In March of 1976, Princess Margaret answered a telephone at Kensington Palace and was told by her private secretary that her husband wanted out. The message was not delivered by Lord Snowdon himself, but through a secretary, a voice carrying news that had been formalized before it was spoken. Margaret was 45 years old and had been married for nearly 16 years.
By then, she had already lived through the notes hidden in drawers, the women at hospital bedsides, and the long evenings of waiting upstairs while her husband disappeared into rooms that did not include her. When the message was delivered that Lord Snowdon wanted the marriage ended, Margaret reportedly did not cry. She said it was the best news he had ever given her.
That moment was not just the collapse of a royal marriage. It was the point at which one of the most glamorous couples in Britain stopped being an image and became what they had privately been for years. A household built on silence, humiliation, divided loyalties, and damage the public never saw.
This is the story of Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon across nearly two decades of marriage and four decades of aftermath. It is a story of a love affair that looked like modernity, the private cruelty that sat behind it, the children who grew up inside its wreckage, and the palace that could manage appearances far more easily than it could protect the people living behind them.
To understand how a princess of the United Kingdom ended up searching her own drawers for evidence of her husband's contempt, you have to go back further than the marriage. You have to go back to two separate inheritances, one royal and one not, and to the quiet, devastating logic by which they were always going to collide.
Princess Margaret Rose was born on the 21st of August 1930 at Glamis Castle in Scotland, the younger daughter of the Duke of York and Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon. By the time Margaret was six years old, history had already rearranged her life without consulting her. Her uncle, Edward VIII, had abdicated to marry Wallis Simpson. Her father had been made king against his own temperament and his own wishes.
Margaret was not the heir. That was Elizabeth, four years older, steady, serious, already being groomed for the throne from childhood. Margaret was the livelier sister, the wittier one, the one who sang, who smoked, who stayed up late and made people laugh. She was beautiful, genuinely, dangerously beautiful, in a way that drew attention she was simultaneously expected to attract and forbidden to act upon.
By her 20s, she had become one of the most glamorous women in Britain, a style icon, a fixture in London social world. But underneath that image, Margaret was learning a central lesson of her life. She could want things desperately, visibly, and still not be allowed to have them.
The proof came in the form of Group Captain Peter Townsend. He was 16 years Margaret's senior, a decorated Battle of Britain hero, handsome, honorable, and divorced. By the early 1950s, they were deeply in love. At the Queen's coronation in June of 1953, Margaret was observed brushing a piece of lint from Townsend's jacket, a gesture so intimate it was reported around the world.
The establishment closed ranks. The prime minister was consulted. The Archbishop of Canterbury made his position clear. Margaret was offered a choice that was not really a choice at all. She could marry Townsend and renounce her place in the succession, her civil list income, and her position within the royal family, or she could give him up.
In October of 1955, Margaret issued a public statement. She would not marry Townsend. She cited her duty to the Commonwealth and the church. She was 25 years old. In that moment, she learned that the institution would always come first, and that the price of being a princess was the surrender of the one thing that might have made the title bearable.
When a few years later she met a man who seemed to offer everything Townsend had represented, excitement, desire, escape from the suffocating predictability of royal life, she reached for him with the urgency of someone who had already been denied once and could not bear to be denied again.
Anthony Charles Robert Armstrong-Jones was born on the 7th of March 1930, the same year as Margaret. His father, Ronald Armstrong-Jones, was a barrister who moved in good society. His mother, Anne Messel, came from a distinguished Anglo-German family with deep roots in the arts. The family had taste, intelligence, and access. What it did not have was stability.
Tony's parents divorced when he was a small boy and both remarried. He grew up divided between households, between countries, between competing versions of what family meant. He learned early that charm could compensate for rupture. He learned that wit was a form of armor.
At the age of 16, polio struck. Tony spent a year in hospital. He lost significant function in one leg, a disability he would spend the rest of his life disguising with such determination that many people who knew him socially had no idea he walked with a limp beneath the careful tailoring.
The illness marked him. It gave him a particular fury about vulnerability, his own and eventually other people's. The lesson he drew from it was not patience or empathy, but resolve. He would not be pitied. He would not be limited. A man who cannot tolerate weakness in himself will often punish it savagely when he finds it in someone he is supposed to love.
He went up to Cambridge where he read architecture and discovered photography. The camera gave him access without requiring submission. By his mid-20s, he had built a serious professional reputation. He shot theater programs, magazine assignments, and society portraits that were technically accomplished and psychologically acute.
