Kinlight · The British Royal Line

Margaret Windsor

1930 – 2002 · Generation XXXVII · House of Windsor

Portrait of Margaret Windsor

Princess Margaret was born at Glamis Castle in Scotland on 21 August 1930, the younger daughter of the Duke and Duchess of York and the only sibling of the future Elizabeth II. She and her sister were taught at home by a governess. In December 1936 their uncle Edward VIII abdicated, their father became George VI, and the six-year-old Margaret found herself second in line to the throne. She spent the war years at Windsor Castle, where the two princesses staged Christmas pantomimes, and in 1947 she made her first journey abroad on the royal family’s tour of southern Africa.

Her father died in February 1952, and the years that followed were dominated by a single question. She had fallen in love with Group Captain Peter Townsend, an RAF officer and war hero who had served as the King’s equerry. He was fifteen years her senior and, from late 1952, divorced. He proposed and she accepted, but under the Royal Marriages Act of 1772 she needed her sister’s consent until she was twenty-five, the Church of England did not accept remarriage after divorce, and Winston Churchill’s cabinet was opposed. The press caught the story at the coronation in June 1953, and within weeks Townsend had been posted to the British embassy in Brussels. For two years newspapers at home and abroad speculated. He returned in October 1955, after her twenty-fifth birthday, and on 31 October she announced that she would not marry him, “mindful of the Church’s teachings that Christian marriage is indissoluble, and conscious of my duty to the Commonwealth”. Government papers released in 2004 suggest that a plan had in fact been prepared under which she could have married him and kept her title and income while giving up her place in the succession.

In 1958 she met the photographer Antony Armstrong-Jones. Their engagement, announced in February 1960, took the press by surprise, and their wedding in Westminster Abbey on 6 May 1960 was the first British royal wedding to be televised, watched by an estimated 300 million people around the world. He was created Earl of Snowdon in 1961. They lived at Kensington Palace and had two children, David, born in 1961, and Sarah, born in 1964. Her circle, until then drawn from the court and the aristocracy, now took in actors, entertainers and bohemians, and the match was read at the time as a sign that Britain’s class barriers were coming down.

It did not last. Husband and wife had grown apart by the early 1970s, and in 1973 Margaret met Roddy Llewellyn, seventeen years her junior, whom she invited more than once to the house she had built on the Caribbean island of Mustique. In February 1976 a tabloid published a photograph of the two of them there, and the following month the Snowdons announced their separation. When the divorce came in 1978, no senior member of the royal family had been through one since 1901. She did not marry again.

Through all this she kept up her public work. She was patron or president of more than eighty organisations, among them the NSPCC and the Girl Guides, and became the first president of the Royal Ballet in 1957. She represented the Crown when Jamaica became independent in 1962 and at the independence of Dominica and Tuvalu in 1978.

A heavy smoker from her youth, she had part of a lung removed in 1985. She suffered a stroke on Mustique in February 1998, badly scalded her feet in a bathroom accident the following year, and had further strokes after that. Princess Margaret died in London on 9 February 2002, aged seventy-one, seven weeks before her mother. After a private funeral at St George’s Chapel, Windsor, held fifty years to the day after her father’s, she was cremated, and her ashes were laid beside her parents in the King George VI Memorial Chapel.

Place in the family

  • Margaret Windsor was a sister of Queen Elizabeth II.
  • Margaret Windsor was the younger of 2 children of King George VI and Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon recorded in this archive.

Images

One of 53 people of House of Windsor (from 1917) in this archive. The present house — it renamed itself Windsor in 1917, setting aside the German title Saxe-Coburg and Gotha.

Line of descent: Owen Tudor → Edmund Tudor → King Henry VII → Margaret Tudor → King James V of Scotland → Mary Queen of Scots → King James I → Elizabeth Stuart → Sophia of Hanover → King George I → King George II → Frederick Prince of Wales → King George III → Edward Duke of Kent → Queen Victoria → King Edward VII → King George V → King George VI → Margaret Windsor.

Read more on Wikipedia

Parents

Siblings

Partners

  • Married Antony Armstrong-Jones (1930 – 2017) in 1960; the marriage was dissolved in 1978 — 2 children together

Children

Life

  • 1930 — Born
  • 1960 — Married Antony Armstrong-Jones
  • 1978 — Separated from Antony Armstrong-Jones
  • 2002 — Died

Sources

  1. Princess Margaret, Countess of Snowdon · Wikipedia
  2. Princess Margaret · The Royal Family (royal.uk)
  3. Princess Margaret, daughter of George VI · Westminster Abbey

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