The Princess Who Nearly Destroyed The Monarchy
Princess Margaret was always a troubled royal for the firm, and this didn’t end with her tragic death. Just two years after her passing, a report came out and exposed the palace’s most shameful secret. She might have grown up in the shadow of her older sister, Queen Elizabeth II, but she didn’t stay that way. By the time she was a teenager, the young, beautiful, and fashionable princess was the talk of the town, and not always for the right reasons.
When Margaret was just five years old, her family had a transformation of fortunes. Her uncle was King Edward VIII, but then infamously abdicated in order to marry Wallis Simpson. Suddenly, Margaret’s father, George, was King, and she was second in line to the throne after her older sister. Growing up as second in line to the throne would turn anyone into a spoiled brat, but this went double for Princess Margaret. Her father, King George, loved his respectable elder daughter Elizabeth, but he absolutely doted on Margaret, claiming that while Elizabeth was his pride, Margaret was his joy. People around the British court started to notice just how much the King let Margaret get her way, even allowing the 13-year-old girl to stay up past her bedtime and attend lavish royal dinners.
As Margaret entered her 20s, she was one of the most stunning women in the royal family, and her good looks and pedigree got her into the most exclusive circles and clubs in London. Before long, the press dubbed her and her fashionable group of aristocratic friends “the Margaret set.” While out on the town, Princess Margaret gained a reputation as the world’s most eligible bachelorette. Her little black book was a veritable who’s who of Britain’s gentry, from millionaire heir Billy Wallace to future Canadian Prime Minister John Turner. Yet, as it turned out, Margaret only had eyes for one man.
One constant presence in Margaret’s life was her royal aide, Group Captain Peter Townsend, a dashing war hero more than 15 years her senior and married. Apparently, the vivacious Margaret wasn’t going to let a little thing like holy matrimony or their ridiculous age difference get in the way of having her fun with Townsend. She flirted with him shamelessly, even once demanding he carry her up the stairs after a party, all in full view of her father, King George VI. But harmless fun quickly turned into dangerous liaisons.
In 1947, Margaret’s family finally let her come with them on a state visit abroad, her first ever to South Africa, and Peter Townsend was to be her chaperone for the visit. For all that Princess Margaret was determined to seduce Peter Townsend, he wasn’t exactly sold on the idea at the beginning, and he treated her very distantly and firmly. According to Townsend himself, it was four years later when he realized he was in love with Margaret. Even so, Townsend was still very much married, and it would take an absolute tragedy to bring them together.
Margaret’s father, King George, died on February 6th, 1952. Princess Margaret was incredibly close with her father, and his passing crushed her. It was already shaping up to be a stressful year, but then Peter Townsend had to throw her another curveball. The palace aide went and divorced his wife. Thrown together by the respective losses in their personal lives, Townsend and Princess Margaret soon began seeing each other in secret, and he proposed in April 1953, just over a year after the King’s passing. Margaret, who had been lovesick for Peter right from the get-go, gave him an ecstatic yes in response.
As a divorced man, Townsend’s betrothal to Margaret presented a catastrophe for the monarchy. Afraid of the stir it would cause at the beginning of her reign, Elizabeth insisted that Margaret wait for a year and keep the relationship a secret until after her coronation. Margaret and Townsend tried their best to keep their love under wraps, but on Coronation Day, chaos broke out. In a casual, thoughtless moment during the ceremony, Margaret fondly picked some lint off of Townsend’s coat, and the press went wild. Suddenly, seemingly every newspaper in the UK started weighing in on Margaret’s princess-and-pauper relationship with this civilian.
Margaret’s royal brood was totally torn over her romance. Elizabeth’s husband, Prince Philip, detested the idea of Townsend becoming part of the family, and he let everyone know it. Elizabeth herself just wanted her sister to be happy, yet felt bound to tradition and couldn’t say yes to the union. Instead, they came up with a desperate plan to buy Margaret more time. Elizabeth begged her sister to wait another couple of years until she turned 25. At this time, she would no longer need to ask the Monarch for permission to marry. If her infatuation with Townsend lasted, she could wed him then, all while Elizabeth avoided a crisis. It was supposed to be the perfect solution.
In reality, it was a complete disaster. For one, Margaret and Townsend had to separate during this time, and many courtiers hoped that absence would make their hearts grow weaker. During the entire time that they were supposed to be apart, the pair were still secretly meeting. On August 21st, 1955, Princess Margaret turned 25, and everyone in Britain noticed. Hundreds of reporters swarmed Balmoral Castle, thirsting for any drop of news. Months later, on October 12th, Peter Townsend returned back to England, this time as Margaret’s official suitor. For the next few weeks, the Princess and the Group Captain courted each other at various dinners around town, all while the entire nation held their breath to see what Margaret would do.
After weeks of speculation, no betrothal had yet materialized, and that’s when Margaret dropped an absolute bombshell. On October 31st, she released an official statement declaring, “I have decided not to marry Group Captain Peter Townsend.” After such a whirlwind romance, the populace was flabbergasted and at a loss for her reasons, but we now have an idea what they were. Although some aspects of the scandal remain a mystery, one of them is very clear: Margaret didn’t think she could live as a civilian. One way or another, marrying Townsend would mean giving up her royal allowance, and they simply couldn’t live on the money he took in.
