On the sixth of May, 1960, three hundred million people watched a commoner with a camera marry the Queen’s sister. It was the first royal wedding ever broadcast on television, sold to the public as the dawn of a modern royal era. The bride beamed in a dress she had helped design. The commentary was breathless.
But behind the cathedral doors lay a truth the British establishment had quietly agreed not to discuss. The groom had, days earlier, fathered a child with another woman. He had a complicated romantic past involving both women and men. And his closest friend, originally chosen as best man, had been dropped from the ceremony because his own history threatened to expose too much.
Anthony Charles Robert Armstrong Jones was born in London in March 1930 to a successful Welsh barrister who would marry six times and a celebrated society beauty from a half-Jewish banking family. His parents divorced when he was five, and he spent his childhood ricocheting between their separate worlds, never central to either. At sixteen, he contracted polio and spent six months in hospital. His mother visited only once.
He emerged with a permanent limp and a lasting sense of having been abandoned when it mattered most. He went to Eton, then Cambridge, where he captained the victorious 1950 Boat Race crew, but failed his architecture exams and left without a degree. He had found his calling, and it was something his mother found humiliating. He wanted to be a photographer.
In early 1950s Britain, photography was still considered a trade. He apprenticed under Baron, a society photographer who was also court photographer to the royal family, and who moved easily through London’s overlapping worlds of high society and bohemian sexuality. By his mid-twenties, Armstrong Jones had his own studio on Pimlico Road and a rising reputation. His natural, candid portrait style made him sought after by actresses, debutantes, and magazine editors.
What most people did not see was the full complexity of his private life. According to the eventual authorized biography, there was a widespread assumption among the young women in his studio that Tony was gay. His own response was characteristically sly. He said he had not fallen in love with boys, but that a few men had been in love with him.
His closest male friendship was with Jeremy Fry, heir to the Fry chocolate fortune. In 1952, Fry had been convicted of what the law called a homosexual offense. Armstrong Jones remained loyal to him, and also became deeply entangled with Fry’s wife, Camilla. In the summer of 1959, Anthony and Camilla conceived a child.
That child, Polly Fry, was born on the twenty-eighth of May, 1960, three weeks after Anthony married Princess Margaret. She was raised as Jeremy Fry’s daughter and had no reason to doubt her parentage for most of her adult life. Princess Margaret had been born only months earlier than the man she would marry. As the younger daughter of the Duke and Duchess of York, her life should have unfolded quietly.
But in December 1936, her uncle Edward VIII abdicated to marry Wallis Simpson. Her father became George VI. Her sister became heir to the throne. Margaret, at age six, became a figure of international interest, permanently in the spotlight, permanently in second place.
Her father famously called Elizabeth his pride and Margaret his joy. When he died in February 1952, Margaret was twenty-one and shattered. She began spending time with Group Captain Peter Townsend, her father’s equerry, a decorated Battle of Britain pilot sixteen years her senior. He was divorced.
When they tried to marry, Margaret was told she could do so only by renouncing her royal status, her income, and her place in the line of succession. In October 1955, she issued a public statement choosing duty over personal happiness. Her friends knew it had broken something in her that would never entirely heal. She met Anthony Armstrong Jones in February 1958.
She was, by her own later admission, initially convinced he was gay. Over the following year, that changed completely. For almost two years, they courted in secret. She slipped out of Kensington Palace in a headscarf and dark glasses, meeting him at a small flat in Rotherhithe by the Thames, where at high tide swans floated past the window.
She cooked simple meals and washed up in rubber gloves. It was astonishingly ordinary, and she loved it for that. He proposed in 1959, and the wedding followed on the sixth of May. She did not know that less than two weeks earlier, Camilla Fry had given birth to Anthony’s daughter.
The first test of the cover came before the wedding. Anthony had chosen Jeremy Fry as best man. Palace security vetting flagged Fry’s 1952 conviction. A homosexual conviction in the best man of a royal wedding was politically impossible.
Jeremy withdrew, citing jaundice. The official story was illness. Another friend, Jeremy Thorpe, was also quietly removed. The final best man was a neurologist chosen essentially at last minute.
He was safe. He had no complicated history. He would not embarrass the monarchy. This was the first act of institutional concealment surrounding the Snowdon marriage.
It established a pattern that would continue for seventeen years. The early months of the marriage were genuinely happy. In October 1961, Anthony was granted the title Earl of Snowdon. A son, David, was born that November, and a daughter, Sarah, in May 1964.
The Snowdons became London’s most glamorous couple, entertaining actors, musicians, and aristocrats, photographed constantly, always smiling. Anthony also did serious work, advocating for disabled people, designing a motorized wheelchair, and directing documentary films that won two Emmy Awards. But inside Kensington Palace, something was going wrong. Anthony had not anticipated what royal life would require.
