Why everyone who worked for Princess Margaret secretly hated her

At Kensington Palace, in the long evenings of the 1970s and 1980s, there was a rule observed in Apartment 1A that no visitor was warned about in advance, and no member of staff was permitted to mention aloud. No one could sit while the Princess stood. No one could leave a dinner before she did. It did not matter how late the hour, how elderly the guest, how full the bladder, how cramped the leg. If the Princess wished to remain at the table at one in the morning, smoking, telling a story she had told the week before, the table remained occupied. Lady Anne Glen Connor, who served as her Lady-in-Waiting from 1971, and recorded the experience in her 2019 memoir, Lady-in-Waiting, described guests in their 70s legs gone numb beneath them, faces fixed in the polite middle distance of people who had learned not to glance at the clock. A Duchess once whispered to a footman, asking whether she might be excused. The footman, perfectly trained, looked through her as if she had not spoken. This was not eccentricity. It was not, as the friendlier biographers have sometimes suggested, the harmless theatre of a woman who liked her rituals. It was the daily working condition of the people paid to serve her. The footman, the dressers, the chef, the chauffeur, the private secretary, the Lady-in-Waiting on her three-month rotation. Their hours, their meals, their sleep, their nerves were arranged around a Princess who had been raised to expect that the world bent toward her, and who, by middle age, had nothing left to govern except the room she happened to be standing in. The staff who knew her best left the most damning testimony. They also, almost without exception, rarely hated her cleanly. That is the difficulty of the subject. The maid who wept over a misfolded napkin in the afternoon might receive the following morning a handwritten note of apology and a small Cartier trinket. The dresser kept waiting for three hours while the Princess changed her mind about an evening gown might be remembered a year later when her mother fell ill, with a personal visit and the quiet payment of a hospital bill. Resentment and loyalty were not opposites in that household. They braided together. They had to. No one stayed otherwise. The woman at the centre of it was Princess Margaret Rose, born on the 21st of August, 1930, at Glamis Castle in Scotland, the younger daughter of the then Duke and Duchess of York. She died on the 9th of February, 2002, in London, aged 71, after a series of strokes that had reduced her, in her last years, to the wheelchair and the dark glasses worn indoors. Between those two dates lay 71 years of being the second of two sisters, the spare to an heir, the witty one, the beautiful one, the difficult one, and finally, the cautionary one. Her elder sister, Elizabeth, became Queen in 1952 and reigned for 70 years. Margaret became, in the phrase she used to the American writer Gore Vidal when he once asked her about her life, a disappointment. To understand the household she would later run, it is necessary to understand the world she was born into and the smaller, stranger world she was abruptly moved into in 1936. At her birth, her uncle David was Prince of Wales and would shortly become Edward VIII. Her father was the Duke of York, a stammering second son with a naval background and no expectation and no desire to occupy the throne. Margaret was therefore, at birth, fourth in line, a princess certainly, but a remote one, the kind of royal child the public might glimpse twice a year in a pathe newsreel and otherwise forget. The future her parents had planned for her was the future of an aristocratic spare. Good marriages, country houses, a quiet life in the orbit of her elder sister, who would also, in that imagined future, be no more than a Duke's daughter. Then, in December 1936, her uncle abdicated to marry Wallis Simpson. Her father became King George VI, her sister became heir presumptive and Margaret, at the age of six, became the spare. It is a word the British press now uses freely. In 1936 it was not spoken aloud, but the structural fact of it shaped every room she would ever enter. She had the visibility of monarchy and none of its purpose. She would be photographed, curtsied to, given a title, given a household, given a civil list allowance and given, in the end, almost nothing to do. The pattern of her response to that role established itself early. Marion Crawford, the governess the two princesses knew as Crawfee, observed that Margaret learned very quickly she could earn her father's laughter by being naughty in places where Elizabeth was good. Elizabeth was diligent over her sons. Margaret pulled faces behind the tutor's back. Elizabeth folded her clothes. Margaret mimicked the bishops. The King, exhausted by the office he had not wanted, adored the younger daughter who made him laugh and the younger daughter discovered that charm was a currency and disobedience was a performance. Both habits, refined over decades, would later be turned upon the people she employed. By the 1960s the apartment at Kensington Palace had been allotted to her and the household she would maintain for the next 40 years had taken shape. Apartment 1A is not a small flat. It contains some 20 rooms arranged