Diana's Nightmare - The Family (40 page)

Nevertheless, something seems to have disturbed him. Five days before Charles was born he issued a decree which affected Margaret for the rest of her life. He ruled that the children of Elizabeth and Philip should be born princes and princesses, but that Margaret's children should not receive the same royal titles. This anomaly seemed to suggest that the King doubted his younger daughter's ability to make a suitable royal marriage.

Peter Townsend had been married to Rosemary Pawle, the daughter of a brigadier, since July 1941 and the couple had two small sons. When she became aware of her husband's romance, the cheated wife reacted with bitterness. Her unhappiness was apparent to Eileen Parker, who met her soon after her husband, Mike, started working for Prince Philip.

'Rosemary Townsend and I were married to men being seduced away from us by the lustre of glittering prizes,' recalled Eileen. 'She was a wife and mother who had to stand by while Princess Margaret (hardly out of ankle socks) led her husband around the Palace by his nose. She could sound bitter sometimes. One night we found ourselves next to each other at a reception. I was a comparatively new Household wife and she asked me how I was enjoying life. "It has its moments," I said. Rosemary gave me a pitying look. "You wait," she said. "There's lots more in store for you - and not all of it good." '

The Townsends separated discreetly and Rosemary started seeing another man, John de Laszlo. On 20 December, 1952, she was divorced on the grounds of her adultery with de Laszlo, whom she later married. To her friends, it seemed that Rosemary, the guilty party in the divorce, had taken the blame for her husband's illicit affair. This, in theory, left Townsend legally free to marry Margaret.

Summoning all the courage of the Battle of Britain fighter pilot he had been, Townsend told Sir Alan 'Tommy' Lascelles, Elizabeth's Private Secretary, that he was in love with Margaret and that she returned his feelings. 'You are either mad or bad,' barked Lascelles.

Townsend reported this unpromising reaction to Margaret. 'I shall curse him to the grave,' she said later. As the Queen's reign was just a year old, Margaret was persuaded, albeit reluctantly, to wait two years before making her plans known to the world.

There was a further disappointment for her at Elizabeth's coronation on 2 June, 1953. The Duke of Edinburgh replaced her as Regent in the event of the Queen's death before Charles reached the age of eighteen. The comeback was immediate. After the vows had been made and Elizabeth had worn the crown for the first time, Margaret and Townsend were sheltering with others on the porch of Westminster Abbey until a downpour had subsided. Nonchalantly, Margaret brushed a piece of fluff off Peter Townsend's RAF uniform in full view of reporters. This one small gesture told newsmen who had come to cover a joyous State occasion that they had also witnessed an intimate moment in a very dangerous love affair. When the Townsend issue boiled to the surface soon afterwards, Margaret found that Philip, for once, sided with the old guard at the Palace. He spoke out uncharitably against Townsend, whom he had grown to loathe during his service as equerry at the Palace. The Duke's hostility was entirely due to his belief that Townsend had tried to influence the King on the subject of his own royal union. He made his feelings known while Margaret, torn between love and duty, was at her most vulnerable.

It was left to the new Prime Minister, Sir Anthony Eden, a divorcee who had happily remarried without wrecking his political prospects, to explain the impossibility of her position to the Princess. The Cabinet, he said, would not condone her marriage to a divorced man. Her thoughts on this piece of hypocrisy were unrecorded.

Townsend encouraged her to take the excruciating step of breaking off their relationship permanently. He even helped her to write the epitaph. It was published on 31 October, 1955, two months after Margaret turned twenty-five.

'I would like it to be known that I have decided not to marry Group Captain Peter Townsend,' the statement said. 'I have been aware that, subject to my renouncing my rights of succession, it might have been possible for me to contract a civil marriage. But, mindful of the Church's teaching that Christian marriage is indissoluble, and conscious of the Commonwealth, I have resolved to put these considerations before any other.'

The dry, formal language gave no inkling of the heartache Margaret was suffering after those two painful years of separation. The lovers had corresponded almost every day. She had mistakenly believed that if she waited, her wishes would be granted. The thought that she had been unjustly punished for falling in love with a married man stayed with her. It is doubtful if she ever forgave.

