Two Scottish women came to work for the same two little girls, and the stories ran that both were tempted with American dollars. One put her name to a gentle book about those girls and, by the accounts that survive, was never spoken to by the family again. The other kept silent for a lifetime and died in her own rooms inside the palace. In February 1988, a Scottish governness died in an Aberdeen nursing home.

She had taught a future queen through most of her childhood, and by later accounts, not one royal wreath came. Five years on, at a small chapel beside St. James’s Palace, the Queen herself was photographed leaving the funeral of her dresser, the Scotswoman who had served her for sixty-seven years. On the Black Isle north of Inverness, a girl grew up in a three-room cottage with no bathroom and bathed in a zinc tub.

That was how an American magazine described her childhood in 1961, long after the girl had become one of the most guarded women in Buckingham Palace. Her name was Margaret MacDonald, and she was born in 1904 on a farming peninsula in the Scottish Highlands. For most of her life, almost nobody outside the royal household knew her name at all. The accounts of her father do not agree.

The newspaper pieces written while she was alive called him a railway man, a working man who paid a few shillings a week in rent for that little cottage. The obituaries printed when she died called him a farmer. Both versions survive, and neither can be settled now. What is plain is the world she came from, a world of small wages and hard work, where a daughter of the house was expected to find a place in service and keep it.

She found one early. The magazine profile of 1961 says she began as an assistant chambermaid at the hotel at Muir of Ord for six shillings a week. From there, by the same telling, she went south to a great house in West Lothian, the home of the Marquis and Marchioness of Linlithgow, where she worked as a chambermaid. A great house was the kind of place where a girl learned how the rich expected their rooms, their linen, and their silences to be kept.

It was the Linlithgows, the magazine said, whose recommendation took the young Scotswoman to a nursery in London. There is a second version of how she arrived, just as vivid. A syndicated newspaper story of 1957 told it differently: she went, trembling with nerves, to Balmoral to apply for a place as an under-housemaid, and within a very few weeks was sent down to London to work in a nursery instead. The two versions cannot both be complete, but both agree on where she ended up.

In 1926, a baby girl was born to the Duke and Duchess of York. The Duke was the second son of King George V, and nobody expected him to reign. Their first child was born on the 21st of April, a daughter named Elizabeth, whom the family would call Lilibet. The Yorks moved into a tall London townhouse at 145 Piccadilly, and at the top of that house was the nursery.

When the baby was six weeks old, Margaret MacDonald came to work in it, about twenty-two years old, taken on as under-nurse, the junior of the nursery staff. Above her stood a woman who would shape that nursery for the next twenty years. Clara Knight had been born in 1879, the daughter of a tenant farmer from Whitwell in Hertfordshire. The Bowes-Lyon family had hired her when she was seventeen, and she had nursed the Duchess herself as a baby.

When the little Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon could not say the name Clara, she made something else of it, and for the rest of her life the old nanny was called Alah. In 1926, Alah moved into the top floor of 145 Piccadilly to take charge of the new princess, and the young Highland girl worked under her. For Elizabeth of York, the people who stood closest to her in her first years were the people she would remember longest. This young woman from the Black Isle was one of them.

The household had a rule, one never written into her terms of service, that would decide in time the whole shape of her life. It would decide the shape of another woman’s life too, a woman who had not yet set foot in this nursery and had no wish to. Within four years, a second baby was born to the Yorks. When Princess Margaret arrived in August 1930, the old nanny took the new baby, and the young Scotswoman took Lilibet.

From that point, the elder princess was hers. A four-year-old girl and a nursemaid of about twenty-six became each other’s daily world. They shared a room; every account agrees on that, though none agrees on how long it lasted. A newspaper obituary of 1993 said they slept in the same bedroom until Elizabeth was eleven.

A later royal biography says thirteen. The governess, who would soon join the household, wrote that at wartime Windsor, when Lilibet was already in her teens, the princess still had her own bedroom and a bathroom, sharing the bedroom with the nursemaid. The child gave her the name she would carry for the rest of her life. It was Bobo, and there are at least three stories of where it came from.

