without them. The escape that saved the mother was, for the children, simply another departure. But the woman who knew that house best has spent the last years of her life arguing that the legend got Margaret wrong.

Remember the name Anne Glenconner. She was Margaret’s lady-in-waiting from 1971 until the very end, more than 30 years at her side. And we will come back to her because what she chose to do with that proximity tells you something the gossip never could. So that is the environment. A doting, glacial mother, a father who wrote cruelty on paper, a marriage dissolving in public, an island that doubled as an escape hatch, two children watching all of it.

 And here is the strange part, the part this whole story turns on. They came out of the same house, the same weather, the same wreckage, and they came out completely different. The same fire produced two opposite survivors. Take the son first. David, Viscount Linley through his childhood, the second Earl of Snowdon after his father’s death in 2017, responded to the chaos the way a certain kind of boy does. He built things.

 There is something almost too neat about it, and yet it is exactly what happened. The son of the most unstable household in the royal family grew up to make furniture, solid, jointed, precise objects that hold their shape and do not change with the weather. He became a designer and a craftsman, and he made a name with his hands and a business that bore that name on its door.

The biographer Theo Aronson noted his gift for the social machinery of it, his ability to draw people through that door and turn a famous surname into a working enterprise. But underneath the commerce was the craft, and underneath the craft you can read a temperament, a boy who could not control the climate of his own home went looking as an adult for the one discipline where the maker is in total command of the material, where a plank does precisely what the plane tells it to, and nothing surprises you, and

nothing turns cold without warning. He learned, as the hook put it, to keep his distance, to channel whatever the household had done to him into work, into objects, into a world he controlled with a chisel and a rule. And at the very end, when his mother was failing, it was David who moved his own wife and child into Kensington Palace to be near her, living alongside her through her final years from 2000 onward.

 Whatever the distance had been, he closed it when it counted. That is the son’s version of survival. Build something that lasts and come back at the end. But it is the daughter who is the real subject. Sarah was the steadier one almost from the start, and the steadiness took a particular form. She got quiet, and she got out of the frame.

While the family generated headlines, she generated paintings. She went to Bedales, then to Camberwell School of Art, then to the Royal Academy Schools, then to a textile course at what was then Middlesex Polytechnic, the unglamorous working education of someone who actually intends to make things rather than merely be photographed making them.

And she made the most pointed choice an artist born into that name could make. When she exhibited, she did not exhibit as a princess’s daughter. She showed her work under the name Sarah [clears throat] Armstrong Jones, plain, no title, and she won real prizes that had nothing to do with her blood. The Windsor and Newton Prize in 1988, the Cresec Landscape Prize in 1990, and she has shown at the Redfern Gallery since 1995.

 There is only one problem with reading this as a story about a woman fleeing her family, and it is an important one. Sarah did not flee the people, she fled the spectacle. She stayed close to the family that actually cared for her, and she walked away only from the part of it that turned people into headlines. You can measure that closeness precisely.

 When she was 17 in July of 1981, it was Sarah who stood as chief bridesmaid at the wedding of Charles and Diana in St. Paul’s Cathedral. Placed at the very heart of the most watched royal occasion of the age, she became godmother to Prince Harry. And her aunt, the Queen, the most reserved woman in Britain, adored her.

 Adored her enough that Sarah was the one niece allowed to come along to Craigowan Lodge, the small house near Balmoral that the Queen kept as her private retreat. So, this was never a woman shunned by the family, or one who slammed the door on it. This was a woman who understood with great precision which parts of royal life were nourishing and which parts were poison, and who quietly kept the first and refused the second.

 That is a far harder thing to do than simply leaving. Leaving is easy. Staying close to the people while declining the circus, that takes a kind of discipline the rest of the family never learned. And then she did the thing that sealed it. She married out out the spotlight on her own terms. She had met Daniel Chatto, an artist and former actor, in India in the 1980s while her father was working there on film projects. Notice even that.

 Her father, the photographer, the man whose camera had made the family glamorous and whose notes had made the marriage cruel. And the daughter met her husband not at a society ball, but on a film set on the far side of the world, an ocean and a continent away from the palaces. Daniel was not a duke.

