Royal Pains: A Rogues' Gallery of Brats, Brutes, and Bad Seeds

by Leslie Carroll

  “She’s not a real rose yet, is she? She’s only a bud,” Elizabeth, who was four years Margaret’s senior, pertly told Lady Cynthia Asquith.

  Born into the royal House of Windsor, the girls were the daughters of the Duke and Duchess of York, the painfully shy and stammering second son of King George V, Prince Albert Frederick Arthur George (like his grandfather, known as “Bertie”), and Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, a petite and vivacious Scottish commoner.

  The sisters were brought up by a nanny, Mrs. Clara Knight, whom the girls nicknamed “Allah,” and a governess, a young Scotswoman named Marion Crawford. The Yorks were careful to raise their daughters in a nurturing environment, but the duchess saw no reason to inundate them with too much book learning. Good deportment, manners, the typical ladylike pursuits that were popular during Queen Victoria’s day, such as drawing and musicality, as well as plenty of fresh country air was all they needed in order to end up successfully married. After all, this system had worked splendidly for the duchess herself, as she was quick to tell any detractors.

  Marion Crawford, or “Crawfie,” as the girls called her, entered the Yorks’ household in 1932, when Margaret was all of two years old and Elizabeth was six. Crawfie was not short of opinions, although she was likely paid well not to have any. Her initial reaction to Margaret was that she “was an enchanting, doll-like child, even in the nursery . . . the baby everyone loves at sight. . . .”

  Crawfie’s first impressions of the York girls were later recorded for posterity in a scandalous tell-all published in 1950 titled The Little Princesses. She had not received permission from the queen—in fact Her Majesty had pointedly refused it; but Crawfie had gone behind her back and signed a deal with an American publisher. Her betrayal of the royal family became eponymous. From then on “doing a Crawfie” was the catchphrase for an act of perfidy or disloyalty. Several passages from Crawfie’s book were excised from the English edition, but it was too little and far too late. The former governess was evicted from her grace-and-favor cottage, her entry in Who’s Who was deleted, and when she died in 1987 no member of the royal family attended her funeral.

  However, it’s worth noting that none of Crawfie’s assertions regarding the princesses’ childhood has ever been refuted by the Windsors, even though they took umbrage at what she had written.

  Crawfie’s assessment of her charges was correct. While Elizabeth was diligent and steady, with a rock-solid conscientiousness when it came to duty, even as a toddler Margaret distinguished herself as the vivacious one. She was spoiled, undisciplined, and overindulged, especially by her father, who doted on her. Margaret loved to mock and mimic others; but because she had such a talent for it, she was never chastised for her unkind impressions, however amusing they might have been. Looking back on her childhood, with classic British understatement Margaret described herself as “rather chatty.” She was also skilled at deflecting attention from anything she deemed unpleasant, delaying her lessons by telling Crawfie about her “appalling dreams,” which she would then dramatically reenact for the governess.

  According to Crawfie, “Margaret was often naughty, but she had a gay bouncing way with her, which was hard to deal with.” Crawfie’s verbal portrait of Margaret paints her as talented, adorable, and winsome, but untidy, impetuous, and willful. In short, she was everything her older sister was not. The governess admitted that she had a difficult time schooling two girls with such different temperaments.

  Occasionally the sibling rivalry between the royal sisters would escalate into violence. The sainted Elizabeth would slap and the scrappy Margaret would bite. “Margaret always wants what I want,” Elizabeth would complain.

  Adolescence was even harder for Margaret than her childhood had been, because what was adorable, or excusable, from a pudgy little girl was far less charming in a coltish teen. Crawfie wrote, “It was to be her misfortune that the ordinary exploits of adolescence, the natural life of a healthy and vivacious girl, in her case made newspaper paragraphs, instead of being dismissed with a laugh.”

  The York family made a quaint and cozy foursome until the December 1936 abdication of Bertie’s older brother, Edward VIII, to wed his lover, the American divorcée Wallis Warfield Simpson. On December 10, the king signed the instrument of abdication, and with the stroke of a pen the girls’ forty-one-year-old father was no longer the Duke of York. He was now George VI of England. “Does that mean that you will be the next queen?” the four-year-old Margaret Rose asked her sister.

