Princess Margaret’s Wedding Book (1960) sits on my bookshelves alongside Debrett’s Book of the Royal Wedding (1981) and Debrett’s Book of the Royal Engagement (1986), all of them souvenirs of dashed hopes.
‘There was no doubt about the nation’s delight at the announcement of this engagement after weeks of speculation,’ reads the introduction to Debrett’s Book of the Royal Engagement, ‘and the general consensus seemed to be that Prince Andrew was a fortunate man indeed in having chosen such an obviously warm-hearted and beautiful girl as Sarah Ferguson.’
The same note of optimism can be found in Princess Margaret’s Wedding Book, though its expression is more tortured:
Now the future lies before the young couple. May there be many more pictures that they and all their well-wishers can turn to with pleasure, and may all the hopes the young bride holds for her married life be as richly fulfilled to her as the promises she made at the altar are certain to be nobly vindicated by her.
… When Princess Margaret walked up the nave of Westminster Abbey to the High Altar on the arm of the Duke of Edinburgh she was not only celebrating a uniquely happy personal event but setting a notable precedent for the British Royal Family. She was marrying a commoner … It is fitting that it should have been left for Princess Margaret to take this final step, since there has always been in her a modernity, a feeling for the constantly shifting patterns of twentieth century living that marked her as an innovator.
The newspapers of the time were every bit as jubilant, perhaps more so. The Evening Standard’s Anne Sharpley set great store by the groom’s lack of blue blood:
In splendour, sunshine and great sweetness, Princess Margaret married Mr Antony Armstrong Jones, the young man without title, without pretension, today in Westminster Abbey.
It was something that could have happened only in the 20th century – a Sovereign’s daughter marrying a photographer with all the force of the centuries of this ancient land bringing dignity, grace and deep approval.
Princess Margaret – perhaps we have never known before how beautiful she is – kept a sweet gravity about her that we had never seen.
The simplicity and lightness of her gown, her quiet air. She was a woman surrounded by all the white mystery of womanhood.
Sharpley’s report was topped by two lines from a poem specially composed by the eighty-one-year-old poet laureate, John Masefield:
All England here, whose symbol is the Rose,
Prays that this Lady’s Fortune may be fair.
Printed in full in the souvenir programme, the poem was called ‘Prayer for this Glad Morning’. Like many royal verses, it favours simplicity over verve:
… Now, here, a nation prays, that a bright spring
May bless the day with sunlight and with flowers,
And through this ever-threatened life of ours,
May bless the lives with every welcome thing …
Masefield left no notes or first drafts for this poem, and omitted it from his letters and diaries, so we can only guess at the manner of its creation. As he wrote the line ‘Now, here, a nation prays, that a bright spring’, was he hoping that the perfect rhyme would crop up, out of the blue, three lines further on? But what? ‘Bling’? ‘Fling’? ‘Ring’? ‘Sting’? Sometimes, the magic fails to materialise. ‘May bless the lives with every welcome thing’. At this point, did he look at it, sigh, and think, like so many poets laureate before and after, ‘It’ll do’?
On the other hand, Noël Coward’s delight flowed effortlessly. It had, he thought, been ‘the big week, the glamorous week, the Hurrah for England week!’ (‘In spite,’ he added, ‘of a hacking cough.’)
On the Wednesday, a court ball at Buckingham Palace had, in his opinion, seen ‘everybody looking their tiptop best and the entire Royal Family charming’. He had enjoyed chats with Prince Philip, the Queen Mother, the Queen (‘brief but amiable’), the ‘dear’ Duchess of Kent and ‘the radiant engaged couple’. And he had been particularly entranced by the groom: ‘He is a charmer and I took a great shine to him, easy and unflurried and a sweet smile.’
On the Friday came the wedding itself. ‘God in his heaven really smiling like mad and everything in the garden being genuinely lovely … The morning was brilliant and the crowds lining the streets looked like endless vivid herbaceous borders. The police were smiling, the Guards beaming and the air tingling with excitement and the magic of spring.’
The service was, he thought, ‘moving and irreproachably organized. The Queen alone looked disagreeable; whether or not this was concealed sadness or bad temper because Tony Armstrong-Jones had refused an earldom,* nobody seems to know but she did scowl a good deal.’ Princess Margaret herself ‘looked like the ideal of what any fairy-tale princess should look like. Tony Armstrong-Jones pale, a bit tremulous and completely charming. Prince Philip jocular and really very sweet and reassuring as he led the bride to the altar. The music was divine and the fanfare immensely moving. Nowhere in the world but England could such pomp and circumstance and pageantry be handled with such exquisite dignity. There wasn’t one note of vulgarity or anything approaching it in the whole thing … it was lusty, charming, romantic, splendid and without a false note. It is still a pretty exciting thing to be English.’
Once it was over, Coward went to ‘a wild but beautifully organised lunch party’ with a motley group drawn from the worlds of politics and the arts, among them James Pope-Hennessy, Lucian Freud, Bob Boothby and Hugh Gaitskell. Later, he sat down to watch the wedding on television, enjoying footage of the royal couple leaving for their honeymoon on the royal yacht Britannia. ‘It was moving and romantic and the weather still held, and when the Tower Bridge opened and the yacht passed through with those two tiny figures waving from just below the bridge I discovered, unashamedly and without surprise, that my eyes were full of tears.’
Just short of his tenth birthday, Alan Johnson, who was to grow up to become Home Secretary and Chancellor of the Exchequer, watched the wedding on television with his mother and sister in their slum dwelling in Walmer Road, London W11. ‘Up until then, I had never been able to figure out why a woman could not have babies before she was married. During the Royal Wedding service, after the couple were pronounced man and wife, the cameras had focused on the altar while the bride and groom went somewhere with the Archbishop of Canterbury, out of sight of the congregation and the cameras.
‘It came to me in a flash that this must be the point at which a bride was injected to enable her to have babies. It all made sense. Princess Margaret had been injected and the following year she’d had a child.’
He held firm to this belief for a full two years before his older sister Linda, ‘with a knowing smile’, disabused him. ‘I listened with mounting horror. How could a man do that to a woman? … A simple injection seemed, to my twelve-year-old self, to be preferable in every respect.’
Sixteen years later, following the announcement of the royal couple’s separation, Auberon Waugh was to look back on their wedding day with mixed emotions. As an undergraduate at Oxford, he had witnessed ‘many scenes of dignified grief in the Christ Church Junior Common Room as she walked up the aisle with her Welsh dwarf of “artistic” leanings. But we may have felt that after her somewhat chequered past she was lucky to catch anyone, and certainly there was nothing like the shock of humiliation we all suffered when Princess Anne announced that she was going to marry her grinning speechless stable-lad.’
* He did not become Lord Snowdon until the following year.