Photos and Interview with Christopher Warwick for Margaret: The Rebel Princess

With series on TV such as Netflix's The Crown and PBS' Victoria on Masterpiece, and the headline-making young royals William, Kate, Harry and Meghan, it is apparent that interest in the British royal family is at an all-time high.

But what many Americans may not realize is that, while Princess Diana, is oft credited with bringing "modern" times to the royal family, the change began even before her marriage to Prince Charles with Princess Margaret, younger sister to Queen Elizabeth.

Now, in a two-part documentary, Margaret: The Rebel Princess, PBS offers an insider's look at the tumultuous life and loves of the royal who defied expectations and paved the way for the new generation of the royal family through new interviews with several of her closest friends including Lady Anne Glenconner, Lady Jane Rayne and Jane Stevens; biographers Christopher Warwick, Craig Brown and Anne de Courcy; journalists Clive Irving of the Daily Express and Doris Bacon of AP among others.

Parade.com has an exclusive interview with Warwick, who wrote the authorized biography Princess Margaret: A Life of Contrasts, who shares his thoughts on Margaret's unique position as the Queen’s younger sister in a changing Britain; the men in her life -- from Peter Townsend, a married aide to her father, to her dashing yet philandering husband Lord Snowden, to the much-younger Roddy Llewellyn; and her relationship with her sister.

Is the interest in Princess Margaret now because of William and Kate and Harry and Meghan, especially here in the states because Meghan is American?

I think what has restarted the interest in Margaret is really The Crown. I was talking to a friend who used to work for the queen, and I said, "Personally speaking, I can't see the point in The Crown," and he said, "Well, if it does one thing, it reminds people that the queen was once young." I think equally it tells people who are too young to know, something about Princess Margaret.

Do you think the portrayals in The Crown are pretty accurate, or…?

No. They're not. I have to confess that I've seen little or nothing of it, but I do know from what I have seen and from what I've been told.  A fellow writer called Hugo Vickers has published a 50-page book on the factual inaccuracies of The Crown. There's a lot of dramatic license, as you might expect. It's rather like the current film, The Favourite, about Queen Anne and the Duchess of Marlborough.

Although it is a brilliant film, brilliantly done, while Queen Anne and the Duchess of Marlborough had an intimate relationship, it wasn't sexual. In the film, it's portrayed as having been sexual. We know why ... because it's going to get punters sitting on the seats in cinemas.

The Crown, I think, is based on published material, and published material, as we know, is not always reliable, and it's not always factual. So, while some of The Crown is, indeed, a fairly decent portrayal of these royal lives, it cannot be taken entirely as fact.

What was the relationship like between Elizabeth and Margaret?

The queen and Princess Margaret were always incredibly close, always. They spoke every day, and there was a great bond of love between them. The interesting thing, of course, is that they were as different as chalk and cheese, totally different characters. The queen always, as one of her cousins said to me when we were talking, the queen always looked out for Margaret. She would say, "Don't do that, Margaret, please don’t," when they were children. Because she could see how misrepresented Margaret would be if she did that later on in life.

In 1953, the year of the coronation, Margaret and Peter Townsend were very much in love and wanted to get married. As I described in my biography of her, she went to the queen and said that she and Peter would like to be married. The down side back in the 1950s was that Peter Townsend was a divorcé, and from today's point of view, younger generations don’t realize how scandalous divorce was. Today, we're so used to it. People are divorcing every five minutes and we don’t bat an eyelid. Society, the world has moved on. In 1953, divorce was still a scandal; it was an outrage. Now, the thing was that he was supposed to be the innocent party, but that's a bit of a moot point.

In 1953, the queen had the problem that she was temporal governor of the Church of England, and the Church of England didn’t recognize divorce. Also, as sovereign, she had to give permission to every member of the royal family when they wanted to marry. This she couldn’t do with Margaret and Townsend because she was also the temporal governor of the Church of England. So, she said to Margaret, "I must ask you, in the circumstances, to wait a year." They waited a year, Margaret went back, and said, "We've waited a year, can we get married?" I think on ministerial advice, she said to Margaret, "I have to ask you to wait another year." Now, that was pretty tough stuff for this couple, but in 1955, Townsend having been sent away, came back. He came back to England, Margaret and he met, and the famous statement was issued in October of 1955. The princess said, "Mindful that Christian marriage is indissoluble, my duty to the commonwealth, etcetera, etcetera." She decided that she was not going to marry him.

What I was able to do in my revised biography was [add information from] government papers that I hadn't seen, and, in fact, hadn't been released so nobody had seen them. Bear in mind, even though I became a friend of Princess Margaret, she would not talk about Townsend at all, except for one little chink in her armor when she said, "How do you know when you’ve been apart from somebody for two years if you want to marry them?"

As I say in my revised biography, which was published just over a year ago, she wrote to the then prime minister, Anthony Eden, to say Townsend was coming back to London that October, she hoped to see him, as it was only by seeing him that she could decide whether she could marry him or not. There was the indecision.