 He was a working artist who had once acted and now painted. A man with no title and no fortune to trade. And that, you suspect, was precisely the point. They married on the 14th of July, 1994, and look at where. Not Westminster Abbey, where her mother had married into glamour and ruin. Not St. Paul’s, where she herself had been a bridesmaid before 2 and 1/2 billion people.

They married at St. Stephen’s Walbrook, a small church in the city of London. A Wren church, beautiful and unshowy and almost private. The choice of venue was the whole statement. A woman who could have commanded any cathedral in the kingdom chose a quiet stone room in the financial district, and a man who painted for a living.

There were no cameras circling for the marriage’s collapse because there would be no collapse. Three decades on, they are still together, still working, still out of the papers. They had two sons, Samuel, born in 1996, and Arthur, born in 1999. And she raised them as far from the cameras as a person of her standing can manage.

 No perch in the line of succession traded for a magazine cover, no childhood sold by the page. What the audience records as a fairy tale, the documentary trail shows as something quieter and more deliberate, a methodical, lifelong refusal to perform. And this is where the silence becomes point. We have spent this story describing Lady Sarah Chatto as the survivor, the one who got out, the daughter who left the wreckage behind.

And every word of that is built on what she did, not on a single word she has ever said, because she has never said anything. She has given almost no interviews. She has never, not once, publicly characterized her mother as cruel or absent or cold. There is no memoir. There is no settling of scores. The difficult mother portrait that opened the story does not come from her.

It comes from the staff, the friends, the watchers. And Sarah has spent 30 years declining to confirm it, deny it, or trade on it. That is not an absence of feeling. That is a decision made and held for a lifetime that whatever happened in those rooms, it belonged to her and not to the public and not to a publisher.

She took her mother’s wit and her grandmother’s discretion, and of the two, it is the discretion that has protected her. It is worth pausing on the woman who has spoken because she pushes hard against the easy story. Anne Glenconner, the lady-in-waiting we met on Mustique, finally wrote her own memoir in 2019.

And she said plainly why. She did it, she said, because she was so fed up with people writing such horrible things about Princess Margaret. Think about what that sentence costs. Here is a woman who had spent more than 30 years close enough to see everything, the moods, the whiskey, the sharpness, the long, sad decline, and who came out of all of it not with a score to settle, but with a grievance on Margaret’s behalf, angry not at the princess, but at the people who reduced her.

From that vantage, the loyal witness did not produce an indictment. She produced a defense, and it was not empty. When Glen Conner’s own son was dying of AIDS, alone and stigmatized in an era that taught people to look away, two people stood by him, his mother and Princess Margaret. The princess did not have to.

There was no protocol that required it, no photographer to record it, nothing in it for her at all. She did it because she chose to. That is the other half of the woman the gossip flattened. The same person who could freeze a footman over a slow whiskey was the person who sat with a dying young man who much of the world had decided to forget.

Both of those are true. Neither cancels the other. The truth about Margaret was always quieter and stranger and more divided than the headline. She was magnetic precisely because she was not simple. And a child raised by someone like that does not grow up hating her. A child raised by someone like that grows up trying for the rest of their life to make sense of her.

Which may be exactly why Sarah has never tried to do it in public. That magnetism is the thing the easy telling forgets. And the audience never has. The American writer Gore Vidal, who knew her, said she was far too intelligent for her station in life. That the wit and the boredom and the cruelty were, in part, the symptoms of a clever woman with nowhere to put the cleverness.

He told the story of the two of them at Windsor fishing bees out of a swimming pool to save them from drowning. And Margaret pronouncing over the rescued insects in what Vidal called a powerful Hanoverian voice, “Go forth and make honey.” That is the other Margaret. The one the comment sections are half in love with.

The one whose one-liners outlived her. She was not only the weather in the nursery, she was also the funniest person in any room she entered. And both things were true at once. And the children grew up under both at once. But the weather won in the end, the way it usually does. Margaret’s later years were a long, hard decline, and the record of them is grim and well kept.