The obituaries of 1993 said it was the baby’s first word. Other writers said it came from a nursery game of hide-and-seek, with cries of “boo” until the sound settled into a name. Prince Philip’s valet, writing in 1954, told it as the nursemaid jumping out and calling “Bobo” herself. The baby’s own progress book records her first words as “Mama” and “Boo.

” No one has ever proved that “boo” meant Bobo. Inside the household, the name was strictly private. One later royal writer put it plainly: the Queen and the royal family might call her Bobo, but she was Miss MacDonald to everyone else. A newspaper profile from the 1950s warned that woe betide anyone who called her anything else.

Her younger sister, born Robina but always called Ruby, came into the same household. One account places Ruby in the nursery from the very start; a magazine profile of 1961 says she arrived about three years after Elizabeth’s birth, at fourteen, on Bobo’s suggestion. A biographer of Princess Margaret gives her age on joining as sixteen. Whatever the date, Ruby would in time become dresser to the younger princess.

The two MacDonald sisters came to serve the two York sisters, Ruby with Margaret and Bobo with Lilibet. In 1932, the people of Wales gave Princess Elizabeth a little thatched cottage of her own, built to a child’s size in the grounds of the family’s country house at Windsor. A magazine later reported that it was there, in that toy house, that Bobo taught the princess to cook. Bobo’s kindnesses were small and practical.

One of them survives because someone else wrote it down: the two princesses had a favourite sweet, a certain fudge that Bobo used to make for them in the kitchen. The woman who preserved that detail and published it would pay for it with the rest of her life. What Bobo herself thought in those years is almost entirely unknown. Prince Philip’s valet, who knew her well, found her small, very smart, and rather peremptory.

He also recorded that she referred to Princess Elizabeth as “my little lady. ” It is a phrase of service and of possession at once. Not far from where the two princesses grew up, a young teacher from Dunfermline was tutoring the children of a noble family. She was about twenty-three, and she was about to arrive in the York nursery with no intention of staying.

Marion Crawford’s own book opens with a confession she clearly meant. She had always wanted to teach, and she had certainly never intended to become a governess. She was born on the 5th of June 1909 at Woodside Cottage near Kilmarnock, in the same house where her mother and her grandfather had been born; the records give the place as Gatehead. Her father died when she was one, her mother remarried when she was six, and the family moved east to Dunfermline.

One later newspaper described her father as a mechanical engineer’s clerk. Her training took her into the poorer parts of Edinburgh. What she saw there stayed with her. In her own words, she saw a great deal of poverty and had to do with children who were not very bright because they were undernourished.

“I was at that time very young,” she wrote, “and I became fired with a crusading spirit. I wanted desperately to help. ”

By several accounts, she took a summer job tutoring the children of Lord Elgin near Dunfermline. In her own book, she named her pupils there as Lady Martha, Lady Jean, and the Honourable Jamie.

Lady Rose Leveson-Gower, the Duchess of York’s sister, came about this time to Rosyth with her husband, the Admiral. Lady Rose heard about the young teacher and arranged for her to meet the Duke and Duchess. Before that meeting came a smaller moment, the one she remembered first. She was crossing the lawn at Lady Rose’s house when an eerie feeling came over her that someone was watching.

She looked up. “Then it was I saw there was a face at the window,” she wrote, “and for the first time I met that long, cool stare I was later to come to know so well. ” The face belonged to the six-year-old Princess Elizabeth. The Duchess made the offer lightly.

“Why not come for a month,” she said, “and see how you like us and how we like you. ” There was no contract and no promise. It was a trial, a month’s work at the family’s country house at Windsor, to begin just before Easter. Most accounts date her arrival in the household to the spring of 1933.

A month is a short time. She packed, took the train south toward Windsor, and the child who had stared at her from a window was waiting for her in bed. From the train, she saw Windsor Castle in the gathering shadows of a spring twilight. “It looms up suddenly,” she wrote, “topping the whole countryside, a fantastic mass of turrets and battlements and towers.

” Her destination lay close by: Royal Lodge in Windsor Great Park, a country house King George V had granted the Yorks in 1931. It was evening when she arrived, and she was taken up to meet her pupil. The scene she recorded is one of the best-known passages about the young Elizabeth ever written. A small figure with a mop of curls sat up in bed, wearing a nightie with a design of small pink roses.

