Lady Sarah Chatto Refused Everything From Princess Margaret — And the Palace Stopped Asking D
Three days after she buried her mother, Lady Sarah Chattau was working. That is the account given by Anne Glenn Connor, Princess Margaret’s Lady in Waiting for over 30 years in her 2019 memoir, Lady in Waiting. The funeral had been held on February 15th, 2002 at St. George’s Chapel, Windsor.
A call came from the Queen Mother in the days that followed. an invitation for Sarah to come and choose some of her mother’s belongings as keepsakes. Sarah’s answer, as Glenn Connor tells it, was that she didn’t want anything. Nothing could bring her mother back. Glenn Connor is worth establishing clearly before going any further.
Born Lady Anne Ko in 1932, she was a childhood playmate of both princesses, a maid of honor at Queen Elizabeth’s 1953 coronation, and appointed Lady and waiting to Princess Margaret in 1971, a role she held until Margaret’s death, roughly 30 years in service to one woman’s social life, official calendar, and private grief.
When she published her memoir at 87, she said she wrote it partly because she was, in her own words, fed up with people writing such horrible things about Princess Margaret. Lady in waiting spent 35 weeks on UK bestseller lists and sold over a million copies. She is the sole named source for the exchange with the Queen Mother.
The exact wording of that conversation isn’t on any verifiable record. What follows will use her account carefully, attributed to Glen Connor every time it appears because that attribution is the foundation, not a caveat. Margaret left her daughter seven things. Three were objects and Sarah kept all three.
She wore the Snowden floral tiara at her own wedding in July 1994. Originally a gift from Lord Snowden to Princess Margaret on their wedding day in 1960. Three floral diamond brooches assembled into a headpiece, carrying 34 years of marriage and divorce and grief into a Christopher Ren church on a July afternoon.
She has worn Margaret’s diamonds at public occasions in the years since, documented on magazine social pages and royal watching records. These aren’t accidental choices. Objects carry their provenence with them. Sarah chose to carry these. The other four things Margaret left weren’t objects. They were ways of being built across a lifetime inside one of the most closely watched households in Britain.
The temper that ran the day, the grievance that never healed, the performance that turned every room into a stage, and the certainty, bone deep, untested, that the world owed her its attention. Those four, Sarah refused, not in a speech, not in a single dramatic rupture, but slowly, quietly, across 30 years, in the smallest decisions a private woman can make.
Princess Margaret’s household had a rhythm, and the rhythm belonged to her. Craig Brown spent seven years assembling Ma’am Darling, 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret, published in 2017, and the portrait he constructed is specific in ways that matter for this story. breakfast in bed at 9 in the morning, two hours afterward lying in reading the newspapers, which she invariably left scattered across the floor, and chain smoking.
At 11:00, the lady’s maid ran a bath, and she took a relaxing hour-long soak. By 12:30, vodka. The day built itself around her waking, her mood, her readiness. Dinner couldn’t begin until she arrived. She was famously reliably late. Nancy Mittford in her published letters recorded a dinner scheduled for 8:30 at which guests stood around in formal clothes for hours while Margaret’s hairdresser finished.
The room stood in suspension until she chose to release it. And no one was permitted to leave before she signaled the night was over. Hosts accommodated this because the alternative was giving offense to a princess. guests accommodated it because the alternative was leaving early and being noted for it.
Julian Barnes, reviewing Brown’s book in the Guardian in October 2017, described Margaret as bossy, petty, and volatile. Brown’s own framing is more precise and more useful. There is no doubt that Margaret could be and often was unbearably difficult. He documents the pattern through specific repeated incidents across decades.
In 1990, Richard Ay, artistic director of the National Theater, stood in a foyer to greet Margaret for a preview of Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park with George. She announced loudly on arrival that she couldn’t stand. She demonstrated this conspicuously throughout the evening. On her way out, he told her he was glad she had enjoyed the show. I didn’t, she replied.
I can’t bear the piece. Two years later, she attended a preview of Carousel. At the door, she told, “I can’t bear the piece.” Brown observed that the pronouncement, the timing, the delivery, the person she aimed it at functioned like a signature, as recognizable as Frank Eiffield’s yodel. The mood, the verdict, the dismissal weren’t occasional eruptions. They were a style.
