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00:00There is a peculiar paradox at the heart of Princess Margaret's existence that only fully
00:05reveals itself when you look at a deed of sale for a house on a Caribbean speck of land called
00:10Mustique. The younger sister of Queen Elizabeth II, a woman who spent her entire life in palaces,
00:17who was waited upon by footmen and ladies-in-waiting and household staff from the day she was born to
00:22the day she died, owned, in the whole course of her 71 years, exactly one piece of property. Not
00:29Kensington Palace, which was allocated to her by the Crown and could be withdrawn at the Crown's
00:34discretion. Not a country estate, which she never possessed. Not a flat in Mayfair, which she could
00:40not have afforded on the income the State provided for her official duties. One house on ten acres,
00:45on a remote island in the eastern Caribbean, eighteen miles south of St. Vincent, ringed by sea
00:51on every side. She called it Le Joliot, the beautiful waters, and she once described it as
00:57the only square inch in the world I own. That sentence, stripped of its royal trimmings,
01:03is the saddest and most extraordinary thing a British princess of the twentieth century ever
01:08said about herself, because everything else, the palaces, the jewels, the cars, the staff,
01:14was borrowed, inherited, or funded by the State, and only this house, this single-storey white
01:20compound of low-slung tropical pavilions perched on the southernmost tip of an island that most
01:25of Britain had never heard of, was genuinely hers. Today we trace the rooms, the relationships,
01:31and the decades of heartbreak that drove a princess to build the only home she ever owned on a headland
01:42The story of Le Joliot begins not with Margaret, but with a wildly eccentric Scottish aristocrat named
01:49Colin Christopher Padgett Tennant, heir to the Glen Connor barony and one of the most flamboyant
01:54personalities ever to orbit the British royal family. In the mid-1950s, while touring his family's
02:01inherited properties in Trinidad, Tennant heard that an almost entirely undeveloped island in
02:07the Grenadine's chain was for sale, cabled his father requesting permission to buy it for ÂŁ45,000,
02:14and with characteristic impulsiveness sealed the deal without having set foot on the property,
02:19a detail his wife Lady Anne would later recount with evident wonder. The island was called Mustique,
02:26a corruption of the French word for mosquito, which gave a reasonably accurate first impression of
02:32what awaited the new owner. It measured roughly four kilometres by two kilometres, small enough to walk
02:38end to end in an afternoon, and its few hundred inhabitants lived in tin huts, scraping a living
02:44from fishing, and what remained of the island's once profitable cotton trade. There was no electricity,
02:51no mains drainage, no running water, and the landscape was a mixture of scrubland, wild feral cows,
02:59jungle, and the remnants of an 18th-century plantation system whose economic purpose had
03:04collapsed decades earlier. The one surviving substantial structure, an old plantation house
03:11called the Great House, was in a state of serious disrepair. A 1958 report had described Mustique
03:19as a desolate island covered in jungle, scrub, and cactus, and the description remained accurate in
03:25every particular. Tenant's wife, Lady Anne Coke, who had been one of Queen Elizabeth II's maids of
03:31honour at the coronation and was a childhood friend of Princess Margaret, thought her husband had lost his
03:37mind, and by any rational assessment she was correct. The island was a liability, its development costs were
03:44incalculable, its revenue potential was zero, and its location in the Ark of the Lesser Antilles, where hurricanes
03:52made landfall with seasonal regularity, was the kind of site that a sane investor would have examined, costed, and
03:58declined. But Colin Tennant was not investing. He was imagining, and what he imagined was something that did not yet
04:05exist
04:06anywhere in the Caribbean. An island so exclusive, so controlled, so entirely removed from the world of
04:13ordinary tourism, that ownership of a plot on it would constitute a form of social membership that no hotel
04:19reservation could provide. The logic was circular and brilliant. Exclusivity would create desirability.
04:27Desirability would attract wealth. Wealth would fund development, and development would be capped at a level
04:33sufficiently low, that the exclusivity which started the cycle would never be diluted. The entire
04:39commercial model depended on scarcity, and Tennant understood, with an instinct that formal business
04:45education would probably have beaten out of him, that scarcity in the Caribbean real estate market
04:50required two things. A physical limit on the number of properties, and a social imprimatur that made
04:56ownership of one of those properties a mark of belonging to a world that money alone could not buy.
05:03His first efforts were characteristically hands-on and somewhat quixotic. He and Anne camped on the island,
05:09eating beans and fish, collecting rainwater, battling the mosquitoes, and climbing trees to avoid the feral cows
05:16that roamed the scrubland, with the territorial confidence of animals that had never encountered a Scottish
05:22aristocrat before. Over time, he began building an infrastructure. A drainage system, electricity, coconut palms,
05:31fruit trees, a reservoir to solve the chronic water problem that made the island uninhabitable,
05:37for anyone accustomed to indoor plumbing. He built a new settlement, Lovell Village, for the existing
05:44island population, relocating the fishing families and smallholders to a slightly less prime location
05:51with improved housing, freeing up the island's most desirable coastal sites for the private development
05:57that would eventually make Mustique one of the most exclusive addresses on earth.
06:02The relocation was handled with a paternalism characteristic of the era and the class.
