Ma’am Darling by Craig Brown5/8/2023 The dashing, dishy Group Captain was banished to Belgium, where he soon met and married a pretty local aristocrat a decade younger than Margaret. Edward VIII’s abdication, of course, had propelled his retiring younger brother George VI to the throne and the unwonted limelight and changed the destinies of Margaret and both Elizabeths forever. Following the scandal of the abdication, when her uncle, the Duke of Windsor, renounced the throne to marry the twice-divorced, hatchet-faced Baltimorean go-getter Wallis Simpson, the royal family, quietly dominated by the fey-slash-steely Queen Elizabeth (later Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother), were acutely conscious of projecting an image of propriety and conventional family life. My grandmother was endlessly tut-tutting that poor Margaret had never been able to marry the man she really loved, Group Captain Peter Townsend, her father’s equerry and an older, divorced man. I grew up fascinated by Princess Margaret’s harebell blue eyes, her Minnie Mouse white shoes that fractionally elevated her diminutive form, and her mallard raw-silk drawing room (revealed in a Sunday supplement story and, of course, the perfect backdrop to Those Eyes). In the rollicking, irresistible, un-put-downable Ma’am Darling, the brilliant British satirist Craig Brown takes as his fertile subject Princess Margaret Rose, the late sister of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |