Princess Margaret, who has died in hospital after suffering a third stroke aged 71, was the most striking illustration of the capricious and troubled relationship that beset the British and their monarchy in the second half of the 20th Century.
Not even the life of Diana, Princess of Wales, concentrated quite so many questions about the role and style of the royal family as that of Margaret Rose, second daughter of George VI, only sibling of Elizabeth II; for while both were creatures of their time, Margaret lived beyond hers into a more critical, ever less deferential era; and her life, above all, posed that essential question which Diana, in her own way, was trying to answer: what, exactly, is a princess for?
It was not a question that had been much posed in any previous age; and certainly not when the princess was born, a second daughter for a second son, the Duke of York.
The place of her birth, her mother's ancestral home at Glamis Castle, was a nod to more ancient royal public relations niceties (the Scots were said to be greatly pleased by the gesture). But it was not to be long before more modern concerns began to press in.
The little princess and her elder sister were a magnet for the burgeoning and energetic popular press. And while Elizabeth seemed, in the way of elder sisters, grave and responsible, a more fluffy, frivolous image was fashioned for Margaret Rose, who was, in that age-old curse-blessing for a princess, pretty, even beautiful.
Clearly, the traditional unnoticed and undemanding life of a minor member of the royal house was not to be hers, even before the romantic complications in the life of her glamorous uncle had made royal private lives a legitimate matter of the widest public interest. Edward VIII's abdication not only transformed the young princess's status; the change in attitude to the royal family it provoked, and the royal family's response to that changed attitude, were to have the most direct and lasting effects on her life.
After the abdication, the new King and Queen moved with their daughters to Buckingham Palace, where the children were brought up and educated, with the exception of the war years when they were sent to Windsor Castle. The younger princess continued to be contrasted with her sister, favourably and unfavourably. Margaret was, according to taste, extrovert or wilful, imaginative or attention-seeking. Elizabeth was said to take after her father, to be charming and unselfish; Margaret, to take after her mother, and to be naughty but fun.
She was particularly taken with acting out pantomimes and taking part in madrigals. In later life, though, she was said to have often complained about her lack of education.
There were a lot of "saids". These began with the children's governess, Marion Crawford - "Crawfie" - whose memoirs shocked 50s Britain, revealing, inter alia, that the princesses bit their fingernails. Other key "saids" concerned King George's attitude towards his younger daughter. He was said to be determined that she would not be neglected in the way that he had been neglected as the younger sibling of the future monarch. And so he was said to have over-indulged her.
Crawfie was less subtle:"She was a plaything. She was warm and demonstrative, made to be cuddled and played with." In 1948, once the princess had become 18, the age at which upper class girls "came out", she began her royal work with 50 official engagements.
It was the start of a public life in which she assumed the presidencies of organisations as diverse as the Lowland Brigade Club and the English Folk Dance and Song Club, the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children and The Girl Guides Association. But the patronages, the visits, the dedications and the openings were only part of the public role royalty was increasingly expected to play.
For the tired and straitened Britain of the late 40s and early 50s, following the activities of a young, pretty, unmarried princess was deemed by the press to be a popular compensatory public pleasure.
She was the Diana of her day. For the next few years the doings of the "Margaret Set " were avidly reported: Margaret in long Dior hemlines; Margaret in night clubs; Margaret with her long cigarette holder; Margaret doing the can-can at an American embassy party; Margaret and suitors. These included "Johnny" Dalkeith and "Sunny" Blandford, heirs to the Buccleuch and Marlborough fortunes and estates respectively; ideal, conventional husbands for a princess.
This pointed up a contradiction in and about the princess that her life would continue to accentuate. For a member of the royal family, she was unconventional in her liking and public enjoyment of the arts and artists, but, in many other ways, she was as conventional as any Victorian or Edwardian, particularly in her unquestioning assumption that her royal status commanded the utmost respect irrespective of circumstance or behaviour. Royalty was toujours sans reproche. To put it in a rather less high-flown way, she wanted to have her cake, and to eat it.
There was a recognition of this difficult side to the princess from an early stage, and it is possible to see an ominous and recognisable note even in the early and mostly adulatory press coverage of her young days; in, for example, this headline from the Sunday Pictorial: "Princess Margaret's Week Of Late Nights". Chips Channon, as he would, affected to detect "A Marie- Antoinette aroma" about her.
Lord Charteris, formerly the Queen's private secretary, put it thus when he told a television documentary: one of the functions of the royal family in the minds of the people is to be the continuing story of Peyton Place . . . And of course in that story there is always somebody who is not actually behaving as they should be . . . The dark princess, if you like. . ."