He had a gift for making his subjects feel they were the only person in the room. That gift was, of course, a seduction technique as much as an artistic one. He was not a dilettante who happened to marry well. He was a working artist who understood images, surfaces, staging, and public myth.
After the gray years of dutiful appearances and appropriate suitors who bored her, after the slow, quiet humiliation of being the princess who had been denied, Tony must have felt like oxygen. He was funny. He was irreverent. He did not treat Margaret's rank as a barrier to intimacy. He teased her. He challenged her. He refused to play the courtier.
His circle was part of the appeal. Through Tony, Margaret gained access to a London she had only glimpsed from the edges. Photographers, theater people, designers, musicians, bohemians, men and women who lived by talent rather than title.
But there was a darker inheritance running alongside the brilliance. Tony's romantic life before Margaret was complicated, layered, entangled. His relationship with Jeremy and Camilla Fry was close in ways that biographers would spend decades trying to untangle. Camilla Fry gave birth to a daughter, Polly, in 1960, the year of Tony's wedding to Margaret. Decades later, in 2004, a DNA test confirmed what some had long suspected. Polly's biological father was not Jeremy Fry, but Anthony Armstrong-Jones.
The wedding took place on the 6th of May 1960 at Westminster Abbey. It was the first British royal wedding to be broadcast live on television in its entirety. 2,000 guests attended. 20 million television viewers in Britain watched, and hundreds of millions more around the world.
Margaret wore a gown by Norman Hartnell. They departed for a honeymoon in the Caribbean aboard the Royal Yacht Britannia. They settled into an apartment at Kensington Palace, surrounded by staff, by protocol, by the quiet surveillance that was the price of Margaret's birth.
In October of 1961, Tony was created Earl of Snowdon and Viscount Linley. David was born on the 3rd of November, 1961, barely 18 months after the wedding. Sarah followed on the 1st of May 1964, by which time the atmosphere had already begun to shift.
For a few years, the Snowdens looked like what the future might hold if the institution loosened its collar and let talent sit beside title. They attended premieres and gallery openings. They entertained lavishly, filling their Kensington Palace rooms with guests who would not normally have been invited inside the royal perimeter.
Friends from this period would later describe the marriage's early years as genuinely exciting. There was laughter in those rooms. There was intimacy. The photographs Tony took of his family during this period are among the best he ever made. Tender, informal, lit with the kind of attention that only a man genuinely engaged with his subjects can produce.
But underneath the entertaining and the children and the magazine profiles, a geometry was forming that would prove inescapable. Tony kept his career. He photographed for the Sunday Times magazine, worked on documentary films, and spent long hours in his basement workroom at Kensington Palace, a space Margaret rarely entered, and where she was not always welcome.
He vanished into assignments for days at a time, and came back charged with a vitality that domestic life could not match. And upstairs, in the palace apartment, Margaret waited. She waited as she had been trained to wait her entire life.
The house argument crystallized everything. Margaret wanted a country home near Sunninghill, close to her family. Tony wanted Old House on the Messel family's estate in Sussex, a place tied to his mother's world. She did not want it. She thought it cold and remote. He went ahead with the restoration anyway.
Old House would later become the place where he entertained friends, worked in peace, and eventually conducted affairs. The disagreement was never simply about property. It was the marriage rendered in architecture. Her need for proximity, for security, set against his need for autonomy, for a self that existed outside the relationship.
By 1964, the year Sarah was born, the competition between them was already audible to anyone standing close enough to hear it. Two people accustomed to commanding every room they entered were now living inside the same household, each needing to be the more vivid presence, each diminished by the other's claim on the same oxygen.
The Snowden marriage did not explode. It corroded. And corrosion by its nature is invisible until the structure it has been eating gives way.
Tony's professional reputation during the 1960s was not borrowed from Margaret's name. It was earned image by image, assignment by assignment. He shot assignments across the world, documentary pieces on poverty, on disability, on communities the readers of a Sunday supplement might never otherwise have encountered. He made a television film about loneliness among the elderly that was broadcast by the BBC.
Margaret, to her credit, recognized it. She was proud of his work. In the early years, she supported that ambition with a generosity that her later bitterness would sometimes obscure.
The difficulty was not that Tony worked. The difficulty was what his work meant about the marriage's internal economy. Every assignment took him away from Kensington Palace physically, emotionally, psychologically. Margaret, meanwhile, had her own calendar. The opening of a hospital wing, a charity luncheon, a reception at which she would be expected to make conversation with people she had not chosen and would never see again.