06:08Tennant provided the new settlement, its residents accepted it, and the transaction was conducted with
06:14the assumption, on both sides, that the island's future lay in the hands of the man who owned it,
06:19rather than the people who had lived on it for generations. He understood that what he was
06:24creating was not a luxury resort, but a dream, a hermetically sealed world in which the very
06:30wealthy could pretend that civilization ended at the shoreline and that the rules governing their lives
06:36everywhere else did not apply. The key to that dream, as Tennant recognized almost immediately,
06:41was Princess Margaret, because her presence on the island would confer upon it a cachet that no amount
06:48of marketing expenditure could purchase. In 1968, the Economic Development Agreement with the Government
06:55of St Vincent formally opened the island to outside buyers, with the crucial condition that total
07:02development would be capped at 140 private homes, using scarcity as the guarantor of the exclusivity on which
07:10the entire financial model depended. What Tennant needed, at precisely this moment, was not another
07:17buyer, but a resident whose name alone would make every subsequent buyer want to follow.
07:25On May 6, 1960, more than 300 million people around the world watched live as Princess Margaret married
07:32Anthony Armstrong Jones at Westminster Abbey, the first royal wedding ever broadcast on television,
07:39a spectacle that assembled foreign royalty, government ministers, and the entire apparatus of the
07:45British establishment into a single ceremonial event that the country had not seen the equal of since
07:51the coronation seven years earlier. The bride arrived in the glass coach wearing a Norman Hartnell gown of
07:57silk organza, deliberately unadorned to suit her petite frame. The groom was a different matter entirely. Anthony
08:04Armstrong Jones was, by the standards of royal matrimony, a provocation, a photographer, which in 1960 was
08:12regarded as a trade rather than a profession, an Etonian who moved between high society and Bohemia with
08:18practiced ease, a man described by contemporaries as, a famous womanizer and swordsman, with a sense of
08:25mischief in the back of mischief in the back of his eyes, and the first commoner in 400 years to
08:29marry a member of the
08:30royal family. Some biographers have suggested the marriage was partly a rebound from the devastating end of
08:37Margaret's affair with group captain Peter Townsend, a love that the Church of England and royal protocol had made
08:44impossible, and whose loss had left her with a wound that never quite healed. She herself disputed this with
08:50characteristic directness, saying, I married Tony five years after the end of Peter Townsend, as though the
08:57passage of time was sufficient proof of emotional resolution. What the wedding's global audience could
09:04not see, and what Armstrong Jones's biographers have since documented in uncomfortable detail, was that the
09:11groom was conducting an affair with Camilla Fry, wife of one of his oldest friends, right up to and through
09:18the
09:18planning of the royal engagement, a fact that Armstrong Jones managed, with the compartmentalised
09:24efficiency of a man who had been juggling several different lives at the same time, with extreme
09:29skill for most of his adult career. Immediately following the ceremony, the couple departed for the
09:36royal yacht Britannia, and that evening the Britannia sailed south on a honeymoon cruise across the Caribbean,
09:42maintaining the full discipline of royal protocol, with all meals conducted in full evening
09:48dress, a peculiarly formal setting for a honeymoon that cost approximately $115,000 at 1960 values.
09:56It was somewhere in the warm waters of the eastern Caribbean that the Britannia swung toward a small,
10:02largely unmapped island in the Grenadines that a mutual friend had recently purchased.
10:08The Britannia dropped anchor off Mustique, and the newlyweds came ashore to find conditions
10:13almost comically at odds with the floating palace they had just left. The tenants received them with rum,
10:20a hibiscus mixer that Lady Anne later described as disgusting, and the warmth of hosts who understood
10:27that the gesture mattered more than the refreshments. We didn't have much to offer them, Lady Anne recalled,
10:33only rum and the most disgusting sour hibiscus mixer, but Princess Margaret had a huge smile on her face as
10:40we
10:40gave her a tour of the island. For Margaret, a woman whose bath was drawn by servants and whose clothes
10:46were selected by ladies-in-waiting, the conditions on Mustique were unlike anything she had encountered.
10:52Like everyone else on the island, she showered using a bucket with holes punched in the bottom,
10:58hung from a tree, and shielded from view by a flap of sailcloth. There were no phones, no photographers,
11:04no court functionaries, no obligations, and the freedom was intoxicating precisely because it was
11:11so utterly unlike everything else she knew. It was all an adventure to her, Lady Anne Glen Connor said
11:18later, something she'd never had in her life. This matters enormously when trying to understand what
11:24the island came to mean to Margaret, because her entire adult existence had been lived inside the
11:30machinery of an institution that required her to be permanently visible, permanently appropriate,
11:36and permanently secondary to her sister. And the palace that surrounded her was magnificent and
11:42suffocating simultaneously, a setting in which every friendship was a potential scandal and every
11:48relationship a constitutional question. Even the question of whether to marry Townsend,
11:54the man she genuinely loved, had been resolved not by her own heart, but by a combination of church
12:01doctrine, governmental advice, and the structural logic of a monarchy that could not accommodate
12:06a divorced man within its family. On Mustique, none of this applied. There were no cameras,
12:13there was no protocol to enforce, and the freedom was intoxicating precisely because it was so
12:19utterly unlike everything else she knew. On the last evening of the visit, Tennant made his offer.
