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Literary Review
The younger sister
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CHRISTOPHER HURST reviews the life of Princess Margaret, who died on February l0.
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WHY do we bother about them? Aren't they basically just ordinary people like the rest of us, but in an extraordinary situation? I am referring to our Royal Family, who have recently come under the spotlight yet again with the death, aged 71, of Princess Margaret. Great expanses of newsprint have been devoted to the well-known facts about her, the intelligent, beautiful younger daughter of the king (George VI) who was forced on to the throne in l936 against all probability and against his own inclination. She was free of many of the burdens and responsibilities of her older sister, but still ineluctably compelled to obey the code of royal duty when, like her uncle Edward VIII, she had to face the choice between marrying the person she loved and giving up her royal privileges. Unlike him, she followed the path of duty and in consequence her later life was blighted. That is how the story was presented, and probably, more or less how it really was.
That for some of them aristocratic breeding dies hard was amply shown when the Queen Mother, aged l0l and extremely frail, had herself flown by helicopter from the country to Windsor to attend Margaret's funeral. She clearly felt, and wanted to show, that to be absent from her daughter's funeral on doctor's orders, when she has very little life left to preserve, would be shameful. "If it's the last thing I do, I'm going to do it," she may have said. The cliché that we don't expect to live to bury our own children was freely aired; perhaps it was forgotten that the previous Queen Mother outlived three of her five sons.
Margaret, especially later in her life, received much unfavourable publicity. Attention was drawn to her large income from the "Civil List", as it is called, and her spacious apartment in the royal commune, Kensington Palace, compared to the rarity of her royal engagements: opening or visiting schools, health centres, factories etc; laying foundation stones; inspecting regiments, attending gala performances, and so on. She spent long periods holidaying in her villa on the small Caribbean island privately owned by one of her friends, Mustique. And in the last decade her health quickly and visibly declined, helped by heavy smoking and alcohol consumption. In l999 she had the indignity of scalding her feet in the bath on Mustique. Her final appearance before the cameras on the Queen Mother's l0lst birthday, when she was in a wheelchair, heavily muffled in spite of the summer weather, wearing dark glasses and her face bloated, shocked the public. She had already suffered two strokes.
It is for her ill-starred love life that Margaret will be best remembered. Since marrying other royalty is now all but impossible, it was expected when she first "came out" that a suitable match would appear from among the small coterie of heirs to great titles and estates in Britain. But she had already tasted the fruit of the forbidden tree. Soon after the end of the war George VI appointed as his equerry a much-decorated air ace, Group Captain Peter Townsend. He was the epitome of the tall, dark, handsome officer, and he was l5 years her senior. Since she was always said to be closely attached to her father, perhaps the fact that Townsend was his protégé and almost as much his generation as hers was an added attraction, but this is only speculation.
The royals are an extended family, with not only various uncles, aunts and cousins who frequently see each other, but also a swarm of ladies in waiting, secretaries, military aides and other courtiers. So possibly the ripening friendship between Margaret and the dashing equerry was not at first considered anything out of the ordinary. After all, she was still very young, and any unsuitable infatuation would doubtless pass. It had to pass, because Townsend had "been through the divorce courts" — as the "innocent party" (i.e. his wife had left him), but for a royal this mitigating factor made no difference. No divorcee would have been allowed at court at all in the previous reign (George V), but by l945, after the upheavals of a great war, certain old social barriers and prejudices had been relaxed.
But one area where they had not been relaxed, and have not even to this day, is the area of religion. The Church of England still does not sanction remarriage of divorcees — i.e. they cannot be remarried using the full religious rite, though their civil marriages can be blessed by the church, and they can be admitted to communion. There are moves afoot to alter this, and unofficially it happens all the time, but it is not official; and the last person for whom it will ever become official is the "Supreme Head" of the church (since Henry VIII, the sovereign) and, by extension, those in close consanguinity with him or her.
This was the hardcore reason for getting rid of Edward VIII, although the unacceptability of a twice-divorced American social climber to our then very traditional society and the Commonwealth governments was a more powerful motive. When it came to Margaret in the l950s, the ground rules had not changed, but the circumstances were quite different, and the drama that unfolded need not have ended as it did. She was third in line to the throne, but she could only have succeeded if the Queen, Charles and Anne had all died in her lifetime.
But we need to go back a little. It was soon clear that a close attachment had grown between Margaret and Townsend, and it was thought wise to separate them by sending him as Air Attaché to the British Embassy in Brussels. This (unlike, say, a posting to New Delhi) was hardly going to damp the flames of a serious love affair, and of course it did not.
In the autumn of l955 the romance had gathered momentum to the point where they had either to marry or separate. The prime minister was Anthony Eden (a remarried divorcee), and his government's advice to the Queen was that Margaret could only be free to marry Townsend if a bill were passed through Parliament making her a private citizen and depriving her of her royal title and Civil List income. It is inconceivable that the Queen would not have provided her with substantial funds if this had happened, but she would, definitively, have retired into private life. It is now totally forgotten that something similar happened in the very different world of l9l4 when another popular Princess of the Blood, Patricia of Connaught, gave up her title and position for the same reason — and she married not a divorced commoner but the unmarried younger son of an earl (instead of a German or Scandinavian princeling).
Margaret opted to give up Townsend, and both married other partners a few years later. She represented her action, in a brief public announcement, as motivated by the Church's teaching that a Christian marriage is indissoluble. Townsend, in an autobiography, said that he could not bring himself to be the cause of Margaret losing her royal position. This has been seized upon by later commentators as the crux of the matter, and Margaret's claim of religious motivation (she was a religious person, and overtly so in the immediate post-Townsend years) dismissed as hypocritical. Those who knew her socially as she got older were sometimes exasperated by the way she mixed free and easy talk and behaviour with insistence on being treated with full regard to her royal status.
Townsend's subsequent second marriage was a success, but Margaret was not so fortunate. The man she married in l960, Antony Armstrong Jones, was in social and personality terms far more unsuitable as a royal consort than Townsend, but he had only had affairs and never been married, and that was all that mattered. Although, like Townsend, he came from what, in our decadent times, had become an acceptably high drawer in the social cabinet, he was a photographer, a media man on the borders of show business. In the wedding procession in Westminster Abbey, his father was accompanied by three women he had married — at different times. The "best man" originally chosen had to drop out at the last moment because he was being sued for divorce. The whole show was a bit rackety.
And when the fizz went out of the couple's passion for each other, they drifted apart and Margaret ended the marriage in the late l970s. Armstrong Jones married again, while she had a long and much-publicised affair with a man l7 years her junior. She continued to perform royal duties, but booze and nicotine eventually took their toll. It is a very sad story. Some have uncharitably suggested that even if she and Townsend had married, it would have foundered on her spoiled and wilful nature, but I reject this: it was undoubtedly real love, which does tend to call forth people's better natures, and would surely have withstood the normal vicissitudes of life. Above all, he was used to her world. One significant achievement of Margaret is that the two children born to her and Armstrong Jones have turned out well.
The Church of England's rules on the remarriage of divorcees have not changed, and even if they did, the Supreme Head of the Church, i.e. the sovereign, and his or her near heirs will be the last to benefit from any liberalisation — just as the captain is the last to take to the lifeboats when his ship is sinking. To pursue the maritime analogy, these rules remain like a dangerous reef just below the water's surface, ready to tear a hole in the hull of any ship that sails off course.
Email: hurst1@atlas.co.uk
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