  “Yes, someday,” Elizabeth replied.

  “Poor you,” responded Margaret.

  Yet at their father’s coronation on May 12, 1937, little Margaret was envious of her older sister’s trappings. The girls were garbed identically in white lace dresses trimmed with silver bows, accessorized with silver slippers and white schoolgirl socks. Small, lightweight tiaras were perched on their blond heads. But Margaret was jealous that Elizabeth’s ermine-trimmed purple mantle was longer than hers. It took a good deal of convincing for her to accept that the reason was because Margaret, being four years younger, was so much smaller than Lilibet.

  After it became apparent that the girls would never have a brother and that Elizabeth would indeed inherit her father’s throne, the sisters began to be treated differently from each other. While the precocious and overindulged Margaret continued to enjoy a social life that few children her age ever would have had, increased emphasis was being placed on preparing Elizabeth for her future responsibilities.

  By the summer of 1939 grim reality was intruding on the Windsors’ fairy tale. Hitler was on the brink of invading Poland; war was inevitable because France and England were bound by an international treaty to defend Poland against foreign aggression.

  Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia signed a mutual nonaggression pact on August 21. Two days later, Princesses Margaret and Elizabeth were taken to Birkhall on the royal estate of Balmoral in Scotland. And on September 1, Hitler invaded Poland.

  At Birkhall, the princesses’ guardians tried to maintain a semblance of normality. The girls’ lessons continued, although Elizabeth’s constitutional history lessons with Sir Henry Marten, vice provost of Eton, were maintained through the mail. To do their part for the war effort, the young royals handed out tea and cakes to the volunteers.

  In the spring of 1940, after Hitler invaded Denmark, Norway, and the Netherlands, the queen instructed Crawfie to move the princesses to Windsor Castle. The girls remained there for the next five years, until the Second World War was over. Marten came up to Windsor to personally tutor Elizabeth. Naturally, Margaret wanted what her older sister had, but was curtly informed that it was “not necessary,” just another reminder that the differences between herself and Lilibet were vaster than the span of four calendar years. Margaret Rose (it was assumed) would never sit on the throne.

  Safely ensconced at Windsor for the duration of the war, the princesses rolled bandages and knitted socks for the troops. And to demonstrate that the royal family understood the necessity of doing their part, the princesses were given the same rationing coupons as all Britons, and Elizabeth wore her mother’s hand-me-down clothes, while Margaret ended up with her older sister’s castoffs.

  In 1940, the princesses performed in the annual Christmas panto, traditionally a charity event for the Queen’s Wool Fund. Elizabeth was skeptical about charging the suggested admission price of seven and sixpence (37½P or about fifty cents nowadays), not only because of the deprivations of wartime, but because the princesses were hardly professional-caliber performers. It was ten-year-old Margaret who understood the public-relations allure of being a royal. “Nonsense, they’ll pay anything to see us!” she insisted.

  The monarchs’ efforts to protect their daughters from the horrors of war resulted in the continued overindulgence of the already precocious Margaret. A visiting entertainer to Windsor Castle noticed that at the age of thirteen or fourteen the princess was already wearing high-heeled shoes with pointed toes. And a courtier�
��s daughter observed, “The King spoiled Princess Margaret dreadfully. She was his pet . . . she was always allowed to stay up to dinner at the age of thirteen and to grow up too quickly. The courtiers didn’t like her much—they found her amusing but . . . she used to keep her parents and everyone waiting for dinner because she wanted to listen to the end of a programme on the radio.”

  Already quite the entitled young lady, Margaret was also becoming aware of her own sexuality and its effect on members of the opposite sex. Even as a burgeoning adolescent she had a charming way of putting shy visiting servicemen at ease by “slipping her small hand into a large one,” and inviting the young men to “come and look at the gardens,” or asking, “Have you seen the horses?” according to one officer who witnessed her poise and self-assurance during those years.

  In the spring of 1944, Rebecca West, who was writing an article for the New York Times on Princess Elizabeth’s eighteenth birthday, interviewed both princesses. West found the heir apparent “too good, too sexless,” but she noticed fourteen-year-old Margaret’s “shrewd egotism” and observed, “When she grows up, people will fall in love with her as if she were not royal. . . .”