Against this, Sarah Cado’s 30 public years present a uniform absence of comparable testimony. No staff member has put an account on record. No host has a story. No artist, gallery director, or official has documented a difficult encounter. The one known statement she has made about how she organizes her working days, quoted in a royal musings profile around her 60th birthday, is this.
I try to go to the studio every morning, but other bits of life slip in as well. That is the full public record in her own voice about the rhythm of her days. The temper that organized her mother’s household didn’t follow her into hers. On October 31st, 1955, Princess Margaret read a statement over BBC radio.
John Snag, the BBC newsreader, interrupted normal programming to introduce it. The text has been widely reproduced and independently confirmed. It ran in part. I have been aware that subject to my renouncing my rights of succession, it might have been possible for me to contract a civil marriage. But mindful of the church’s teaching that Christian marriage is indiscoluble and conscious of my duty to the commonwealth, I have resolved to put these considerations before any others.
The language was formal, compressed, final. The words were hers, and they framed the decision as an act of faith and duty rather than an imposition from outside. What official papers kept secret until 2004 reveal is that the situation may have been less absolute than the public understood.
A compromise appears to have been discussed. Margaret could retain her royal title and her civil list income if she gave up succession rights and married in a register office. A letter from Margaret herself to Prime Minister Anthony Eden in August 1955 indicated only that she intended to see Townsend in October and make her decision then.
The statement that went out over the BBC may have been less a forced concession than a genuine choice, which in some ways makes what followed harder to explain. Peter Townsend had entered Margaret’s awareness in 1947 on a royal tour of South Africa. He was a Battle of Britain ace who had helped shoot down the first German bomber on English soil, decorated and composed and 15 years older than a princess who was just 17.
He had been posted to Brussels in 1953, what he later described to the BBC as a slightly disciplinary measure, and they had written to each other nearly every day across 2 years of enforced absence. He proposed shortly after his divorce was finalized in November 1952. She was 22 when he was sent away and 25 when the statement ended it.
The relationship had stretched across 8 years of her early adulthood before it was closed by a 48-word announcement on BBC radio. What biographers documented in the decades that followed was a woman who didn’t set down that weight easily. Christopher Warick’s authorized account and Craig Brown’s forensic one both treat the town’s indecision as the emotional axis of everything that came afterward.
Biographers’s interpretation, not Margaret’s direct self-description. The language of lifelong grievance is analytical framing, not a documented quote. But the behavioral pattern across her subsequent years is consistent. a woman conscious at a specific moment in 1955 that something concrete had been foreclosed and who remained conscious of it.
Sarah’s equivalent record is a marriage that has lasted over 30 years without incident on the public record. She married Daniel Cado on July 14th, 1994 at St. Steven Walbrook. 200 guests, Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip attended. Diana, Princess of Wales, attended the first event at which Charles and Diana had appeared together since his televised admission of the affair with Camila that June.
The ceremony lasted 30 minutes. The reception was at Clarence House. They honeymooned in India where they had first met on a film set in 1983. Their elder son, Samuel, was born July 28th, 1996. Their younger son, Arthur, was born February 5th, 1999. No public separation, no documented public friction, no aired wounds, no media grievances, no record across three decades of the sustained family drama surrounding her in all directions.
her parents’ divorce, the wider family’s rolling crisis, the inheritance disputes and charity sales and press coverage that followed Margaret’s death touching her own public posture. The contrast with what Margaret carried from 1955 onward isn’t interpretive. It’s observable, 30 years wide and documented by simple absence.
In 1975, Princess Margaret attended Gore Vidal’s 50th birthday party at Mark’s Club in Mayfair. She was 45. The guest list included Kenneth Tinen, Tennessee Williams, Ryan O’Neal, Jonathan Miller, Clare Bloom, and Harold Pinter, who had arrived with Lady Antonia Fraser. Tinen addressed the company as comrades. The Labor Party conference was in session that week in Blackpool.