over several floors, a private garden, a separate staff wing. Within it she kept a personal dresser, a maid, footman on rotation, a chef, a chauffeur, a lady-in-waiting in residence and, from 1973 until her effective retirement, the private secretary Lord Napier, Nigel Napier, who served her for 27 years and who, by every account, adored her. The household was the size of a small country house and was run on country house principles that had themselves become anachronistic by the time she inherited them. Inside those rooms the rules were absolute and unwritten. She was to be addressed as mom. The word rhymed with jam rather than with harm and the distinction was noticed. One curtsied on arrival and again on departure. One did not turn one's back on her even when leaving a room, which required a small choreographed retreat that newcomers practiced in their bedrooms beforehand. One did not initiate a topic of conversation. One did not refer to anything she had said the previous evening as if it had actually been said, because the previous evening, by tacit agreement, had not happened. And one did not, under any circumstances, leave before she did. By the middle of the 1970s, the staff turnover in her household had become a quiet matter of concern within the wider royal household, discussed in the corridors of Buckingham Palace in tones too discreet to reach the newspapers. Footmen lasted months, dressers lasted in some cases weeks, and late at night, in the corridor outside Apartment 1A, the duty footman would still be standing, uniformed, upright, waiting for the small electric bell that signalled the princess had finally gone to bed. Sometimes it rang at two, sometimes at three. The corridor outside Apartment 1A at Kensington Palace had a particular quality of stillness in the small hours. Carpet thick enough to absorb a footstep. Lamps left burning at half strength. A footman seated, then standing, then seated again, listening for a bell that signalled the princess had at last decided to go to bed. The wait might end at one. It might end at three. The household's working day was shaped from beginning to end by her refusal to keep to anyone's clock but her own. The day that produced those nights had a shape of its own. Margaret rarely rose before nine. Breakfast came on a tray, with the morning papers and the first cigarette of the day fitted into the long ivory holder that became, in photographs, almost a part of her hand. She did not speak much before she had smoked. The hairdresser arrived around eleven and worked while she read. By noon, a vodka pick-me-up. Lunch at one, often with a guest who had been summoned at short notice and who would not be permitted to leave when they had planned. In the afternoon, a bath that could run to two hours. The water topped up by a maid who stood by in case she was wanted. Cocktails at six. Dinner at half-past eight. And then the long evening which was the part the staff feared. What Lady Anne Glen Connor records in her 2019 memoir, Lady in Waiting, is not principally the grand cruelty. It is the small corrections, administered in front of others, that accumulated into something heavier than any single rebuke. A guest who used the wrong fork would be watched, in silence, until she looked up and met the princess's eye. A woman who sat down in a chair Margaret considered her own would be told to move, not by Margaret, but by a tightening of the room around her. Glen Connor describes a dinner at which a guest mentioned having enjoyed a film the princess had publicly disliked. Margaret turned her shoulder and did not address the woman again for the rest of the evening. The other diners noted it, adjusted, and carried on. The guest sat through three more courses and the coffee. There is a passage in Craig Brown's 2017 book, Mom Darling, 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret, that recounts a conversation with the American writer Gore Vidal, who liked her and was liked in return. Vidal told her, with the directness he reserved for people he thought could bear it, that she must have had a difficult life. She considered the remark and gave him a Disappointing. He pressed her gently. Disappointing how? Being born so close to the throne, she said. Not on it. Near it. That answer is, in a way, the key that opens the whole household. The staff who polished her shoes and laid out her gloves, and stood while she decided whether to wear the emeralds or the sapphires, were being punished, in small, daily ways, for a structural accident of birth that had nothing to do with them. They were the only people present when the disappointment had nowhere else to go. The footman waiting in the corridor was waiting because the princess did not wish to be alone in the room she had left, and did not wish to enter the room she was meant to go to next. The bell, when it rang, was a kind of surrender. The dressers and maids carried the weight of this most directly. Tim Heald, in his 2007 biography, Princess Margaret, A Life Unraveled, gathered testimony from several women who had worked in her personal service over the decades. The pattern they described was consistent. She would not dress herself, even when no one was due to see her. A maid drew the bath. A dresser laid out the clothes she had requested the night before. The