She had tied the cords of her dressing gown to the knobs of the old-fashioned bed and was busy driving her team. The nanny made the introduction. “This is Miss Crawford,” said Alah in her stern way. The little girl said, “How do you do?

” Then she gave the newcomer the same long, comprehensive look and went on: “Why have you no hair? ” The governess wore her hair short in the fashion of the time. “I have enough to go on with,” she answered. “It’s an Eton crop.

” Then she asked the obvious question: “Do you usually drive in bed? ” “I mostly go once or twice around the park before I go to sleep, you know,” the princess replied. Old King George V had one request. “For goodness’ sake,” he told the new governess, “teach Margaret and Lilibet to write a decent hand.

That’s all I ask you. ” Crawfie, as she came to be known, had other ideas. She believed children should know something of the world outside their walls. The surviving accounts record trips on the London Underground, walks in the park, and cups of tea at the YWCA.

In a story told often since, the princesses left their teacups on the table when they had finished, having never in their lives had to clear up after themselves. The month became a term, and the term became years. She simply stayed, because the family wanted her to and because she wanted to. For the next sixteen years or so, she was among the people closest to the two princesses outside their own family.

At the end of 1936, an uncle’s choice turned this quiet nursery into the most watched rooms in Britain. On the 10th of December, Edward VIII signed away the throne he had held for 327 days. The act of Parliament that made the abdication law took effect the next day. On the 12th, the Duke of York was proclaimed King George VI.

The Duchess became Queen Elizabeth, and their elder daughter, the ten-year-old Lilibet, became heir presumptive to the throne. For the two Scottish women who cared for her, the work itself barely changed. Bobo still woke beside the princess, dressed her, and kept her clothes. Crawfie still taught her lessons and walked her in the park.

What changed was the value of everything they saw. A nursemaid and a governess in the house of the heir presumptive held, without ever asking for it, one of the most sought-after stories in the world. If the later record is any guide, Bobo answered the change by drawing the circle tighter, and Crawfie by watching more closely and remembering. The new reign needed a coronation, and it came on the 12th of May 1937.

That morning, the eleven-year-old heir presumptive was woken early, and she wrote about it afterward in an exercise book she gave to her parents, titled “To Mummy and Papa, in memory of their coronation, from Lilibet by herself. ” Its opening has become one of the best-known pieces of royal childhood writing. “At 5 o’clock in the morning I was woken up by the band of the Royal Marines striking up just outside my window,” she wrote. “I leapt out of bed, and so did Bobo.

We put on dressing gowns and shoes, and Bobo made me put on an eiderdown as it was cold, and we crouched in the window, looking on to a cold, misty morning. ”

On the most public morning of her father’s reign, the first person the future Queen mentioned was the woman in the room with her. After the coronation ceremony came photographs, and then more photographs. The new Queen, worn out by it, said something the governess never forgot: “We aren’t supposed to be human.

”

When war came in 1939, the princesses were sent north to Balmoral first, and Crawfie went with them. Then they were moved south to Windsor Castle, and for most of the next five years the old fortress was their home. The arrangement of Elizabeth’s rooms at Windsor is preserved in the governess’s book: the princess had her own bedroom and a bathroom, sharing the bedroom with Bobo. A Scottish newspaper’s obituary of Bobo in 1993 recorded that the two had shared an air raid shelter under Windsor Castle.

Life behind those walls had a strange sealed quality. “A glass curtain seems to come down between you and the outer world,” Crawfie wrote, “and escape is not entirely possible. ” She admired the nursemaid’s steadiness, for Bobo, she wrote, was a sensible Scottish lass who one felt would come calm and unperturbed through innumerable bombardments. The governess also watched the two sisters grow apart in character.

Margaret, she recorded, was often naughty, and would often defy her with a sidelong look. The younger girl’s behaviour made Lilibet uneasy and filled with foreboding. In earlier years there had been bath times of hilarious shrieks, splashing, and pillow fights, and a little sister forever calling after the elder, “Wait for me, Lilibet. Wait for me.

”

The war brought its own small duties. The princesses staged Christmas pantomimes at Windsor to raise money for the Queen’s Wool Fund. In 1940, Elizabeth made her first broadcast on the BBC’s Children’s Hour. Before her first public speech at sixteen, Bobo is said to have given her glucose sweets so that her mouth would not dry; one biographer remembered it as barley sugar for butterflies in the tummy.

