Game of Crowns: Elizabeth, Camilla, Kate, and the Throne (8 page)

So, too, was the Queen’s only sibling. Princess Margaret was just twenty-one when Elizabeth became queen. With her blue-violet eyes, raven hair, and hourglass figure, Margaret already boasted a well-deserved reputation as the headstrong, hell-raising, defiantly decadent flip side to her dutiful elder sister. A denizen of London’s nightclub scene who liked to be photographed with a long cigarette holder, Princess Margaret had what Cecil Beaton called a “sex twinkle” that made her “irresistible to the press and of course a thorn in the side of the establishment.”

For all the young Queen’s budding statesmanship that so impressed the legendary likes of Winston Churchill, the first real crisis thrust upon her had nothing at all to do with the worlds of politics or international relations. It involved Princess Margaret’s complicated romantic life—the first in a cavalcade of Royal Family missteps, scandals, and misadventures that Elizabeth would have to wrestle with and, sadly, that would come to define her reign.

Margaret, at the time third in line to the throne behind Prince Charles and Princess Anne, had fallen in love with Peter Townsend, a dashing Royal Air Force Group Captain who shot down eleven German planes during the Battle of Britain. Self-effacing and matinee-idol handsome, Townsend had worked for the Royal Family for nearly a decade, first as an equerry and later
as Deputy Master of the Household—a post that placed him in charge of arranging all private engagements for the Royal Family.

Unfortunately, Townsend was also sixteen years older than Margaret and the divorced father of two young sons. Once Townsend’s final divorce decree was granted, he and Margaret went directly to Elizabeth and informed her that they wished to marry. To do so, they would need the consent of the sovereign.

The very next day the Queen’s private secretary, Alan Lascelles, briefed her on what such a marriage would mean. Most important, the Church of England—of which Elizabeth II was head—would not recognize it. (The Church refused to remarry anyone whose marriage had ended in divorce, regardless of their status in society.) Moreover, divorced people continued to be shunned in royal circles—banned from all functions at the royal palaces, and even aboard the royal yacht.

There was more. Churchill stepped in to make the case that, should something happen to the Queen and Prince Philip when their children were still minors, Margaret might be a logical choice to serve as regent. He also reminded Elizabeth that her sister was right behind the Queen’s own children in the line of succession—“Just a car crash away,” Churchill liked to say, “from the throne.” Given Margaret’s importance in the royal scheme of things, Sir Winston continued, her marriage to a divorced commoner could cause a rift within the Commonwealth, since parliaments in those countries might reasonably conclude that such a marriage was unsuitable. Churchill flatly informed the Queen that, if her sister insisted on marrying, she would have to renounce any claim to the throne.

Elizabeth, spurred on by her firm conviction that there was no place for divorcees in the Royal Family, concocted a scheme
of her own. Convinced that the romance would cool off if she could put distance between her mercurial sister and the dashing Townsend, the Queen suggested he be reassigned to serve in the British embassy in Brussels as air attaché. The couple agreed, believing that, once she turned twenty-five, Margaret was free to marry without her sister’s approval.

But that was not the case. The headline-grabbing love affair between the Princess and the war hero stretched on another agonizing two years, and soon Elizabeth was consulting with the new prime minister, Anthony Eden, on how best to handle the delicate matter. With both the Church of England and Parliament opposing the marriage, the Queen was in no position to grant her sister’s wish.

At Windsor Castle the Princess was told that if she insisted on marrying Townsend in a civil ceremony, a Bill of Renunciation would be placed before Parliament, stripping Margaret of all her rights, privileges, and income. It was not a sacrifice the Princess was willing to make.

Concerned that Townsend might still put up a fight, the Queen secretly enlisted the help of the Queen Mother. “I know what a great decision you have to make fairly soon,” the Queen Mother wrote Margaret, “and I beg you to look at it from every angle, and to be quite sure that you don’t marry somebody because you are sorry for them.”

Defeated, she phoned Townsend in tears. “We reached the end of the road,” he later wrote. “Our feelings for one another were unchanged but they had incurred for us so great a burden that we decided, together, to lay it down.”

