Margaret was wild. Lilibet was tidy. She would hop out of bed several times a night to get her shoes straight and her clothes arranged just so...
Royal biographer CRAIG BROWN on two sisters: one known as her father’s pride, the other his joy
IT’S easily forgotten that, as well as being a mother, wife and daughter, Queen Elizabeth was also a sister. They grew up as a unit, but their destinies were to prove wildly different, with Elizabeth’s decades of service and constancy contrasting sharply with Margaret’s much wilder, shorter and more rackety life. In the 1930s, they were always known to the public as a twosome: ‘the little Princesses’. Yet even in childhood, the contrasting characters of the two sisters, Elizabeth and Margaret, were already clear to those who knew them well.
Their father, King George VI, would refer to Elizabeth as his pride, and Margaret, four years her junior, as his joy. Elizabeth was serious and dutiful; Margaret was disobedient and playful.
Their long-serving governess, Marion Crawford, arrived in their household when Princess Margaret Rose, as she was then always known, was just two years old.
From the start , the governess, known as ‘Crawfie’, found the two sisters very different.
Elizabeth was very organised and polite, and Margaret more wild and attention-seeking.
‘Margaret was a great joy and diversion, but Lilibet had a natural grace of her own,’ she was to recall about the sisters.
‘...Lilibet was the one with the temper, but it was under control.
‘Margaret was often naughty but she had a gay, bouncing way with her which was hard to deal with.
‘She would often defy me with a sidelong look, make a scene and kiss and be friends and all forgiven and forgotten.
‘Lilibet took longer to recover, but she had always the more dignity of the two.’
Margaret was always up to mischief; she loved mimicking people and playing practical jokes on them. Lilibet was much more determined to do the right thing.
Whereas Margaret would dawdle, and be late for everything, Lilibet hated keeping people waiting. In her bedroom, she liked everything to be shipshape, to an extent that might nowadays almost be diagnosed as a mild form of ADHD.
‘At one time I got anxious about Lilibet and her fads,’ Crawfie recalled. ‘She became almost too methodical and tidy. She would hop out of bed several times a night to get her shoes quite straight, her clothes arranged just so.’
Between the two of them, Crawfie and Margaret hit upon a cure.
‘We soon laughed her out of this. I remember one hilarious session we had with Margaret imitating her sister going to bed. It was not the first occasion, or the last, on which Margaret’s gift of caricature came in very handy.’
The King and Queen indulged
Margaret’s skittish ways. ‘She never got herself reprimanded,’ recalled their cousin, Margaret Rhodes, who was later to become Elizabeth’s lady-in-waiting. ‘She got away with everything.’
Yet, for all Margaret’s joie de vivre, people tended to feel much more comfortable with Lilibet than with her little sister. They knew where they were with Lilibet but were often fearful of Margaret’s sharp tongue and unpredictable, high-handed ways.
And, as she grew older, Margaret could suddenly pull rank, reminding one and all that she was a Princess. Lilibet, on the other hand, preferred to fit in, always putting the demands of others before hers.
In 1942, the two girls – now aged 16 and 12 – were preparing for their annual family pantomime at Windsor Castle.
Margaret insisted on playing the part of Cinderella; Elizabeth was content to be cast in the secondary and less glamorous role of principal boy.
The two sisters argued over the price of admission.
‘You can’t ask people to pay seven and sixpence...
‘No one will pay that to look at
US!’ was Elizabeth’s point of view.
‘Nonsense!’ countered Margaret. ‘They’ll pay anything to see us.’
As she grew older, Margaret’s sense of self-importance was exacerbated by her insecurities.
‘On one side she was given an inflated sense of her own value, while on the other her confidence was continually undermined by comparisons with her sister,’ recalled the journalist and biographer Selina Hastings.
‘She was very spoilt and indulged and made to feel a very special person indeed,’ she said, ‘while simultaneously being given clearly to
understand that it was her sister who was important.’
In 1936, when Lilibet was ten years old and Margaret six, came the unexpected abdication of their uncle, King Edward VIII, and their father King George VI’s accession to the throne.
Lilibet was now destined to be Queen, and Margaret just her younger sister. Their relative positions were similar to those of William and Harry in our own time, with the younger sibling sinking further and further down the line of succession, further and further away from the throne, as the years rolled by.
Selina Hastings believes Margaret’s increasingly troublesome character was at least partly shaped by this descent. ‘At each royal birth, the new Order of Succession appeared in The Times, Margaret’s position moving down with monotonous regularity, like a game of Snakes and Ladders, all snake and no ladder.’