On the 28th of May 1943, in the King’s Birthday Honours, the London Gazette listed a new member of the Royal Victorian Order, fourth class. The name was Marion Kirk Crawford. It was a personal mark of thanks from the King himself. Bobo had no place in the order yet.

As the princess grew up, the duties of the nursery gave way to the duties of a lady’s maid. Clothes, hair, and the private hours of the day became Bobo’s domain. The governess’s work would end when the schooling ended. The nursemaid’s work would simply change shape and go on.

On the 2nd of January 1946, Clara Knight, the nanny the children called Alah, died at Sandringham. The family buried her as one of their own. The funeral was held at St Paul’s Walden in Hertfordshire, and the Queen attended it with both princesses. The governess described what the old nanny had been to the girls: a shoulder to weep on, a bosom to fall asleep on.

Alah was never photographed out of her uniform and never spoke to the press. The bargain the royal household offered its people was never written down. Loyalty would be repaid with loyalty. In return, a servant was expected to keep everything she saw to herself for life.

In 1947, too ill to walk aboard, Bobo had herself carried onto the ship for South Africa on a stretcher. The family was sailing for a long tour, and the nursemaid would not let Lilibet go without her. That year was a hinge for both Scottish women. The princess was twenty-one, and her own marriage was coming.

The governess had found the man she meant to marry, George Buthlay, a Scottish bank official. According to an account in the Daily Express, she had put off marrying for years because she did not want to abandon the King and Queen. In 1947 she finally married him. A Scottish newspaper listed a coffee set from Princess Elizabeth and three bedside lamps from Princess Margaret at her wedding, and noted nothing from the King and Queen; another article from the same paper mentioned a full dinner service from the Queen.

On the 20th of November 1947, Princess Elizabeth married Philip at Westminster Abbey. He was about to discover that he had married into a household with a fixed and immovable centre. Bobo went on the honeymoon. A newspaper story ten years later told how she had laid sprigs of rosemary on the tea table of the honeymoon train with a note: “God bless you both.

Rosemary for remembrance. ”

Then the friction began. Patricia Mountbatten later described the honeymoon scene to the royal biographer Gyles Brandreth: Bobo would prepare Lilibet’s bath, then potter in and out of the bathroom while she was having it, effectively keeping Philip at bay. Philip’s friend and private secretary Mike Parker summed it up in a single sentence: Princess Elizabeth was Bobo’s baby, and that was that.

A biographer of Philip wrote in 1981 that the Duke continued to feel that Bobo MacDonald exercised too much influence. The royal writer Ingrid Seward put it the other way round: Bobo MacDonald, the Queen’s maid and dresser, has never really approved of Prince Philip. The two marriages of 1947 pointed the two women in opposite directions. The princess’s marriage tied Bobo more tightly to her than ever.

The governess’s marriage pointed her out of the household and into a life of her own. In the honours list gazetted on the last day of 1948, a name appeared: Marion Kirk Buthlay, the governess under her married name, made a Commander of the Royal Victorian Order, the third grade of the order, two steps above where she had begun in 1943. It was a higher grade than Bobo MacDonald would ever hold. On her retirement, the governess was given a grace-and-favour home within the walls of Kensington Palace called Nottingham Cottage.

By one biographer’s account, Queen Mary furnished it for her with antiques and flower prints. Bobo in that same winter held no place in the order at all. And then came what was coming from America. Bruce and Beatrice Gould were the editors of the Ladies’ Home Journal, an American magazine for women.

They wanted an inside account of the two little princesses. According to papers that surfaced many years later, they approached the Palace and the Foreign Office to get one. The Palace refused, and the government was keen. The plan was for the story to be told anonymously, written by a royal writer named Dermot Morrah, with the governess helping from her memories, paid from America, her name not appearing.

Before any contract was signed, the Queen herself sat down and wrote to her daughter’s governess. The letter is dated the 4th of April 1949. “I do feel most definitely,” the Queen wrote, “that you should not write and sign articles about the children, as people in positions of confidence with us must be utterly oyster. ” She went on: “If you the moment you finished teaching Margaret started writing about her and Lilibet, well, we should never feel confidence in anyone again.