Their social circle was not merely decorative. Through Tony, Margaret had access to artists, designers, photographers, actors, and filmmakers. Through Margaret, Tony had access to institutional power. Each gave the other a dimension they lacked.
Margaret herself was not a passive ornament in this cultural world. She played piano with real competence. She sang with genuine musicality and conviction. She had opinions about theater, about design, about the visual arts that were informed and sometimes incisive.
There was a period, brief and measured in a few years rather than a decade, when the marriage functioned as a genuine creative partnership. That period is crucial to the story because it establishes what was real before the damage began.
The first signs were atmospheric. Tony's absences grew longer. His returns grew more perfunctory. The basement workroom became a barrier, a closed door between them. When Margaret came downstairs to find him, she was sent back up. That detail is small enough to seem trivial and important enough to deserve attention. Margaret was not being screamed at. She was not being struck. She was being dismissed.
The notes began. Tony had a habit of leaving written insults in places where only Margaret would find them, inside books, in drawers, tucked among her gloves or her stationery. The content of at least one, as later described in reporting drawn from Lady Anne Glenconner's account, was vicious. A message telling her she looked like a Jewish manicurist and that he hated her.
The method was worse than the content. These were not insults hurled in the heat of an argument. They were ambushes. They were designed to be discovered in private, in quiet moments, when Margaret was alone with her own thoughts and her husband was elsewhere. The cruelty was not impulsive. It was architectural.
The most devastating single scene from this phase took place at the London Clinic. Tony was hospitalized and Margaret came to visit him. She arrived to find Lady Jacqueline Rufus-Isaacs already there, already at his bedside, already occupying the position that should have been Margaret's.
Margaret, standing in a hospital room, confronted with the physical evidence of her own displacement, reportedly said something to the effect that she could nurse him herself. A line that is devastating precisely because it sounds not furious but plaintive. A princess of the blood, the sister of the queen, reduced to competing for access to her own husband's sickbed.
Margaret absorbed it. That is what Margaret had been trained to do. The Windsor code, one does not speak, one does not seen, one endures, had been bred into her since childhood.
Elizabeth knew, of course. The queen was not a woman who missed things. But knowing and acting are different things when you are the sovereign. She could not intervene in Margaret's marriage without acknowledging that the marriage was failing, and acknowledging the failure publicly would create the very crisis that royal protocol existed to prevent.
The Queen Mother too maintained her position. She adored Margaret, but she belonged to a generation for which marital unhappiness was not a reason for divorce, but a reason for better behavior at dinner.
Margaret began to harden. Her wit developed an edge that could draw blood. Her drinking increased. Her social life became more frenetic. She did not leave Tony. She could not leave Tony. Not yet.
The biographical record names Anthony Barton, a Bordeaux wine merchant, and Robin Douglas-Home, a pianist and nephew of a former prime minister, among Margaret's attachments during this period. These were attempts to recover something that the marriage had destroyed. The feeling of being desired, valued, seen as a woman rather than an institution.
Tony's affairs and Margaret's affairs were not equivalent. Tony's affairs were exercises of appetite. He conducted them with a confidence that bordered on indifference to discovery. Margaret's attachments were acts of survival. Each man she turned to represented not a thrill but a rescue.
Robin Douglas-Home's story carries a particular weight because his relationship with Margaret did not end cleanly. After the relationship ended, Douglas-Home spiraled into depression that would years later contribute to his death by suicide.
Tony, meanwhile, was not merely conducting affairs. He was constructing parallel lives. Old House at Nymans had become a second domestic world. The Fry thread remained quietly present. Polly, born in 1960, was growing up as Jeremy Fry's acknowledged daughter. But the truth of her paternity lay buried.
The marriage was now a private war. It was not yet a public scandal because the machinery of royal discretion was still functioning. Neither could afford to be the one who broke the surface.
The children were watching, of course. David was old enough by the late 1960s to register the atmospheres even if he could not yet name them. Sarah, younger by three years, absorbed what children always absorb. Not the specifics of adult conflict, but its emotional weather.
Neither child has spoken publicly in any sustained or detailed way about what growing up in this household was like. That silence, held for more than 50 years, is perhaps the most telling inheritance they received.
