“Lilibet is my pride. Margaret is my joy,” King George VI once said of his two daughters, Queen Elizabeth and Princess Margaret Rose. It ended up being a symbolic remark for the relationship the royal sisters held with society as a whole: Elizabeth was stoic and steadfast as the Queen of England, while Margaret remained mercurial and fabulous as she donned Dior dresses while partying around the world. “Elizabeth was organized, Margaret artistic; Elizabeth discreet, Margaret attention-seeking; Elizabeth dutiful, Margaret disobedient; Elizabeth disciplined, Margaret wild,” Craig Brown recalled in Ninety-Nine Glimpses of Princess Margaret. In light of the final season of The Crown—which covers the final days between Imelda Staunton’s Queen Elizabeth and Lesley Manville’s Princess Margaret—their relationship, once again, is back under the spotlight.
Colorful stories about their polarity dotted their childhood: take one Christmas pantomime during wartime at Windsor Castle, where Elizabeth fretted over the ticket price of seven and sixpence. ”No one will pay that to look at us!” the future queen said to her sister, according to Brown. “Nonsense. They’ll pay anything to see us,” Margaret replied.
Of course, their relationship wasn’t without its troubles. Tensions are inevitable between all siblings—especially when the older is a ruling monarch and the younger, her subject. Queen Elizabeth legally couldn’t approve of Margaret’s relationship with the older, divorced Peter Townsend due to her position as the head of the Church of England. Meanwhile, Margaret was said to struggle with her dropping order in the line of succession—and the decreased visibility that came with it. (“The absence of a role was her tragedy, ” wrote Hugo Vickers of The Independent.) Her frustration showed: “On one occasion Margaret slams into the Queen’s drawing room at Windsor Castle whilst the Prime Minister was there; she walks in and, in addressing her, says, “If you weren’t Queen, nobody would talk to you,” Andrew Morton, author of Elizabeth and Margaret: The Intimate World of the Windsor Sisters, told Vogue. “You see this jealousy and you also see this loyalty that Margaret had towards Elizabeth.”
Yet, despite their assigned places in history, their devotion to each other never wavered. Princess Margaret had a telephone with a direct line to her sister at Buckingham Palace. They called each other every day to gossip and laugh, according to friend Reinaldo Herrera. “They had a love, friendship, and conspiracy that were impressive to behold,” he wrote in Vanity Fair. And when Princess Margaret passed away in 2002, Queen Elizabeth openly cried at her funeral—one of the only times the monarch has shown emotion in a public setting. “The queen lost her most intimate companion,” Herrera wrote. “Never explaining anything to the world—what she feels, or why she does what she does—is part of her greatness. But for a few minutes that day, as she stood by the steps of St. George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle, watching her sister’s coffin being borne away, her eyes betrayed her.”
Below, a complicated yet loving sisterhood, in photos.