Princess Margaret, sister of Queen Elizabeth II and once the most photographed woman in Britain, reached a point in her marriage where she could no longer bear to open her own chest of drawers. She had her maid do it instead. Somewhere among the gloves and folded handkerchiefs, her husband had hidden another note for her to find when she was alone. One told her she looked like a Jewish manicurist.
Another was a list he had headed “20 reasons why he hated her. ” The world had watched this woman marry for love before an audience of 300 million. No one was allowed to watch what happened once the doors closed. Before she was ever betrayed by a husband, Margaret had already learned that loving the wrong man could cost her everything.
Born on August 21, 1930, at Glamis Castle in Scotland, she was the second daughter of a second son who was never meant to be king. For the first years of her life, she was simply the younger, quicker, more willful of two small girls in a comfortable and largely private household. Then, in December 1936, her uncle gave up the throne for a divorced American woman, and everything changed in a single afternoon. Her shy, stammering father became King George VI.
Her sister Elizabeth became heir to the crown. And Margaret, at six years old, became a princess of the blood, watched, photographed, and discussed for the rest of her life. She grew into the role the public adored. Where Elizabeth was steady and dutiful, Margaret was sharp, musical, and theatrical, with vivid blue eyes and a gift for filling a room.
By the early 1950s, she was one of the most photographed young women in the world, the glamorous face of a country climbing out of rationing and ruin. She had no constitutional job and no real power. What she had was visibility. What she did not have was the freedom to choose.
The first time she tried to choose, the cost was made brutally plain. The man was Group Captain Peter Townsend, a decorated wartime pilot who served as an equerry inside her father’s household. He was older, divorced, and not remotely the match the establishment wanted for a king’s daughter. The Royal Marriages Act of 1772 meant she could not marry without the monarch’s consent before the age of 25.
The Church of England, of which her sister was now supreme governor, would not bless a marriage to a divorced man while his first wife still lived. The government made its disapproval clear. On October 31, 1955, Margaret stepped in front of the country and gave him up. Mindful of the church’s teaching that Christian marriage was indissoluble, and conscious of her duty to the Commonwealth, she chose to remain a princess and lose the man.
She was twenty-five, in love with a man who loved her back, and she was made to choose between him and the only identity she had ever been given. She chose the identity, knowing the choice could not be undone. Five years later, she would marry a man the palace never saw coming. Antony Armstrong-Jones was not an aristocrat, not a courtier, and not a soldier.
He was a young and fashionable photographer with a studio, a motorcycle, and a circle of friends drawn from theater and design. He was charming, quick, physically magnetic, and entirely unimpressed by rank. To a princess who had spent her whole life surrounded by men who bowed first and spoke second, he was something close to oxygen. He understood the value of secrecy.
He photographed her professionally, which gave them a reason to be in the same rooms. They met in private, away from the long lenses that followed her everywhere else. For a woman who had lost her first love partly to publicity, the privacy itself must have felt like proof that this time might be different. On May 6, 1960, Margaret married Armstrong-Jones at Westminster Abbey in the first royal wedding ever broadcast on television.
Some 300 million people around the world watched, with about 20 million of them in Britain alone. The princess who had been denied her heart was getting it back. In October 1961, the Queen created her sister’s husband Earl of Snowdon. A month later, their first child arrived, a son, David.
In May 1964 came a daughter, Lady Sarah. On paper, it was a complete and enviable picture: a beautiful princess, a brilliant and handsome husband, two healthy children, a grand apartment at Kensington Palace, and a place at the center of a London becoming the most exciting city on Earth. But the strain was there from early on, hidden inside the glamour like a hairline crack in a porcelain cup. Two people of enormous ego and considerable temper had been placed inside a marriage the whole world was watching.
He resented being seen as an attachment to her rank. She resented any suggestion that she was less than the center of the room. The first thing to vanish was not love, but the simple sound of her husband in the same room. Snowdon kept a studio in the lower floor of their apartment, and as the marriage soured, the studio became less a workplace than a refuge from his wife.
The door would close. By the middle of the 1960s, in public he remained the charming, attentive figure the cameras adored. In private, the warmth drained away and was replaced by something colder and more deliberate. What Snowdon practiced was not the obvious kind of cruelty.
It was the cruelty of withdrawal, of contempt expressed through silence and timing and small engineered humiliations. He knew exactly how to wound a woman who had spent her life being adored. His lady-in-waiting and lifelong friend, Anne Glenconner, would later describe a home in which the princess grew quieter and more careful, learning to brace herself against her own husband. Margaret began to drink more, to stay up later, to fill the empty evenings with company and cigarettes.
And then the notes came. According to Glenconner’s memoir, Snowdon took to writing vicious little notes and hiding them where his wife would come upon them when she was by herself. He tucked them into the pages of books she was reading. He slipped them among her handkerchiefs.
He left them in the drawer where she kept her gloves. They were not the products of a single bad night. They were a habit sustained over years. One note told her she looked like a Jewish manicurist.