12:26Ma'am, we haven't given you a wedding present. Would you like something in a little box or a piece
12:31of
12:31land? Margaret made up her mind without waiting for her new husband to respond. Oh, I think a piece of
12:38land would be wonderful. The land was on GĂ©lyceau Point, a phonetic evolution of the French
12:44Jolly Caillou, beautiful pebbles, at the island's southernmost tip, where the Atlantic meets the
12:51Caribbean and the views extend to neighbouring islands on the horizon. Armstrong Jones's reaction to
12:57Mustique was the polar opposite of his wife's. He visited once, on this honeymoon, and never returned,
13:05taking to calling the island Mustique and later Mistake, his distaste total and his absence from it
13:10over the following decades, among the clearest evidence of how completely the marriage would collapse.
13:19Margaret received the gift of land on Mustique in 1960, and she did not begin building her house
13:25until 1968, a gap of eight years during which the ten acres sat on paper, a theoretical paradise,
13:33unrealised and never far from her mind. The logistical explanation had several layers.
13:39The Mustique Company was not established until 1968. The airport did not open until 1969, and before
13:47that, getting to Mustique required either sailing or an indirect chain of transfers through St. Vincent,
13:53neither of which was practical for a princess who travelled with security and the full apparatus of
13:58royal life. Even by the late 1960s, conditions remained profoundly spartan. We only had tilly lamps for
14:06lighting. There was no hot water and most of our food came from tins, Lady Anne Glen Connor recalled, of
14:12what
14:12the tenants themselves endured. But logistics were the smaller part of the story. Margaret was not a wealthy
14:19woman in any personal sense. The palaces she inhabited belonged to the Crown, and her income derived almost
14:26entirely from the civil list, an allowance that existed to fund her performance of official duties,
14:32rather than to provide her with personal capital. She was, by multiple accounts, famously cautious with
14:39money, deploying her royal status to obtain goods and services for free at every available opportunity.
14:46A documentary quoted sources noting, she had, a unique system for financing her extravagances,
14:53often using her royal status to obtain things for free, including regular hair appointments and shopping trips to
14:59Harrods.
15:01Money in her life was never just money. It was freedom, or the lack of it, and she had grown
15:07up in palaces that belonged to the
15:08nation, wearing jewels that were heirlooms with histories beyond her personal ownership, in a wardrobe that functioned as a
15:15uniform, rather than an expression of taste. Building a house on a Caribbean headland required capital she
15:22did not possess, and a patron willing to absorb the costs, and the patron, as it turned out, would be
15:28tenant, though
15:29neither of them discussed the arrangement in those terms.
15:33I don't think it ever occurred to her to offer to pay for some of the work, one source noted
15:37in documentary footage,
15:39and she knew, and tenant knew, and everyone in their circle knew, that his generosity was
15:44simultaneously an act of friendship and a commercial investment, because a princess building a house on
15:50his island was worth more to Mustique's development than any sum she could have contributed in cash.
15:56There is something both unapologetically royal and quietly vulnerable about this dynamic.
16:02Margaret did not have the money to build her house, tenant did, and the gift had been offered,
16:07and she was simply accepting it in the fullest possible terms. But the psychological weight of the
16:12situation, a princess who could not independently fund the construction of the one property she would
16:18ever own, spoke to the strange financial dependency that governed her entire existence. The emotional
16:25dimension of the delay mattered as much as the financial one. The years between 1960 and 1967
16:31were years of attempting to make her marriage work. She and Armstrong Jones had two children,
16:37David in 1961 and Sarah in 1964, and the early years had enough surface warmth to suggest the project
16:45might succeed. Armstrong Jones was created Earl of Snowden in 1961, giving the marriage its formal royal
16:53gloss, and the couple moved in the overlapping worlds of art, fashion, entertainment, and aristocracy,
17:00hosting parties and travelling in a style that made them, briefly, the most glamorous couple in Britain.
17:06The disintegration came slowly, then with sickening speed. By the mid-1960s, Armstrong Jones had
17:13conducted his first major extramarital affair, with Lady Jacqueline Rufus Isaacs, though the pattern of
17:19infidelity predated this significantly, and the notes he left around the apartment at Kensington Palace were among the
17:26cruelest weapons in what one lady-in-waiting described as an environment of open warfare.
17:32One, discovered in a drawer, read,
17:35You look like a Jewish manicurist and I hate you. The marriage had become a competition in mutual
17:40humiliation, conducted in whispers and silences and the occasional verbal explosion with the
17:47children present throughout, and it was in this context, the marriage collapsing, the architecture
17:52of her formal life feeling more like a trap than a setting, that Margaret reached for the one thing
17:57that remained unclaimed, unrealised, and genuinely hers. She picked up the telephone and called Colin
18:05Tennant. Were you really serious about the land? Yes, he told her, and does it come with a house? Tennant,
18:13who had been waiting for this call with the patience of a man who understood exactly what he was waiting
18:17for, later reflected, Well, I could hardly say no, could I? Margaret would choose the site,
18:25the architect, the specifications. Tennant would pay for everything, because she was simultaneously
18:30his dearest friend and the most valuable commercial asset his island development could ever acquire.
18:36A few months later, Margaret flew out to survey the plot, found the marker stakes in the ground,
18:42delineating the ten acres Tennant had promised, walked the headland with the tenants in simple
18:47cotton clothing, and quietly repositioned the stakes, enlarging the perimeter. When Tennant observed
18:54what she was doing, she replied, I think I need a bit more. The building of Les Jolies Eaux,
19:00and the escape it represented, had begun.
19:06To design the house, Margaret chose Oliver Messel, and the choice was revealing on multiple levels.
