The truth about Margaret’s most ‘scandalous’ royal romance
As ‘The Crown’ depicts the Princess’s affair with Roddy Llewellyn, her biographer Christopher Warwick offers his insight
Tomorrow night’s muchanticipated series of The
Crown sets a mink-clad Princess Margaret’s first meeting with a young Roddy Llewellyn at a country house swimming pool party. That, in reality, was not how or where they met back in the summer of 1973. But then Roddy’s introduction to his host, Colin Tennant, later Lord Glenconner, and his royal guest over tea in the sedate setting of Edinburgh’s Cafe Royal, may not, in visually dramatic terms, have set the required tone for the raciest season of the series yet.
What is certainly true is that the meeting led almost immediately to a loving, if scandalous, relationship between the then 43-year-old Princess, whom the republican Scottish MP Willie Hamilton called a “floozy”, and the tousle-haired 26-year-old gardener, who was swiftly cast by the prurient tabloid press as her “toy boy lover” but who became an enduring friend and confidante.
By the time the pair met, Margaret’s marriage to Lord Snowdon was in advanced terminal decline, bringing her to what was very probably the lowest point of her life. Lonely, desperately unhappy, drinking too much, smoking even more than usual, and overweight – “People don’t like me when I’m fat, do they?” she once said to me – Margaret was spending tearful hours on the telephone to sympathetic friends. When Roddy, good-looking, charming, caring and, above all, fun, entered her life, he gave her back everything Snowdon had drained from her: happiness, confidence, self-esteem. When, after their first meeting, he remarked to Lady Glenconner that Margaret had the most beautiful eyes, she replied: “Don’t tell me, tell her.” He did. Elsewhere, Roddy’s presence was less welcome. The relationship did nothing for the Princess’s standing in the eyes of the public. It was said, and not without reason, that she was unlucky in love; her taste in men questionable.
The first of her headline-making relationships was with RAF fighter pilot, Grp Capt Peter Townsend, equerry to the one man Margaret truly adored and deeply missed for half a century following his untimely death: her father, George VI. Even in later life, she would plaintively ask: “Why did he have to die so young?” Had he lived, it is certain that Margaret’s affair with Townsend, a man 16 years her senior and the divorced father of two boys, would never have got anywhere near the critical stage that it did. At a time when divorce was still regarded as scandalous,
Margaret and Townsend were left to make up their own minds about their future. At the end of the twoyear “will they, won’t they?” saga, the government did an unexpected U-turn, clearing the way for them to marry if that is what they still wanted.
Contrary to popular belief, which had Margaret and Townsend as star-crossed lovers, forced apart and forbidden to marry, doubt had already started to cloud her thoughts. “How do you know after two years apart whether you do want to marry somebody?” the Princess once said to me. In the summer of 1955, she gave an indication of her uncertainty in a confidential letter to the prime minister, Anthony Eden, saying that it was “only by seeing” Townsend on his return to England that October “that I feel I can properly decide whether I can marry him or not”. The die was cast.
Post-townsend, Margaret was introduced to photographer and designer, Antony Armstrong-jones. At first, she didn’t give him another thought. It was only after they met again that they unquestionably fell head over heels in love.
Yet they had been married only three years when the cracks first started to appear. He didn’t want to spend the rest of his life as “Mister Princess Margaret”, dutifully accompanying her on official engagements, while she didn’t want to be left alone when he was away – and he was often away.
A serial adulterer, he minded when the Princess eventually followed his example with short-lived affairs. It wasn’t long before the Snowdons’ legendary rows became tabloid fodder and, though it certainly took two to tango, Tony, as one friend put it, was “cleverer at being cruel”.
By the early Seventies, he was already involved with Lucy Lindsayhogg, who would become his second wife, and with whom history would repeat itself. But when Margaret became involved with Roddy, shortly afterwards, he was furious. “Tell that man to keep out of my house,” he would yell. Not long afterwards, a long-range shot of Margaret and Roddy in their swimwear, during a visit to Mustique, acted as the catalyst for the Snowdons’ separation and divorce.
I first met Roddy in 1980 when we worked together at Kensington Palace on a publishing commission. It was then that I also met Margaret and, by getting to know her, subsequently became her biographer.
One afternoon, early the following year, Roddy asked: “What would you say if I told you I wanted to get married?” Somewhat taken aback, as I assumed that his relationship with the Princess was an ongoing fixture, I replied: “To you-know-who?” The answer was no. He told Margaret about his intentions on their last holiday together to Mustique that February, and married Tania Soskin in July.
I think she was hurt. But by then it is true their romance had evolved into a friendship. Had she not been away on an official visit to Canada, she would no doubt have attended the wedding – she was always good at putting on a brave face. Nevertheless, she, Roddy and now Tania would continue to enjoy a warm relationship, with the Princess becoming godmother to the eldest of their three daughters.
Towards the end of her life, after several strokes, Margaret did not see any of her male friends. She no doubt wanted them to remember her as she was. The one exception was Roddy. It has been said that he was the love of her life, but in truth, although she never lost her affection for him – or Townsend, whom she last invited for lunch in 1992 – I’m not sure the love she felt for any man ever equalled that she felt for her adored “Papa”.
Christopher Warwick is the author of ‘Princess Margaret: A Life of Contrasts’
I’m not sure the love she felt for any man equalled that she felt for her adored ‘Papa’