Immediately after Elizabeth’s coronation ceremony, in June, 1953, Margaret’s friend and lady-in-waiting Anne Tennant spotted Margaret looking tearful.
‘Oh, Ma’am, you look so sad,’ she said to her.
‘I’ve lost my father, and I’ve lost my sister,’ replied Margaret, who then added: ‘She will be busy. Our lives will change.’
And, of course, she was right. The gap between them grew wider, and harder to bridge. Lilibet, ever dutiful and conscientious, led a busy life, always in the spotlight. But in the non-stop Royal pantomime, Margaret had to make do with a walk-on part.
For the rest of her life, she remained conscious of her image as the one who wasn’t: the one who wasn’t the Queen; the one who was never in the first coach, and never first onto the Buckingham Palace balcony; the one who was never given the most important duties, but had to make do with lesser chores: the naming of the out-ofthe-way hospital; the state visit to the duller country; the patronage of the more obscure charities; the glad-handing of the deputies and second-in-commands.
Though she always remained staunchly loyal to her elder sister, Margaret recognised, and resented, the way people – even close relations – would treat the two of them differently. This, in turn, made her ever more eager to pull rank, to let them know how grand she really was, and to put them in their place.
Margaret took offence easily, and gave it back in spades. She once complained to her friend Gore Vidal that even their grandmother, Queen Mary, had treated her as the also-ran of the two.
‘I detested Queen Mary,’ she said. ‘She was rude to all of us except Lilibet, who was going to be Queen. Of course, she [Queen Mary] had an inferiority complex. We were Royal, and she was not.’
While her elder sister worked tirelessly, never put a foot wrong, and was rewarded with the esteem of the world, Margaret led an increasingly giddy life. As a young woman, Margaret had been obliged to give up the man she loved, Peter Townsend, because he was divorced with two children.
She had then married the vain and louche photographer Antony Armstrong-Jones, but their union proved unhappy and they split up and, later, divorced.
In middle age, Margaret’s love affair with a good-looking young man-about-town, Roddy Llewellyn, was regarded as scandalous, and Margaret became the unwilling object of disapproval and/or mirth.
As Lilibet ascended higher in the public regard, so Margaret sank lower and lower. Publicity-seeking bishops, columnists and politicians seemed to take turns in condemning her.
‘The Princess has become a monstrous charge on the public purse with her languid life of favoured leisure,’ harrumphed the republican Labour MP Willie Hamilton.
‘She has become an embarrassment within her own family and a bad advertisement for the claim that the Monarchy is the exemplar of our national morality.’
Margaret once explained her dodgy reputation to Gore Vidal.
‘It was inevitable when there are two sisters and one is the Queen who must be the source of honour and all that is good while the other must be the focus of the most creative malice, the evil sister.’ But her own mercurial character had much to do with it, too.
Around this time, Queen Elizabeth grew concerned, approaching one of her little sister’s friends.
‘She talked to me about her sister during the bad patch. She asked, “How can we get her out of the gutter?” She was worried about her. The Queen sometimes found it hard to cope with Princess Margaret. She wondered, “What am I going to do with her?”’
One of the Queen’s most reliable biographers, Professor Ben Pimlott, revealed that there were a number of meetings concerning
Margaret involving No 10. At one point, a special Whitehall paper suggested that Princess Margaret be taken off the Civil List, and, like Prince Harry in our own day, relieved of her Royal duties. But the Queen remained loyal.
‘The Queen was very resistant to this,’ recalled a close aide of Jim Callaghan, who was Prime Minister at the time.
Throughout all these ups and downs, the two sisters remained fondly protective of one another.
Over the years, they had shared so much, not least their unique Royal childhoods.
The more rackety Princess Margaret’s life became, the more she felt the need for her elder sister’s reassurance.
In his fascinating new autobiography, the writer A.N. Wilson remembers asking Princess Margaret if, like many people, she ever dreamt about the Queen.
Margaret replied that she had a recurring nightmare: she had done something wrong, but could not remember what it was.
She only knew she was out of favour with her sister.
‘When I wake in the morning after this dream, I have to ring her up. She is usually at work when I ring, so all I need to do is to hear her voice. “Hello.” And I say, “Hello” and hang up. Then all is right with the world again.’
‘Margaret got away with everything – she was never reprimanded’ ‘Even their grandmother treated Margaret as the also-ran’
Ma’am Darling: 99 Glimpses Of Princess Margaret, by Craig Brown, is published by 4th Estate.