Robert Brown, an accountant from Jersey, believes himself to be the illegitimate son of Princess Margaret.
Brown is registered as having been born in Nairobi on 5 January 1955, though the birth was not officially registered until 2 February of the same year. His parents are registered as Douglas and Cynthia Brown, who are both now dead.
Brown thinks that, in its later stage, the Princess’s pregnancy was covered up by body doubles; he was then moved to Kenya, for adoption by Cynthia Brown, who had been a model for Hardy Amies. He believes that his true father may have been Princess Margaret’s lover Robin Douglas-Home, who committed suicide in 1968.
For some time, Brown has harboured an instinctive conviction that he was not the natural son of the Browns, who had always been more distant from him than from their other children, his supposed siblings. Douglas and Cynthia Brown would sometimes forget his birthday, and never discussed his birth with him. His first idea was that he was related to King Edward VIII; he then wondered if Prince Philip might be his father.
‘Cynthia gave me my birth certificate in my early twenties in a rather stiff, matter-of-fact way – a pure statement of fact in a slightly stressed monotone. It struck me as odd at the time – on her part devoid of emotion, slightly embarrassed, and her manner did not invite discussion,’ he says. ‘Odd for a mother, but maybe not in the circumstances, given she would have played a part, if only of silence, in the registration of the birth.’
Since Princess Margaret’s death in 2002, Brown has fought to obtain secret court papers relating to her will. He thinks that these documents will show that Buckingham Palace, the attorney general and a senior judge conspired to cover up the Princess’s last testament, in which, he suspects, details of his birth were included. In an early court hearing, lawyers for the Royal Family dismissed him as ‘a fantasist seeking to feed his private obsession’. In 2007, Geoffrey Robertson QC told the court that Brown was ‘a perfectly rational man who seeks peace of mind’, but Sir Mark Porter, president of the Family Division, described Brown’s claim as ‘imaginary and baseless’.
Brown has a childhood memory of meeting a woman he now believes to have been Princess Margaret. ‘The woman told me to stand on a tree-trunk and repeat, “I’m the king of the castle, you’re the dirty rascal” again and again. It was meant to be fun, but it wasn’t. There was a poignant subtext to it. I had a gut feeling that there was a royal connection, even though my logical side said there must be some other explanation.’ Princess Margaret paid an official visit to Kenya in October 1956, when Brown would have been a year and nine months old.
‘I can’t get it out of my head that I am right,’ Brown told a reporter from the Guardian in 2012. ‘I can understand that people are sceptical because it seems to be childhood fantasy stuff, but it is not like that with me … Hopefully I am not a nutcase. I am either right or I am wrong.’
An obviously intelligent and articulate man, who bears more than a passing resemblance to Princess Margaret, Brown was initially in two minds about pursuing his case. ‘It took me ages to do anything about it because though my instinctual side suggested that it was correct, and my emotions said it was correct, my rational side said that’s nuts, how could they have covered up a pregnancy, it’s the stuff of fantasy, there must be some other explanation for the memories that you have.’
Critics of his theory point out that Princess Margaret attended a dress show in London on 1 December 1955, and a performance of Cinderella on Ice at Earl’s Court a week later. Had she been eight months pregnant, it would, they say, have been evident. On 21 December she attended the Royal Family’s annual staff party at Buckingham Palace, and led the dancing with Cyril Dickman, a Palace footman. Lady Rosemary Muir recalled Princess Margaret attending her son Alexander’s christening at Woodstock on 8 January. ‘There was no evidence she had just given birth. I should know, having just done so myself … These claims are absolute poppycock.’
In January 1992, the seventy-seven-year-old Peter Townsend was visited at his home outside Paris by a man who introduced himself as Philip Thomas. ‘The purpose of his unannounced visit was to inform me that he had reason to believe that he was the son of HRH Princess Margaret and that I might well be his father!’ Townsend explained in a letter to Sir Martin Gilliat, the Queen Mother’s private secretary.
Townsend told Thomas that he would never discuss the Princess ‘on any account’, but he offered him a glass of wine, and the two men had a conversation about Welsh rugby. When Thomas got in touch with him again a year later, Townsend contacted his solicitor. ‘Silly as this may be,’ he wrote, ‘I cannot resist the following observations: considering that (as he confirms) he was born in Swansea on 25 April 1956, it is not likely that P.M., whom he claims to be his mother, would (as he also confirms) have made an official visit to Port Talbot on 26 April 1956.’