So, the truth of the matter is not that she ever would have said to the queen, "You married the man you wanted," as portrayed in The Crown, but that they decided not to marry because they'd fallen out of love. That statement was issued, I maintain, because they had to save face.

It was such a huge story here [in the U.K.] and around the world. We have to remember that she was the most famous princess in the world, the most glamorous princess in the world, and the attention was enormous. So, they couldn't actually just say, "Sorry, folks. We're still very fond of one another, but we're just not in love anymore."

Even now what's so extraordinary to me is that the Margaret/Townsend saga is so deeply carved in stone that a lot of people still don’t know that the government actually did do a U-turn, and they could have married if they'd wanted to, that Margaret would have kept her title, her civil list income would have been increased from 6,000 to 15,000 pounds, and she could have carried on as she wanted to do with her official role. The one thing that she would have lost would have been her place in the line of succession to the throne.

The documentary that PBS is showing next month, I think it's a brilliant documentary, probably the best that's ever been made, but I was disappointed -- and I said so to the producer-director -- that they ended the Townsend business on this thing about duty.  I said, "I'm so sorry that you actually didn’t take it further and say why they didn’t marry," but I guess it didn’t fit in with the storyline. But the truth of it is that, although they had retained a lot of affection, the love that they had just was no longer strong enough for them to marry.

Do you think there ever was a time when she was really happy?

My answer to that is the answer that I've always given, that she was like the rest of us. There were unhappy times in her life, and there were really seriously happy times in her life. You see her portrayed very often as tragic, and as a sad person, and she wasn't at all.

The greatest sadness in her life was the loss of her father. She so adored King George VI. She was just over 21 when he died, and she adored this man. I was sitting having lunch with her on one occasion, and we were talking about the king, and she looked at me and she said, "Christopher, I do wish you had met my father." Even as an older woman she could be reduced to tears and could ask, "Why did he have to die so young?" So, that was a great sorrow in her life.

Of course, she didn’t have a lot of luck with the men in her life. Townsend, of course, was several years older than her. Even if they had married, it probably wouldn’t have worked terribly well, and then people say, "Oh, she married Tony Armstrong Jones on the rebound."

Well, they either don’t know or they forget that in between Peter Townsend and Tony Armstrong Jones, Lord Snowdon, there was a guy called Billy Wallace. Billy Wallace had been part of the so-called Margaret set. He was an old friend of Margaret's, and he had proposed to her before, and then he proposed again, and though she said to me, "I decided it was probably better to marry somebody one at least likes than not to marry at all." So she said, "Well, provided the queen approves." She didn’t want a rerun of Peter Townsend, you see, so she said, "Provided the queen approves, then, yes, we'll marry."

Billy Wallace was fine, he was an aristocrat, and he wasn't married so he couldn't have been divorced. It was all very hush-hush. Nobody knew. It wasn't public knowledge at the time. Then, off he went on a holiday to the Caribbean. He had a bit of an affair with a lady while he was there, came back home, told Princess Margaret that he'd had this affair, and then she said to me, "He was amazed when I threw him out."

Then she met Tony in February of 1958. He didn’t make much of an impression on her then, until a friend of hers who was going abroad on a diplomatic mission said that he'd like to have photographs of her, would she sit for a new session of pictures? She said, "Yes," and this guy said, "I know exactly the photographer, Tony Armstrong Jones, and it really started from there.

When they fell in love, there was absolutely no doubt whatsoever that they really were head over heels in love. Tony had this place overlooking the Thames in a bend in the river. In one direction you saw the Tower Bridge and Saint Paul's Cathedral; in the other direction you saw all the docks. She said in the high tide, swans looked in the window. So, this was, to her, absolute heaven, and they used to escape there after they married.

They'd only been married round about three years, she was pregnant with Sarah, so it's 1963, when there were cracks in the marriage. The writing was on the wall. She became a bit too obsessive. He didn’t always want to tell her where he was, he didn’t just want to be Mr. Princess Margaret. But Tony, as I was told, was much cleverer at being nasty than Princess Margaret ever knew how to be. So, in a way it's not too surprising that that marriage went wrong and that they divorced. It was the first divorce in the royal family since Henry VIII, I think.

One of the things that I think was interesting about Elizabeth and Margaret that's different than say William and Harry is they were never meant to ascend to the throne. So, Margaret wasn't raised up with the idea that she was the spare?

Absolutely not.

So, when that happened did it change her?

No. I think because she was too young, you see. Again, what we have to remember is that in 1936 when Edward VIII abdicated and the girls' father became King George VI, Elizabeth was 10 and Margaret was 6. Kids back then had no comprehension of what the world was all about. Elizabeth was the one who explained what was happening to the young Margaret. Margaret said to me that her sister had said, "Uncle David is going away and Papa is to be king," and Margaret said to her, "Elizabeth, does that mean you'll be queen?" Elizabeth replied, "One day," and never referred to it again.