Princess Margaret

Six of her ten planets are cardinal and only one is fixed. Three sit in water and three in earth, with two apiece in fire and air. The Moon, Jupiter and Pluto fill eight degrees of Cancer. The record gives two facts and both are about a marriage: Margaret gave up marrying a divorced equerry in 1955 under pressure from the Church and the establishment, and she later became the first senior royal to divorce in four hundred years.

Venus sits in hard contact with Jupiter at under three fifths of a degree, and the standing reading is pleasure without a brake: overindulgence, extravagance, and valuing more of something when the problem was never quantity. That reading matches a press characterisation of her almost exactly, which is a reason to be careful with it rather than pleased about it. The record in front of this chart contains no extravagance at all. It contains two decisions about a marriage, the first of them taken largely by other people, and a divorce with no precedent for four hundred years.

The Moon sits conjunct Pluto at three quarters of a degree, which is feeling at full depth: an all-or-nothing emotional life, unusual perceptiveness about what people are hiding, and attachment that turns into control if it is not watched. Jupiter sits in the same group, all three of them inside eight degrees of Cancer, the sign that reads a room by its mood. For a record whose entire content is one marriage refused under pressure and another ended against four hundred years of practice, an all-or-nothing emotional life is the reading that meets the facts rather than the caricature. Her Moon's sign is certain at nineteen degrees of Cancer.

The Sun sits in mild friction with Venus at fourteen hundredths of a degree, the closest contact here and the hardest angle those two can make, and in mild friction with Jupiter at three quarters, belief in one's own scale meeting a limit: over-promising, and the particular discomfort of having been confident in public and wrong. Mercury sits a fifth of a turn from Jupiter at over half a degree, learning that comes easily and an ability to make complicated things sound simple. A T-square closes on Uranus using Venus and Jupiter. Saturn and Uranus were the two retrograde planets. She died in London on 9 February 2002, at seventy one. One contact alone came inside half a degree that day, the Moon standing opposite its own natal place at under three tenths. The Moon was balsamic and seven per cent lit.