Royal Legacy: How the royal family have made, spent and passed on their wealth by McClure David

Author:McClure, David [McClure, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Thistle Publishing
Published: 2015-01-14T22:00:00+00:00

11.MARGARET, MUSTIQUE AND MONEY - 2002

“She is far too intelligent for her station in life. She often had a bad press, the usual fate of wits in society”

Gore Vidal on his friend Princess Margaret1

In the last decade of her life Princess Margaret made one important contribution to Princess Diana's legacy. She destroyed Diana’s letters to the Queen Mother. Ordinarily such correspondence would have been deposited in the Royal Archives for future historians to pore over but on the princess’s orders several large black bags of papers were removed for destruction.2 Although the Queen Mother's official biographer has suggested that Margaret did this "to protect” her mother and other members of the family,3 several commentators have wondered whether it was also to protect Diana from embarrassing her own family.

Andrew Morton, who famously collaborated with her on "Diana: Her True Story," has suggested that she might have confided in her grandmother-in-law her antipathy for her real grandmother, Lady Fermoy, who thought her an unsuitable match for a future king.4 At the time of the destruction of the letters in 1993, Diana was still alive and expected to outlive everyone. Equally erroneously, the destroyer of the letters, Princess Margaret, was expected to outlive their recipient, the Queen Mother.

Shortly after 8.30 am on Saturday, 9 February 2002 Sky News’s colourful graphics flashed with an alert about a royal death. A few minutes earlier Buckingham Palace had announced that at 6.30 that morning Princess Margaret had died peacefully in her sleep in the King Edward VII's Hospital for Officers, London with her two children, Lord Linley and Lady Sarah Chatto, at her side. She was seventy-one years old.

The news came as no surprise to anyone who had seen the princess at the 101st birthday celebrations for the Queen Mother the previous August. In one of her rare public appearances, the cameras captured the image of an erstwhile English rose as invalid. Her wheelchair was rolled out into the Mall with her legs hidden by a beige blanket that did not quite mask her swollen feet and her left arm hanging limply in a lilywhite sling. Her puffy cheeks and skin showed signs of someone on steroids, while the rest of her face was obscured by a large pair of wraparound sunglasses. She looked confused and the next day's papers ran shock headlines expressing “Concern for the Princess” and “The Queen keeps her eye on Margaret."

Her health had been deteriorating for almost a decade. After suffering a minor stroke in 1994 that forced her to curtail her official duties, she had a more serious attack after a dinner party on Mustique in February 1998 and had to be flown back to England for treatment at the King Edward VII's Hospital where she made a good recovery. A year later - again in her Caribbean home - she severely scolded her feet in an accident when she turned on the wrong tap on the shower and was only saved from greater injury from the boiling water by the intervention of her private detective kicking down the bathroom door.

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