19:12Messel was Lord Snowdon's uncle, his mother's brother, which meant he was Margaret's uncle-in-law,
19:18a relationship that made the commission simultaneously a family affair, and a quiet assertion of aesthetic
19:24independence from the husband whose contempt for her was, by 1968, a feature of daily life at Kensington
19:32Palace. He was also one of the most distinguished theatrical and set designers in Britain, the man
19:37who had reimagined Sleeping Beauty for Sadler's Wells with Margot Fontaine in 1946, who had designed Caesar and
19:45Cleopatra for the screen, and who had created the Messel Suite at the Dorchester Hotel on Park Lane,
19:50and Margaret had seen a house he had built on Barbados and fallen in love with it. By the late
19:571960s,
19:58Messel had reinvented himself entirely. The rise of kitchen sink drama in British theatre had made his
20:05romantic, escapist design sensibility commercially unfashionable, and faced with dwindling commissions,
20:12he had moved to Barbados in 1966 for both financial and health reasons, where he began a second career
20:20designing villas for the Caribbean's wealthy expatriate community that proved to be, as one
20:25observer noted, a case of a set designer who had initiated a whole style of indoor-outdoor living,
20:32finding the perfect canvas for his theatrical gifts. He designed 26 homes on Mustique and Barbados in
20:39total, working almost until his death in 1978. His design philosophy in the Caribbean synthesized
20:46traditions that should have been incompatible and made them sing, from the colonial heritage,
20:52the French plantation house aesthetic of wide verandas, jalousy shutters, and generous proportions
20:58oriented toward the prevailing breezes. From his theatrical background, an obsessive attention to
21:05detail, and the ability to think of a house as a stage set, where every room created a particular
21:10mood, and from his aristocratic English sensibility, neo-Georgian symmetry, Regency-style elliptical
21:18arches, palladian proportions, and classical mouldings. What distinguished Messel's Caribbean houses from
21:25the work of other architects operating in the region was his understanding, learned across decades of
21:31theatrical design, that the relationship between a building and its setting is a performance,
21:36that every window frames a view the way a proscenium arch frames a stage, and that the function of
21:43architecture in a landscape this beautiful is to create the conditions in which the beauty can be
21:48experienced without distraction. The result was what commentators would christen Caribbean Messel,
21:54or Caribbean colonial, a style so distinctive that it became the defining visual language of
22:00Moustique itself. For Les Jolis' Eaux, Messel designed what both he and Margaret insisted on calling a house
22:08rather than a villa, since Margaret objected fiercely to the word villa, saying,
22:13it makes it sound like something you'd find in Brighton. The structure was a compound of separate
22:19pavilions, a main house containing the entrance hall, a spectacular living area that opened entirely
22:25onto covered terraces, and a formal dining room and bar with three bedrooms, a second pavilion housing the
22:32master suite, positioned to catch the maximum breeze and oriented toward the most spectacular views the
22:38southern point could offer, and further pavilions for additional bedrooms, the whole compound arranged on
22:44a private peninsula at the island's absolute southern tip, with views taking in both the Atlantic and the
22:50Caribbean simultaneously. The aesthetic was theatrical in the best sense. Coral stone balustrades framing the
22:58main terrace, plantation shutters filtering the Caribbean light into warm geometric patterns on
23:04whitewashed walls, cedar vaulted ceilings drawing the eye upward, Regency-style arches framing the sea view as
23:11precisely as a proscenium arch frames a stage. The outdoor spaces were equally considered. An infinity pool,
23:19a covered dining pavilion open to the breeze, and tropical gardens with fruit trees, flowers, and
23:25Messel's characteristic classical garden follies, the entire composition designed to make the boundary
23:30between interior and exterior as psychologically irrelevant as the Caribbean climate made it physically
23:37unnecessary. Messel's signature sage green paint, now known as Messel Green or Mustique Green, appeared on
23:45the shutters and doors, a colour so distinctive that it became inseparable from the island's identity.
23:51He also designed bespoke wooden and ironwork furniture in a Regency style with a touch of chinoiserie,
23:58pieces that could be replicated by local craftsmen, and that gave the interiors a quality that was neither
24:04palatial nor austere but specifically intentionally comfortable, the aesthetic of someone who understood
24:11grandeur but was choosing, for the first time in her life, warmth over formality. Margaret was deeply
24:18pleased. I am very pleased with what Oliver did for Les Joliot, she told visitors, and the pride in her
24:24voice when she spoke about the house was, by every account, of a different character from the pride she
24:29brought to any other subject. This was not the practised satisfaction of a royal commenting on
24:34a state project. It was the personal vulnerable pride of someone showing you the one thing she had
24:40that was truly her own.
24:45Les Jolies' Eau was completed in 1972, the main house finished by February, though some accounts give
24:521973 as the completion date of the full compound, and what emerged from four years of construction on a
24:59Caribbean headland was a five-bedroom compound on approximately eleven and a half acres, with two
25:05swimming pools, full staff quarters, and a private peninsula that no other property on Mystique could
25:11match. The master bedroom, her bedroom, was painted a vivid, defiant orange. It was not the colour of a
25:19palace bedroom, and it was not the colour that any decorator working within the conventions of the
25:23British Royal Interior would have chosen. It was the colour of someone expressing a private aesthetic
25:29preference for the first time in a space that answered to nobody's taste except her own. The rest of the
25:35house bore Messel's characteristic palette, his sage green on shutters and doors, whitewashed walls that
25:41caught and softened the Caribbean light, cedar ceilings that drew the heat upward, but the orange bedroom
25:47stood apart, an interior declaration of personal identity that no residence allocated to her by the
25:54Crown would have permitted. The furnishings were assembled with Margaret's characteristic mixture
26:00of style and economy, including pieces she had obtained, in some cases entirely for free, from the
26:07annual Ideal Home Exhibition in London, attending the trade show, selecting items that caught her eye,
26:13and accepting them as gifts from exhibitors who were delighted to have a princess as a client.