He wasn’t being humorous. Williams told Margaret they couldn’t talk because they lived in different worlds. She asked which world he meant. He cited Laboom. She had already confided to Cecil Beaton years earlier that she loathed his plays, that she hated squalor and that Williams made her feel ill. Beaton wrote it down.
Williams wrote it down that evening. Tinen wrote it down. Vidal wrote it down. This was the reliable tax of being the princess in the room. The moment she turned her back, the diaries opened. Brown built an entire book from the archive these evenings generated because nearly every significant literary and artistic diarist of the second half of the 20th century had Margaret somewhere in their index.
between Charles Manson and Alda Marcos in Warhols, between Margate and Miriam Margalles in Kenneth Williams’. She showed up without warning, Brown noted, popping her head around the door of every other memoir and diary written in the second half of the 20th century. The performance was deliberate and sustained. Brown’s central characterization, Ma’am Camp, captures the mechanism, arriving late, entering with a flourish, exiting with a flounce, pausing for effect, making a scene.
The court she held in late evenings at Kensington Palace was real. Writers, decorators, artists received until 2 in the morning. The conversation sharp and the drinking serious. She signed her check simply Margaret. No surname, no title, no elaboration was required. The room already knew. The room always knew. That was the point.
Not incidentally commanding attention, but needing it, structuring her evenings around its reliable delivery. Against this, Sarah Armstrong Jones built a career from a different premise entirely. She has been represented by the Red Fern Gallery since 1995. She exhibits under her own name. Not Lady Sarah Cado, not any variation on the Armstrong Jones title her father received when her parents married in 1960.
Just Sarah Armstrong Jones. The Red Fern Gallery’s description of her work draws on language from the critic Patrick Kinmmon. The paintings grow like plants flowering or landscapes excavated over time from remembered indistinct horizons. The oil on canvas she contributed to Horatio’s Gardens 2025 charity auction was submitted under the same name.
It has held without variation for 30 years. No substantive interview by Lady Sarah Cado is on the public record in national press or major arts publications across those three decades. a country life feature in which she named her favorite painting, Pierro Del Francesca’s baptism of Christ at the National Gallery, which she visits whenever she is nearby, and the single studio practice quote constitute nearly the full extent of her published self-presentation.
Her mother appeared in every significant European diary of the second half of the 20th century. Her daughter has left no comparable archive. Anne Edwards in Royal Sisters, Queen Elizabeth II and Princess Margaret records an observation about the early dynamic between the two sisters. Princess Margaret does draw all the attention and Princess Elizabeth lets her do that.
The pattern was established before Margaret was 20 and held for the remaining 50 odd years of her life. At informal gatherings throughout her adult life, she required to be addressed as ma’am regardless of the setting. Not rigid protocol applied uniformly, but a standing reminder in someone else’s drawing room that hierarchy was still operational.
No one ate until she arrived. No one left until she signaled the night was finished. The biography.com profile is specific about what this looked like in practice. She insisted on being called ma’am in social settings where others assumed more latitude and her behavior as multiple attendees documented separately could switch without warning from charm to hot.
The evening existed to provide her with the thing she had been given at birth and had come to require as a daily necessity. the arrangement of the room around her centrality, the faces turned toward her, the conversation structured by her presence. Sarah has attended Trooping the Color.
She was present at Queen Elizabeth II’s funeral in September 2022. She appears at Red Fern Gallery events and at major family occasions. Town and Country in a 2023 profile described her as creative, loyal, and famously low-key. A description that is held across every documented appearance. She attends, she participates, she supports, and she leaves without requiring the gathering to have been organized around her arrival.
The fourth pattern, the most instinctive of all because it was simply the atmosphere of her childhood, is absent from every account of her adult life that reached the public record. Sarah Francis Elizabeth Armstrong Jones was born on May 1st, 1964 at Kensington Palace Apartment 1A, London. Her brother David had been born there in November 1961.
The apartment at Kensington Palace was the family’s principal home through their childhood. The household that occupied it was, by the consistent accounts of three independent biographers, Warick Brown and Tim Heield, lively, conflictridden, and built around two creative personalities who had chosen each other and then wore each other down across 15 years.
