Margaret and the problems of being the ‘spare’ Princess
Everyone, surely, even the most flint-hearted of republicans, will wish the little Princess a long, happy and healthy life. yet, in spite of the new succession legislation that will spare her from being demoted lower and lower in the royal pecking order simply because she is a girl, one cannot help wondering exactly what future lies in store for Prince George’s baby sister.
Being born a royal number two can be, as Time magazine once observed, ‘a lousy gig’.
Prince William, the most family-minded of men, spoke significantly, on the day of his engagement to Catherine Middleton in 2010, of ‘the mistakes of the past’ from which it was necessary to ‘learn lessons’.
That was clearly an oblique reference to the marriage of his parents, and to the treatment of Princess Diana.
But in his concern for the future of his new daughter, there are bound to be other considerations now in William’s mind.
Among them, without doubt, will be the cautionary spectre of his grandmother the Queen’s late sister, Princess Margaret, whose fate was to spend her entire existence in the shadow of her elder sibling, a position that robbed her of all sense of purpose and accelerated her tragic and inexorable decline.
Margaret was, in her youth, a sparkling beauty, a pocket venus little more than 5 ft tall with lustrous eyes and perfect skin.
She was feted and adored as a royal celebrity, a fun-packed alternative to her elder, more sombre sister.
yet the abiding image that remains of her for those too young to recall her heyday was of a sad, enfeebled woman in a wheelchair, the celebrated eyes hidden by dark glasses and her slight body wrapped in a rug.
What happened to Princess Margaret is a salutary lesson in the problems that can befall the throne’s ‘spare’ — as opposed to its heir. And it is a spare, of course, that the little Princess will become.
As Margaret’s biographer Tim Heald said, her position was an extraordinary paradox: on the one hand she was immensely privileged; on the other, she was an also-ran.
In her youth this was unimportant. But as Margaret endured royal life’s vicissitudes, she failed to cope with them. She never really carved out a role for herself and became known for her hedonistic lifestyle, her string of lovers and her fondness for a drink and a cigarette.
It did not help that she could be haughty, rude, dismissive and monumentally snobbish. She felt she was a victim and to a certain extent she was — although much of the blame lies at her own door.
Being a spare became a tragic role for Margaret. ‘I’ve never known an unhappier woman,’ commented the author and aristocrat John Julius norwich.
The Princess’s cousin, Margaret rhodes, agreed: ‘I do think her life was sad. She was unfulfilled.’
Photographer Cecil Beaton, after encountering her at a ball in the early Seventies, commented: ‘Gosh, the shock. She has become a little pocket monster — Queen victoria. Poor brute. I do feel sorry for her.
‘She was not very nice in the days when she was so pretty and attractive. She snubbed and ignored friends. But, my God, has she been paid out!’
SIR roy Strong, the historian, called her in his diaries: ‘Tiresome, spoilt, idle and irritating. She has no direction, no overriding interest. All she likes is young men.’ There are those who claim her decline was all down to her flawed character, to the fact that she was so f ond of royal privilege yet unwilling to work for it.
But the circumstances of her upbringing unquestionably played their part. And it is for this reason that her story holds important lessons for William, Kate and their baby daughter.
For a start, Margaret, born four years after the Queen, was horrendously spoiled by her father, George VI, who found her impish and beguiling behaviour irresistible.
Her mother, Queen elizabeth, would later say of Margaret: ‘She was always a handful.’
The sisters were close in their early years, but fights between them were frequent. Princess elizabeth, it was said, had ‘a mean left hook’, while Margaret ‘liked to get in close and was known to bite’.
When their uncle’s abdication brought their parents unexpectedly to the throne, the rivalry between the sisters became more apparent. At t heir parents’ coronation, elizabeth had a train. Margaret did not, and resented it.
elizabeth, now destined to be Queen, began having lessons in constitutional history twice a week with the vice Provost of eton. Margaret was l eft out of this arrangement, and it rankled.
Margaret’s stability was profoundly rocked at the age of 21 by the sudden death of her adored father, the King, at the age of 56.
With her mother suddenly a remote figure in the seclusion of mourning, and her sister totally preoccupied by the challenge of early sovereignty, Margaret found herself isolated and lonely.
She gravitated to a consoling relationship with her f ather’s equerry, the much-decorated but divorced Battle of Britain fighter ace Captain Peter Townsend, who was 16 years her senior.
Divorce was still a no-go area for the Queen’s immediate family and Margaret was asked to choose between Townsend and being a royal. The Princess, in character more royal even than her elder sister, struggled — she was unwilling to relinquish her royal status to become the wife of a Group Captain, yet she claimed to be in love.
In the meantime, The regency Act of 1953 was passed, expunging her from the constitutional role that ought to have been hers — that of becoming the regent who would step in should anything happen to the Queen while her children were young.
Forced into publicly renouncing Townsend, an embittered Margaret — stripped of yet more royal prerogative — now found herself trapped in a gilded limbo.
She eventually drifted into a late and disastrous marriage, at the age of 29, to the bohemian and funloving society photographer Antony Armstrong- Jones, who was elevated to the earldom of Snowdon.
Margaret chain-smoked virtually non-stop and drank huge quantities o f Famous Grouse whisky, becoming an obvious alcoholic. Her behaviour i n public became increasingly extraordinary: she snubbed friends and courtiers with icy and regal hauteur, and insulted people she had only just met.
The Sixties supermodel, Twiggy, seated at dinner next to Margaret, was completely ignored by her for about two hours. Finally, the Princess turned to her and asked haughtily: ‘And who are you?’ Twiggy replied: ‘I’m Lesley Hornby, Ma’am, but people call me Twiggy.’ Margaret responded: ‘How unfortunate,’ and turned her back.
AMonG the regular recipients of her rudeness was her own mother, the Queen Mother. A close f amily f riend, Prudence, Lady Penn once said to her: ‘I can’t bear to see the way Princess Margaret treats you.’ The Queen Mother replied: ‘ oh, you mustn’t worry about that. I’m quite used to it.’
Cavorting on the Carribean island of Mustique in the company of landscape gardener roddy Llewellyn, 17 years her j unior, brought Margaret severe public censure. The anti-royalist Labour MP, Willie Hamilton, denounced her as ‘ t his expensive kept woman’, and her 18-year marriage t o Lord Snowdon ended in divorce. Margaret was admitted to King edward VII Hospital in London suffering from alcoholic hepatitis, and there were suspicions — denied but never wholly disproved — that she was suffering from porphyria, resulting from an imbalance in the metabolism, that is now believed to have caused the madness of George III.
The final years of Margaret’s life were profoundly tragic. Severely depressed, crippled by an accident that scalded her feet, and by a series of strokes, her last public appearances in that wheelchair were painful to behold.
Today, the Princess, once a national idol and an icon of style and glamour, seems virtually forgotten by the public.
Prince William, one feels, is more sensitive to the pressures of royalty than his forebears. He is not the sort of father to allow his new daughter’s life to unravel as Margaret’s did after she came so close to the throne, but never found a role.
The new Princess also has her mother’s solid middle- and workingclass Middleton ancestry to keep her firmly grounded. She is blessed, in William and Kate, with parents who genuinely understand the perils of being born royal.
Let us wish t he Queen’s fifth great-grandchild a happy, fulfilled and meaningful existence, f r ee f r om t he demons t hat beset, and ultimately destroyed, Princess Margaret.