After a short-lived engagement to her old friend Billy Wallace, Margaret met bohemian photographer and man-about-town Antony Armstrong-Jones at a dinner party in 1958. On the surface, he represented everything she was looking for in a man: dashing, daring, and bound to anger the establishment. They fell into a secret romance. Then, like everything Margaret did, it moved too fast. In October 1959, Armstrong-Jones got down on one knee and proposed to Princess Margaret, and for the third time in her life that we know of, Margaret said yes to her suitor. As it turned out, she actually accepted the proposal the day after finding out that Townsend was planning to marry a beautiful Belgian woman named Marie-Luce Jamagne. It was a desperate revenge on Margaret’s part.
On May 6th, 1960, Princess Margaret finally walked down the aisle, tying the knot with Armstrong-Jones in a lavish ceremony at Westminster Abbey. If you looked closely at Margaret’s wedding ceremony, you might have noticed a disturbing absence. Almost no foreign royals attended. They refused to accept Margaret’s marriage to a common photographer, and only Queen Ingrid of Denmark was a noble guest that Margaret wasn’t directly related to.
The newlyweds soon became the respectable-sounding Countess and Earl of Snowdon. By 1964, they also had two children, David and Sarah, but behind the scenes, it was falling apart. Their marriage was a total mismatch of personalities and goals. When it came to relationships, Armstrong-Jones was a workaholic, and Margaret often complained that he was never around and that she was constantly lonely. On top of that, Antony, who was openly bisexual, had no qualms about going after nearly every bedroom prospect that came his way. Although Armstrong-Jones had a steady stream of male lovers and mistresses behind Margaret’s back, in the 1960s she embarked on a string of extramarital affairs of her own, and there are rumors she even fell into the beds of celebrities like Mick Jagger and Warren Beatty.
In 1967, Margaret engaged in a brief affair with Robin Douglas-Home, a nephew of a former British Prime Minister. However, she later denied everything and insisted their relationship was platonic until, that is, she was caught red-handed. Her love letters to him came out, spilling the beans and her lies to the world. Robin Douglas-Home never really recovered from their breakup, and Margaret’s denials probably did nothing to comfort him. Then, just 18 months after their romance fell apart, he fell into a deep depression and took his own life.
Around this time, Margaret’s famous wit took on a very mean streak, reflecting her own bitter personal life. Once, while she was at a fashionable party in New York, a fellow guest asked the princess how the Queen was doing. She said, “Which one? My sister, my mother, or my husband?”
By the late 1960s, Princess Margaret’s marriage to Armstrong-Jones had turned into a tragedy, and she had very little in the way of a support system. Sadly, her family often took her husband’s side in their squabbles, thinking that Margaret was just being dramatic again. Desperately lonely and almost entirely estranged from her husband, Princess Margaret started what she called a loving friendship with a man named Roddy Llewellyn, a landscape gardener 17 years younger than her. She even invited him for several visits to her private island of Mustique, and that’s maybe where it became more than just a friendship.
Her relationship with Roddy quickly turned dangerous. In the winter of 1976, a notorious photograph hit the British tabloids. The snap showed Princess Margaret and her supposed boy toy Roddy Llewellyn sunning themselves on the beach. Politicians immediately and cruelly denounced Margaret as a floozy and a royal parasite. But the photo’s real damage was to her marriage. With the jig now truly up, Margaret and Antony finally sought a separation, officially divorcing in 1978.
By the end of her life, many thought that Princess Margaret became a parody of herself. The caliber of her lovers plummeted, and her crudeness only grew with her disturbing drinking habits. Another one of Margaret’s more scandalous alleged lovers at this time includes the gangster John Bindon. Shockingly, Bindon claimed they embarked on an affair after he awed the princess with a lewd but admittedly impressive party trick: balancing five half-pint glasses upon a particular part of his body. Mhm, yes, that part.
Perhaps the greatest sadness at the end of Princess Margaret’s time was how all her fair-weather friends left her one by one. Still, she also pushed them away. The diarist Sir Roy Strong wrote that Margaret became tiresome, spoiled, idle, and irritating during her later years, and he complained that she has no direction, no overriding interest. “All she likes is young men.”
Eventually, Margaret’s lifestyle caught up with her. In addition to her other unsavory habits, the princess was also a near-lifelong smoker, having started when she was just 15 years old. By the 1980s, she needed to have her left lung removed, a procedure that eerily recalled her father’s demise. In the 1990s, the princess began to go downhill fast. She suffered a series of strokes and also scalded her feet in a bathroom mishap, leaving her bedridden or wheelchair-bound for months on end. By 2001, she was partially paralyzed and had difficulty swallowing.
On February 9th, 2002, Princess Margaret died in King Edward VII’s Hospital at the age of 71 after her long and difficult battle with multiple illnesses, following a decline that looked much like her father’s. She also died just three days after the 50th anniversary of King George VI’s own death.
Even in death, Princess Margaret couldn’t escape the horror show that was her marriage with Antony Armstrong-Jones. In 2004, a vicious report came out claiming that just three weeks into his marriage with Margaret, Armstrong-Jones fathered an illegitimate daughter with a mistress he’d been seeing during his royal engagement. At first, Armstrong-Jones vehemently denied paternity, despite the fact that the girl, Polly Fry, claimed she had done a DNA test and that he was most certainly the father. Four years later, he finally admitted that the story was true.
Late into Princess Margaret’s life, people still wondered if she continued to carry a torch for her dashing Group Captain Peter Townsend. After all these years, even after their official announcement and split, the pair saw each other on and off, though they swore it was only in a friendly capacity. In reality, we may not know the full truth until much later. The palace will release their love letters 100 years after Margaret’s birth in 2030. So yeah, save the date.
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