26:19Alongside these, Messel had designed bespoke furniture in his Regency with chinoiserie style,
26:25executed by local island craftsmen in a manner perfectly suited to the indoor-outdoor fluidity of
26:31the rooms, and the effect was the specific atmosphere of someone who understood elegance,
26:36but was, on this island, choosing comfort over ceremony.
26:41The staff quarters were a practical necessity that also revealed something about the nature of
26:46Margaret's royal existence, even in her most private refuge. A dedicated room accommodated
26:52the Scotland Yard detectives who travelled with her at all times, their presence non-negotiable,
26:57because she was the Queen's sister, and the possibility of a truly unguarded life was never,
27:03even on Mustique, entirely real. The housekeeper, the cook, the gardener, the full domestic team,
27:10lived in the staff accommodation attached to the compound year-round, maintaining the property
27:15between Margaret's visits, and staffing it at full capacity when she was in residence, which meant
27:21that Les Jolies' eau was, in a sense, always waiting for her, always maintained in a state of readiness.
27:27The gardens tended, the pools clean, the rooms aired, a permanent expression of care directed
27:34at a woman who spent most of her year in a palace that cared for her institutionally,
27:40rather than personally. Margaret gave the house its name, and the French was apt on several levels.
27:47It was a direct description of the aquatic panorama visible from every terrace, the Caribbean Sea to one
27:54side, the Atlantic to the other, and it was also a pun, since the bay below the headland was already
28:00called Jeliso, a creolisation of Jolie-Kailu, beautiful pebbles, so in naming her house Les Jolies' eau,
28:08Margaret was rhyming with the landscape itself. From the moment of completion she adopted a fixed
28:14seasonal rhythm that she maintained for nearly thirty years. She came twice a year, in October or November,
28:21and again in February, the first catching the tail end of the Caribbean's warm dry season,
28:27and the second calculated to coincide with the bleakest stretch of the English winter,
28:31when London felt like a conspiracy of damp and obligation, and Mustique offered a temperature
28:37difference of roughly twenty-five degrees, and a psychological distance that was, if anything, greater.
28:45She would arrive on the small island plain from Barbados or St Lucia, a journey of fifty minutes
28:51from Barbados and twenty-five from St Lucia, stepping onto the tarmac of the airstrip that had
28:57been opened in 1969, barely capable of receiving commercial aircraft, and entering a world that the
29:04preceding weeks of London engagements had made feel not just desirable, but medically necessary.
29:10The arrival was a ritual. The island's small airstrip received her party with golf carts driven by
29:17Mustique Company staff who knew the drill, and in the early years, Tennant arranged for bowls of fresh
29:23water to be ready near the beach, so that Margaret's feet could be washed of sand after her daily swim.
29:29A detail so particular that it serves as a perfect emblem of the island's character, tropical informality,
29:35governed by absolute deference. Because deference there was, the insistence on being called ma'am by
29:43closest friends as well as strangers, the expectation that visitors would curtsy or bow upon entering a
29:49room where she was present, the rule that dinner could not begin until she arrived, deployed with the
29:54same theatrical timing on Mustique as in London. A man followed her around with an ashtray when she was
30:00smoking at parties, just as one did at Kensington Palace. The protocol was not a cage she had escaped,
30:07it was part of who she was, so thoroughly internalised that it arrived with her on the island as naturally
30:12as her cigarettes and her famous grouse whisky. What changed was not the protocol, but the landscape in
30:19which it operated and that difference changed everything. Margaret told visitors repeatedly that
30:28Les Jolies' Eau was, the only place I can relax, and the declaration appeared in enough interviews,
30:34documentaries and reminiscences to constitute a considered position. To understand what she meant
30:39requires understanding what her life was everywhere else. At Kensington Palace, she occupied apartment 1A,
30:47a residence of twenty rooms, a formal drawing room, a library, a dining room for two dozen guests,
30:54and all the trappings of the British aristocratic interior, and it was entirely and inalienably not
31:00hers. She had no title to it, could not sell it, could not substantially alter it without permission,
31:06and the apartment was a loan from the institution of the monarchy, whose terms were set by the sovereign's
31:11discretion. Her civil list allowance existed to fund the performance of official duties,
31:16not to provide personal capital, and she could not invest it, could not build with it, could not use
31:23it to acquire assets independently of the royal machinery that distributed it. Everything around
31:29her was magnificent, and almost none of it was hers in any sense that would survive a change of sovereign.
31:36Margaret told me Les Jolies' Eau was the only property she had ever owned in her entire life,
31:41said the wife of Gerrit Copeland, a close friend from the island's social circle. It was hers. She felt
31:48inordinate love and pride that this was not from the royal family, it was not her sisters, it was not
31:54grace and favour. She loved the fact it was her own. The particular phrase grace and favour is worth pausing
32:01on because it describes the legal framework that had governed Margaret's entire domestic experience.
