Royal Residents of Kensington Palace
About 200 years later, two royal widows would battle it out at Kensington Palace. The women were sisters and their mother was Queen Victoria. In one apartment was Princess Louise, a feminist, chain-smoking, free-spirited sculptor who liked a drink. Next door was Princess Beatrice, Victoria’s coddled youngest child, who was her mother’s meek literary executor.
It was too close for comfort. “Louise…disliked her sister Beatrice, who lived in the apartment next door to Louise’s,” Judith Morris, the daughter of Princess Louise’s maid Edith, recalled. “Mum would hear shouting late in the evening and assumed it was the two sisters arguing through the walls. Louise also liked a drink too, and when she was tipsy, she would bang on her sister’s wall and shout abuse.”
As Kensington Palace filled up with more and more minor royals during the 20th century, earning it the nickname “the aunt heap,” the battles between the neighbors became increasingly petty. “Because none of the royal residents were, in reality, as important as members of the immediate family, they were forever squabbling over precedence,” a former courtier told author Tom Quinn in Kensington Palace: An Intimate History. “But they hated the idea that anyone outside the palace would find out about this.”
In 1960, the neighbor from hell arrived in the diminutive, dainty package of Princess Margaret. Initially, Margaret and her new husband, the equally volatile photographer Antony Armstrong-Jones, the future Earl of Snowdon, lived in Apartment 10, which Margaret derisively called the “doll’s house.” They were forced to live in this unworthy apartment while their new home, the palatial 1A, was completely renovated and redesigned to their hyper-hip standards.
By the time the Snowdons moved in in 1963, they had already made one enemy, Margaret’s elegant aunt, Princess Marina, who was driven insane by the constant noise from endless renovations.
Things didn’t get much quieter once the famously hard-partying, oft-feuding couple moved in. “[Margaret] would shriek the most terrible things,” one palace insider told Quinn. “She didn’t give a damn if the windows and doors were open and everyone could hear. Quite a shock, I can tell you, to hear the queen’s sister shout the word cunt at the top of her voice.”
When Margaret ventured outside her apartment walls, she turned her ire on one resident in particular. Sir Alan “Tommy” Lascelles had been the private secretary to her sister, Queen Elizabeth II, and Margaret accused him of ruining her life by helping block her marriage to Group Captain Peter Townsend. Now living in a grace-and-favor residence at the palace, the aging Lascelles was Margaret’s biggest target. The vengeful princess would spit on the ground whenever she caught sight of him, according to Quinn. One day, she spotted the old man shuffling across the palace’s courtyard. “Run the brute down,” she called to her chauffeur.
Luckily, Margaret’s chauffeur disobeyed her order, and Lascelles died in 1981. But by then, a divorced Princess Margaret had many more feuds to occupy her time.