By the early 1970s, the marriage existed in a state of armed suspension. And into this suspended world, sometime around 1973, a new figure began to move. His name was Roddy Llewellyn.
He was 25 years old to Margaret's 43. He was handsome in a soft, unthreatening way that was the precise opposite of Tony's angular, electric charisma. He was a would-be landscape gardener, the son of a Welsh baronet, a man whose principal gifts were charm, warmth, and the ability to make Margaret feel that someone was paying attention to her not because she was a princess, but because she was a person who deserved kindness.
By the time Margaret invited him to Les Jolies Eaux on Mustique, the relationship had crossed whatever invisible line separates friendship from attachment. They swam together. They sat in the sun together. They stayed up late together on a terrace overlooking the Caribbean.
It was an affair conducted in paradise. But Roddy was also a symptom. Margaret reached for him not because she had found a great love, but because she was drowning, and he was the nearest solid thing.
The photograph was taken in February 1976 on the island of Mustique. Margaret and Roddy Llewellyn together in swimwear on a beach in the Caribbean sunshine. No embrace, no kiss, nothing that would have scandalized a viewer who did not know who these people were. But the viewer did know.
The photograph was published by the News of the World. Within hours, the careful architecture of discretion that held the Snowden marriage together in public lay in pieces.
The palace's response was what the palace's response always was in moments of crisis. Silence followed by the minimum possible acknowledgement followed by an attempt to move on as quickly as possible. But this time the silence could not hold.
Senior courtiers understood that the separation, long anticipated in private, would now have to become public. The machinery began to move. The queen was briefed. The prime minister was informed.
Tony, sensing that the balance of public sympathy had shifted against Margaret, or seizing an opportunity that the photograph had created, moved towards separation with a speed that suggested he had been waiting for exactly this kind of opening. Margaret was the one who had been photographed with another man. In the public narrative, she was the transgressor.
Anne Glenconner watched all of this from closer range than almost anyone. She had been with Margaret on Mustique. She had seen the relationship with Roddy develop. She understood that Margaret's pursuit of happiness was about to become the instrument of her public humiliation.
The ironies multiplied. Margaret, who had sacrificed Peter Townsend to protect the monarchy's image, was now the person whose behavior threatened that image. Margaret, who had endured Tony's far more numerous and far more deliberate infidelities in silence for over a decade, was now the one whose single visible attachment was being treated as a scandal.
The weeks between the photograph's publication and the formal announcement of the separation were grim. Tony and Margaret were still technically sharing the apartment, though their lives within it had long since separated into parallel tracks. Conversations that should have taken place between husband and wife were instead conducted through intermediaries.
David was 14. Sarah was 11. They were at school living the bifurcated lives of children whose parents occupied the intersection of public celebrity and private dysfunction. Every classmate, every teacher, every friend's parent had seen the headline.
Tony made the decisive move in March of 1976. Not through a personal conversation with his wife, but through the institutional machinery that now mediated every aspect of their relationship. Margaret's private secretary, Lord Nigel Napier, placed a telephone call to the princess.
The content of the call was simple and unadorned. Lord Snowdon wished to end the marriage. Margaret's response was dry and devastating. She reportedly told Napier that it was the best news he had ever given her.
The formal announcement came on the 19th of March 1976. The language was palace language, precise, bloodless. The couple had mutually agreed to live apart. There were no plans for divorce proceedings.
The statement used the word mutually, which was technically accurate and deeply misleading. Tony had wanted out. Margaret had been told she was being left.
The public read it in their morning newspapers and drew their own conclusions, which were largely that Margaret had brought this upon herself. She had endured years of Tony's cruelty, and the public believed she was the unfaithful one. She had been the one left, and the public believed she had been the one leaving.
Tony moved toward Lucy Lindsay-Hogg and the life he had been constructing in parallel for years. He was, by all accounts, relieved. His energy was undiminished. His charm was intact.
Margaret remained at Kensington Palace, publicly humiliated, privately devastated beneath the performance of resilience. Her relationship with Roddy continued, but it was now stripped of the privacy that had made it bearable.
Roddy himself was struggling under the weight of the attention. He had never sought fame. He would later attempt a recording career and various horticultural ventures. But the defining fact of his public life would always be that he had been Princess Margaret's lover.
The relationship would eventually run its course. Not because of any dramatic rupture, but because the pressure surrounding it eroded it gradually.
By the spring of 1978, strain had become illness. Margaret was taken ill in May at the very moment the legal machinery of divorce was moving into its final stage. Reports described a princess physically depleted, emotionally exhausted, and increasingly unable to pretend that the damage done in private had not entered her body.