32:08Grace and favour accommodations are residences assigned by the sovereign to deserving individuals as a
32:14personal gift, a gesture of royal grace rather than a right or a purchase, and the recipient lives as a
32:20guest of the Crown in a property the Crown owns and administers under conditions ultimately determined
32:26by royal discretion. Margaret had lived in grace and favour accommodation for her entire adult life, which meant
32:33that her experience of home was always, at its foundation, borrowed. She was a guest of the institution, housed in
32:41exchange for her performance of the role the institution assigned her, and if the role ended, or the institution's
32:47generosity was withdrawn, the housing ended with it. Les Jolies Eaux was the exception, the one place where
32:56the title was hers, the one piece of the world where she was not anyone's guest, and not anyone's functionary,
33:02and not anyone's spare. The freedom this conferred was simultaneously symbolic and practical, because the
33:09island was privately owned, with visitors registered with the Mustique Company's security and no permanent
33:14press presence, Les Jolies Eaux offered a degree of genuine privacy that her London existence made
33:20structurally impossible. Her mornings began by several accounts with a gin and tonic on the veranda as the
33:27Caribbean morning warmed around her, a detail delightful in its unapologetic simplicity. No photographers by the
33:34gates, no equerry with a schedule, no engagement on the calendar, just the veranda, the view, the drink,
33:41and the sound of two oceans meeting below the headland. There were no cameras except the ones
33:47that eventually found her, and no reporters waiting at the airstrip, and no obligation to smile at anyone
33:53she did not wish to smile at, which was a form of freedom so fundamental that most people experience
33:59it every day without recognising it as a privilege, and that Margaret, who had never experienced it
34:05anywhere else, recognised immediately as the most precious thing the island had to offer.
34:10The two-hour breakfast in bed followed, reading whatever she had brought, she was a serious and
34:16wide-ranging reader, while chain-smoking her Chesterfields, then the slow process of hair and
34:22dressing, and only then, sometime around noon, the emergence onto the terrace. The pace was deliberately,
34:30consciously slow, in a way that metropolitan royal life, packed with engagements and functions and
34:36commitments almost never permitted, and the slowness was itself a form of rebellion, a refusal to organise
34:43her hours around anyone else's expectations that she could exercise at leisurely Eau and nowhere else.
34:50The daily swim was a significant part of her routine, the one form of exercise she embraced with genuine
34:56enthusiasm, and by the mid-1990s, after her first stroke had weakened her left side, the swimming became a
35:03form of determined daily therapy as well as pleasure, with Lady Anne Glen Connor developing a specific
35:10side stroke to keep pace with her in the water, lunch under the poolside gazebo with whichever guests
35:15had joined her that season, late afternoons on the beach, or at the home of whichever resident was hosting
35:21that evening's drinks, and then the evenings. On Mustique she could insist on being called Ma'am, and then,
35:29in the same evening, sit at the piano in her swimsuit, and play show tunes with increasing ribaldry until
35:35the small hours. She could accept a curtsy from a new arrival, and then wade into the sea for a
35:41midnight
35:41swim without telling anyone she was going. The coexistence of formality and wildness, impossible
35:49anywhere near the palace, was perfectly natural on the headland, because it was, in fact, perfectly
35:54natural to her, and the island was the one place that allowed both halves of her personality to occupy
36:00the same evening without either one requiring an apology.
36:07The early Mustique social circle was a deliberately heterogeneous group.
36:12Aristocrats, rock musicians, actors, fashion designers, socialites, and writers mixed in proportions that
36:18reflected Tennant's Catholic social tastes, and Margaret's genuine pleasure in company that crossed every
36:24conventional line. In London, her world was heavily skewed toward the established aristocracy.
36:30On Mustique, Mick Jagger was a neighbour, having bought on the island after Margaret encouraged him
36:36to do so, constructing his Japanese-style Stargroves villa, and David Bowie bought a multi-pavilion
36:42property he called Britannia Bay, though he eventually sold it, saying the house was so tranquil and peaceful
36:48that he found it hard to get any work done. Brian Adams built a home he still owns, and Tommy
36:55Hilfiger,
36:55Paul McCartney, and an archipelago of aristocrats and business magnates followed, each drawn by the
37:01promise of absolute seclusion that had drawn Margaret herself. People had parties with every
37:07type of person there, Lady Anne Glen Connor recalled, and the conversations at evening drinks parties crossed
37:14lines that the drawing rooms of Kensington Palace were not designed to cross. She could be very wild and
37:21unrestrained, several Mustique regulars noted, and she could be very difficult. She liked to be spoiled
37:27and taken care of. If she felt well cared for, she was fun. The piano was central to her evenings.
37:35She liked nothing more than to sit and drink and sing a ditty at the piano, recalled the wife of
37:40Gerrit
37:40Copeland. She sang somewhat off-colour songs sitting on the stool with a piano player. She had a very
37:46ribald sense of humour, which around the right people was pretty bad. She loved that sort of stuff.
37:52Margaret was, by training and genuine talent, an accomplished musician who had learned piano as a
37:58child, and retained the technique and the ear of someone who had grown up in a household where music
38:04was practised seriously. At Kensington Palace, piano playing was an entertainment provided for guests.
38:11On Mystique, it was liberation. The songs got bawdier as the night went on, the famous grouse whisky
38:18circulated freely, there was dancing, people disappeared to the beach, and the behaviour was, in the generous
38:24assessment of those who were present, outrageous in the pleasantest possible sense of the word.