His time was no longer his own. He could not travel freely or take commissions without clearance. He began to resent it intensely. The cruelty of the marriage has been documented by multiple witnesses.
Princess Margaret’s closest friend, Lady Anne Glenconner, wrote about it explicitly in her 2019 memoir. One particularly infamous note left on Margaret’s desk was headed “24 reasons why I hate you. ” Margaret reportedly said she could not think of twenty-four reasons to hate anybody. The cruelty was cold, deliberate, performed.
Anthony seemed to take satisfaction in humiliating his wife in front of witnesses. In public, he was charming and witty. The gap between his public persona and private behavior was vast, and it isolated her. Margaret began to drink more and smoke sixty cigarettes a day.
The bright, witty princess developed a harder, more brittle edge. While this was happening at home, Anthony conducted an extraordinary parallel life. A close friend’s summary of his sexual behavior, quoted by the authorized biography, was blunt. “If it moves, he’ll have it.
” The affairs were extensive and overlapping, with actresses, models, assistants, society women, and continuing relationships with men. The most significant affair of the middle marriage period was with Lady Jacqueline Rufus Isaacs, eighteen years his junior, whom he met secretly using code words. There was also Anne Hills, a journalist with whom he maintained a relationship for roughly twenty years. The Dictionary of National Biography identifies Snowdon as bisexual, a label he never publicly denied.
Margaret knew. Palace staff knew. Courtiers knew. And the institution made a quiet collective decision that none of it would become publicly admitted.
Margaret was not faithful either, by the mid-1960s. Her affair with Anthony Barton, a Bordeaux wine maker, began in 1966, and according to de Courcy’s biography, Anthony had actually pushed Barton toward her, asking him to keep Margaret company while he traveled. One of his friends later said that when you are playing the field yourself, it eases your conscience if your spouse is also straying. The following year, Robin Douglas-Home, a former lover of Margaret’s, was found dead of an overdose.
Margaret carried the weight of it privately for the rest of her life. In September 1973, at a house party in Scotland, Margaret met Roddy Llewellyn. She was forty-three; he was twenty-five. He was kind to her.
He listened. Their relationship deepened, much of it conducted on Mustique, the private Caribbean island where Margaret had a villa. She was happy there, wearing caftans and going barefoot, hosting dinners on the beach. In February 1976, a tabloid photographer infiltrated the island and photographed Margaret and Roddy in swimwear.
The reaction was ferocious. MPs called for her to lose her income. One Labour MP called her a royal parasite. Anthony, who was in Australia with Lucy Lindsay-Hogg, with whom he had been conducting a long-running affair for years, went to the press himself before the palace could coordinate a statement.
He expressed regret at the breakdown, positioning himself as the dignified, wounded husband. The public narrative blamed Margaret. Most of the royal family took his side. The separation was announced in March 1976.
The divorce was finalized in July 1978, the first divorce of a senior royal since Henry VIII. In December 1978, Anthony married Lucy Lindsay-Hogg. It was not a faithful marriage. In 1998, he fathered another child with another woman, Melanie Cable Alexander, a Country Life editor.
The revelation ended his second marriage. Five children across two marriages and two outside relationships, fathered across nearly forty years. In 2004, the story of Polly Fry finally broke. The Sunday Telegraph reported that Snowdon had fathered an illegitimate daughter shortly before his marriage.
Polly Fry, who had grown up believing Jeremy Fry was her father, had pursued the question as an adult. A DNA test confirmed Snowdon as her biological father. Snowdon denied it, saying he had never taken a DNA test. Jeremy Fry rejected the claim.
Polly stood by her account. The child who was the living evidence of the deception had grown up until her forties without knowing who her father actually was. Margaret never remarried. Her health declined through the 1980s and 1990s.
She had surgery to remove part of her left lung in 1985. She suffered strokes in 1998 and 2001 that left her partially paralyzed and visually impaired. She died on the ninth of February 2002, at the age of seventy-one. At her funeral, both Anthony and Roddy Llewellyn were present, the two men she had loved most intensely in her adult life.
One had nearly destroyed her. One had quietly saved her from the worst of that destruction. Anthony died at his home in Kensington in January 2017, at the age of eighty-six. The obituaries focused mainly on his photography.
The full picture, assembled through the authorized biography, later memoirs, and the DNA revelation, was present in the record but not centrally framed. He was remembered primarily as an artist. The palace covered the truth, not through any single conspiracy, but through a thousand small discretions across decades. The cover held during her lifetime.
Most of it held during his. What remains in the public record is a portrait of a marriage that was never what it appeared to be, maintained by an institution that understood perfectly well what was happening and chose to let it continue.