  The girls were at an age when every parent begins to worry; beaux were on the horizon. Elizabeth met her handsome cousin Prince Philip of Greece in 1939, when he was just an eighteen-year-old cadet. They kept in touch during the war years and Elizabeth maintained that she had fallen in love with him at first sight. Of course, she had been all of thirteen at the time, but even when she reached the age of eighteen in 1944 and was eager to wed the dashing Philip, the king and queen deemed her too young to marry.

  Another captivating war hero would enter the Windsors’ lives in 1944. But instead of leading to a royal wedding, his relationship with one of the princesses would foment a scandal of national proportions.

  Group Captain Peter Townsend, slender and sensitive, was a decorated RAF pilot for his bravery in the Battle of Britain. He’d had a wartime wedding in 1941 to a girl he barely knew, Rosemary Pawle. In 1944 at the age of twenty-nine he was made a temporary equerry in the service of George VI. His royal appointment came with a grace-and-favor cottage at Windsor, and he and Rosemary moved in with their two young sons.

  But Townsend’s job required him to travel with the king, leaving Rosemary stuck at Windsor with their children—and Townsend with plenty of time to become acquainted with the princesses. His first impression of the fourteen-year-old Margaret was that she was “unremarkable,” though he did notice that the color of her dark blue eyes was “like those of a tropical sea.” He gets points for poetry but none for grammar and syntax. Townsend was also impressed with the way the adolescent princess would make “some shattering wisecrack,” after which, “to her unconcealed delight, all eyes were upon her.” During family gatherings, although Margaret was not the most important person in the room, she was well aware of how to become the center of attention.

  Margaret turned fifteen in August 1945 and remained as keen as ever to distinguish herself from the rest of her immediate family. To begin with, she disdained her sister’s beloved Welsh Corgis; Margaret’s dog of choice was a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel named Rowley (an inside joke, as it was one of Charles II’s nicknames, as well as that of the “Merry Monarch’s” favorite stud horse). And Margaret never shared her family’s passion for the rusticity of Balmoral and the sportsmanlike pursuits of hunting and fishing that went with the territory. “She didn’t care for sporting women and thought shooting unwomanly,” Crawfie wrote in The Little Princesses. So while her older sister was out stalking, Margaret was smoking—through a soigné ivory cigarette holder that would become one of her trademarks. Her interests tallied with those of her fey and flamboyant uncle the Duke of Kent, with his penchant for theaters, ballet, jazz, and nightclubs.

  In February 1947, “the Firm,” as the royal family referred to themselves, was to have a final excursion as a tight-knit foursome: a three-month state visit to South Africa. Prince Philip had proposed to Elizabeth the previous autumn and she had joyfully accepted, but their engagement, at least for the time being, remained a secret.

  Despite Margaret’s enduring reputation as the “palace brat,” the sixteen-year-old princess turned out to be the acknowledged belle of the South African trip. Margaret looked older than her years, a sex kitten in bright red lipstick. Her appearance was a marked visual contrast to that of her reserved older sister, and her vibrant smile made everyone fall in love with her. But she couldn’t keep a lid on her urge to mimic others, particularly the portly wives of the African dignitaries, and no matter how mature she looked, she still giggled at them like a schoolgirl. Nevertheless, the experience whetted Margaret’s appetite for exotic, sun-drenched locales. That attraction, too, would set her apart from her sister and their parents.

  Elizabeth’s engagement to Prince Philip was officially announced on July 10, 1947, a few months after the royal family returned from South Africa. Since Margaret was generally acknowledged to be the more scintillating sister, Philip was teased by a friend for having “chosen the wrong girl. Margaret is much better looking.”

  Philip evidently retorted, “You wouldn’t say that if you knew them. Elizabeth is sweet and kind, just like her mother.” The obvious implication was chivalrously left hanging in the air.

  Margaret was a bridesmaid at the November 20 royal wedding, although she walked three paces ahead of the other seven attendants, to emphasize her rank. For the next several years, she would be regarded as one of the world’s most glamorous and eligible bachelorettes. The American press dubbed her “Britain’s No. One item for public scrutiny,” opining that “People are more interested in her than in the House of Commons or the dollar crisis.”