38:29Margaret was, in these evenings, the organising principle of the island's social world and its
38:36greatest attraction, a woman exercising the authority of the host and the owner, rather than
38:42performing the role of the princess, and the difference between the two was, for her, the difference
38:47between obligation and pleasure. She had spent thirty years being the permanent spare to the permanent heir,
38:55and on this headland, in this house, with this piano and this whisky and these friends who were there,
39:00because they wanted to be, rather than because protocol required it, she was the centre of the room,
39:06because the room was hers. For Margaret, who had grown up as the witty, glamorous, more naturally
39:13sociable of the two sisters, and who had then spent her adult life watching the less socially gifted
39:18sister, inherit the role that required social gifts, while she herself was allocated a position that required
39:25her to be permanently charming, and permanently subordinate. The reversal that Mustique provided was
39:31psychologically profound. Here, she was not the supporting act, but the headliner, not the spare,
39:37but the reason everyone else had come. The early Mustique social world, in the years when the island had
39:44only fifteen homeowners, and each hosted drinks every evening, was small enough to be intimate and
39:51exclusive enough to be discreet, and this combination, the smallness and the discretion, was what allowed
39:58Margaret to be simultaneously the most royal person present, and the most relaxed. The parties at Les Jolies
40:05Eaux, during the 1970s and 1980s, entered legend. Margaret seated on a wooden throne strewn with fresh
40:13orchid petals, presiding over fashion shows to the beats of a local band, while in the garden, the famous
40:20grouse flowed, and the conversations grew increasingly unconstrained by anything resembling metropolitan
40:26propriety. Colin Tennant understood, with crystalline clarity, what Margaret's presence on the island was
40:33worth. She was, as one commentator put it, the living proof that Mustique was a place where a royal
40:40princess could be herself, where the normal rules did not apply, where one could swim and drink and laugh
40:46without a photographer in the bushes, and her presence was the island's greatest endorsement and its greatest
40:52advertisement simultaneously. A consortium led by Venezuelan industrialist Hans Neumann had bought
41:0060% of the Mustique company from Tennant in 1976, when his financial difficulties had made the sale
41:06necessary, and the company's continued commercial viability depended on attracting buyers of sufficient
41:13wealth and sufficient social ambition to sustain the island's reputation as the most exclusive private
41:19community in the Caribbean. Margaret, by simply being there, accomplished more for that reputation than any
41:28amount of advertising expenditure could have purchased. In return, the island gave her the one thing she could not
41:34find anywhere else in the world.
41:39The first scandal associated with Les Jolies Eaux predated even its completion. In the late 1960s, Margaret had been
41:47introduced to John Bindon, a Cockney actor who had appeared in Quadrophenia, and who came with what
41:52one source described delicately as some gangster connections, and who was invited to spend three
41:58weeks on Mustique with her. The stories that circulated about their interactions were extraordinarily racy.
42:05His then-girlfriend, model Vicki Hodge, claimed that Margaret had been charmed by his Cockney accent,
42:12his rhyming slang, and dirty jokes. Photographs allegedly taken on the beach were said to have
42:18ended up in a Lloyds Bank vault at the centre of the famous 1971 Baker Street robbery, with some
42:24accounts suggesting a D notice was issued to suppress press coverage, and all documents relating to the
42:30robbery placed under embargo at the National Archives until 2071, a date sufficiently distant to ensure that
42:37everyone directly involved will be long dead before the truth, whatever it is, becomes public.
42:43But Bindon was a footnote. The main event came in 1973, when Tennant introduced Margaret to Roddy Llewellyn,
42:50the sweet-natured, gardening-obsessed son of a baronet. Margaret was 43, and Llewellyn was 25, and their
42:58affair began immediately, with Mustique as its primary theatre. The island offered exactly what such a liaison
43:05required. Genuine seclusion, no permanent press presence, and the diplomatic amnesia of a social world that
43:12understood what went on in private villas, was supposed to stay there. I was just following my heart, Llewellyn said
43:19later, with the straightforward simplicity of a man who had not yet learned to mistrust his own motives.
43:25Mustique in this period was not a holiday destination for Margaret, but an emotional refuge, the place she retreated to
43:33when her marriage had degenerated into open warfare, when London felt like a prison of obligations,
43:40when the pressure of being watched and judged and found wanting had become genuinely unbearable.
43:46For nearly three years, the affair was conducted in the warm Caribbean latitude of Les Jolieux, with Llewellyn a
43:53regular and increasingly integral part of Margaret's island life, the two of them sharing the headland and the
43:59pool and the evenings with the freedom of people who believed the sea provided sufficient insulation
44:05from the world's opinion. Llewellyn, who was gentle and uncomplicated in ways that Armstrong Jones had
44:12never been, brought to Margaret's life on Mustique a quality of calm that those around her noticed, and that
44:19the architecture of her London existence had made impossible. He gardened, he swam, he sat with her on the
44:26terrace in the evenings, and he did not leave notes in drawers telling her he hated her. The simplicity of
44:32what he offered, after the Baroque cruelties of the Snowden marriage, was precisely what made it so
44:38valuable, and precisely what made its public exposure so devastating. In 1976, the insulation failed.
