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piano-player, and loved dancing. With her gifts and her capricious, prima-donna
temperament, Margaret in another life might have made a successful musical comedy
star. She was also intelligent and intellectually starved. Her education had ceased when
Crawfie left, a fact which later in life she came to resent. Crawfie had tried to arrange
for Margaret to take advanced history lessons with Sir Henry Marten as Elizabeth had
done, but nothing had come of it. ‘Sir Henry was far from well,’ Crawfie had written,
‘[and] Margaret’s social life became more and more demanding.’ When she
remonstrated with the Queen about Margaret’s late nights, the Queen replied, ‘We are
only young once, Crawfie. We want her to have a good time. With Lilibet gone, it is
lonely for her here…’ ‘As always they could not bring themselves to cross her,’ Crawfie
commented.
She was very short – what is politely called petite (her grandmother, Queen Mary, had
earned her granddaughter’s dislike by repeatedly and tactlessly asking her, ‘When are
you going to grow?’) – but equally very slender, with her mother’s complexion and
cornflower-blue eyes – Margaret’s were larger, her best feature. Otherwise she had no
family traits; people remarked on her Semitic looks, her full, sensuous lips and the
contrast between her radiant pink and white complexion and her dark hair. At twenty,
Margaret was lovely, outshining her elder sister in looks and ability to fascinate men.
But Elizabeth, as usual, had everything Margaret wanted: a handsome husband with
whom she was very much in love and two adorable small children. She was happy, busy
and now had the all-important job of being Queen. ‘Poor you,’ Margaret had said at the
time of Uncle David’s abdication, when Elizabeth’s fate had been borne in on them both.
In her heart of hearts she did not mean it, however much she might protest to the
contrary. Hers was a complex personality; she could be warm, generous and kind, or
alternatively selfish and cruel. She was liked by the domestic staff but disliked by many
of the courtiers, who thought her spoiled and arrogant, and particularly by their wives,
who were not impressed when Margaret deliberately collared their husbands to dance
with her, leaving them on the sidelines. As one courtier’s wife said:
She had everything and then she destroyed herself. Her nature was to make everything go wrong. Nice one
day – nasty the next. She was the only one who would come up to you at a party and really talk to you – then
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… Then she’d be so tiresome in house
parties – keeping people up too late and buggering up evenings.
To Townsend, however, she revealed her best, more serious side. She was the most
intellectually and emotionally religious member of her family, even going so far as to
attend post-confirmation classes. It was a shared interest between Townsend and
herself. Looking back to those days he wrote of her:
What ultimately made Princess Margaret so attractive and lovable was that behind the dazzling façade, the
apparent self-assurance, you could 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. I was but one among many to be so moved.
There were dozens of others; their names were in the papers, which vied with each other, frantically and