This week, royal reporters began covering a new royal biography of Princess Margaret, who died in 2002. Margaret was Queen Elizabeth II’s younger sister, and Margaret very much lived in her sister’s shadow. The royal institution loved that Margaret was such a screw-up, it made QEII look pure and competent. No one wanted Margaret to use her gifts – her wit, her intelligence, her charm. She was the spare, and she always had to be less-than. And now this new biography claims that all of Margaret’s problems could be traced back to the possibility that she had fetal alcohol syndrome. As I said earlier this week, a FAS diagnosis makes no sense, and that’s what all of the royal reporters are saying too.
I tend to believe that this is all the royal-biographer’s trick or habit: they write a “biography” seemingly about one royal when really the conversation is about another royal. A biography of King Charles is really about his sons, a biography of William or Kate is really about the Sussexes, etc. In this case, it seems like Margaret’s biography is really about the Queen Mum and her alcoholism, and how alcoholism “cursed” the Windsors. An excerpt from Richard Kay’s latest column:
This was never going to be the ideal week for the King to read that his beloved grandmother’s drinking in pregnancy might have been to blame for the troubled life of Princess Margaret. And it is certainly not the jolliest way to mark the 125th anniversary of the Queen Mother’s birth in four days – a date Charles will mark privately.
The extraordinary assertion that the King’s aunt suffered from an ‘invisible disability’ brought on by foetal alcohol disorder is at the heart of an unofficial new biography of the Princess, who died 23 years ago. Whether the claim by Pulitzer Prize-nominated biographer Meryle Secrest – made with a bewildering array of expert testimony – is true is another matter. Actual evidence to back up this audacious claim appears flimsy.
A 1925 letter to the future King George VI from his wife – then pregnant with their first daughter Princess Elizabeth – is cited. In it, she writes: ‘The sight of wine simply turns me up! Isn’t it extraordinary! It will be a tragedy if I never recover my drinking powers.’
Four years later, when pregnant with Margaret, the Queen Mother was not so handicapped. ‘In any case no doctor is likely to have her warned her… not to drink,’ the 95-year-old Secrest writes. ‘Prevailing medical opinion had it that the placenta protected the growing baby from alcohol’s effects.’
The author notes darkly that the Queen Mother’s Scottish family, the aristocratic Bowes-Lyon clan, were ‘hard drinkers’ with an ability to ‘hold their liquor’. This was said to show ‘strength of character – and not to keep up with everyone was proof of lack of inner worth’.
Kenneth Clark – the distinguished art historian and father of maverick Tory MP Alan Clark – is roped in, describing how, when he became friends with the royal couple in the 1930s, ‘the little Queen [Queen Mother] started drinking at 11.30 in the morning. [Clark] consoled himself by adding that she only drank Dubonnet before lunch.’
Another account of her drinking from later in life comes from Major Colin Burgess, a former equerry, who says that a ‘well-spiked Dubonnet would be followed every day by wine for lunch with perhaps a glass of port afterwards’ until the 6pm ‘magic hour’ when martinis and pink champagne would be prepared. It is the evidence of her mother’s heavy drinking that illuminates the author’s claim that these pre-ordained all Margaret’s problems, from her stunted growth and struggles learning to write, to her later emotional crises.
The US-based writer says her book is less a biography and more an investigation into the life of the Princess. All the same, her conclusions are unlikely to go down well with Margaret’s children – her son David, the 2nd Earl of Snowdon, and her artist daughter Lady Sarah Chatto – or her surviving friends. ‘It is truly bizarre to suggest that everything that happened to the Princess can be put down to how much the Queen Mother drank while pregnant. And not just bizarre but ridiculous,’ says a former friend of Margaret. ‘Her life was not one long tragedy: she was an intelligent woman with a wide circle of interests and friends and was a mother and grandmother.’
What do you think about my theory? Is this book actually about the Queen Mum’s alcoholism? Is there some kind of larger point or larger discussion to be had? For what it’s worth, we heard, over the years, that QEII was quite a drinker too. Margaret was often described as sharing her mother’s love of being sh-tfaced constantly, but QEII reportedly started drinking mid-day and didn’t stop until she went to bed. What’s also interesting is that I don’t think King Charles has any kind of problem with alcohol – he’ll do a champagne toast, or maybe sip a glass of wine, but he’s never had any kind of drinking problem. Diana barely drank, and then he married Camilla, who is always half in the bag. I also think Prince William has a drinking problem but they only allude to it. Anyway, yeah, let’s have a bigger conversation about the Windsors’ relationships with alcohol.
Photos courtesy of Avalon Red and Cover Images.