dresser then stood by while the princess, in her dressing gown, smoked a cigarette and changed her mind. The clothes were returned to the wardrobe. Another set was brought out. The cigarette was finished. A third set, perhaps, was considered. Hours could be lost this way, in a silence punctuated only by the click of hangers and the small sound of a lighter. The dresser was not permitted to sit. The dresser was not permitted to suggest. The dresser, in one account, learned to keep her face entirely still, because any expression at all might be read as opinion, and opinion was not wanted. Outside the household proper, the burden fell on her hosts. Margaret treated friends' country houses as a network of alternative residences, moving between them for long weekends and longer weeks. She arrived, by several accounts collected in Heald and elsewhere, with up to 20 pieces of luggage. She expected, as a matter of course, a bedroom with an adjoining sitting room and an adjoining dressing room. The flowers in the bedroom were to be of a particular colour, or, in some accounts, not of a particular colour she happened to dislike that season. Malvern water on the bedside table. Famous grouse whiskey in the sitting room. A specific brand of Hostesses learned, over years, to dread the honour of her visit and to plan it like a small military campaign. Country house cooks were briefed on what she would not eat. Country house butlers were briefed on the standing rule, the one the corridor at Kensington enforced to, that no one sat while she stood and no one left before she did. The most peculiar version of this regime unfolded in the Caribbean. In 1960, as a wedding present, Colin Tennant, Lord Glen Connor, gave her a plot of land on the small island of Mustique, which he had recently bought. On that plot, she built the villa Les Joliots, a low white house above the sea, and there, from the late sixties onwards, she conducted a parallel life. The clothes were lighter. The drinks came earlier. The guests were chosen more freely. The household, in absolute terms, was larger, because local staff had been added to the existing entourage, and the entire operation had to be reconstituted in another hemisphere. The island people who worked at the villa found her, the accounts suggest, by turns extraordinarily generous and entirely glacial within the same afternoon. She would ask warmly after a man's children and then, an hour later, fail to recognise him as he passed her on the terrace. Both behaviours were sincere. Neither cancelled the other. It would be a mistake to leave the account here, because the account would then be untrue. The staff who served Princess Margaret longest were also, by a measurable standard, her most loyal. Christopher Warwick, who wrote the authorised biography, Princess Margaret, A Life of Contrasts, in 2000, and who knew her well in her last years, insisted that those who lasted came to love her. Lord Napier, her private secretary, worked for her for 27 years, from 1973 until shortly before her death. Her senior dresser remained in post for decades. Her chauffeur, her chef, her senior footman, several of them gave her the bulk of their working lives. People do not do this for monsters. They do it sometimes for difficult people they have come to understand, and whose difficulty they have come to regard as something other than personal. Napier, asked late in his career what it had been like, gave the kind of answer that civil servants give. He said she had been demanding, and he said she had been worth it. He did not, in the interviews he gave, recant. To understand why the longest-serving staff spoke this way, one has to look back 20 years, before the worst of the late-night corridors, to a single document she signed in the autumn of 1955. The context belongs more fully to a later part of this account, and will be taken up there. But it must be marked here, because without it, nothing that came afterwards has a centre. In 1953, aged 22, she had fallen in love with group captain Peter Townsend, a decorated wartime pilot who had served as equerry to her late father, King George VI. Townsend was 16 years older than her, and divorced. The church, the government, and the palace, working in concert, decided over the course of two years that the marriage could not be permitted. In October 1955, she issued a statement renouncing him. The statement was She signed it. She was 25 years old. Several of her biographers, Warwick and Heald and Brown among them, have written carefully around the suggestion that something in her did not recover from that signature. They put it differently, but they put it. The woman who, twenty years later, would humiliate a dresser over a crease, or hold a footman in a corridor until three in the morning, was the same woman who had been told, at 25, that what she wanted was not available to her, and that her role was to accept it gracefully in public. She accepted it. The grace, in private, ran out. Every dismissed maid, every long evening, every cruelly extended dinner over the next forty-seven years carried, somewhere in it, a trace of the ink from that page. She signed the statement on the last day of October, 1955. The text was brief, the handwriting controlled, the public language that of a woman doing her duty. Mindful of the