44:47Paparazzi photographs of Margaret and Llewellyn appeared in the News of the World, him in Union Jack
44:53swimming trunks on the beach. The two of them photographed with an intimacy that left nothing
44:58to the imagination. Buckingham Palace confirmed that the royal marriage had broken down. The public
45:05reaction was largely unsympathetic, with politicians condemning Margaret as a royal parasite, and a floozy,
45:12the Queen expressing clear disapproval, and real fears circulating within the palace that the scandal
45:18would damage public confidence in the monarchy at a moment when public confidence was already under
45:23strain. Margaret had apparently suffered what some accounts describe as a nervous breakdown on
45:30Mustique in 1974, the year before the public unravelling, with friends reportedly having her room
45:37monitored and connections made with Priory clinic doctors for treatment of serious depression. The island
45:43she had built as a refuge had, in some ways, accelerated the crisis by providing the conditions
45:49in which the marriage's collapse became fully visible. The divorce from Armstrong Jones was finalised
45:56in 1978, the first royal divorce in Britain in 400 years, and the public narrative that surrounded it
46:03was shaped almost entirely by the photographs from Mustique, the images of Margaret and Llewellyn on the beach
46:10that had made the private collapse of the marriage a matter of national discussion and parliamentary
46:15condemnation. Margaret kept Les Jolies Eaux. In a settlement that divided the assets of a marriage
46:22in which almost nothing had been genuinely shared, the villa on Mustique was the one property whose
46:29ownership was unambiguous, because it had been given to Margaret before the marriage began to fail,
46:34built during the years of its most active deterioration, and completed at the moment when the pretense of a
46:41functioning relationship had become impossible to sustain. It was the only thing in the settlement
46:46that was genuinely and unambiguously her own.
46:53For a woman who had spent decades watching her sister inherit the weight and purpose of the crown,
46:58while she was allocated a supporting role with no independent base, no defined function, and no
47:04property that did not belong to someone else, the villa on Mustique carried a meaning that the word
47:10holiday entirely fails to capture. She had been denied the man she loved because the church could not
47:17accommodate his divorce. She had married a man who expressed his contempt in notes left around the
47:22apartment like landmines. She had been called a parasite in Parliament and a floocy in the tabloids.
47:29She had raised two children in a household where open warfare was the prevailing domestic climate,
47:35where notes left in drawers were designed to wound with surgical precision, where the man she had
47:40married in front of three hundred million television viewers had turned the intimacy of their shared
47:46apartment into a theatre of cruelty that the children witnessed and the staff endured and the palace
47:52pretended not to know about. She had performed three decades of official engagements, charity visits,
47:59foreign tours, and ceremonial obligations, all of them conducted in the knowledge that she was doing
48:04these things not because she was queen, but because she was not, and that the public who watched her do
48:10them
48:10was simultaneously impressed by her style, scandalized by her personal life, and resentful of the cost of
48:17maintaining her in the manner to which her birth had accustomed her. The civil list allowance that funded
48:23her official existence had, by 1990, reached ÂŁ219,000 per year, and the figure was debated in Parliament with
48:33a hostility that would have been unthinkable had it been directed at the Sovereign herself, because Margaret was
48:39the spare, and the spare's expenditure was, in the public mind, always potentially excessive in a
48:45way that the heir's expenditure was not. Through all of it, she owned, in the whole world, one house.
48:53More than any palace, as one account noted, Princess Margaret loved her villa on Mustique and the freedom
48:59that she could enjoy on the private island. The distinction this sentence draws is between a palace,
49:05which is a setting for the performance of a role, and a house, which is a setting for the living
49:10of a
49:11life. And what Margaret understood, with the clarity that her position in the royal hierarchy had given
49:16her decades to develop, was that she had spent her entire adult existence in settings designed for
49:23the performance of a role she had not chosen, in rooms whose dimensions were determined by institutional
49:29function, rather than personal preference, surrounded by beauty that answered to the nation's requirements,
49:35rather than her own. The orange bedroom answered to her requirements. The piano on which she played
49:42bawdy songs at midnight answered to her requirements. The headland, the two oceans, the view across the
49:48grenadines, the sound of the water on the pebbles that gave the bay its name. The gardens that Messel had
49:54designed with the theatrical instinct of a man who understood that beauty is most effective when it
50:00appears to have arrived without effort. All of this answered to her requirements in a way that no palace,
50:07however magnificent, ever had. She visited Les Jolies Eaux twice a year for nearly three decades.
50:13The house was maintained year-round by a full domestic staff, who kept the gardens tended, the pools clean,
50:20the rooms aired, the compound in a permanent state of readiness for the arrival of a woman who spent
50:26most of her year in a residence she did not own, waiting for the weeks when she could return to
50:31one
50:31she did. One could buy or rent a Caribbean villa for a week and feel the pleasure of warmth and
50:38beauty
50:38and distance from obligation. One could spend a fortnight in a property of staggering beauty and leave no trace.
50:46What Margaret felt at Les Jolies Eaux was categorically different. The specific, irreplaceable
50:52sensation of being at home, not visiting someone else's home, not occupying a residence as a function
50:59of a role, but home, the one place in the world where she was not a guest and not a
51:04functionary and
51:05not a spare, where the walls were the colour she had chosen and the name on the deed was her
51:10own.
51:10She called it the only square inch in the world she owned. She was not exaggerating. The deed bore
51:17her name, and the orange walls bore her taste, and the piano bore the memory of her voice, and the
51:23headland bore the weight of the only freedom she ever found, on ten acres of Caribbean land that a
51:29Scottish eccentric gave her, because he understood, before she did, that what she needed was a place in
51:36the world she could call her own. It was the only place she ever had. It was hers.
51:42Not yet.
51:43Not yet.
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