The Danish Court, Queen Alexandra’s family, would sit around a table, each member counting. Queen Mary had to prod her husband, when being told a joke, with her umbrella – ‘Now, Georgie’ – to extract the expected laugh. In princesses, it comes over as hoity-toity.Īnd humour wasn’t prevalent in the family circle. In millionaires and movie stars, it may be mildly amusing in paupers, it was deemed merely mockable (‘Who does that little man think he is?’). It may be a cliché that smaller people are by nature aggressive, but it is only natural to find some way of holding one’s own. Queen Victoria (even shorter than Princess Margaret) instilled sheer dread in family and courtiers with her gimlet criticism. Upstart Anne Boleyn was renowned for being ‘rude and arrogant’, Nell Gwynne impertinent, Wallis Simpson a trashy termagant. Throughout history, royal ladies’ sayings have been most memorable for their acid edge: the ‘Let them eat cake’ syndrome. Some unique, wayward gene seems to have been present in Princess Margaret’s make-up. Contrary to royal blandness, she realised she had definite opinions and was going to voice them, and develop an aptitude for withering ripostes. It is no surprise that she was to develop a self-protective shell of aloofness. A close member of Princess Margaret’s gang, Judy Montagu, heard a tiara’d old trout, gazing at a state portrait at Windsor, say, ‘Poor May, with her Morganatic hands.’Įven the most glamorous years, her twenties, of Princess Margaret’s film-star beauty, were marred by this lack of height consistently remarked upon, initially with sympathy but later with cruel accuracy. ‘Ach, you tiny little thing, I can hardly see you’, thus earning the tiny tsing’s undying enmity – and her stinging observation that ‘Anyway, she was Morganatic, not really royal.’ The opinion was often bruited throughout Mary’s queenship.

Her grandmother Queen Mary teased her from earliest childhood. Lifelong friends say that her diminutive size – far, far more than being number two, then three, then gradually further down-ranked – was what shaped her character.

The subject of this book was a victim: of birth, circumstance, education (or sparseness thereof), romance, marriage, and her innate gaiety but most all, of her stature. Nicky Haslam rejoices in Craig Brown's 'glimpses' of the Queen's sister Princess Margaret died 20 years ago today.

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