by Kitty Kelley
The Queen was better on paper than in person, especially on matters of taste. When she received letters of protest objecting to a Danish director coming to England to film The Love Life of Jesus Christ, she, too, objected. Her press secretary said, “Her Majesty finds this proposal as obnoxious as most of her subjects do.” The director was not allowed to film in the United Kingdom. When British newspapers offered huge sums of money for the life story of the Yorkshire Ripper, who had terrorized northern England for five years, killing women, the Queen registered her “sense of distaste.” She wrote to the mother of one of the victims, who had complained about the murderer’s profiting from his crimes. The Queen agreed, and the newspapers withdrew their bids.
Her subjects felt that Her Majesty was the best representative of the world’s most prestigious surviving monarchy, and as such, she was entitled to extraordinary wealth. With the exception of the fiery Willie Hamilton, few people begrudged her her $400 million fortune.* So, with little dissension in 1972, Parliament voted to give her the tax-free raise she requested for herself—$3 million a year—and the tax-free raises for her family: the Queen Mother was raised to $237,500; Prince Philip to $162,500; Princess Margaret to $87,500; and Princess Anne to $37,500. Because Prince Charles received an annual income from the Duchy of Cornwall, he was not included on the Civil List.
The pressure on Charles to marry grew in 1973 when Princess Anne became engaged to Captain Mark Phillips. Reporters suggested that Charles had been bested by his sister, who was marrying before him. Anne chose her brother’s twenty-fifth birthday, November 14, 1973, as her wedding day, but Charles did not feel honored. He was aboard the frigate HMS Minerva when he received the news of her engagement in a letter from his father. “I was crestfallen,” Charles admitted. “I reacted with a spasm of shock and amazement.”
Growing up, he and Anne had become close, especially after their royal tours of Australia and the United States, when they represented the Queen. On those trips, Anne, who seemed selfish and arrogant, made Charles look good. He was ingratiating; she was dismissive. He tolerated tedious questions from reporters; she refused. He smiled for photographers; she swatted them like nasty flies. “Bugger off,” she ordered, holding up her hand when cameras pressed too close. In Washington, D.C., Charles asked the Speaker of the House of Representatives why the bald eagle had been selected as the country’s national symbol. Anne crinkled her nose in disgust. “Most unfortunate choice, isn’t it?” she said.
“Anne was awful,” recalled the wife of the Assistant Chief of Protocol in the Nixon administration. “She did not speak to anyone. Charles was stupid but rather sweet. During their visit to the U.S. in 1970, Charles asked the British Ambassador, ‘Do the Catholics and the Protestants fight each other over here as much as they do in Britain?’ The Ambassador cringed with embarrassment.”
When Princess Anne was asked how it felt to have Buckingham Palace as a private property, she shrugged. “Don’t know,” she said, irritated by the question. “It’s not private property. The Palace belongs to the Crown.”
Charm eluded Anne, who didn’t stifle yawns when bored or pretend to be amused when she wasn’t. She had her father’s blast furnace personality and his “the only good reporter is a dead reporter” attitude toward the press. She was terse, tough, and unemotional, a far cry from her grandmother. The Queen Mother preferred the sweet, malleable Charles to his blunt sister, but Anne won the affection of her aunt, Margaret, who envied her independent spirit.
“Anne’s much more positive than I was,” said Princess Margaret, who understood the difficulty of growing up as royalty’s second child. “She’s much tougher, too, and has been brought up in a different atmosphere, and went to school.”
Charles, who valued his sister’s no-nonsense strength, was heartsick to lose her to marriage. “I can see I shall have to find myself a wife pretty rapidly,” he wrote to one friend, “otherwise I shall get left behind and feel very miserable!” To another he said: “Everyone is becoming engaged left, right and centre…. I am now becoming convinced that I shall soon be left floundering helplessly on a shelf somewhere, having missed everyone!”