The death of King George VI on February 6 1952 affected the 22-year-old princess deeply. It was at this time that she fell in love with Group Captain Peter Townsend, who had been her father's equerry. Townsend was divorced (though he was the "innocent party ", as the law of the time had it), a status always likely to create a furore in 50s Britain.
The relationship became public in a rather more subtle way than is likely today. on Coronation Day, June 2 1953, the princess, waiting at Westminster Abbey for her carriage back to Buckingham Palace, was seen to flick a piece of fluff off Townsend's uniform. That possessive gesture was enough.
The couple had told the Queen of their desire to marry in the spring of 1953. The Queen asked them to wait a year. on June 14, following the piece of fluff and acres of speculation in the foreign press, the People printed the story in Britain.
After this, Palace advisers decided that Townsend, by now an equerry to the Queen, should be sent abroad and he was given seven days in which to remove himself to Brussels as air attache at the British Embassy. At the time Princess Margaret and the Queen Mother were on a tour of Rhodesia; when Margaret returned, Townsend had gone.
The issues surrounding the proposed marriage were not, even at the time, seen as constitutional so much as exemplary. It was recognised that there was little likelihood of the princess or her putative children succeeding to the Throne (the Queen already had two children) and the question that was presented to the public was whether it was right, bearing in mind the Queen's position as Head of the Church of England, that she should give consent to a marriage between her sister and a divorced man. Were that consent to be withheld, Princess Margaret would still have been able to marry without it at the age of 25, provided neither House of Parliament objected.
The Church of England was thought to be solidly against the match. Churchill, then prime minister, was initially in favour until his wife pointed out that this was the same mistake he had made with Edward and Mrs Simpson. The cabinet decided against it; Churchill made it clear that cabinet approval was unlikely even after the princess became 25 (even though it contained three members who had been involved in divorces, including Anthony Eden). This seemed a little at odds with public opinion. "Go on, Marg, do what you want," shouted women when she visited the East End. A poll in the Daily Mirror had 95 % in favour of the marriage. But consistency and predictability have never been prime public assets where royalty is concerned.
The princess turned 25 in August 1955. She and Townsend met again that October at Clarence House, surrounded by a ferment of publicity. Eden, by then prime minister, had told the Queen that any marriage between the two would not receive parliamentary sanction and that if it took place, a bill would be set out to deprive Princess Margaret of her rights of succession, her title and her Civil List entitlement.
This left only two options open to the princess. She could either renounce all these rights and privileges and become Mrs Peter Townsend, or she could give up all ideas of this marriage. The Queen, in an impossible position, seems to have opted to offer no advice.
On October 31, the princess issued a famous communique: "I would like it to be known that I have decided not to marry Group Captain Peter Townsend. I have been aware that, subject to my renouncing my rights of succession, it might have been possible for me to contract a civil marriage. But, mindful of the Church's teaching that Christian marriage is indissoluble, and conscious of my duty to the Commonwealth, I have decided to put these considerations before any others. I have reached this decision entirely alone, and in doing so have been strengthened by the unfailing support and devotion of Group Captain Townsend. I am deeply grateful for the concern of all those who have constantly prayed for my happiness." It was signed "Margaret."
The Guardian was scathing about the influences that had been brought to bear upon her. "Her decision, which has plainly been come to after subtle pressure, will be regarded by great masses of people as unnecessary and perhaps a great waste. In the long run it will not redound to the credit or the influence of those who have been most persistent in denying the princess the same liberty that is enjoyed by the rest of her fellow citizens."
Whatever, and for whatever reason, the nation was united in its sympathy for the decision, which, in direct contrast to 1936, seemed to put duty before self.
In 1958, after three years of royal rounds, and extensive tours abroad, Princess Margaret met Antony Armstrong-Jones, a magazine photographer. Half a commoner (his barrister father and his mother, the Countess of Rosse, had divorced when he was four), educated at Eton but sent down from Cambridge, he struck the note of unconventionality that appealed to her.
The couple were married in May 1960 at Westminster Abbey before a congregation of 2,000. Crowds lined the streets and the ceremony was watched widely on television. Afterwards they had a six-week honeymoon on Britannia and returned to start their married life together in apartments at Kensington Palace. Their son, David, was, born on November 3 1961. The previous month it was announced that Armstrong-Jones was to be made Earl of Snowdon; his first child became Viscount Linley. Their second child, Sarah, was, born on May 1 1964.
