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

by Leslie Carroll

  Years later, Townsend himself admitted that the marriage wouldn’t have worked, because he could not have compensated for what the princess would have sacrificed to wed him.

  Following Margaret’s formal renunciation of their relationship, Townsend embarked on a trip around the world, while Her Royal Highness threw herself headlong into London’s social whirl. John Moynihan, a reporter whose beat encompassed the local boîtes, recalled the princess’s “zest for whisky at various nightclubs . . . her eyes became hard as coins as she dragged on her long cigarette holder. But no assistance was needed as she rose imperiously for the drive back to Buck House, escorted by a number of doting male friends. . . .”

  Perhaps to assuage her broken heart, Margaret accepted a marriage proposal from one of these chinless wonders, Billy Wallace. Right after she said yes, Wallace set off for the Bahamas, where he proved to be the upper-class twit everyone thought he was. He enjoyed a romantic fling while on holiday and when he returned home he told his royal fiancée all about it. Margaret promptly kicked Wallace to the curb.

  As the 1950s flew by, rumors began to circulate about the princess’s little attitude problem. Lord Mountbatten asserted that Margaret had inherited her mother’s “sardonic and really quite bitchy” personality, but not the queen mum’s “common touch, her genuine interest in and enjoyment of people.” The princess had become a roving international ambassador for the monarchy, but many people noticed her rudeness; instead of gritting her teeth and thinking of England, she had a way of behaving imperiously or churlishly whenever she found an event tedious or not focused enough on her.

  An unnamed courtier’s wife summed up Her Royal Highness’s unpredictable moods, observing that Margaret was “nice one day and nasty the next. She was the only one who would come up to you at a party and really talk to you—but the next day she’d cut you. She antagonized her friends with her tricks, being horrid to their wives. She’d come up to a man and get him to dance with her, cutting out his wife. . . .” Others commented on her way of encouraging a person to call her “Margaret,” but the next time they’d encounter her and use her Christian name, she’d freeze them out with one of her legendary regal stares.

  Margaret’s reputation for creating scandals had by then reached global proportions. The caption of a cartoon published in a German magazine depicted an angry Queen Elizabeth confronting her younger sister and exclaiming, “Say, Margaret, couldn’t you do something to distract the horrid world press from our Suez débâcle?”

  Margaret’s selfishness garnered media attention after she made only the briefest and most begrudging of appearances at her sister’s tenth wedding anniversary on November 20, 1957. A royal watcher, who must have been a stranger to sibling rivalry, particularly among the high and mighty, found her rudeness “inexplicable.” Perhaps Margaret could not stomach yielding the spotlight to anyone, least of all her sister. Or perhaps she blamed the queen for her (nonetheless unavoidable) lack of support regarding the Townsend affair.

  Peter Townsend stepped back into Margaret’s life in the spring of 1958, and romantic Britons hoped the match would be rekindled, although Buckingham Palace denied all rumors of a formal reunion. Dogged by the press and pressured by the palace, the star-crossed couple met at Clarence House, but it was clear that dreams of a second chance were hopeless. Townsend would write in his memoirs, “Public curiosity killed our long and faithful attachment. That evening, Princess Margaret and I, warmly, affectionately, said adieu.”

  A chapter in Margaret’s life had closed for good. She would not see Townsend again for another thirty years.

  In October 1959, while she was at Balmoral, the princess received a letter from her forty-five-year-old former beau: He was getting married to a nineteen-year-old Belgian heiress, Marie-Luce (nicknamed “Mosquito”) Jamagne. Margaret’s reaction was swift. As if she had flipped a switch, she suddenly agreed to wed her man-of-the-moment, the society photographer Antony Armstrong-Jones. Years later, she confided to Conservative MP Jonathan Aitken, “I received a letter from Peter in the morning and that evening I decided to marry Tony. It was no coincidence.” Margaret took Townsend’s news very hard. Evidently, after they had been compelled to end their relationship, the pair had made an unrealistic pact never to wed anyone else. After receiving Peter’s letter informing her of his engagement, the princess sent him a scathing reply, rebuking him for breaking their agreement.