Prone to melancholy, the Prince of Wales fell into a deep depression, which he acknowledged in long, self-pitying letters to friends. “I suppose the feeling of emptiness will pass eventually,” he wrote. He kept to himself as much as he could on board ship and poured his distress into his diary.
To his shipmates he tried to appear jaunty about his sister’s engagement, but he could not conceal his resentment. “Anne couldn’t marry her horse, so she’s marrying Mark,” he said about his future brother-in-law, an accomplished equestrian in the Queen’s Dragoon Guards. Years later the writer Auberon Waugh described Phillips as “Princess Anne’s grinning, speechless husband, who, if you whistle at him, wets himself.” Charles agreed and called him “Fog” because he was “so thick.”
The Duke of Edinburgh, whose letter to Charles had hinted at a mismatch between Anne and the army captain, had questioned his future son-in-law after the couple had been photographed kissing in public. The young officer professed honorable intentions toward the Princess, but Prince Philip cut him off.
“Balls,” Philip retorted. “I just hope there’s none of this premarital malarkey.”
The Palace tried to claim the kissing photograph was a fake. They officially denied there was any relationship between the Princess and Mark Phillips. In fact, they claimed that the couple did not know each other. “They’ve never met,” said the Queen’s press secretary. He then asked Robert Edwards, editor of the Sunday Mirror, to run a story ending speculation about a relationship between Princess Anne and Captain Mark Phillips. The editor complied. Weeks later the Queen announced her daughter’s engagement.
Marrying into the royal family at that time carried a certain responsibility for producing children. The Prince of Wales had not yet married and provided an heir, and his brothers, Prince Andrew (thirteen) and Prince Edward (nine), were too young to marry, so the prospect of children from Anne, fourth in the line of succession, became crucial. Mark Phillips was summoned to the Palace and ordered to provide a specimen of semen. When his potency was assured, the Queen offered him a title, which he respectfully declined. The Queen could not understand anyone’s preferring to remain a commoner, so she tried again. But the young captain said no and was staunchly supported by Princess Anne. Later he turned down a desk job in the Ministry of Defense, preferring to be a country squire. So the Queen offered to buy Anne and Mark Gatcombe Park, a 500-acre estate in Gloucestershire worth almost $2 million. Phillips accepted. “Very nice of her, indeed,” he said.
“They’re gold-plated parasites,” roared Willie Hamilton in Parliament. “The lot of them. All parasites.”
Four months later the surly Princess earned grudging respect from the public when she faced down a gunman threatening to kidnap her. Traveling down the Mall toward Buckingham Palace one evening, Anne was riding with her husband in a royal limousine. The blue light above the windshield indicated that a member of the royal family was inside, so pedestrians and motorists were stunned when the limousine was rammed by a small white Ford Escort. The Ford’s driver jumped out with a pistol in each hand and started firing. The assailant ran toward the limousine, shooting the Princess’s chauffeur, her protection officer, and a pedestrian. Then the gunman lunged toward a rear door to grab the Princess. Frightened but tough, Anne and her husband held on to the door from inside until the deranged man was subdued.
Acts of terrorism were so rare in England in 1974 that policemen did not carry guns* and people did not worry about getting shot. One man who rushed to Anne’s rescue was more intent on manners than mayhem.
“My first thought was that the two cars had bumped each other, and that the driver of the Escort had lost his temper,” recalled Ron Russell, manager of a London cleaning firm. “Obviously he didn’t realize he was embarrassing a member of the royal family. Someone should tell him. With this in min
d, I pulled off the road.”
The public was shocked by the attack on a member of the royal family but praised the composure of the Princess, who seemed to dismiss her assailant with the dispatch of Mary Poppins.
“The girl’s got steel britches,” a London cabbie told the Daily Mail.