Tony, by contrast, kept moving. By then, he was filming in Australia with Lucy Lindsay-Hogg. Within 18 months, he had begun another long affair with the journalist Ann Hills, as though even the woman who had replaced Margaret could not actually contain him.
On the 24th of May 1978, Princess Margaret's divorce case appeared in the Supreme Court of Judicature daily cause list for hearing in the London Divorce Court in courtroom 44 of the Queen's Building. It was listed 20th in a batch of 28 cases.
The hearing was expected to take only a couple of minutes. Margaret was not there. She did not need to be. The divorce moved through the court in her absence, on paper, with the speed and impersonality the system reserved for consent and inevitability.
The decree nisi was granted that May. By July the divorce was finalized. It was the first divorce of a senior British royal in the modern era. Margaret was 47 years old. Tony was 48.
On the 15th of December 1978, Snowdon married Lucy Lindsay-Hogg. July, the divorce completed. December, the remarriage. By the following year, there would be a daughter, Frances.
Margaret never remarried. She had once been denied a marriage she wanted, and then had endured one that degraded her. There was no reason to expect she would trust it a third time.
Her health deteriorated slowly, then unmistakably. Heavy smoking, long years of drinking, emotional strain, and simple bad luck all played their part. In February of 1998, while at her holiday home in Mustique, she suffered a mild stroke. A year later, she severely scalded her feet in a bathroom accident. In 2000 and 2001, she suffered further strokes.
On the 9th of February 2002, Princess Margaret died at the King Edward VII Hospital after a further stroke. She was 71 years old. Her children, Lord Linley and Lady Sarah Chatto, were at her side.
Her funeral was held at St. George's Chapel, Windsor. Margaret was cremated and her ashes were placed in the King George VI Memorial Chapel.
Snowdon's aftermath followed the pattern one might have predicted. His marriage to Lucy Lindsay-Hogg produced a daughter, Frances, in 1979. Within 18 months of the wedding, he had begun a long affair with Ann Hills. In the late 1990s, while working with Country Life editor Melanie Cable-Alexander, Snowdon fathered a son, Jasper, born in April of 1998. Lucy moved out.
The old secret of Polly Fry finally hardened into documented fact in 2004 when a DNA test confirmed that Snowdon, not Jeremy Fry, was her biological father. That revelation reached back across 44 years.
None of this erased his work. Snowdon remained in the artistic sense significant. The National Portrait Gallery describes him as a photographer, filmmaker, designer, and campaigner for disability rights with hundreds of portraits in its collection. He designed the aviary at London Zoo. He campaigned for disabled people with seriousness shaped in part by his own experience of polio.
He died on the 13th of January 2017 at his home in Kensington, age 86.
David Armstrong-Jones was born in November of 1961. He trained as a craftsman in wood, opened a workshop in Dorking in 1985, and built the company that became Linley, associated with bespoke furniture, marquetry, and a particular kind of highly finished British luxury. After his father's death in 2017, he inherited the earldom and became the second Earl of Snowdon.
Sarah, born on the 1st of May 1964, took a quieter route still. She trained at Camberwell and the Royal Academy Schools and has long exhibited under the name Sarah Armstrong-Jones. The Redfern Gallery has shown her work for decades. In 2024, she became president of the Royal Ballet School, a role that carries a direct line back to her mother.
On Mustique, Les Jolies Eaux still exists, transformed now into a rentable legendary villa. The cultural afterlife of Margaret and Snowdon has been vigorous. The biography by Anne de Courcy, published in 2008, remains one of the key works in shaping modern understanding of him. Lady Anne Glenconner's memoir gave later audiences some of the most intimate glimpses of what Margaret's daily life had actually felt like.
Television inevitably moved in too. Netflix's The Crown made the marriage globally legible all over again. The series captured the allure, the sexual charge, the class friction, the emotional asymmetry. What it could not fully capture was the long administrative grind of real damage. The patience of humiliation, the repetitive nature of contempt, the years in which nothing explodes and yet a life is steadily being made smaller.
In the end, perhaps the most revealing image is still the smallest one. Not Westminster Abbey, not Mustique, not the court list. A note hidden in a drawer, a private insult placed where only one person would find it. The whole story is in that gesture. The public performance outside the room, the private cruelty inside it, and the long silence required to keep the two from touching.