  That December, as Townsend quietly wed his teenage bride, Margaret and Armstrong-Jones became formally engaged. Tony, as she called her fiancé, gave the princess a ring in the shape of a flower: a ruby surrounded by diamonds. The pair had met in February 1958 at a dinner party hosted by a mutual friend, and their relationship did not become serious until that spring. The same age as Margaret, Armstrong-Jones was five-foot-seven, sandy haired, slender, and handsome. He was the son of a barrister and the nephew of a famous theatrical set designer, Oliver Messel.

  Tony belonged to London’s bohemian set. Most of his friends were in the fields of theater, fashion, and advertising; several of them were gay (including his uncle Oliver). Perennial royal watcher Nigel Dempster wrote in his column that according to Margaret she was able to keep her affair with Armstrong-Jones a secret for so many months “because no one believed he was interested in women.”

  But Margaret loved to deliberately shock people. One of her main reasons for choosing to wed Armstrong-Jones was because, as she told the film director Jean Cocteau, “Disobedience is my joy!”

  Looking back on her relationship with Tony in the late 1950s, Margaret mused, “He was such a nice person in those days. He understood my job and pushed me to do things. In a way, he introduced me to a new world.” They shared common artistic interests and she felt “daring” in his company. And although Tony’s background was rather posh (he’d attended Eton and Cambridge), he could hardly be described as an “upper-class twit.”

  The royal romance was kept discreetly under wraps. Margaret visited Tony’s Chelsea flat in Pimlico Road only when there was a group of people present, and the press wasn’t even primed for the scent of a princess dating a photographer—a man so many rungs beneath her on the social ladder. The lovers enjoyed private trysts at Tony’s “white room,” his studio in Rotherhite Street, where the windows faced the Thames and, at high tide, the swans would swim right up to the glass.

  According to one of Tony’s friends, what the couple had most in common was “sex, sex, sex. Theirs was a terribly physical relationship, they couldn’t keep their hands off each other, even with other people present. . . .”

  Armstrong-Jones obtained the queen’s formal consent to wed her sister in January 1960. Interestingly, it was his friends and family who saw the royal match as a mésalliance. Tony’s father expressed his apprehensions, and the photographer’s pal Jocelyn Stevens thought the princess was too imperious and indulged and Tony too independent and assertive for their union to ever be a success.

  Of course, it could have been sour grapes, but Cecil Beaton, the foremost society photographer of the day (who may have surmised that Armstrong-Jones would have a lock on all the royal commissions after his marriage), was rather ungenerous to his professional rival. Beaton tartly characterized Tony as “extremely nondescript, biscuit-complexioned, ratty and untidy . . . the young man is not worthy of this strange fluke [of] fortune, or misfortune, and because he is likeable and may become unhappy makes one all the sorrier.”

  Right.

  The celebrated writer Kingsley Amis had his own tuppence to insert regarding the match: Such a symbol of the age we live in, when a royal princess, famed for her devotion to all that is most vapid and mindless in the world of entertainment, her habit of reminding people of her status whenever they venture to disagree with her in conversation, and her appalling taste in clothes, is united with a dog-faced tight-jeaned fotog of fruitarian tastes such as can be found in dozens in any pseudo-arty drinking cellar in fashionable-unfashionable London. They’re made for each other.r />
  Tony’s wedding attendants had to be vetted by the palace. His first choice for best man had been convicted for a homosexual offense eight years earlier and therefore had to be eliminated from consideration. His fallback was also gay. Tony finally ended up with a best man he barely knew, but whose sexual proclivities passed muster with Buckingham Palace—a wildly hypocritical move, as the royals routinely hobnobbed with Noël Coward, the queen’s couturier Norman Hartnell, Tony’s uncle Oliver Messel—and Cecil Beaton.

  Armstrong-Jones’s rarefied status went to his head immediately. The princess was appalled when she caught him ordering her staff about imperiously, prefacing his demands with such flip phrases as, “Do be a darling, and . . .”