Her father agreed. Anne had called him in Indonesia, where he was on a royal tour with the Queen. The Princess did not want to talk to her mother about the attempted kidnapping, only her father. “God help that cretin,” Prince Philip said. “If he had succeeded in abducting Anne, she would have given him a hell of a time while in captivity.” Upon her return to London, the Queen presented royal honors to the four men wounded while trying to protect her daughter. The Duke of Edinburgh commended his favorite child on scoring a public relations triumph. “Well done,” he told Anne. “You saved the Civil List.”
The royal allowances remained unchallenged until Princess Margaret let a fox into the chicken coop. With her penchant for weak men, she had become romantically involved with an effete young man who had lived with an avowed homosexual. Margaret was forty-three years old when she met Roderic (“Roddy”) Llewellyn at a party. He was seventeen years her junior. As the second son of Sir Henry Llewellyn, he was an aristocrat, which was not insignificant to the Princess. His father seemed amused by their relationship. “You mean Roddy’s new friend?” he asked. “Well, it makes a change from his usual Italian waiters.” Margaret said the long-haired youth, who lived on a commune in Wales, reminded her of a younger version of her husband “back in the days when Tony was sweet.” The Princess and the hippie began an affair known only to their friends. In deference to the Queen, the couple did not socialize in public.
Snowdon, who was involved in his own love affair, was desperate for a divorce. The Princess unthinkingly gave him grounds in 1976 when she took her young lover to Mustique. The couple were photographed there in a cozy island bar with another couple. A picture of Margaret and Roddy sitting on a wooden bench in their bathing suits was published on the front page of the News of the World. The other couple was cropped from the photograph so Princess Margaret appeared to be dining intimately with a man who was not her husband. Under the headline “Margaret and the Handsome Young Courtier,” the article described the two lovers walking arm in arm on the beach, adding that “Roddy rubs suntan oil on her bronzed shoulders. She can suddenly look radiant in a way the public have not seen for a long time.” In a later edition, the headline was changed to “The Picture a Husband Just Couldn’t Take.”
Even people who had suspected that Margaret’s marriage was not perfect were grateful for the royal facade. For years the public made allowances for Princess Margaret, tolerating her minor transgressions such as smoking in public and showing up late for royal events. People said she had suffered extraordinary heartbreak when she was forced to give up Peter Townsend, so they relaxed the standards for her. They overlooked her imperious behavior and sympathetically referred to her as “poor Margaret.” That gave her further license to be naughty. But now, on Mustique, she had gone too far.
No longer was there tolerance for a married royal Princess, who received $70,000 a year from the public purse, who left her children in England and flagrantly cavorted in the Caribbean with a raffish young man of ambiguous sexuality from a hippie commune in Wales.
“If she thumbs her nose at taxpayers by flying off to Mustique,” said Willie Hamilton, “she shouldn’t expect the workers of the country to pay for it.”
This time another Member of Parliament agreed. “The Princess is a parasite,” said Dennis Canavan, a Labor MP from Scotland. “She should not get any money at all.”
Sensing the mounting public outrage, Snowdon pounced. He said he was humiliated by his wife’s flagrant indiscretion and that continuing their marriage under any circumstance was intolerable. Alarmed by the uproar, the Queen summoned Margaret to London, so she left Mustique—without her lover. The Palace told Snowdon to meet her at the airport for the sake of public appearance. He arrived in a royal limousine accompanied by his young son and thoughtfully carried Margaret’s fur coat so she would not freeze in her summer cottons. In front of photographers, he kissed her on the cheek and draped the coat over her shoulders. Afterward she said, “Lord Snowdon was devilish cunning.”
Two months later Kensington Palace issued a statement:*
Her Royal Highness, the Princess Margaret, Countess of Snowdon, and the Earl of Snowdon have mutually agreed to live apart. The Princess will carry out her public duties and functions unaccompanied by Lord Snowdon. There are no plans for divorce proceedings.
“I remember the night the announcement was made,” recalled one of Margaret’s friends. “The Princess was terribly upset. She kept running to the loo to cry, but we kept her going, took her to a premiere, and then to Bubbles [a nightclub] for champagne. We stayed with her until four-thirty in the morning. She needed the support.”