On October 27, 1955, Margaret informed the Archbishop of Canterbury of her decision. Four days later, she announced in a
statement that was submitted to the Queen for her approval that any prospect of marriage with Townsend had ended. “I would like it to be known,” Margaret’s statement read, “that I have decided not to marry Group Captain Peter Townsend. Mindful that Christian marriage is indissoluble and conscious of my duty to the Commonwealth, I have resolved to put these considerations before others.”

Although Elizabeth had never intended to allow the marriage to take place and had deftly maneuvered behind the scenes to thwart it, she appeared to sail above the controversy. Even Margaret, who felt that she had been misled to believe that at twenty-five she was free to marry anyone she wished, blamed the Queen’s senior staff and not her sister. Ironically, within just a few years attitudes toward divorce would change dramatically. In 1978, Princess Margaret’s eighteen-year marriage to photographer Anthony Armstrong-Jones (later Lord Snowden) would end, making her the first royal to divorce since Henry VIII. By the end of the century, three of the Queen’s own children would be divorced.

From Berlin to the Cuban Missile Crisis to Vietnam to the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Robert Kennedy to the rise of the counterculture, the 1960s were a time of unparalleled political and social upheaval. Yet, remarkably, during the first thirty years of Elizabeth’s reign the Royal Family was relatively untouched by scandal—a streak that was broken in 1981 when news of Prince Andrew’s steamy affair with American soft-porn actress Koo Stark hit the tabloids, earning Elizabeth’s second son the sobriquet “Randy Andy.”

There were early exceptions, to be sure. During the Profumo spy scandal of the early 1960s, speculation arose that a member of the Royal Family was the infamous “naked waiter” who served
drinks at a sex party wearing only a hood over his head and a pink ribbon tied to his genitals. (In fact, it turned out to be a top cabinet minister.) Of more direct concern to the Queen was her sister’s continued unpredictable behavior. Princess Margaret kept making headlines with her freewheeling lifestyle and a string of rumored lovers that included Mick Jagger, Peter O’Toole, Peter Sellers, and Warren Beatty.

Fleet Street wasted no time holding up the wild princess as a prime example of decadence and moral decay among members of Britain’s aristocracy. “The upper classes,” noted journalist Malcolm Muggeridge wrote at the time, “have always been given to lying, fornication, and corrupt practices.”

For all the aggravation Margaret undoubtedly caused her, the Queen never scolded or pressured Margaret to change. It was enough that, in order to avoid a constitutional crisis, Elizabeth did not hesitate to stand in the way of her own sister’s one true chance at happiness.

“Of course as sisters the Queen and Princess Margaret loved each other very much, without doubt,” their cousin Margaret Rhodes said. “But the Queen always puts duty first. Always.”

Strange, but I never felt intimidated in his presence, never. I felt from the beginning that we were two peas in a pod.

—CAMILLA

SMITH’S LAWN NEAR WINDSOR CASTLE

AUGUST 1971

“That’s a fine animal, sir!” Charles was sliding off his sweat-soaked mount at Smith’s Lawn near Windsor, and turned to see the young blonde in a green Barbour jacket and painted-on jeans standing apart from the rest of the awestruck onlookers. “I thought,” she continued brightly, “you played wonderfully well.”

The scene around the royal enclosure was too familiar to Charles: scores of comely young women, the highborn daughters of Britain’s elite, all smiling broadly and hoping to catch the Prince’s eye. Charles recognized all of them—with the exception of the one young woman audacious enough to break away from the pack and call out to the Prince directly.

Camilla Rosemary Shand stood out from the leggy, shapely,
meticulously groomed young “Windsor Club groupies” who routinely threw themselves at him, yet he was instantly charmed by her brash self-assurance. He wandered over and started up a conversation about their shared love of horses in general and polo in particular. To one spectator, the couple looked “completely relaxed in each other’s company.”

At this time in Charles’s life, someone to talk to was precisely what he needed. His isolated, loveless childhood had been followed by what Charles later referred to as a “prison sentence” at Gordonstoun, the spartan Scottish boarding school Philip had chosen for his son. Even when it snowed, Gordonstoun’s mostly middle-class students began each day with a shirtless run topped off with an icy shower. Charles’s classmates, not wanting to be accused of sucking up to the future king, alternately teased, shunned, and bullied him.