  The royal wedding took place on May 6, 1960, yet the event was a bit of an embarrassment, as one by one the RSVPs from foreign royals had arrived in the negative from all but Queen Ingrid of Denmark, whose mother had been a British princess. The bride’s gown was designed by Armstrong-Jones and created by Norman Hartnell. One of the loveliest wedding dresses to be worn by a twentieth-century luminary, it was deceptively simple: long-sleeved, with a V-neck and a full skirt, constructed from thirty yards of white silk organza. The only sparkle came from the famous Poltimore tiara; its original owner was the daughter of the eighteenth-century playwright, tavern wit, and MP Richard Brinsley Sheridan.

  The wedding cost £25,000 (upward of $715,000 today), £16,000 (over $458,000) of which was spent on decorations to line the route from Buckingham Palace to Westminster Abbey. The six-week honeymoon would cost another £40,000 (more than $1.1 million in today’s economy).

  The couple honeymooned on the royal yacht Britannia. Halfway through the voyage they anchored off the Caribbean island of Mustique, which Margaret’s friend Colin Tennant was developing into a pleasure paradise for the titled, entitled, and famous. He offered Margaret a parcel of land as a wedding present. Worth £15,000, it was far more than Tony could ever have spent on his wife, and Tennant’s largesse made the photographer distinctly uncomfortable. Perhaps it was the reason Armstrong-Jones had no desire to revisit Mustique no matter how much his wife adored it.

  It was a good thing for the extravagant Margaret that her Civil List income increased substantially upon her marriage. She would now receive £15,000 annually (over $429,000 in today’s economy). Upon their return to London the newlyweds moved into one of the state apartments in Kensington Palace; but the princess didn’t find it grand or comfortable enough; so £6,000 (nearly $172,000 today) was spent on renovations, spearheaded by Armstrong-Jones.

  The huge redecorating expenses sent shock waves through Buckingham Palace; and Tony’s casual behavior—in his own home—scandalized the Kensington Palace staff. The photographer ate breakfast in his shirtsleeves or popped into the kitchen and ordered the servants about. Of course, they were determined to pretend that Tony didn’t exist, bringing a breakfast tray to the couple set with a single teacup, or complaining that he had made off with the car or raided the pantry, as though he were a delinquent teen. His own staff believed that he went out of his way to be difficult and rude to them. Perhaps the root of the problem, as one unnamed insider commented, was that “Tony may have been the head of the house, but he was not the head of the household.”

  As a measure of the Windsors’ continued disapproval of the marriage (even though the queen had given the couple her permission to wed), none of the royal family ever visited. Their dissatisfaction increased when Margaret decided that after spending £6,000 on renovating apartment 10 in Kensington Palace, the residence remained unsatisfactory, necessitating the move to a significantly larger flat, which they redecorated to the tune of another £85,000 (nearly $2.5 million today).

  Margaret had to have been footing the bill, which was exponentially larger than her income. Armstrong-Jones had found himself out of a job when he married her, a situation that would soon become intolerable for his ambitious and aggressive personality. He was now more or less a kept man, emasculated by his role as the princess’s permanent escort. But when he was finally permitted to garner some design assignments, even if they were in an advisory capacity, he was publicly mocked for receiving them solely because of his lofty marital status. The ridicule hurt all the more because he was a genuine talent who had enjoyed a fairly lucrative and prestigious career prior to his nuptials.

  Tony was elevated to the peerage during the spring of 1961 while Margaret was pregnant with their first child. Queen Elizabeth created him Earl of Snowdon, and Viscount Linley of Nymans. The first title was an invented one, a nod to Armstrong-Jones’s Welsh ancestry, as Snowdon is the highest peak in Wales. Nymans had been a Messel family estate in Sussex. The viscountcy was a courtesy title that the earl would eventually pass to his son. Margaret would thereafter be styled Her Royal Highness The Princess Margaret, Countess of Snowdon.

  She gave birth to a son, David Albert Charles, on November 3, 1961, and the boy inherited his father’s courtesy title at birth. The Snowdons’ daughter, Lady Sarah Armstrong-Jones, was born on May 1, 1964. Both of Margaret’s children were delivered by caesarean section, derided by the princess’s biographer Tim Heald as the “too posh to push” system of childbirth.