  And who can wonder why? Physically, she was the perfect package, a pocket Venus dressed in Christian Dior’s radical and exceptionally feminine “New Look,” accessorized with peep-toe platform heels. And when she wore Dior, ten million Englishwomen followed suit. At a whisper over five feet tall, Princess Margaret (she dropped the “Rose” in 1947 as well) was “perfectly made,” with a waspish twenty-threeinch waist and thirty-four-inch bustline. Young adulthood had mellowed the golden hair of her childhood to a rich shade of brown. Her mouth was a sensuous red pout; her eyes, as Group Captain Peter Townsend so rhapsodically observed, were deep pools of dark blue, and her kilowatt smile and vivacity made her the life of every party. Where the other females in her family were dowdy, Margaret was the epitome of chic.

  She was now mature enough to make official visits on her own. In February 1948, she toured Amsterdam, accompanied by equerry Peter Townsend. Tongues wagged as she danced every number with him at the ball hosted in her honor by the International Culture Center. Townsend would later write in his memoirs, “Without realizing it, I was being carried a little further from home, a little nearer the Princess.”

  Elizabeth’s younger sister was gaining a reputation as a party girl. Her coterie of friends, known as the “Margaret set,” consisted of the age’s society belles and young lordlings. Naturally, there was rampant speculation as to which of these “chinless wonders” she would marry. Shocking polite society at the age of nineteen, Margaret was caught smoking in a West End restaurant. Not only did her behavior cause a national commotion, but, predictably, it sparked a trend. Margaret’s cigarette habit, which she’d flaunted in a photograph taken at Balmoral when she was fifteen, would catch up with her in time, snuffing out her life when she was in her early seventies, although she came from a family of long-lived women.

  But heart and lung problems would arrive decades in the future, and might just as well have been light-years away for a teenage princess who was hell-bent on being the center of attention wherever she went. And Margaret was fully aware of her allure. She once dared a dance partner to “look into my eyes. Do you realize that you are looking into the most beautiful eyes in the world?” With a bit of self-mockery the princess admitted that she was parroting a newspaper quote about
her, but in many ways she believed her own press.

  The good-time royal enjoyed being shocking. Employing her more than modest musical talents, she once decided to entertain a dour Presbyterian minister with her rendition of one of the hit numbers from the 1943 Rodgers and Hammerstein musical Oklahoma! Brightly accompanying herself at the keyboard she belted out the innuendo-laden, sexually charged “I Cain’t Say No.”

  Margaret often stayed out late, returning to Buckingham Palace at four a.m. Her antics were gently indulged by the queen, who with perfect equanimity reminded Crawfie, “We are only young once . . . we want her to have a good time. With Lilibet gone, it is lonely for her here.” The only time Her Majesty was less inclined to leniency was on an occasion when Margaret planned to swan about in an evening gown with a deep décolletage. Displaying the royal cleavage just wouldn’t do, so the queen insisted that the dress be altered with the addition of a pair of straps.

  In 1950 Crawfie’s book The Little Princesses was published, and its text reinforced the public’s impression that Margaret was a mischievous and spoiled little hoyden as a child, and had become an inconsiderate, exacting, and untidy young lady. But there was another side to Margaret that the public seldom, if ever, saw: the nonbratty aspect of her personality. Like all members of the royal family, she was patron of a number of charities, philanthropic trusts, and good-works societies. And, surprisingly for a young woman intent on breaking as many rules as possible, the princess was also devoutly religious and keenly interested in theology. Consequently, she became well versed in Church doctrine and took it very seriously, never traveling without her Bible bound in white leather and blocked in gold.

  Group Captain Peter Townsend saw his own version of Margaret, asserting, “Behind the dazzling façade, the apparent self-assurance, you would find, if you looked for it, a rare softness and sincerity. She could make you bend double with laughing; she could also touch you deeply.” If those sound like the sentiments of a man in love, they were. The very married equerry had fallen hard for the boss’s daughter, describing her as “a girl of unusual, intense beauty, confined as it was in her short, slender figure and centered about large purple-blue eyes, generous, sensitive lips and a complexion as smooth as a peach. She was capable, in her face and her whole being, of an astonishing power of expression. It could change in an instant from saintly, almost melancholic, composure to hilarious, uncontrollable joy. She was by nature, generous, volatile. . . .”