”

Then came the part that would matter most decades later. The Queen knew about the anonymous plan, and she did not forbid it. “Mr Morrah,” she wrote, “seemed to think that you could help him with his articles and get paid from America. This would be quite all right as long as your name did not come into it.

” And then she drew the line as firmly as she could: “Nevertheless, I do feel most strongly that you must resist the allure of American money and persistent editors and say no, no, no to offers of dollars for articles about something as private and as precious as our family. ”

The governess did not say no. On the 25th of May 1949, seven weeks after the Queen’s letter, a contract was dated between Marion Crawford and the Goulds. A Scottish newspaper that reported on her papers in 2000 quoted one of its clauses: “You will further consider publication of the articles without Her Majesty’s consent.

” Those opening words alone show that everyone involved knew consent was the question. In October 1949, Lady Astor, the American-born former Member of Parliament, sent the Goulds’ manuscript to the Queen. Nancy Astor was a natural go-between. The Queen read it.

By the account of the biographer Sarah Bradford, she found it shockingly frank. She went through it, annotated it, and asked for cuts. According to the same biographer, the Goulds did not pass her response on to the governess. Whatever the Queen had marked, Marion Crawford may never have seen it.

In a letter, the Queen wrote that the governess “has gone off her head. ”

There is another layer to the manuscript. The royal biographer Hugo Vickers wrote that the Goulds rewrote the governess’s prose word by word, line by line. “Incidents were inserted which never happened,” he wrote, “and words put into the mouths of those who never said them.

”

The Little Princesses appeared first in the Ladies’ Home Journal in early 1950 and in Britain in Woman’s Own, under the governess’s own name. Then came the book. In the United States it was published by Harcourt Brace at $3. 50, 314 pages; in Britain the publisher was Cassell.

The Book of the Month Club chose it as its midsummer selection. Time magazine reviewed it on the 17th of July under the headline “Confessions of Crawfie. ”

What did the confessions contain? Almost nothing that a later age would recognize as scandal.

There were the toy horses, the Underground, the Guides. There was old King George V asking her to teach the girls to write a decent hand. There was the palace that felt like camping in a museum. There was the younger princess Margaret, who in the review’s delighted phrase was known to bite on occasion, leaving a hand bearing the royal teeth marks.

There was the elder Lilibet who was quick with her left hook. The governess had recorded the Queen’s weary remark after the coronation photographs: “We aren’t supposed to be human. ” Now it was in print for anyone to read. The book also put Bobo MacDonald into print.

Remember the fudge. In its pages, the governess recorded that the princesses’ favourite sweet was a certain fudge that Bobo used to make for them in the kitchen, and she described the two MacDonald sisters in a sentence that has been quoted ever since: “These two girls are there still, Margaret MacDonald and Ruby MacDonald, two sisters, who have become the personal maids and friends of two sisters. ”

There is no record of what Bobo thought about it. She never commented on the book publicly, or so far as anyone knows privately.

That silence, in a way, was her answer. The family closed the door for good. Adrienne Tinniswood, the historian of the royal household, put the reaction in a single plain sentence: “Queen Elizabeth and her daughters were furious. They severed all contact with their old governess, who became a non-person within the royal circle.

” From 1950 onward, the woman who had taught the heir to the throne for sixteen years ceased, in the eyes of the family, to exist. The governess left Nottingham Cottage. The house given at the sovereign’s pleasure was in effect taken back by the sovereign’s displeasure. Tinniswood records that she was brought to the edge of a nervous breakdown.

By the autumn of 1950 she had retreated to Scotland. The household found a phrase for what she had done, and it outlived her. For years afterward, according to her entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, servants who spoke publicly for money were said to be doing “a Crawfie. ”

No recorded word from Elizabeth about the governess after 1950 has ever been found.

Whether her silence came from her own sense of betrayal, from deference to her mother’s absolute line, or from the household rule itself, nobody knows. The silence is documented. The reason is not. On the 31st of January 1952, at London Airport, a sick King said goodbye to his daughter and turned to her maid.

