It appears that she was also shockingly ill-educated-inexplicably, neither she nor her sister were given any serious schooling at all, which is astonishing, when one considers that Elizabeth’s namesake, Elizabeth I, was, in her era, among the most learned women in the known world. Margaret emerges as a chain-smoking, chain-drinking, man-eating monster with flashes of wit and unsteady charm. Photographed by Cecil Beaton, Vogue, November 1965 He was the polar opposite of Her Majesty the Queen’s marital choice-the lantern-jawed, impoverished Nordic beauty Prince Philip, who has defined stiff-upper-lip butchness, inter-family froideur, and political incorrectness through decades of unflinching service to queen and country. He art directed the spiky Medievalism of the Prince of Wales’s 1969 investiture at Caernarfon Castle the new aviary at London Zoo and, eventually, the groundbreaking Sunday Times Magazine. The sexually fluid Armstrong-Jones moved in bohemian circles and brought taste and up-to-the-minute élan to Britain’s consciously dowdy royal family. On the rebound from this slight, Margaret married the randy society photographer Antony Armstrong-Jones, whose uncle was the whimsical designer Oliver Messel and whose mother-a fashion plate muse of Charles James between the wars-became the Countess of Rosse on her second marriage. The dashing, dishy Group Captain was banished to Belgium, where he soon met and married a pretty local aristocrat a decade younger than Margaret. Edward VIII’s abdication, of course, had propelled his retiring younger brother George VI to the throne and the unwonted limelight and changed the destinies of Margaret and both Elizabeths forever. Following the scandal of the abdication, when her uncle, the Duke of Windsor, renounced the throne to marry the twice-divorced, hatchet-faced Baltimorean go-getter Wallis Simpson, the royal family, quietly dominated by the fey-slash-steely Queen Elizabeth (later Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother), were acutely conscious of projecting an image of propriety and conventional family life.
My grandmother was endlessly tut-tutting that poor Margaret had never been able to marry the man she really loved, Group Captain Peter Townsend, her father’s equerry and an older, divorced man.
I grew up fascinated by Princess Margaret’s harebell blue eyes, her Minnie Mouse white shoes that fractionally elevated her diminutive form, and her mallard raw-silk drawing room (revealed in a Sunday supplement story and, of course, the perfect backdrop to Those Eyes). In the rollicking, irresistible, un-put-downable Ma’am Darling, the brilliant British satirist Craig Brown takes as his fertile subject Princess Margaret Rose, the late sister of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.
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