Church's teaching that Christian marriage is indissoluble, and conscious of my duty to the Commonwealth, I have resolved to put these considerations before others. Peter Townsend was gone. The cameras moved on. The household around her did not see her weep, because Margaret did not weep in front of staff. She went to her room and closed the door, and the footman on duty that night recorded nothing unusual in the log. Five years later, almost to the month, the door opened onto a different life. On the 6th of May 1960, in Westminster Abbey, she married the photographer Anthony Armstrong Jones. He was twenty-nine, slight, charming, professionally watchful. He was created Lord Snowden the following year. The wedding was the first royal wedding broadcast on television, watched by an estimated 300 million people worldwide. The dress, by Norman Hartnell, was praised for its severity. The bride, observers noted, looked radiant. The world saw a modern marriage between a princess and an artist. The household at Kensington Palace, which the couple moved into shortly afterwards, saw something else within months. Both partners, it became clear, were demanding employers. Both took lovers. Both, in time, used the staff as audience and as instrument in their fights. Anne de Courcy, in her 2008 biography of Snowden, documents the notes he began to leave around the apartment in the later 1960s. Lists, written in his neat photographer's hand, headed Things I Hate About You, and slipped into her drawers, into the pages of her diary, once into the pocket of a coat she was about to wear out. Staff who tidied found them. Staff who found them said nothing, because saying anything was not within the terms of employment. One housemaid, interviewed decades later, recalled smoothing a note flat, refolding it, and replacing it exactly where it had been, because to remove it would be to admit she had read it, and to leave it crumpled would be to admit she had touched it. The drinking, which had been ornamental in the 1950s, became structural in the 1960s. Famous grouse whiskey, gin and tonic from the middle of the morning, vodka in the afternoon. She was almost never visibly drunk in public. Photographs from the period show a woman in command of her posture, her cigarette holder at a precise angle, her eyes alert, but the household orbited the bottle. Footman learned which guests to seat away from her after the third drink, and which conversations to interrupt with the offer of a fresh ashtray. The chef learned to delay dinner by half an hour when the pre-prandial drinks were running long, and to push it forward when she had eaten little at lunch. The choreography was invisible to outsiders. It consumed the working day of a dozen people. Tempers, when they came, were sudden and physical. The staff memoirs and the biographer interviews collected by Tim Heald in A Life Unraveled, public in 2007, record incidents that recur with enough consistency to be treated as pattern rather than rumor. Cigarettes ground out on polished tables. China deliberately broken in private. A tray once kicked across a room at Kensington Palace after a misdelivered message. The apologies, when they came, came the following morning. They came as a note left on a tray, or a small gift left on a chair, or a passing remark about the weather delivered with unusual warmth. They were never spoken directly. To speak the apology would have been to acknowledge the offence, and acknowledgement was not a register the household used. In 1973, at the home of friends in Wiltshire, she met Roddy Llewellyn. He was 25. She was 43. He was the younger son of an Olympic showjumper, a gentle and slightly aimless young man with an interest in gardening and a soft singing voice. The affair began almost at once and continued, with interruptions, for the rest of the decade. He was taken to Mustique. He was photographed there. In February 1976, the tabloid pictures of Margaret in a swimsuit beside the young Llewellyn, taken at Les Jolies Hauts, ran on every front page in Britain. Snowden, who had been conducting his own affairs for years, used the photographs as the occasion for separation. The divorce was finalised in 1978. It was the first divorce of a senior member of the royal family since Henry VIII annulled his marriage to Anne of Cleves in 1540. The constitutional implications were debated in the broadsheets for weeks. Within the household, the practical implications were more immediate. Snowden moved out. The apartment contracted around a single occupant. The loneliness, which had been one element among many, became the dominant fact of the building. It is the period after the divorce that Lady Anne Len Connor describes most vividly in her 2019 memoir. Appointed Lady-in-Waiting in 1971, Len Connor had known Margaret since childhood, and the friendship sustained the working relationship in ways that pure employment could not. She describes being summoned at all hours, expected to laugh at the same anecdotes she had laughed at the previous week, expected to remain standing through evenings that drifted She describes the dinners at Kensington Palace, where elderly guests, having arrived at eight, were still in their chairs at one in the morning, because the princess had not risen. She describes the careful work of steering the conversation