To console herself, Margaret bought a tiara which, by custom, only married women wore. The Duke openly ridiculed her. But Margaret never allowed Philip's antagonism to come between her and her sister. 'Anyone who offends the Queen makes two enemies,' said the friend. It came across in little ways. If someone mentioned 'your sister' to her, she immediately put them in their place. 'You mean Her Majesty,' she would say witheringly.

After Townsend, Margaret's lifestyle would have scandalised the country had it ever been made public. The Press kept dutifully silent, though, and there was a collective sigh of relief when she announced her engagement to Antony Armstrong-Jones, the photographer she met at the wedding of her friends, the Honourable Colin Tennant and Lady Anne Coke. The Snowdons' marriage ended unedifyingly after both partners took lovers during the course of a very libertarian 'separate lives' agreement.

At sixty-two, Margaret entered the fray of 1992 with more campaign medals won in lost causes of the heart than anyone else in the whole scenario.

MARGARET had spent part of the summer cruising off the Turkish coast with friends, including her irrepressible Irish court jester Ned Ryan. By chance, they had met up with Charles and Diana, who were going through the motions of a second honeymoon with their sons on board the
Alexander,
owned by the Greek shipping tycoon John Latsis, who also owned expensive chunks of Mayfair. As the two groups of royalty and their entourages spent a day together exploring the coast, Diana's distant behaviour towards her husband confirmed to Margaret that the marriage was going through its death throes. Her moody silences, it was claimed, were the result of a radio phone call she had intercepted between Charles and Camilla. Diana supposedly picked up the phone in her cabin and overheard some of the love talk. Whatever the reason, Diana stayed close to her sons, pointedly ignoring invitations to join the others.

At Balmoral, Diana's efforts to promote her own cause soon after Fergie had fled Balmoral infuriated Margaret so much that she felt compelled to speak. Diana listened as the words came tumbling out. Auntie Margo accused her of being 'insensitive and utterly selfish'. Bitterly, she added: 'You just don't realise - and probably don't care - how much you have hurt the Queen. She deserved better.' To Diana, the outburst merely confirmed that the Family had united against her and she would be better out of it.

Margaret was so incensed that, even four months later, she described the scene when she was among friends at Bowood House, the Earl of Shelburne's mansion in Wiltshire. She had just returned from a holiday on Mustique with Viscount Linley and Serena Stanhope. 'She still felt strongly about Diana's behaviour,' said an insider. 'The conversation turned to another aristocrat who was having problems with his girlfriend and Margaret said, "They don't know how to get rid of each other." Then she added, "We're very glad to have got rid of Diana." '

Auntie Margo couldn't resist having the last word.

AT Kensington Palace, Diana realised that her travails in getting out of a marriage were not unlike Margaret's difficulties had been in getting into one. The royal system had defeated both of them. Short on laughs, she relished a tasty vignette which reached her circle from the Caribbean. The Queen's sister, it transpired, had taken a leaf out of Imelda Marcos's book during her annual holiday and was holding roving dinner parties at the homes of absent owners.

Margaret had flown to Mustique to recuperate at Les Jolies Eaux after being treated in hospital for pneumonia, another of the illnesses contracted from her sixty-a-day smoking habit. She had spent five days at the King Edward VII Military Hospital in London, ill-health and unhappiness are things she can do without,' said a charity executive who works closely with her. 'She has had enough problems in life.' Still frail, Margaret made it plain to her son David, Serena and the other house guests that she would prefer it if they stayed away from Basil's Bar, the island's seafront watering hole.

'Everyone goes to Basil's to watch the sun go down at five thirty in the evening,' said a holidaymaker privy to the secrets of Margaret's circle. 'So there was some grumpiness about the ban. To make life interesting, the Princess decided to dine in some of the empty villas. She would ring up Mick Jagger's people if the tenants were away and say, "We would like to use Stargroves for dinner this evening. I trust that will be in order." She sends her cook on ahead with all the food and then turns up with her guests to spend the evening.' Only one owner, pop idol David Bowie, had objected to Margaret's movable feasts, saying: 'I built this house and I don't see why I should let a load of strangers wander around snooping in my bedrooms.'

'I was at school with one of Imelda Marcos's goddaughters and she said Imelda did exactly the same thing, only she went much further,' said the holidaymaker. 'She would admire a painting on the wall and expect the owner to give it to her. Her hosts began to lock up everything before she arrived.' Margaret, of course, did not go that far. But to the other residents it showed that she viewed herself as the undisputed queen of the tropical isle.

