Princess Margaret

Princess Margaret (born August 21, 1930, Glamis Castle, Scotland—died February 9, 2002, London, England) was a British royal, the second daughter of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth (later Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother) and the younger sister of Queen Elizabeth II. She struggled throughout her life to balance an independent spirit and artistic temperament with her duties as a member of Britain’s royal family.

Margaret was the first member of the royal family in some 300 years to be born in Scotland, at her mother’s family seat of Glamis Castle. Her education was supervised by her mother, and she and her sister were entrusted to a governess. Margaret showed an early interest in music and took piano lessons from the age of four. She was six years old when her uncle, King Edward VIII, abdicated, and her father became king. After that, Princess Elizabeth, as heir to the throne, received a separate education, while Margaret continued under her mother’s supervision. In addition, she was required to take part in public engagements.

Margaret, who became known for her glamour and beauty, displayed an early love for nightlife and the arts. When she was in her early 20s, she fell in love with Group Capt. Peter Townsend, a war hero who had served as an equerry to her father. Their romance became public knowledge when Margaret was seen brushing lint off Townsend’s jacket at her sister’s coronation in 1953. Although Townsend and Margaret wished to marry, the fact that he was divorced made the marriage unsuitable, and Margaret gained worldwide sympathy in 1955 when she publicly renounced their plans to wed.

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Margaret was already a fixture on London’s social and arts scene when she began secretly seeing photographer Antony Armstrong-Jones in 1958. The announcement of their engagement in February 1960 caught many by surprise. They were married on May 6, 1960, in the first royal wedding to be televised. (Armstrong-Jones was created earl of Snowdon in 1961.) The marriage was at first successful, and they had two children: David, Viscount Linley, born in 1961, and Lady Sarah, born in 1964. By the 1970s, however, the couple had grown apart. Both of the Snowdons engaged in public love affairs, and the princess scandalized conservative monarchists, cultivating friendships and romances among actors, writers, ballet dancers, and artists. She spent much of her time on the Caribbean island of Mustique, in the Grenadines. When her long-standing affair with Roddy Llewellyn, a landscape gardener 17 years her junior, was exposed in 1976, she lost public sympathy, and her volatile marriage finally ended in 1978, the first divorce in the British royal family in 400 years.

Eventually her extensive charitable work, combined with a new, more modern sympathy for the restricted options she faced, gained her a measure of public respect. Princess Margaret, who smoked and drank heavily throughout her adult life, was often in ill health. She had surgery for possible lung cancer in 1985 (the tissue proved to be benign) and later suffered a series of strokes.