away from films Margaret had disliked, books she had not read, people she had cut. The Lady-in-Waiting was not a friend in those rooms. She was an instrument tuned to a particular frequency, and the tuning was constant. And yet the same memoir, and the same period, produces the contradictions that make the household testimony so difficult to reduce. Margaret was capable of immense kindness, deployed without warning and without performance. She visited six staff in hospital, sitting at the bedside long past the polite duration. She paid quietly for the funeral of a footman's mother. She remembered the birthdays of children she had met once, years before, and sent presents chosen with care. The same week, she might reduce a maid to tears over a crease in a tablecloth, or cut a dresser dead for three days over a misjudged remark about a hat. The cruelty and the kindness came from the same person on the same afternoon, and the staff who lived inside that weather learned to carry both without protest, because protest was not available. The pattern outside the household was different. She held more than 80 patronages. She worked for decades for the Royal Ballet, for the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, for the Girl Guides, for the Royal Scottish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, for hospitals and music colleges and regimental associations. The staff at those organisations, when interviewed across the years by Christopher Warwick and others, remember her as informed, punctual and professional. She read her papers. She asked specific questions. She remembered the names of administrators she had met once. The cruelty, by every available account, was reserved for those who could not leave the room. The patronage workers went home at the end of the meeting. The footman at Kensington Palace did not. The body began to fail in the middle of the 1980s. In January 1985, she underwent surgery for the removal of part of her left lung. She had been smoking, by her own admission to her authorised biographer Christopher Warwick, around 60 cigarettes a day for 40 years. She gave up cigarettes, briefly, and resumed them. In February 1998, she suffered the first of the strokes that would take her speech, her mobility and, eventually, her sight. In early 1999, in the bathroom at Les Jolies Hauts on Mustique, she stepped into a bath that had been run too hot and scalded her feet so badly that she was left partially disabled for the remainder of her life. The accounts differ as to who had drawn the bath and who was responsible. What is not in dispute is that thereafter she could no longer walk unaided and that the household at Kensington Palace converted, by degrees, from a court into a nursing operation. Some of the long-serving staff stayed to the end. Lord Napier, her private secretary since 1973, remained in post until 2000. Her dresser of decades remained. The footman who had stood through the long evenings of the 1970s stood now through the long silences of the late 1990s, when the princess sat for hours in a wheelchair by the window, dark glasses against the light, a rug across her knees, the ivory cigarette holder put away for good. Witnesses described what kept them there as something between duty and love and refused to draw a sharper line because no sharper line existed. In August 2001, she was wheeled out for the 101st birthday of her mother at Clarence House. The photographs show her in dark glasses indoors, her face thin, her left hand inert in her lap, her mother beside her smiling at the cameras. She was frail, diminished, and still the most photographed woman in the frame. The wheelchair at the garden party in August 2001 was the last clear photograph the public would have of her. Dark glasses indoors, a rug across her knees, her mother impossibly turning 101 on the lawn beside her, upright in pale blue. Margaret was 70 then and looked older. She had been the family beauty. The cameras, trained for half a century on her face, recorded what was left of it and moved on to the Queen Mother, who was still waving. Six months later, on the 9th of February 2002, Princess Margaret died at the King Edward VII Hospital in central London. She was 71. The cause was given as cardiac problems following a further stroke. Seven weeks after that, the Queen Mother followed her daughter into the vault at St. George's Chapel, Windsor. An entire generation of the House of Windsor, the generation that had carried the monarchy through abdication and war, closed in that brief gap of weeks. The country noticed the mother's passing more than the daughter's. Margaret had been famous for so long, and for so little obvious purpose, that her death felt less like a loss than the closing of a file. In the two decades since, that file has been reopened with some care. Christopher Warwick, who knew her and wrote with her cooperation, published Princess Margaret, A Life of Contrasts, in 2000. Tim Heald's A Life Unraveled appeared in 2007, drawing on extensive interviews with household staff who had retired and could finally speak. Craig Brown's Mom Darling, in 2017, assembled ninety-nine fragments into a portrait that was funny, sympathetic, and at times unsparing. Then, Lady Anne Glenn-Connor's Lady in Waiting, in 2019, added the testimony of a woman