She grew up inside all four patterns at close range. The late mornings and the late evenings held for the entertainment of writers and decorators. The moods that set the schedule on any given day. The towns and wound which surfaced periodically across decades of conversation because some losses don’t fully archive themselves.
The expectation, atmospheric and constant, that the room would hold itself in suspension until she was ready. Sarah was 12 when her parents formally separated in 1976, 14 when her mother filed for divorce in May 1978, 14 when it was granted that July. Margaret’s divorce was the first within the immediate family of a reigning British monarch in the modern Windsor era. The press treated it as rupture.
The tabloids were explicit in their hostility. For Sarah, it was the legal formalization of something she had been living inside for years. Anthony Armstrong Jones had left notes for Margaret during the deterioration of their marriage. One documented example is recorded in the biographies as deliberately cruel in its wording.
She had seen what a household organized around performance and unhealed grievance produced as a final outcome. She left Bedale school with a single A level in art, enrolled at Campberwell School of Art, transferred to the Royal Academy Schools. The prizes arrived without fanfare, Windsor and Newton in 1988, Creswick Landscape in 1990.
gallery representation at Red Fern from 1995. The direction was set early and didn’t change. The education she chose was technical, solitary, and built around practice rather than presentation. She had attended the tutorial on the cost of the other approach for 14 years. She didn’t need to theorize about it.
In Glen Connor<unk>’s account of the days following Margaret’s death, what she describes centers on grief. The episode in her memoir’s closing chapters involves Sarah in the immediate shock of her mother’s loss. The Queen Mother offering to let her come and choose keepsakes from her mother’s belongings and Sarah declining, saying nothing could bring her mother back.
Glen Connor frames the moment as evidence of Sarah’s grief, not defiance. Whether the call carried additional dimensions of family expectation, Glen Connor found it significant enough to preserve in a book she began writing 17 years after the funeral. What sits outside that uncertainty is documented without ambiguity.
Princess Margaret died on February 9th, 2002 at King Edward III’s Hospital, London following a stroke. Her funeral was February 15th at Windsor. Her ashes were interred at the King George V 6th Memorial Chapel. The Queen Mother died at Royal Lodge on March 30th, 2002, 6 weeks later.
And in the compressed weeks between those two deaths, Anne Glen Connor, who had been present throughout Margaret’s final year, who had helped arrange the terms of her cremation, who had spent 30 years watching the household Sarah grew up in, formed an impression of Sarah Shadow that she considered worth recording. The observation held in Glen Connor<unk>’s memory for 17 years before she wrote it down.
That persistence is its own form of evidence. Sarah had a painting in progress. She went back to it. She has been making the morning trip to her studio for 30 years, according to the one statement she has made about the practice. Sustained is always harder than dramatic. Drama announces itself. Quiet refusal accumulates without fanfare.
And one morning at a time is how it gets done. The word is refused, not escaped. Escape implies something in pursuit. The documented record shows a series of choices, ordinary in isolation, extraordinary in aggregate, made across 30 years without announcement or explanation. She married in a 200 seat Christopher Ren church rather than Westminster Abbey.
Her brother had married at Westminster Abbey the previous year. She chose a professional name that has held for three decades. She kept the tiara and the diamonds, the objects, the visible inheritance, and put none of the four behavioral patterns into production. She gave the one countrylife interview she was prepared to give, named a painting she loves at the National Gallery, and declined to turn either moment into anything larger than it was.
She didn’t give the National Press a profile. She didn’t build a public persona. She didn’t require the room to wait. There was no confrontation. There was no announcement. There was no single moment when the family understood that Sarah wasn’t going to become Margaret. There were 30 years of evidence accumulating quietly.
The temper that ran the day absent from every documented account. The grievance that never healed, absent from 30 years of public record. The performance that turned every room into a stage replaced by a career conducted under a plain name at a single gallery. The certainty that a room owed her its attention, visible nowhere.
A complete script handed over at birth and none of it used. The patterns her mother had lived inside were learnable, which meant they were also refusable. The behavioral inheritance of a difficult household is a script, not a fate. She was patient enough to refuse it slowly in the smallest decisions available to a private woman, and the rest of them were tired enough in the end to stop asking.
That is the proof, and it’s 30 years wide. Subscribe for more stories like