King George VI was too ill to make the long Commonwealth tour planned for him, so Princess Elizabeth and the Duke of Edinburgh were going in his place. John Dean, Prince Philip’s valet, wrote about it two years later. He heard the King say to Bobo MacDonald, “Look after the princess for me, Bobo. ”

In Kenya, the princess and the Duke spent a night at the famous Treetops Lodge, then returned to their Kenyan home, Sagana Lodge.

It was there, on the 6th of February 1952, that word arrived from England. The King had died at Sandringham. Philip told his wife she was now Queen. Then the practical questions began, and many of them fell to Bobo.

The royal biographer William Shawcross describes her packing at Sagana for the journey home. According to the recollection of Lady Pamela Hicks, Bobo had to cable her deputy aboard the Gothic to find black clothes; a black coat, bag, and shoes were found, and a black hat was brought onto the plane in London so that the new Queen could step out properly dressed for mourning. In the other version, told by an American magazine in 1961, mourning clothes were always carried when the royal family travelled abroad; the problem was that her grandmother, Queen Mary, remarked that the new Queen’s skirts were far too short for mourning, and Bobo lowered a whole hem in eight minutes. On the 1st of June 1953, the eve of the coronation, the London Gazette printed the name Margaret MacDonald in the coronation honours list, appointed a Member of the Royal Victorian Order, fifth class.

The same list contained Norman Hartnell, the couturier who designed the coronation gown, made a Member of the fourth class, one step above her. In the formal order of things, the dressmaker ranked above the dresser. In the private order of things, as the household well knew, it was often the other way round. Bobo had now joined the governess in that order, four and a half years after the governess’s last promotion within it, and three years after the governess’s fall.

One woman had been thanked twice and then cast out. The other had waited twenty-seven years for her first grade in the order and would never be cast out at all. The coronation came the next day, the 2nd of June 1953, in Westminster Abbey, the first in British history to be televised. A royal magazine reported in 2023 that Bobo, her sister Ruby, and Norman Hartnell all watched the ceremony from the Queen’s Box in the Abbey.

A newspaper profile of 1957 told an even more striking story, that the police cleared a special route for Bobo across London. In the summer of 1955, a magazine column under the governess’s name described the pageantry of Trooping the Colour, a parade that never took place. The column was called “Crawfie’s Column” and it ran in Woman’s Own. On the 28th of May 1955, a national rail strike was called, and Trooping the Colour was cancelled because of it.

But the column had already been written and set in type. Royal Ascot, which the column also covered, was cancelled or postponed that year as well. The governess had been made to describe royal occasions she had not attended and could not have seen. The result was public ridicule, and it finished her.

The disgrace, in the words of her biographer, ended her career as a writer. In July 1957, a syndicated newspaper story ran under the headline “Refused Fortune for Royal Secrets. ” The woman who had refused it was the Queen’s dresser, and the fortune, according to the story, was $150,000 from an American magazine. An American magazine profile four years later repeated the figure.

The highest figure ever reported for the Little Princesses was $85,000. If the stories were right, Bobo had been offered nearly twice as much, and she had turned it down. Bobo’s authority reached the jewels. The fashion writer Susie Menkes, investigating which of the Queen’s jewels belonged to the state and which to the Queen personally, was told by a member of the Lord Chamberlain’s staff that only heaven and Bobo MacDonald knew which was which.

When a royal book of 1969 described the hierarchy of Buckingham Palace, it put it plainly: “In the hierarchy of Buckingham Palace, Bobo MacDonald is a very important person. What Bobo wants, Bobo usually gets. ”

Her house in Aberdeen stood, by the accounts, about two hundred yards from the road the royal family took to Balmoral. Year after year, the story goes, the royal cars passed within sight of the house where the governess lived on their way to the family’s Highland holidays.

Nobody stopped. No record has ever been found of any member of the family calling at her door. She withdrew from public life completely. After the humiliation of 1955 she wrote nothing more for the magazines and refused every request from journalists.

George Buthlay, the husband she had waited so long to marry, died in 1977. She was then sixty-seven or sixty-eight. According to a Scottish newspaper that saw her private papers in 2000, she attempted to take her own life. The same newspaper reported the note she left: “The world has passed me by, and I can’t bear those I love to pass me by on the road.

