Gilded Youth by Tom Quinn

Author:Tom Quinn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Biteback Publishing
Published: 2023-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

One of the reasons Margaret found her sister so reassuring was that Elizabeth, throughout her life, hated confrontation or unpleasantness – her scoldings were always far more like quiet appeals. Good-tempered attempts to stop Margaret being overly silly or loud can be clearly seen in the earliest film of the two girls playing in the gardens of their various houses. As Margaret became more outrageous, so Elizabeth increasingly became thoughtful, restrained and organised. But avoiding confrontation was undoubtedly a factor in her own children’s development, especially, as we will see, in the case of Prince Andrew.

Where Elizabeth was praised by her parents for her restraint and good behaviour, Margaret enjoyed not praise but a kind of positive feedback from her parents for being outrageous – her father, mother and even sister responded with gales of delighted laughter.

William Tallon said, ‘She became the buffoon in a sort of feedback loop – the more her father laughed at her antics, the more she played up and the more her father laughed, which meant even more outrageous antics, even more laughter and so on.’

Even her grandmother Queen Mary described Margaret as ‘a little rogue’. Throughout the two girls’ childhoods, of course this didn’t matter, for Margaret was never going to be in the public eye. She would marry well and calm down.

A servant of the time who occasionally helped out with the day care of Elizabeth and Margaret said:

It was amazing, even before the two girls reached their teens, how you could see them developing as polar opposites. Margaret always misbehaved and the more she misbehaved, the more her sister determined to be the sensible one who kept her sister in check and behaved well herself. Margaret rarely did as she was told; Elizabeth always did – or almost always.

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