 The drinking and the 60 cigarettes a day caught up with her. Part of her left lung was removed back in 1985, and the warning did not change the habit for years. Then, on Mustique, the island that had been her refuge, the one place that had always made her better, the refuge turned on her. She stepped into a bath of scalding water in 1999 and badly injured her feet, and she never fully walked again after it.

 There is something almost unbearable in the symmetry of that. The sanctuary that had soothed her nerves for 30 years was where her body finally failed. From 1998, the strokes began, and another came in the spring of 2001, and the public saw less and less of her. And when they did, she was in a wheelchair, in dark glasses, her sight failing, a blanket over her legs.

 The famous face turned away from the cameras that had followed it for 70 years. The most glamorous woman in Britain ended in shadow. What the public never saw was this. By most accounts, beneath the wit, she was lonely and she was disappointed. A clever, dazzling woman who had been handed everything except the one thing that might have used her up properly, and who had spent her life feeling the lack of it.

 The tragedy of Princess Margaret was never that the world was cruel to her. The world adored her. The tragedy was that adoration was not a job, and she’d never found one. And a person of that intelligence with nothing to spend it on will, given enough decades, turn some of it inward. She died on the morning of the 9th of February 2002 at 6:30 in King Edward VII Hospital in London, 71 years old.

 Her two children, David and Sarah, the boy who built things and the girl who painted, were at the bedside. Six days later, on the 15th of February, she was carried into St. George’s Chapel at Windsor. And the date was not chosen by accident. It was exactly 50 years to the day since the funeral of her father, King George VI.

 She had asked to be cremated, breaking with royal tradition, and she was at a municipal crematorium in Slough, of all the unglamorous places, and her ashes were brought back to the royal vault. Her mother, the Queen Mother, 101 years old, sat through the service and followed her younger daughter to the grave, and then died herself 7 weeks later.

The glamour and the ruin went out almost together. And then came the inheritance, and the last small drama, and it tells you everything about the difference between the generations. The estate came to roughly 7 and 1/2 million pounds, divided between David and Sarah, and the taxman took close to 40% of it, a bill of nearly 3 million.

So, in 2006, the two children sent some 800 of their mother’s possessions to Christie’s to be sold. The famous Poltimore Tiara, the one she had worn, went for around 900,000 pounds. The wholesale brought in some 14 million, and a portion of it went to charity, to a stroke fund set up in her name. Their father was said to be wounded by it, but look at what it actually was.

 It was not a betrayal. It was arithmetic, a tax bill that had to be paid, settled by selling the objects rather than performing the grief. Even in the disposal of her things, Sarah did the unsentimental, undramatic, practical thing, and declined to make a tragedy of it. Margaret had collected, her daughter, when the time came, simply let it go.

That is the whole inheritance when you lay it out. Margaret left her children a great deal, a name, a fortune diminished by tax, a tiara, a villa on a Caribbean island, and a childhood lived inside weather no child should have to forecast. And out of all of it, the daughter took exactly two things and left the rest. She took the wit.

 You can see it in the precision of her choices. The dry economy of a woman who marries in a small Wren church and exhibits under a borrowed name. And she took the discretion, not Margaret’s, but the grandmother’s. The Queen Mother’s gift for saying nothing and letting the silence do the work. The breakdowns, the bottles, the notes in the drawer, the parties on Mustique, the appetite for spectacle that turned a brilliant woman into a tabloid.

 All of that she sat down and walked past. She is, by any measure the family produces, the rarest thing it makes. A person who stood next to the dysfunction for a lifetime and never once caught it. Princess Margaret had everything her sister had except the throne, and she spent a lifetime proving that everything was not enough.

 She married a man who broke her, drank to fill the gap, and ran her own children by the weather of her moods. And out of that beautiful wreckage walked a daughter who wanted none of it. No title trading, no tell-all, no tabloid war. Lady Sarah Chatto took her mother’s wit and her grandmother’s discretion and left the rest on Mustique.

 In a family that turns its children into headlines, she became the one nobody could write about. That, in the end, was the only revenge worth having.