”

She survived. She lived another decade. She died on the 11th of February 1988 at Hawkhill House, a nursing home in Aberdeen. She was seventy-eight.

A newspaper later reported that neither the Queen nor the Queen Mother nor Princess Margaret sent a wreath to her funeral. One later account went further and said that no member of the royal family attended it. In London that same winter, Bobo MacDonald was in her eighties and still in the Queen’s service. She had been made a Lieutenant of the Royal Victorian Order two years before, a promotion in the honours dated the last day of 1985.

The governess died without a wreath. The dresser was still being thanked. Bobo stayed at her post until her body would no longer let her. She had been forced by ill health to retire about three years before her death, which puts the end of her working life at around 1990.

Retirement for Bobo meant staying exactly where she was, in her rooms at Buckingham Palace. Douglas Keay, quoted in her obituary, described her position: in her later years Bobo held a unique position in Buckingham Palace, having her own suite, no duties, and enjoying a closer personal friendship with the Queen than practically anyone else, including some of the Queen’s closest relatives. She died on the night of Wednesday, the 22nd of September 1993, at Buckingham Palace, aged eighty-nine. An American newspaper recorded where she died with a detail that no invented story could improve: she died in her rooms filled with the Queen’s dresses, coats, and ceremonial outfits.

The funeral was held eight days later, on the 30th of September 1993, at the Queen’s Chapel, a small royal chapel beside St James’s Palace built in the seventeenth century for Henrietta Maria. The Queen attended. A press photograph from that day carries a caption of almost unbearable plainness: the Queen leaving the funeral service of Margaret “Bobo” MacDonald at the Queen’s Chapel, St James’s Palace. In June 2000, Crawfie’s papers, kept by her solicitor, reached the newspapers.

The Daily Record in Scotland on the 24th of June and the Guardian in London the next day reported what the documents appeared to show. According to those reports, the Queen Mother had been secretly involved in a government plan to sell anecdotes about the princesses to an American magazine, a plan brokered by the Foreign Office. The Palace had refused the Goulds at first; the government had been keen. The governess’s name had come forward through official channels, and the Queen herself had written that anonymous help, paid from America, would be quite all right, so long as the governess’s name did not come into it.

The governness had company in what she did. The government had wanted the story told. The Queen’s own letter had blessed an anonymous version. And at the end of all of it, only one person was punished: the one whose name appeared on the cover.

The rule she had broken has since hardened into something more formal. The royal household now asks its staff to sign an undertaking of confidentiality. Its explanatory notes say that it binds them during their employment and during the remainder of their life, that it binds their executors after they are dead, that it applies even after the death of the royal person they served, and that any profits from a breach are to be assigned to that person. What the Queen once asked for in a single letter, that people in positions of confidence must be utterly oyster, now stood in black and white for life and beyond it.

Others tested the rule after her. A housekeeper at Highgrove published her diary in 1995, and royal lawyers argued she should be held to the confidentiality agreement she had signed. In October 2003, Paul Burrell, who had been butler to Diana, Princess of Wales, published A Royal Duty, and Princes William and Harry issued a statement: “We cannot believe that Paul, who was entrusted with so much, could abuse his position in such a cold and overt betrayal. It would mortify our mother if she were alive today.

”

And then there was the exception. On the 29th of October 2019, the Queen’s own dresser in later years, Angela Kelly, published a book about her service with HarperCollins called The Other Side of the Coin. Her publisher said she was the first serving member of the royal household to have been given this extraordinary permission; the Queen had personally granted it. Kelly described her bond with the Queen in words Bobo would never have used in public: “We are two typical women.

We discuss clothes, makeup, jewellery. ”

A dresser who wrote about the Queen with permission kept her house. A governess who wrote about the princesses without it had lost hers. Her friend Nigel Athel spoke about her with a simplicity that lands harder than any judgment: “She always hoped for a reconciliation, but it never came.

Crawfie was intensely loyal. ”

Two Scottish women came to work for the same two little girls. One said nothing for sixty-seven years, and when she died, the Queen came to the chapel beside St James’s Palace to say goodbye.

The other wrote down the fudge, the horses, and the face at the window, and spent her exile, by the accounts, within sight of the road to Balmoral as the family she loved drove by.