The 1963 wedding of Princess Alexandra of Kent and Angus Ogilvy drew an estimated 200 million television viewers, a global audience that saw only a flawless fairy tale. Behind that serene image, however, lay a decision that would shape a marriage and eventually expose the family to a scandal that reached the floor of the House of Commons. Before the wedding, Queen Elizabeth II offered Angus Ogilvy an earldom, the customary title for a commoner marrying into royalty. He refused it.
He also declined a grace-and-favor apartment, choosing instead to take out a mortgage on Thatched House Lodge in Richmond Park. He was determined to keep his own name, his own career in the City of London, and his financial independence. Alexandra was born on Christmas Day, 1936, the only daughter of Prince George, Duke of Kent, and Princess Marina. She was five years old when her father was killed in a Royal Air Force plane crash in Scotland in August 1942, becoming the first British royal in centuries to die on active service.
Her mother raised her and her two brothers with a strict code of composure, a lesson the young princess absorbed completely. She grew into one of the hardest-working members of the royal family, often carrying out more than 120 official engagements a year. Her choice of husband seemed to reflect her own values. Angus Ogilvy, the second son of the Earl of Airlie, had built a successful career as a director of more than 50 companies.
For over a decade, the marriage appeared stable. The couple had two children, James and Marina. But Ogilvy’s insistence on his own career had placed him on the board of the London and Rhodesia Mining and Land Company, known as Lonrho. In the early 1970s, a bitter boardroom battle to remove the company’s chairman, Tiny Rowland, turned into a national corporate scandal.
In May 1973, Prime Minister Edward Heath condemned the affair in Parliament, branding the conduct involved as the “unpleasant and unacceptable face of capitalism. ” The controversy deepened when Lonrho was linked to breaking sanctions against the white-minority regime in Rhodesia, a matter of national conscience. In 1976, after a lengthy inquiry, the Department of Trade inspectors delivered their report. They did not accuse Angus Ogilvy of dishonesty, but they found that his conduct as a director merited severe censure.
The report named the husband of the Queen’s cousin in the most public and damaging way possible. He resigned from his directorship of Lonrho and from about sixteen other company boards in a single summer. While some companies, including the Rank Organisation, refused to accept his resignation, the damage to his professional identity was done. In 1978, the Director of Public Prosecutions declined to bring any charges against him, but the legal clearance came too late to undo the public judgment.
Following the scandal, Ogilvy withdrew from the business world. He rebuilt his reputation through quiet, sustained charitable work, including as president of the Imperial Cancer Research Fund and as chairman of the advisory council of the Prince’s Trust. In 1988, he was made a Knight Commander of the Royal Victorian Order, a clear sign of the sovereign’s personal regard. The family’s most painful public rupture came from within.
In 1989, the couple’s daughter, Marina, announced her pregnancy and publicly claimed her parents had tried to pressure her into an abortion or a rushed marriage and had then cut her off financially. She appealed directly to the Queen in a letter, addressing her as “dear cousin Lilibet. ” Her parents responded by saying they loved her and had not cut her off. Marina married photographer Paul Mowatt in February 1990, wearing a black dress and red bolero that was widely read as defiance.
Neither the Queen nor the Prince of Wales attended the wedding. The couple later divorced, and the family eventually reconciled. In his final years, Angus Ogilvy fell ill with throat cancer. He made his last public appearances in June 2004 before entering the hospital for his final three months.
Princess Alexandra remained at his bedside throughout. He died on December 26, 2004, at the age of 76, a date that fell on the morning after her birthday. The widow returned to her public duties. In 2013, Buckingham Palace announced she was suffering from polymyalgia rheumatica, an inflammatory condition, and would cancel engagements indefinitely.
She made only rare appearances after that, using a wheelchair in her later years. Princess Alexandra spent her life keeping a still face over a private history of loss. She lost her father at five, her mother at 31, and witnessed her husband’s censure, his professional ruin, her daughter’s estrangement, and his slow death.
She carried all of it without ever letting the public see the weight, and she remained, to the end, the royal that no one ever thought to pity.