Like most Brits we always had a great deal of affection for Queen Elizabeth’s younger sister Princess Margaret which started at our Protestant kindergarten (many many years ago) when we were all asked to pray for her. Not that we understood what it meant but we were told it was because she had decided not to marry her current lover the divorced Capt Peter Townsend. As a member of the Royal Household there were strict rules about who she could marriage, but years later she still managed to break a 400 year old tradition with her wedding to a ‘commoner’ Tony Armstrong-Jones
This fascinating new TV series from the BBC (and available in the US in PBS) portrays the Princess who was possibly born in the wrong era when being part of the Royal Family was a very stuffy boring job that had very tight restrictions on what one could, or couldn’t do. Whilst her sister had ascended the throne at a very early age, Margaret didn’t have a specific role and had a schedule of opening Fetes, visiting factories, and being an unofficial ambassador.
Meeting her future husband changed all that. He was a bohemian bisexual photographer who enjoyed a lifestyle that is often referred to as louche. However even with his romance with the Princess and their spectacular fairy tale wedding He just couldn’t keep his pants on and at the same time of the marriage one his best friend’s wife gave birth to his child.
We can see from this documentary that the Princess was tien between two worlds and as much as she enjoyed the new liberation of the 1960’s that her husband was a major part of, at the same she still very much wanted all the reverence and pomp and circumstance that came with being a royal Princess, Even her husband referred to her as Princess Margaret.
It was inevitable that their unlikely marriage wouldn’t last and the end of it was played out in the tabloid headlines who had now completely forsaken their decades old deference off whitewashing all their coverage of the Royal Family. By then she met her ‘toy boy’ Roddy Llewellyn who was 17 years younger than her, which was even too much for her sister the Queen.
What is so fascinating about her story is that as she valiantly tried to stride both worlds, she also never really enjoyed the freedom that Diana and Sarah Ferguson would later so rightful grab for themselves. Margaret was also the first modern royal to divorce, way before the Queen’s three children later followed suit.
With its wealth of glorious archival footage mixed in with interviews with some of her remaining friends and courtiers, there is this underlying hope that the Princess Margaret had a happy life. Check it out and see what you think.
