The story of the Royal Family in the 1990s involved a lot of going off the rails. The marriages of three of the Queen’s four children – Charles, Anne and Andrew – hit the rocks, amidst a series of scandals reminiscent of a particularly fruity Carry On film. This had the effect of making Princess Margaret, now in her sixties, appear almost strait-laced by comparison. Moreover, her own two children, David and Sarah, had both embarked on enduring marriages; they were now widely regarded as more accomplished and personable than their Windsor cousins. The media spotlight had moved on. ‘They all leave me alone these days,’ she told a visitor. ‘They’ve got other fish to fry.’
In 1994, when Margaret was sixty-four, a rackety journalist called Noel Botham published Margaret: The Untold Story, a book containing two love letters written by Margaret to her lover Robin Douglas-Home in the spring of 1967. Their authenticity was inarguable: the Princess’s handwriting was reproduced in facsimile.
Douglas-Home, the nephew of the former prime minister, had committed suicide in October 1968, eighteen months after the brief affair had come to an end. A lounge lizard, he had first entered Princess Margaret’s orbit while playing piano at fashionable nightclubs in the late 1950s. After a brief, unhappy marriage to the eighteen-year-old model Sandra Paul,* he had returned to the piano stool in 1966, this time at a restaurant called The Society, his modest salary supplemented by a fast-flowing stream of champagne cocktails.
He was one of the men Margaret would invite for dinner from time to time, partly to stave off the boredom and loneliness caused by Lord Snowdon’s protracted absences, and partly to make him jealous. Their affair lasted barely a month before Snowdon got wind of it, and brought it to a halt.
‘Darling Robin,’ began her first letter, written on Valentine’s Day 1967, when she was thirty-six:
Thank you for a perfect weekend …
Thank you for the care and trouble you took to make everything delicious, which restored one’s heart.
Thank you for the concert, the pleasure of which will remain in the mind for ever, and in a way shocked one into sensibility again.
Thank you for the music, which mended the nerve ends.
Thank you for making me live again …
The second, written a fortnight later, was in response to an emotional outburst from Douglas-Home after Margaret had been forced by Snowdon to swear on the Bible that she had been faithful. It is a heartfelt mixture of love, fear and faith.
Darling,
I have never had a letter like it. I don’t suppose one like it has ever been written. The beauty in it, and the poetry lifted my heart again.
Then came two nights of complete attack on – the affair of the heart – denied, as said, on the Bible, my only consolation being that that revered book was not there to lay my hand on.
I think all the time of you. I was so happy when I heard your voice again … This is to be a bleak time for love. I am only encouraged by the knowledge that I am secure in yours and I would do anything, as you know, to make you happy and not hurt you.
I am hampered by thoughts and hearts being divided at this moment when a real effort must be made on my side to make the marriage work.
I feel I can do this, curiously enough, more convincingly with this happiness of security in you, and feeling of being upheld by you, than without
My brain wireless must have been tuned in quite well, for I felt your presence very strongly. I do hope that by being ‘très sage’ that we can keep the precious memories safe. They are more precious to me than perhaps you think. I, too, would love to unlimit the limitedness, but I see no possibility of this happening.
What I don’t want us to do is to yearn and long, and eat our hearts out wanting something that is forbidden.
We must make the most of this wonder that has happened to us to do particularly wonderful things … so that people will marvel at them and they won’t know why we are doing such excellent things in such a special way.
No one will know, only us with our secret source of inspiration. I shall try and speak to you as much as possible but I am in fear of him and I don’t know what lengths he won’t go to, jealous as he is, to find out what I am up to, and your movements, too.
… Our love has the passionate scent of new mown grass and lilies about it.
Not many people are lucky enough to have known any love like this. I feel so happy that it has happened to me.
… Promise you will never give up, that you will go on encouraging me to make the marriage a success, and that given a good and safe chance, I will try and come back to you one day.
I daren’t at the moment.
You are good and loyal, think that I am, too, whatever I may seem to do or say.
All my love my darling,
M
Had these letters entered the public domain at the time they were penned, Margaret would have been vilified as the scarlet woman, and Tony sanctified as her poor, long-suffering victim. But over the course of twenty-seven years, the mood and mores of the country had moved on. In contrast to the more sordid philanderings of the younger generation, this seemed passionate and loving, and more like the stuff of true romance. Margaret, long seen by the British public as difficult and dissolute, would now be welcomed back into her former, youthful role as the Unhappy Princess, or the Princess Unlucky in Love.
* Who remains married to her fourth husband, Michael Howard, leader of the Conservative Party 2003–2005.