The Snowdons seemed the ideal cipher for an age that was promoting style above status but had not yet completely kicked deference. In the early days of their marriage Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon broke new ground socially, making friendships, or at least acquaintance, with all the usual 60s names, Nureyev, Peter Sellers, Vidal Sassoon, Mary Quant, and the more flaky, including John Bindon, a minor actor of East End sensitivities famed most for an interesting trick involving beer glasses with handles and a private part of his anatomy.
Their private lives seemed pretty 60s, too. Both had affairs. In 1968, Robin Douglas-Home, a nephew of Lord Home, committed suicide 18 months after the princess had ended their liaison. In 1973, with their marriage all but over, Princess Margaret met Roddy Llewellyn, son of the well known horseman, Sir Harry Llewellyn, and 17 years her junior. They became close. Three years later, in 1976, the News of the World published a picture of them in swimsuits on Mustique, the West Indian island where she had a villa, sparking off unprecedented press coverage of the private life of a member of the royal family: a coverage that would increase and intensify until it reached its highest pitch 20 years later in its basilisk observation of the marriages of the Prince and Princess of Wales and the Duke and Duchess of York.
Two days later, the Snowdons announced their separation, providing the press coverage with some sort of a result and another precedent. The princess continued her relationship with Llewellyn, to the reported displeasure of the Queen and the continued fascination of press and public.
Light was being let in on the magic, and it was not kind. Llewellyn pursued ill-judged career moves, trying, when not on Mustique, to become a pop singer or a nightclub frontman in Battersea. Willie Hamilton, the Labour MP, worked out that the princess had drawn £14,000 from the civil list during a time when she had carried out only eight public engagements. Another unprecedented debate, about whether the royal family gave value for money, was having its beginnings.
In May 1978 the Snowdons announced their divorce. With hindsight, it is now possible to see the entire episode as a benchmark both for media coverage and for the later behaviour of younger members of the royal family.
The relationship with Llewellyn lasted another three years. During it and thereafter, the princess continued to expect the treatment from friends and hosts that had earned her the sobriquet, "the house guest from hell", prickly on protocol, while taking little trouble in public to conceal boredom, capable of walking away in the middle of a conversation, or of conducting official engagements glumly and in haste.
The sympathy won earlier was not inexhaustible, and was further eroded in later years, when it became popular for the royal industry to assert that her choice over Townsend had been selfish rather than selfless, that she had not been willing to forgo privilege and position for him. Townsend's autobiography, in which he wrote that the desire to marry had foundered on his inability to ask Princess Margaret to give up her royal position and live the life of an "ordinary " person, received knowing nods.
The inability of the age to understand that the princess's decision might - indeed must- have been more complicated than a straight choice between love and duty, shows how deep-rooted Lord Charteris's concept of royalty as soap opera had become.
The princess became less of a central figure in it as the years and interest passed onto the younger members of the family. Some revelations and claims did continue, though. In 1994, letters that she had written to Douglas-Home, leaving no doubt about their relationship, were published in a biography. It was said, too, that her relationship with Sellers had involved more than platonic posing.In 1996, a biography of the Queen claimed that the princess had tried to commitsuicide in 1974, during the break-up of her marriage.
None of these revelations, claims, echoes and foreshadowings appeared to give her much pause. In 1996, she wrote to the Duchess of York: "Clearly you have never considered the damage you are causing us all . . . You have done more to bring shame on the family than could ever have been imagined."
She was said, despite this, to be a mellower figure in later life, less demanding; and she did receive credit in the comparison between the behaviour of her children and those of her sister.
But, as she entered her 60s, her health began a decline mostly blamed on a heavy and lengthy consumption of alcohol and nicotine. In 1993, she was rushed to hospital with pneumonia; in 1998, on Mustique, she suffered a stroke which left her with a mild speech impediment. A year later, again on Mustique, at her villa, Les Jolies Eaux, she scalded her feet with hot bathwater. Recovery was slow and only partial before a relapse at Christmas, 2000. In March 2001, she suffered a further stroke, which impaired her mobility and sight.
Her late troubles met with even less sympathy from commentators. At another time, there might have been admiration for a life led with such hauteur and brio; but in a time of much disenchantment with the doings of the Windsors, there seemed to be a consensus that even royalty had only itself to blame. "The only constants in the blindingly mediocre life of Princess Margaret would appear to be privilege, illness and lashings of alcohol," was only one of many such judgments in her last years.
In the end, though, verdicts on her life tended to divide between those accustomed to the ways of princesses and those unable to see the point of them.
To which the princess and her life provided an uncompromising, unrelenting and increasingly unfashionable response: the point of a princess is to be a princess.
Charles Nevin
HRH The Princess Margaret (Rose), Countess of Snowdon, born August 21 1930; died February 9 2002