The royals - Kitty Kelley [269]
Two years later, in 2004, the British government unsealed documents from the National Archives revealing the “crisis” plans from 1955 in case Margaret had decided to marry Group Captain Peter Townsend, the King’s equerry and a divorced war hero. The documents contained several drafts of a letter to be sent by the Princess to the Queen, asking permission to marry the Royal Air Force hero of World War II and renouncing any claim to the throne. At the time, Margaret was third in the line of succession, after Prince Charles and Princess Anne. But Margaret never sent the letter to her sister. Instead, “conscious of my duty,” she renounced Townsend, the great love of her life. He immediately resigned from the RAF, left England, eventually remarried, and lived the rest of his life in France. Shortly before he died of cancer in 1995 at the age of eighty, he flew to London to say good-bye to Margaret. By then, having been forced to forsake marrying a divorced man, she herself was divorced after a tumultuous marriage of seventeen years.
The Princess had wed Anthony Armstrong-Jones in 1960 after the Queen had bestowed upon him the title of Lord Snowdon. It was inconceivable then that a royal would marry a commoner and—worse yet—that the daughter of a king and the sister of a queen might give birth to children without titles. Snowdon became an internationally acclaimed photographer but with an eye not always focused on his camera. After many meanderings, his marriage to Margaret ended in divorce in 1978; he remarried shortly thereafter, then divorced a few years later, and remarried again. Sadly, his wandering eye led him to many women in and out of his marriages, and the suicide of a longtime mistress plus the birth of an illegitimate child by another mistress tarred him with notoriety at the end of his life. In 2008, the Daily Mail headlined him as “the Unrepentant Lothario: Lord Snowdon and His Insatiable Appetite for Sex.”
Going into the millennium, the Queen had told a friend her worst fear was that her mother would die and then her sister. “And I’ll be alone,” she said. Her 101-year-old mother outlived her seventy-one-year-old sister by six weeks, but the desolate monarch carried on with characteristic resolve. She instructed the palace to announce that plans for her golden jubilee would proceed despite the deaths of Princess Margaret and the Queen Mother.
Amidst the good wishes Britons showered on their seventy-six-year-old queen in 2002, scandal poured from the palace like a hard rain on parched tabloids. The most sordid storm erupted over the arrest and trial of Diana’s beloved butler, Paul Burrell, her supposed “rock,” who was accused of stealing 342 items from her residence, including some of her nightgowns and designer dresses, which he reportedly was wearing to private parties. Police raided Burrell’s house and confiscated several items, including clothes, CDs and LPs signed by Diana, photo albums, and personal letters to the Princess from Mother Teresa and the Queen Mother.
Shortly after Diana’s death, the Queen had honored Paul Burrell’s twenty-one years of service to the royal family by awarding him the Royal Victorian Medal—the highest accolade a monarch can bestow upon a servant. The Queen was grateful to him for flying to Paris immediately after the crash to dress the Princess’s body and apply her makeup before Prince Charles met her coffin and had it flown home. Burrell kept the clothes Diana had died in and stored them in his freezer before burning them a few weeks later.
The Spencers, also grateful at the time, asked the butler to join the Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fund to help with fund-raising, and he worked every day with Diana’s sister, cataloguing the Princess’s possessions at Kensington Palace.
During that time he made several public appearances, pronouncing