who had stood, often literally, beside the princess for Read together, these four books produce an unusually detailed picture of what it was like to work in Apartment 1A. The picture is not one of simple hatred, that is the first thing to say, because the title of an account like this one promises something cleaner than the evidence delivers. The dressers and footmen and private secretaries who left her service used a more complicated vocabulary. Resentment, certainly. Exhaustion, repeatedly. An awareness that one's working life was being shaped, day by day, by the moods of a woman who could not be answered back, and who would not, herself, leave the room. Many spoke of relief on retirement. A surprising number, including some who had been reduced to tears more than once, spoke of missing her within weeks. Lord Napier, her private secretary from 1973 until 2000, served her for 27 years and defended her until his own death. Her dresser stayed decades. These are not the career arcs of people who worked for a monster, they are the career arcs of people who worked for someone difficult, brilliant, and trapped, and who came to understand over time which of those three words mattered most. If this account has been useful, subscribing to the channel costs nothing, and there are more stories like this one queued. The bell notification means you will see them when they go up. What the evidence actually tells us, taken as a whole, is something more interesting than the household legend of the tyrant in the tiara. Margaret was not unique among 20th century royals in her demands. Her sister kept a household run on principles almost as rigid. Her mother expected and received the same curtsies and the same standing. What was unique to Margaret was the gap between the role she had been trained for and the role she ended up performing. Until 1948, when Princess Elizabeth's first child, Charles, was born and displaced her in the line of succession, Margaret had been the second person in the kingdom. She had been educated alongside a future queen. She had been schooled in protocol, in languages, in constitutional history, by tutors who assumed she might one day be required to use any of it. And then, year by year, the requirement receded. New nieces and nephews arrived. The succession lengthened in front of her. By 1960, when she married Antony Armstrong Jones, she was fourth in line. By 1980, she was eleventh. By the time she died, she was no longer in any sensible sense near the throne at all. She had been educated to govern and was permitted only to entertain. The friction of that mismatch did not vanish into the air. It was absorbed daily by the people who served her dinner. The town's end question hangs over the whole story, and the biographers, from Warwick to Brown, have all, in their different ways, arrived at the same cautious suggestion. Had Margaret been allowed, in 1955, to marry Group Captain Peter Townsend, the divorced equerry she had loved since her early twenties, the woman who would later humiliate a maid over a crease in a tablecloth might never have come into existence. We cannot rerun the experiment. Plenty of women have been refused the marriages they wanted and have not, in consequence, kept guests in their seventies pinned to dining chairs until two in the morning. But the timeline is suggestive. The renunciation of Townsend was the first occasion on which the institution she had been born into demonstrated that it could, and would, take from her something she could not bear to lose. Everything that followed, every demand, every late night, every refusal to release a room, can be read as the conduct of a person who had learned that the only thing she still controlled was the conduct of the room itself. This is the structural point the staff testimony, in the end, makes. The people who found it hard to work for her were not really objecting to her, though it must often have felt that way as they stood in their stockinged feet at one in the morning, waiting to be dismissed. They were objecting to the arrangement that had produced her. An arrangement that gave a clever, witty, musically gifted woman a twenty-room apartment at Kensington Palace, a staff of dozens, an income, a title, no defined job, no permission to take one, and forty unfilled years. Return, then, to the rule with which this began. No one sits while she stands. No one leaves before she does. It is easy to hear that rule as vanity, and easier still to hear it as cruelty, and it was sometimes both. But it was also the last piece of sovereignty she had been left, the power to keep a room, the power to decide when an evening ended. Strip that away, and what remained was the thing she had told Gore Vidal she was. A disappointment. A spare. A woman in a lit apartment, late at night, who could not bear to be the first to say goodnight, because being alone was the part she had never learned. The footmen who served her longest were asked, in the years after her death, what word they would use. They did not say monster. They did not say tyrant. They said again and again the same quiet word. Sad. The windows of apartment 1A stayed lit late, most nights, for forty years. The footmen waited in the corridor for the bell. One evening, in February 2002, the bell did not ring, and did not ring at all.