Although their royal roles—and personalities—couldn't have been more different, Queen Elizabeth and Princess Margaret shared a close bond throughout their lives. The late Queen's only sibling, who died in 2002, has long been remembered as an outspoken, ultra-glam wild child. But after three of Queen Elizabeth's four children ended up divorced in the '90s, the sisters experienced a role reversal that no one expected.
In a classic case of heir and spare, Princess Margaret is said to have suffered from an inferiority complex when it came to Elizabeth. "As a young woman she had always felt that the Queen was so good and perfect while she was very much the opposite, doomed to an unhappy marriage and a succession of unsuitable romances," author Ingrid Seward wrote in her book My Mother and I (via the Daily Mail).
Despite this, Margaret loved her sister dearly, and after her own divorce in 1978, she became the perfect person to give advice to Queen Elizabeth. In 1992, Elizabeth's only daughter, Princess Anne, finalized her divorce from husband Mark Phillips, and the same year—dubbed her "annus horribilis" by the late Queen—both Prince Charles and Princess Diana and Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson announced their separations.
"For all her personal problems and temperamental behaviour, she was a natural mother," Seward wrote of Princess Margaret, who shared daughter Sarah Chatto and son David Armstrong-Jones with ex-husband Antony Armstrong-Jones. And when Queen Elizabeth was struggling with her children's divorces, Margaret was there to lend an ear.
Describing Princess Margaret as developing "a new kind of confidence," Seward wrote that the princess "felt able to give the Queen advice, rather than the other way around" for the "first time" ever.
"The ironic poignancy of this reversal was not lost on the Queen or Prince Philip," the biographer added. "This is not how anyone could ever have seen things turning out, with Margaret at ease with herself and her children happily settled, while the Queen and Philip were faced with three out of their four children getting divorced."
"Princess Margaret prided herself on being a good mother and it made her feel that at least she had managed to get something right," Seward added. "Unlike her sister, who put her husband before the children, Princess Margaret put her children first."
In his book Queen of Our Times: The Life of Queen Elizabeth II, royal biographer Robert Hardman wrote that the series of divorces impacted Elizabeth "much more than she let on." A former palace staffer recalled, via the Daily Mail, telling the late Queen that divorces were "almost common practice" in the '90s.
However, Queen Elizabeth exclaimed, "Three out of four!" in a tone filled with "sheer sadness and exasperation."
