Windsor sisters who broke all the rules
ELIZABETH & MARGARET: THE INTIMATE WORLD OF THE WINDSOR SISTERS Andrew Morton Grand Central Review: Louis Bayard
WITH the sad passing of Prince Philip, this timely book offers insight into Queen Elizabeth II and her sister Princess Margaret. The Windsors have long ceased to be a fairy tale unless you mean the kind where the dragon devours all the princes and princesses and refuses to cough them back up.
The dragon’s identity has been open to debate, but the recent Oprah Winfrey confessathon with Harry and Meghan suggests the culprit all along has been the hazy behemoth that Harry’s grandfather first dubbed “the Firm”. It’s a title that twines usefully with the John Grisham novel, if only to suggest that the British monarchy is both organised and a crime – at least to the hopes, sensibilities and perhaps even the survivability of its occupants.
We have had time now to digest the testimony of Meghan and, before her, Diana. So let us turn to the Windsor princess of an earlier generation who, ravaged by alcohol and illness, struggled in her final hours against darkness. As one of her friends would later report: “Princess Margaret was a depressed person, and in the royal family you are not allowed to be depressed.”
That is not the lesson that Andrew Morton – a royal watcher of long standing with a best-selling biography of Princess Diana to his credit – seeks to impart with his latest exercise in historical synthesis, Elizabeth & Margaret.
Born four years apart but raised practically in tandem, Lilibet and Margot, from an early age, wore the same clothes, imbibed roughly the same fund of knowledge from the same tutors and weathered the Blitz together in the crepuscular precincts of Windsor Castle. Elizabeth, the elder, was obedient, shy, methodical, most at home in the country and most devoted to dogs and horses. Margaret was naughty, theatrical, funny, metropolitan, given to tantrums. “Disobedience is my joy,” she once declared. Just more than 1.52m tall, Margaret parlayed her blue eyes and ivory complexion and curvy figure. She partied, she sang, she danced, she flirted, she came home every morning “with the milk bottles”. She was the first female royal to smoke in public. The first king’s daughter in more than 450 years to marry a commoner – bohemian photographer Anthony Armstrong-Jones – and, in the aftermath of that bitter, volcanic marriage, the first royal divorce since Henry VIII and Anne of Cleeves in 1540.
By then, her “scudding moods”, as Morton usefully describes them, had hardened into “rudeness and self-absorption”. Her hedonistic lifestyle, beamed out to the world from her beachfront estate on Mustique, and her openly sexual relationship with a younger man had turned the British populace against her.
Through it all, it seems, Margaret was trying to find a purpose beyond the accident of her birth. She died in 2002. The intimate private funeral was dwarfed in scale by the 200 000 citizen mourners who would file past her mother’s coffin a few weeks later.
Given the millions more who have watched the series The Crown, Morton’s narrative arc has the inescapable feeling of rehash. Crown viewers will likely feel that they’ve heard this song before and that, in the superbly nuanced performances of Vanessa Kirby and Helena Bonham Carter, they’ve gleaned grace notes that a glib compiler like Morton can’t aspire to.
What we need now is not another celebrity biographer but an investigative journalist who will pry open the tiara casing around the Firm and expose its workings. |