Another was a list headed in his hand with the words “20 reasons why he hated her,” set down and numbered as coldly as a household inventory. According to Glenconner, the princess eventually stopped opening her own chest of drawers. She could no longer bear the small daily risk of what might be folded inside. So she had her maid open them for her instead.
If the notes were the private cruelty, the affairs were the cruelty he was happy for everyone to see. Snowdon conducted his private life with a boldness that left little room for his wife’s dignity. Margaret, lonely and wounded and still only in her thirties, found her own attachments as the marriage failed. But Margaret’s affairs read as the reaching of a starved person toward warmth.
Snowdon’s read as appetite combined with provocation. Every affair was a message that she was not enough, delivered not in a hidden note but in the open. The woman who had given up Peter Townsend to protect the dignity of the crown now found her own dignity stripped away week by week. Two thousand miles from Kensington Palace, on a small island in the Caribbean, Margaret finally found a house that belonged to no one but her.
The island was Mustique, owned by her friend Colin Tennant, who had offered her a plot of land as a wedding present. The house she built was called Les Jolies Eaux, completed in 1972. For the first time in her life, Margaret owned something outright, a place that came to her not through the institution but as a gift she could shape to her own taste. On Mustique, she was simply the owner of a house by the sea.
There, the notes could not find her. There, the drawers were just drawers. It was on Mustique that a young man arrived who was seventeen years her junior. His name was Roddy Llewellyn, a gentle and unworldly figure with a passion for gardens.
They met in 1973, when she was forty-three and he was twenty-five. In his company, she was happier and softer than she had been in a long time. In 1976, a photograph was published showing Margaret and Llewellyn together on Mustique, relaxed in the sun, unmistakably a couple. By the standards of the day, applied to the sister of the queen, it was a sensation.
Within weeks, the formal separation of the Earl and Countess of Snowdon was announced. The thing the household had spent more than a decade hiding was suddenly the most talked-about story in the country. Margaret was cast in much of the press as a wealthy older woman indulging herself with a younger man. The cruelty she had endured for years was invisible.
She bore the blame for the ending of a marriage that had been killing her by inches. By the middle of the 1970s, the woman the cameras had adored was taking pills to get through the nights. She fell into a depression deep enough to frighten the people who loved her. At her lowest, she is reported to have taken an overdose of sleeping pills.
She could not speak openly about the cruelty of her marriage because the institution did not permit its women to be publicly unhappy. The marriage ended formally in 1978, and two years later the divorce was finalized. Snowdon married again within months and moved on into the long, successful career that would define his public reputation. For Margaret, there was no neat second chapter waiting.
The relationship with Llewellyn faded. She was approaching fifty, divorced, her great romances behind her. When the divorce was announced, it broke a silence the royal family had kept since the age of the Tudors. Senior members of the British monarchy did not divorce.
They endured. Margaret was the sister of the reigning queen, a woman near the very center of the institution, ending her marriage in public and surviving. The Queen, by every account, handled her sister’s situation with private sympathy and public calm. There was no banishment, no stripping of titles, no exile.
But the precedent had been set. The wave of royal marital collapse that defined the 1980s and 1990s unfolded in a world that Margaret had already changed. She had been the first to walk away and remain. Her health began its slow decline.
In 1985 she underwent an operation on her lung. In 1998, a stroke struck while she was at Mustique, in the very house that had once been her refuge. The following year, she stepped into a bath of water that was scaldingly hot and suffered severe burns to her legs and feet, leaving her in great pain and seriously impairing her ability to walk. That same year, Les Jolies Eaux was sold out of the family altogether.
She would not see the island again. Further strokes followed. The sharp, glittering princess of the 1960s withdrew almost entirely. Through all of it, the cruelty she had endured remained unspoken.
The country that watched her fade still believed the tidy old story. Princess Margaret died on February 9, 2002, in a hospital bed in London, aged seventy-one. A final stroke took her after years of failing health. Snowdon outlived her by many years, dying in January 2017 at the age of eighty-six, his reputation as one of the great photographers of his age intact.
It was only in the years that followed, through the authorized account of his own life and above all through the memoir of Anne Glenconner, that the hidden history of the marriage finally reached the public: the notes, the lists, the drawers she could no longer bear to open, the patient, written year upon year, contempt of a husband who had turned a home into a weapon. To understand the cruelty fully is to return to where this story began. A princess adored by millions, married before 300 million watching eyes, reached a point where she was afraid of her own chest of drawers. She had her maid open them so that she would not have to face, alone, whatever her husband had folded inside.
She had given up love to protect the crown. That was the bargain she made at twenty-five, in public, with the whole country watching, and she kept her side of it for the rest of her life. The crown’s side of the bargain was never honored. It denied her the man she wanted, and then it held her inside the marriage that broke her.
The deepest cruelty of the story was not the notes, terrible as they were. It was the silence around them. The long understanding that a royal woman could be seen and admired and photographed without end, but must never, under any circumstances, be allowed to be unhappy out loud. She was given everything except the one thing she asked for, which was simply to choose her own life.
The most photographed woman in Britain spent her last strength learning not to open a drawer.