Tea, Titles & Tiaras with Emily Darlow
Royal scandals are often remembered for one moment. Princess Margaret’s was not a moment at all, but rather a lifetime of moments some bigger than others but all equally as scandalous. A slow accumulation of frustration, compromise and quiet rebellion that unfolded in full public view and left the monarchy permanently changed.
As the younger sister of Elizabeth II, Princess Margaret lived close enough to the Crown to feel its authority but never close enough to direct it herself. She was glamorous, emotional, sharp tongued and deeply sensitive in an institution that prized restraint above all else.
Her life was not undone by one forbidden romance. It was shaped by timing, hierarchy and the unspoken rules of monarchy that allowed no room for softness in the wrong places.
Elizabeth and Margaret were raised in an unusually close family. Their father, George VI, was deeply affectionate and acutely aware of his daughters’ differences.
He is widely quoted as saying that Elizabeth was his strength, while Margaret was his joy, a distinction that neatly captured their contrasting personalities.
Elizabeth was conscientious, reserved and serious even as a child. Margaret was lively, musical and expressive, relishing attention and affection. Within a family that never expected to reign, those differences were complementary rather than divisive.
That balance shattered in 1936. When Edward VIII abdicated and George VI became king, Elizabeth became heir presumptive overnight. From that point on, the sisters’ lives diverged. Elizabeth was trained for duty. Margaret was not given a role at all, a gap that widened dramatically when Elizabeth ascended the throne in 1952 and Margaret, aged just 21, became the spare without a future of her own.
When Elizabeth became queen at 25, Margaret lost more than a sister, she lost equality. Their relationship remained affectionate, but it was permanently altered by hierarchy. Elizabeth was sovereign first and sister second, and Margaret understood that the Crown would always come between them.
Margaret carried royal status without authority, privilege without independence and constant visibility without agency. In modern terms, she had a platform but no power, and it was into this emotional vacuum that Peter Townsend entered.
Peter Townsend was a decorated war hero, former prisoner of war and equerry to King George VI. He had been present during the king’s illness and death, and his shared grief with Margaret drew them close.
Their relationship developed privately but unmistakably. The obstacle was not affection but doctrine. Townsend was divorced, and as head of the Church of England, the monarch could not sanction remarriage while a former spouse was still alive. Allowing the marriage would have required parliamentary approval, political courage and a willingness to test public opinion in the fragile early years of Elizabeth’s reign.
The government opposed the match while at the same time Commonwealth leaders were consulted and the Palace delayed a decision at every opportunity.
Elizabeth hesitated, caught between loyalty to her sister and responsibility to the Crown. Margaret was left waiting under intense public scrutiny.
In 1955, she announced she would not marry Townsend. The statement framed the decision as hers alone, but the reality was far more constrained. She could marry him only by surrendering royal duties, income and succession rights. She chose to remain royal, and the choice broke something fundamental.
After Townsend, Margaret’s behaviour shifted noticeably. She became more openly defiant, less careful about appearances and increasingly contemptuous of palace rules. She drank heavily, smoked constantly and surrounded herself with artists, aristocrats and celebrities who lived beyond royal convention.
The press labelled her difficult while Palace insiders labelled her unstable. Rarely acknowledged was that she had been offered no alternative life, no steadfast role and had been denied the opportunity to marry for love. Her rebellion was not random, but reactive, shaped by years of denial rather than indulgence.
Elizabeth absorbed a different lesson, Love could never be allowed to destabilise the Crown, a principle that would guide royal decision making for decades.
In 1960, Margaret shocked the establishment by marrying Antony Armstrong-Jones, a society photographer with no aristocratic background. It was framed as proof that the monarchy could modernise.
The wedding was glamorous and wildly popular, but the marriage itself was volatile almost from the start. Both were unfaithful, arguments were frequent and resentment simmered beneath the surface. They had two children, Sarah and David, but little stability.
Their divorce in 1978 made Margaret the first senior royal to do so in centuries. The Palace was horrified, but the precedent had been set, once again with Margaret absorbing the institutional fallout.
When Diana, Princess of Wales joined the royal family in the early 1980s, Princess Margaret is widely believed to have recognised the danger almost immediately. She understood, from bitter personal experience, what it meant to enter the monarchy with emotional openness, popular appeal and no real protection from the institution’s more unforgiving instincts.
Margaret had lived through the consequences of loving too visibly and pushing against expectations, and she is said to have warned Diana about the rigidity of royal life and the cost of stepping outside its carefully drawn boundaries. Where Margaret’s rebellion unfolded slowly over decades, Diana’s resistance was faster and played out under intense global scrutiny, but the underlying tension was strikingly similar.
In many ways, Margaret was the rehearsal the Palace failed to learn from, while Diana became the crisis it could no longer ignore. The monarchy would eventually adapt, but not before both women paid an extraordinary personal price.
By the 1980s and 1990s, Margaret’s health was failing. Years of smoking and drinking took their toll. She suffered multiple strokes, became increasingly frail and withdrew from public life.
Her relationship with Elizabeth softened with age, but it was never uncomplicated. They were sisters bound by affection, shared history and regret, but never equals. Margaret died in 2002 at the age of 71, just weeks before their mother. Her funeral was restrained, her life quietly closed.
Princess Margaret’s life is often reduced to excess or unhappiness, but viewed properly, it was neither frivolous nor inevitable. It was the result of an institution that prioritised continuity over compassion and left no room for those who did not fit neatly into its hierarchy.
She was too royal to live freely and too marginal to be meaningfully protected, indulged just enough to be contained but never trusted with real agency. Her emotional volatility was criticised without serious examination of the conditions that produced it, and her struggles were treated as personal failings rather than structural consequences.
And yet, without Margaret, the monarchy may never have evolved. Her experiences exposed the limits of royal rigidity and quietly paved the way for later acceptance of divorce, remarriage and personal choice. The Crown that refused to bend for her eventually softened for Charles III, for Camilla, and later for William and Catherine in ways that would have been unthinkable in Margaret’s youth.
Princess Margaret did not seek to undermine the monarchy, and despite everything, she remained loyal to it throughout her life. What she did, often unintentionally, was reveal the emotional cost of duty when it is demanded without flexibility or empathy, and the quiet cruelty of rules designed to protect institutions rather than the people living inside them.
Her father once described her as his joy, a reflection of the warmth and vitality she brought to family life, yet as the years passed, the monarchy increasingly treated her as a problem to be managed rather than a woman shaped by impossible circumstances. She lived loudly because she was never allowed to choose quietly, and she pushed boundaries because no other path was ever offered to her.
In the long history of royal scandals, Princess Margaret’s may be one of the most revealing of all, not because of who she loved or how she lived, but because her life shows exactly what happens when the Crown demands sacrifice without offering choice.
Until next time, keep the kettle warm and maybe whip up a batch of scones with jam and cream.