Parenting & Family Quote by Princess Margaret

The line is a neat little act of aristocratic misdirection: it pretends to puncture royal mystique while quietly reaffirming it. Princess Margaret’s “not royal” is technically defensible in the fussy grammar of monarchy (titles, succession, who counts as what), but socially absurd. If your aunt is the Queen, your life is already stamped with the very thing she claims to disavow. That tension is the point.

The intent feels defensive and strategic. Margaret is drawing a boundary around her children’s identity, insisting they’re not part of the crown’s machinery, not “working royals,” not public property. It’s a bid for normalcy that’s also a rebuke: stop treating them like state assets because they are related to one. Yet she can’t resist the sly flex embedded in “just happen to have the Queen for their aunt,” a phrase that drapes extraordinary privilege in the language of coincidence. “Just happen” is the joke and the tell.

Context matters: Margaret lived as the monarchy’s glamorous spare, both indulged and constrained, watching her private life become public entertainment. After marrying Antony Armstrong-Jones (a commoner, a photographer, a modernizing choice), she occupied an unstable middle ground between tradition and celebrity. The quote works because it captures that mid-century royal dilemma in a single, brittle sentence: trying to secure privacy while trading, knowingly, on proximity to power. It’s modesty as armor, and as brand.