At Cambridge University, where he studied archaeology, history, and anthropology, the awkwardly stiff Royal who had been called “sir” since he was named Prince of Wales at age ten made few friends. Now that he was about to embark on a seven-year tour of duty as an officer in the Royal Navy with a stint aboard the guided missile destroyer HMS
Norfolk
, Charles felt more than ever in need of a confidant.

Mummy and Papa were not about to change any time soon. Philip showed only thinly veiled contempt for his son, and the Queen worried that perhaps he was too sensitive. (Later, while serving aboard the HMS
Jupiter
, Charles broke down over the phone while telling his mother that a young seaman under his command had been killed in a car crash. “Charles,” she told her private secretary, “must really learn to be tougher.”)

There had always been only one person with whom Charles
could share his deepest thoughts: his adored great-uncle Lord Louis Mountbatten of Burma, the legendary World War II hero who later served as Viceroy of India and First Sea Lord. Convinced that his great-nephew would make a superb king, “Dickie,” as Mountbatten was called in royal circles, invited Charles to spend long stretches of time at Broadlands, his imposing estate in Hampshire.

At Broadlands, Mountbatten (whom Charles called “Grandpapa” even though Mountbatten was his great-uncle) also undertook his own scheme to put a member of his household on the throne alongside Charles. Lord Louis introduced the Prince of Wales to dozens of suitable young women, most significantly his granddaughter (and Charles’s cousin) Lady Amanda Knatchbull. Since she was only fourteen at the time, the other women were to amuse Charles until Amanda came of age.

“In a case like yours,” Mountbatten bluntly advised Charles, “a man should sow his wild oats and have as many affairs as he can before settling down.” Not surprisingly, women beat a path to Charles—they were literally delivered to his doorstep by aides wherever he happened to be—and, by his friends’ reckoning, the Prince of Wales obliged scores of them.

But Mountbatten made it clear to his young charge that these women were not to be seriously thought of as marriage or even mistress material. “For a wife,” he told Charles, “you should choose a suitable, attractive, sweet-charactered girl before she has met anyone else she might fall for.” Mountbatten also told his grandnephew not to marry until he was thirty.

By arranging for Charles to conduct his more serious trysts at Broadlands, Mountbatten was also in the enviable position of being able to vet each candidate. “Grandpapa is the one person I can trust completely,” Charles said, “to have my interests at heart.”

Soon there would be someone else he could learn to trust, implicitly. At a dinner party not long after their encounter among the horsy set at Smith’s Lawn, Lucia Santa Cruz sidled up to Charles and whispered in his ear, “I have found the perfect girl for you!”

The stunning daughter of Chile’s ambassador to Great Britain, Santa Cruz spoke from experience. The Prince of Wales allegedly lost his virginity with her when he was a first-year student at Cambridge. Santa Cruz vanished, but within a matter of moments reappeared with Camilla at her side.

“Your Highness,” Santa Cruz said, “I would like to present Miss Camilla Shand.”

“Yes,” Charles answered with a nod and a smile, “I believe we’ve already met.”

Camilla, who at twenty-four was sixteen months Charles’s senior, curtsied. Then she said, without missing a beat, “My great-grandmother and your great-great-grandfather were lovers. So how about it?”

While other ancestors were responsible for amassing the family’s fortunes with shrewd real estate investments in London’s Mayfair and Belgravia districts, Alice Keppel, the notorious mistress of King Edward VII, had been Camilla’s role model since childhood. So firmly entrenched was Keppel as King Edward’s mistress that Queen Alexandra summoned her to her husband’s bedside as he lay dying. Witty, kind, beautiful, and unflappable, Keppel conducted her affairs right under the nose of her husband, George. “My job is to curtsy first,” she once explained of her role as royal mistress, “and then jump into bed.”

Although Alice Keppel met an ignominious end—in 1946 she died of cirrhosis of the liver—Camilla boasted about her great-grandmother’s exploits even as a child. Fellow pupils at
the aptly named Queen’s Gate boarding school near Kensington Palace remember ten-year-old “Milla” waltzing into class and grandly ordering the other children to bow before her. “My great-grandmother was the lover of the King,” she proclaimed. “We’re
practically
royalty.”

Actress Lynn Redgrave, who was a few years ahead of Camilla at Queen’s Gate, recalled that “landing a rich husband was the top of the agenda. Camilla . . . wanted to have fun, but she also wanted to marry well because, in her mind, that would be the most fun of all.”