  Just a few months after their son was born, the Snowdons became snowbirds, leaving the infant with a nanny and departing dreary London for the Caribbean sun. Margaret received hate mail calling her “callous, selfish, and perverse” for leaving her little one so soon. The princess’s commandeering of the entire first-class cabin of a BOAC jet just for herself, her husband, and pair of domestics did not sit well with the public, either. Lady Jebb, the wife of the British ambassador in Paris, did not mince words when it came to Margaret’s behavior abroad and her sense of entitlement: Princess Margaret seems to fall between two stools. She wishes to convey that she is very much the Princess, but at the same time she is not prepared to stick to the rules if they bore or annoy her, such as being polite to people. She is quick, bright in repartee, wanting to be amused, all the more so if it is at someone else’s expense. This is the most disagreeable side to her character. . . .

  As the swinging sixties swept through Britain, Margaret became mod, sporting heavy eye makeup and miniskirts. The Snowdons were the kingdom’s hot young glamour couple, frequenting nightclubs, theaters, and the ballet, and jet-setting to exotic locales. But with her regal hauteur, icy stare, tidy coiffure, and Windsor “cut-glass” accent, Margaret never let anyone forget that she was a princess. She was not quite as progressive as people thought; for example, when someone dared to curse in her presence, she looked as if she had smelled something unpleasant.

  By the summer of 1965, although the Snowdons were off on an Italian holiday, the royal marriage was headed for the rocks. Margaret’s biographer Theo Aronson surmises that the relationship had begun to sour as early as 1964, before their daughter, Sarah, was born. Never happy walking a few paces behind his wife despite the perquisites of their lifestyle, the earl griped, “I am not a member of the royal family, I am married to a member of the royal family.” He was not cut out for the rigidity of a lifestyle steeped in centuries of unbreakable tradition. And the spouses had entirely different views on child rearing; just like Charles and Diana, the royal wanted a very oldschool upbringing for their offspring, while the commoner wanted the kids to experience a more casual and informal childhood.

  An element of commonality that had brought Margaret and Tony together—a mutual self-centered arrogance—was what contributed to tearing them asunder. Neither partner was accustomed to capitulation or compromise. Snowdon would snap at Margaret if she entered one of his rooms without knocking first. She didn’t understand his sulks or his need to return to his artistic milieu, viewing his desires for self-expression and self-worth as a personal rejection of her. As her husband accepted increasingly frequent photography assignments that took him to farflung parts of the globe, the princess, known for her positively Hanoverian amorous appetites, inherited from her libidinous forebears, found her
self oversexed and underappreciated.

  In Snowdon’s absence, the princess began to indulge in extramarital affairs. Did anyone dare to mention the inconsistencies between Margaret’s formal renunciation of Group Captain Peter Townsend based on her rock-solid faith and the Anglican Church’s views on the indissolubility of marriage, and her own adulterous flings?

  Her first lover, Anthony Barton, was their daughter’s godfather and a former school chum of her husband’s. The paramours’ discretion was commendable until Margaret phoned Barton’s wife to confess everything. According to a family friend of the Bartons’, the princess “obviously enjoyed the role of femme fatale. She is a typical Leo—devious, destructive, and jealous.” When Snowdon found out about the affair he was quick to forgive his old friend, but Mrs. Barton was far less cheerful about the matter.

  By the final months of 1966 the thirty-six-year-old princess was miserable, guzzling Famous Grouse and drunkdialing her friends for a pity party. Margaret entered the King Edward VII Hospital for Officers for a “checkup” early in 1967, but according to Theo Aronson it was reported that she had deliberately overdone the liquor and pills and had checked herself into the hospital to dry out.

  While Snowdon was on a photographic assignment in Japan, Margaret embarked on a torrid affair with thirtyfive-year-old Robin Douglas-Home. Robin was the son of Margaret Spencer, wife of the 6th Earl Spencer—the future Princess Diana’s grandmother. Divorced, a heavy drinker, and an equally avid gambler, he was a pianist in popular nightclubs and an advertising executive in the London office of J. Walter Thompson, where a colleague described him as “. . . a nice enough chap, but a lazy bastard.”

  Robin wrote effusive love letters to his royal mistress, and Margaret responded, though with less ardor than her swain. Only a month after their romance began, the press reported the demise of the Snowdons’ marriage.