Perhaps wisely, the author didn’t elaborate on his aside that Margaret might have made a rather good queen. Since then, others have begged to differ. ‘The Almighty gets the right people to be born first,’ her cousin Margaret Rhodes told Tim Heald. ‘Thank heaven Margaret wasn’t the eldest – it would have been disastrous the other way round.’
The Princess would at least have gone along with her cousin’s theology. Her sister’s position was, in her opinion, decreed by God. A.N. Wilson remembers one evening spent in her company. ‘Someone mentioned the quasi-religious feelings excited in many bosoms by the thought of the Queen. Someone else spoke of the common phenomenon, in all ranks of society, of dreaming about the Queen, and said that in their case these dreams brought feelings of peace and benediction, as if they had been in the presence of God. “Quite right, too,” said Princess Margaret firmly. “After all, the Queen is God’s representative in this realm.” Admittedly the Princess was in a condition which Private Eye would describe as “tired and emotional”, but I got the impression that her words were meant entirely seriously.’
In fact, Margaret Rhodes’s glowing interim report on the Almighty’s gift for administrating the royal succession was a little selective: in 1502 He saw to it that the first-born, Prince Arthur, perished from sweating sickness at the age of fifteen, thus allowing his reckless younger brother Henry to be crowned King Henry VIII on their father’s death seven years later. In 1894 He arranged for the flighty Duke of Windsor to be born first, before the dependable King George VI. Had it been the other way round, would the Duke of Windsor’s supporters now be saying that, if only he had been born first, he might have made a rather good king? Likewise, the Queen’s grandfather, King George V, was born second, the early death of his flaky elder brother, Prince Albert Victor, described by the historian Philip Magnus as ‘a merciful act of providence’.
But what if Margaret had been born first? Would she really have been better-suited to the role of Queen than the secondary role of Princess? John Updike once suggested that ‘Margaret would have made a more striking and expressive queen’, though he then went on to ask, ‘but would she have worn as well, and presided as smoothly?’
What if Elizabeth had been the younger daughter? Would she have turned out all moody and demanding? Pursued any further, these idle speculations spiral to the very heart of human existence. Nature or nurture? If the egg that turned into Elizabeth had instead turned into Margaret – that is to say, had Margaret been born first – would Margaret have become the dutiful monarch, and Elizabeth the wayward bossyboots? Or would Queen Margaret I have been a chain-smoking, high-camp, acid-tongued, slugabed monarch, leaving her younger sister, HRH the Princess Elizabeth, in her tweed skirts and her sensible shoes, to pick up the pieces? Was Margaret’s entire life overshadowed by the conviction that she had missed out on the throne? How odd, to emerge from the womb fourth in line, to go up a notch at the age of six, up another notch that same year, and then to find yourself hurtling down, down, down to fourth place at the birth of Prince Charles in 1948, fifth at the birth of Princess Anne in 1950, then downhill all the way, overtaken by a non-stop stream of riff-raff – Prince Andrew and Prince Edward and Peter Phillips and Princess Beatrice and the rest of them, down, down, down, until by the time of your death you have plummeted to number eleven, behind Zara Phillips, later to become Zara Tindall, mother of Mia Tindall, who, if you were still alive, would herself be one ahead of you, even when she was still in nappies. Not many women have to face the fact that their careers peaked at the age of six, or to live with the prospect of losing their place in the pecking order to a succession of newborn babies, and to face demotion every few years thereafter. Small wonder, then, if Princess Margaret felt short-changed by life.
But what if she had been the first-born? Would it have been any different? What if she had been Queen? Or if Elizabeth had died young? What if, somewhere along the line, Margaret and Elizabeth had switched characters?
What if? What if? What if?