British law requires a formal two-year separation before granting an uncontested divorce. If one party objects, a five-year waiting period is imposed before the divorce can be granted. Margaret never believed that the separation would lead to divorce, but Snowdon was determined. He said he felt like a prisoner serving time and he wanted his freedom.
The Queen was so disturbed by what she saw as her sister’s self-destructiveness that she didn’t speak to her for several weeks. She said Margaret was leading the life of a “guttersnipe,” and the Queen’s disgust soon led to snickering about Margaret’s promiscuity. One joke making the rounds had the Queen and her lady-in-waiting driving in the country when the Queen’s Rolls-Royce was overtaken by bandits. The gunmen, who did not recognize the passengers, demanded money and jewels but got nothing except an empty white handbag. So they threw the two women out of the car and drove off with the Rolls.
The Queen dusted herself off.
“Where is your beautiful ring?” asked the lady-in-waiting.
“I hid it,” said the Queen.
“Where?”
“In a very private place.”
The Queen looked at the lady-in-waiting and asked about her tiara.
“I hid it,” said the lady-in-waiting.
The Queen raised her eyebrows inquiringly.
“Same place,” said the lady-in-waiting.
The Queen looked at her and smiled. “Pity Margaret wasn’t here,” she said. “We could’ve saved the Rolls.”
Despite the public derision, the Princess continued her relationship with Roddy Llewellyn because she said he was the only person who was kind to her. “I need him,” she sobbed. “He’s good to me.” The Queen, aware of public opinion, begged her to reconsider. Margaret refused.
“That friendship may be in the modern trend,” said Willie Hamilton on the floor of the House of Commons, “but it has turned the Princess into a royal punk.” This time few members of the Tory Party rose to object. In fact, the only person to defend the Princess was her young lover.
“I would like to see Willie Hamilton or any of the others do all her jobs in the marvelous way that she does,” said Roddy Llewellyn. “People love the monarchy and appreciate with their whole hearts the job Princess Margaret does.”
By then the public had turned against the Princess. A national opinion poll reported that 73 percent of the country felt her way of life had harmed her public standing and that of the monarchy. So the Queen told her sister she must make a choice: either give up her lover or give up public life.
Margaret cursed the “prayer makers” in the church and mocked the establishment newspapers for their pious editorials against her. She called them all “slop buckets of hypocrisy.” But in the end she caved in to public pressure and agreed to do her duty.
Looking worn and tired, she carried out her official duties but frequently arrived late or left early, pleading fatigue. Her doctors warned her to stop smoking and drinking, but she did not listen until she was hospitalized with gastroenteritis and alcoholic hepatitis. Even when faced with
a lung operation, she continued smoking sixty unfiltered cigarettes a day, which she puffed through a tortoiseshell holder. She suffered a nervous breakdown, and shortly before the divorce announcement, she threatened suicide.
Margaret had not reckoned with her husband’s determination to be rid of her. Despite their separation, she never believed they would divorce. So she was surprised when Snowdon asked to dissolve their marriage. She said she wouldn’t stand in his way, especially if he wanted to remarry, but he said he had no such plans. He simply wanted a divorce. The announcement was made on May 10, 1978. But seven months later Snowdon remarried. His lover, Lucy Lindsay-Hogg, was pregnant. Margaret read about the marriage in the newspapers. “He didn’t even have the courtesy to call me beforehand,” she told a biographer, “and he never told the children.”
The first royal divorce since King Henry VIII’s divorce from Anne of Cleves in 1533 placed unremitting pressure on the Prince of Wales as he approached his thirtieth birthday. “This is the Year,” headlined one newspaper, printing a photo montage of all the “suitable” young women Charles had dated and discarded. Another newspaper announced, “Prince Stranded Between Altar and Abyss.”
Prince Philip teased his son about the press coverage. “You’d better get on with it, Charles,” he said, “or there won’t be anyone left.”