Few complained because she was a popular figure and they looked forward to her arrival in time for the St Valentine's fancy dress party on 14 February. Her presence in their midst also guaranteed that rental prices remained among the highest in the Caribbean. No fewer than forty villas were available for rent at up to $15,000 a week to well-heeled holidaymakers who liked to swim, sunbathe and siesta in luxurious surroundings.

Diana had never visited the island which, though it shone like a piece of jade in the Caribbean blue, was rightly named after the French word for mosquito,
moustique.
The afternoon arrival of free-biting mosquitoes signals an early curfew to outdoor activities. There is little else to do at night except chat over drinks. 'Hollywood doesn't go to Mustique because of its drawbacks, the mosquitoes being the worst,' said one suntanned survivor. 'None of the food is fresh, the fruit juices are all canned and the meat and vegetables are brought in frozen. Yachties drop in to moor their boats because they think they are going to see Mick Jagger and Jerry Hall having a rum punch at Basil's Bar, but it doesn't happen. David Bowie goes there specifically to be alone with Iman. He doesn't see anybody; he carves things out of stone and plays chess. At Basil's Bar, people just sit there in the evening passing the spray cans. You get all dollied up in something cool and silky, put on your expensive perfume and then sit there covering your scent with mosquito repellent.'

Colin Tennant, later Lord Glenconner, had paid £45,000 in 1958 for this swampy piece of real estate just three miles long and a mile and a half wide. As a wedding present, he had given Margaret ten acres on a headland where the waters of the Caribbean meet the Atlantic. Lord Snowdon hadn't shared Margaret's enthusiasm for the tropical speck, even though his uncle Oliver Messel had designed Les Jolies Eaux and many of the other homes on the island.

Guests paid $8,000 a week plus five per cent government tax and a three per cent administrative charge to stay there. The Mustique Company also suggested that a gratuity of one and a half to three per cent of the total rental should be paid to staff. The U-shaped villa was built around a courtyard with its sitting room pointing towards the waters of Gelliceaux Bay. Opening up the doors, guests could convert the living area into a spacious, open-air veranda. Outside, they walked across a paved sun deck and through Roddy's Garden to the swimming pool and gazebo. The young Roderic Llewellyn had planned the garden, ablaze with oleander and hibiscus, when he was Margaret's toy-boy lover. But it was years since he had visited Mustique and dutifully carried buckets of water from the beach to wash the sand off her feet as she left it.

'The people who are renting Mick Jagger's house at the moment are the Kauzovs, Sergei and Ally,' recounted one who had stayed there in March, 1993. 'They are paying $8,000 a week because they bought The Great House from Lord Glenconner and they are having the whole place landscaped. It's costing a fortune. A botanist has been flown in from England to do all the plants. Sergei was the third husband of Christina Onassis and he was given a huge settlement when the marriage ended. He put it into shipping in Russia and now he's a freighter tycoon. Christina was Jamie Blandford's step-sister and, of course, his father Sunny was one of the Margaret Set. Ally commutes from the Kausovs' house in Knightsbridge with their daughter Maria, a two-year-old. They have a Norland nanny who is permanently in uniform and looks immaculate. Everyone else just wears a swimsuit and a sarong during the day and it's really funny to see the Norland nanny pushing her pram as though she's in Kensington Gardens.'

Guests recalled the fate of another nanny, Barbara Barnes, who had departed Kensington Palace soon after partying in Mustique. 'Barbara had looked after the Glenconners' children and she was invited to Lord Glenconner's sixtieth birthday party as a friend,' said one. 'By all accounts, it was an excellent do and everyone was photographed in fancy dress. Diana already thought Nanny Barnes was too close to her sons and the pictures only made things worse. She more or less froze her out after that and she left in the New Year.' Diana's petulance annoyed Princess Margaret, who was extremely fond of Baba.

At one party, guests conferred over an item of gossip which had reached them from Los Angeles concerning Prince Andrew and his friendship with the actress Catherine Oxenberg. 'He likes her because she's very shy and quiet and very feminine,' said one guest. 'I think men are intimidated by me,' Catherine was quoted as saying. 'They assume that if you are pretty and comfortably off then you must have someone in your life.'