On a number of occasions, the Princess asked Griffin to drive her to Clarence House. After a couple of hours she would emerge with a large binbag filled with letters, which she would hand to him. Back at Kensington Palace, she would put on a pair of yellow rubber gloves and help him bundle the letters, still in their bags, into a metal garden dustbin in the garage before ordering him to set light to them. ‘We did it several times over a period of years,’ says Griffin. ‘A lot of it was old, going back donkeys’ years, but I saw letters from Diana among them. We must have destroyed thousands of letters. I could see what it was we were burning. She made it very clear it was the highly confidential stuff that we burned. The rest was shredded in her office.’
Where memoirs of servants are concerned, it suits those upstairs to pooh-pooh them. Their authors are embittered, they say, and wrote them for money, or to settle a score. Biographers of the Royal Family tend to follow suit, turning up their noses at the reminiscences of a butler or footman, while devoting page upon page to the unreliable gush of a distant relative. But even William Shawcross, the Queen Mother’s treacly biographer, acknowledges that, when it came to her mother’s correspondence, Princess Margaret had a touch of the pyromaniac about her.
In the preface to his 666*-page doorstopper Counting One’s Blessings: The Selected Letters of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, Shawcross acknowledges that ‘Princess Margaret … made little secret of the fact that in the 1990s she “tidied” her mother’s papers and consigned many of them to black bin-bags for burning.’ In his companion biography, Shawcross states that, around the time of Lord Linley’s wedding in 1993, ‘Princess Margaret was now engaged on one of her periodic “sortings” of her mother’s papers, which were still filed haphazardly in various drawers and bags and pieces of furniture in her rooms at Clarence House and at Royal Lodge.* She wrote to her mother at Birkhall, “I am going back today to clear up some more of your room. Keeping the letters for you to sort later.” Next day, she wrote, “Darling Mummy, I am sitting in your sitting room ‘doing a bit of sorting’ … I’ve nearly cleared the chaise longue and made an attack on the fire stool.”’
Naturally, Shawcross does his loyal best to make Margaret’s little fires appear perfectly respectable, even caring: ‘No doubt Princess Margaret felt that she was protecting her mother and other members of the family. It was understandable, although regrettable from a historical viewpoint.’
Shawcross writes of ‘large black bags … taken away for destruction’. He acknowledges that no one will ever know what went up in flames, ‘but Princess Margaret later told Lady Penn that among the papers she had destroyed were letters from the Princess of Wales to Queen Elizabeth – because they were so private, she said’.
It’s likely that quite a few letters incinerated by Margaret were those she herself had written. Her relationship with her mother was often stormy, particularly in the years 1952–1960, after the death of King George VI and the accession of Queen Elizabeth II, when she was in her twenties. The two of them were living in separate apartments in Clarence House, one above the other. As the Queen Mother’s authorised biographer, Shawcross is generally the smoothest of courtiers, tiptoeing around any unpleasantness with his forefinger pressed to his lips, yet he makes little attempt to conceal Margaret’s prickliness towards her mother. ‘Even her closest friends could not predict when her mood might change from gaiety to hauteur. Although she loved her mother, she was not always kind to her – indeed she could be rude,’ he writes. ‘On one occasion Lady Penn … said to Queen Elizabeth, “I can’t bear to see the way Princess Margaret treats you.” To which Queen Elizabeth replied, “Oh, you mustn’t worry about that. I’m quite used to it.”’
The household staff at Clarence House were also struck by Margaret’s shirtiness towards her mother. ‘Why do you dress in those ridiculous clothes?’ she once asked in passing, as the Queen Mother stood chatting to a lady-in-waiting. If her mother was watching a television programme she didn’t like, Princess Margaret would offhandedly switch channels without asking.
Their preferred method of communication during these years was by letter, even though, most of the time, there was only a ceiling between them. A footman doubled as a postman, taking letters upstairs and downstairs, from one to the other, on an almost daily basis. Yet in his voluminous collection, Shawcross includes just twelve letters from the Queen Mother to Margaret, as opposed to seventy to her elder daughter, Elizabeth. Judging by their tone and content, most of them were written in response to heated accusations,* perhaps after a telephone had been hung up, or flung down.
‘My Darling Margaret,’ the Queen Mother writes from Birkhall on 9 September 1955, at the height of the Townsend crisis:
I sometimes wonder whether you quite realise how much I hate having to point out the more difficult and occasionally horrid problems which arise when discussing your future.
It would be so much easier to gloss them over, but I feel such a deep sense of responsibility as your only living parent, and I seem to be the only person who can point them out, and you can imagine what anguish it causes.
I suppose that every mother wants her child to be happy, and I know what a miserable & worrying time you are having, torn by so many difficult constitutional & moral problems.
I think about it and you all the time, and because I have to talk over the horrid things does not mean that I don’t suffer with you, or that one’s love is any less.
I have wanted to write this for a long time, as it is a thing which might sound embarrassing if said. Your very loving Mummy.
Margaret’s response, contained in a footnote, seems to acknowledge her own explosive nature: ‘Please don’t think that because I have blown up at intervals when we’ve discussed the situation, that I didn’t know how you felt.’
Their relationship remained tricky right to the end. In his less dewy-eyed biography of the Queen Mother, Hugo Vickers states that ‘There were those who were depressed by the way she [Margaret] could be openly rude to her mother when groups were about, though when alone with her, perhaps without an audience, she tended to be more sympathetic. But there was clearly some residual bitterness, and the Queen Mother did not always have an easy time with her younger daughter.’
For his biography Princess Margaret: A Life of Contrasts, Christopher Warwick was helped by the Princess herself, and was duly grateful: ‘I am, of course, greatly indebted to Princess Margaret, to whom … I offer my warmest and best thanks; not only for her time and co-operation, but also for asking some of her closest friends … to see me.’ But even this most tactful of biographers says that ‘It had to be admitted … that the Queen Mother was closer to her first-born, whose character was more like her own … The relationship between Queen Elizabeth [the Queen Mother] and Princess Margaret was almost stereotypically mother-and-daughter: each guaranteed at times to bait and irritate the other.’
Warwick points out that it took Princess Margaret thirty years to visit the castle her mother had bought in the early days of her widowhood. Following this one and only visit, Margaret concluded, ‘I can’t think why you have such a horrible place as the Castle of Mey.’
‘Well, darling,’ replied her mother, ‘you needn’t come again.’ And she did not.
So we leave the Princess, for the moment, in her garage at Kensington Palace, resplendent – a word much-loved by royal biographers – in her yellow rubber gloves, her eyes aglow from the blaze of her mother’s letters. ‘The smoke was so thick it made her eyes water and she had to leave,’ recalls Griffin. ‘We went back to Clarence House several