I Dressed Princess Margaret for 26 Years — She Knew What Was in That Locked Room

For 26 years I dressed Princess Margaret. I was in that household in October 1955 — and I carried her breakfast tray up on the morning after she gave up Peter Townsend. Nothing in that house had changed. The flowers had been done. Someone was laughing in the hall about a dog. Nobody came. And I was at Royal Lodge in April 1976, the month her marriage ended in front of the entire country, when she got into a car and drove home to her mother. There was a room in that house that stayed closed. Every servant knew of it. Nobody named it. And there was no lock on the door — there never had been. At one o'clock in the morning I watched her stand in front of it with her hand on the handle. She could have opened it. She stood there for three minutes and then she turned around and walked away, and what she said to me in that corridor explains her entire life: the 1955 statement, the silence that followed it, and the fifty years the country spent calling her wayward. She was not protecting her mother's secret. She was protecting her own reason for the choice she made. This is the second half of a story told in two parts. The first half — the woman who locked the door — is linked below. Subscribe to The Crown Vault. New episodes every Tuesday and Friday. — This account is a dramatized reconstruction drawn from documented history and the recorded testimony of palace household staff. Dates, public events and public statements are factual. Private conversations are inferred, not transcribed.