The marriage of Princess Margaret and Antony Armstrong-Jones began as a fairy tale watched by an estimated 300 million people. It ended in a divorce that was unprecedented for a senior royal, but the private years between were marked by a cruelty that remained hidden for decades.
Margaret was 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. When her uncle abdicated in December 1936, her father became King George VI, and Margaret became a princess of the blood at just six years old.
She grew into a sharp, musical, and theatrical figure. By the early 1950s, she was one of the most photographed young women in the world. She had visibility, but she did not have the freedom to choose her own path.
Her first attempt at choosing her own life came with Group Captain Peter Townsend, a decorated wartime pilot who was older and divorced. The Royal Marriages Act of 1772 meant she could not marry without the monarch’s consent before age 25. The Church of England would not bless a marriage to a divorced man.
On October 31, 1955, Margaret stepped before the country and gave him up. She chose to stay a princess and lose the man. Those who knew her said a brightness dimmed after that decision, and a willingness to test the rules hardened into something more reckless.
Five years later, she married a man the palace never saw coming. Antony Armstrong-Jones was not an aristocrat or a courtier. He was a photographer with a studio, a motorcycle, and a circle of friends drawn from the new creative London of the late 1950s.
He was charming, quick, and entirely unimpressed by rank. To a princess surrounded by men who bowed first and spoke second, he was something close to oxygen. The courtship was conducted with obsessive care, and the privacy of their meetings felt like proof that this time might be different.
The engagement was announced in February 1960. The princess who had given up a war hero was going to marry a commoner with a camera. The public read it as the happy ending the story had promised.
The wedding took place on May 6, 1960, at Westminster Abbey. It was the first royal wedding ever broadcast on television. Crowds lined the route in numbers not seen since the coronation, and the royal yacht carried the couple away on a Caribbean honeymoon.
In October 1961, the Queen created Armstrong-Jones Earl of Snowdon. A son, David, arrived that same year, followed by a daughter, Lady Sarah, in 1964. On paper, it was a complete and enviable picture.
The strain was there from early on. Two people of enormous ego and considerable temper were 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 the simple sound of her husband in the same room. Snowdon kept a studio in the lower floor of their Kensington Palace apartment. As the marriage soured, the studio became less a workplace than a refuge from his wife.
In public, Snowdon remained charming and warm. In private, the warmth drained away and was replaced by something colder and more deliberate. The contrast was so sharp that friends and household staff struggled to reconcile the two men.
The cruelty was not the obvious kind. There is little to suggest violence. What Snowdon practiced was quieter and more corrosive. It was the cruelty of withdrawal, of contempt expressed through silence and timing and small engineered humiliations.
The fullest account of the marriage comes from Lady Anne Glenconner, Margaret’s lady-in-waiting and lifelong friend. She described a man composing his cruelty in advance. Snowdon took to writing vicious little notes and hiding them where his wife would come upon them alone.
He tucked them into books she was reading. He slipped them among her handkerchiefs. He left them in the drawer where she kept her gloves. It was a habit sustained over years, a steady drip of contempt placed exactly where it would do the most damage.
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.” Each one was a small ambush waiting for a quiet moment.
The detail that captures the whole of it is what Margaret did in response. She eventually stopped opening her own chest of drawers. She could no longer bear the small daily risk of what might be folded inside. She had her maid open them for her instead.
A woman raised in palaces, adored by millions, reached a point where she was afraid of her own furniture. The home that was meant to be her sanctuary had been turned drawer by drawer into somewhere she had to be protected from.
If the notes were the private cruelty, the affairs were the cruelty he was happy for everyone to see. Snowdon’s appetite for other people did not pause for marriage. He conducted his private life with a boldness that left little room for his wife’s dignity.
Margaret, lonely and wounded, found her own attachments as the marriage failed. But the patterns were different. 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. 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. Margaret’s drinking grew heavier, her hours later, her moods more volatile.
By the early 1970s, the couple were strangers who happened to share an address and a pair of children. The marriage would not end quietly. It would end in sunlight on a beach 2,000 miles away in a single photograph.
The island was Mustique, a small and then largely undeveloped place owned by her friend Colin Tennant. As a wedding present, he had offered Margaret a plot of land. The house she built there was called Les Jolies Eaux, and it was completed in 1972.
It was not a palace. By the standards of her birth, it was modest. But its modesty was the point. 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.
The young man was Roddy Llewellyn, a gentle figure with a passion for gardens, 17 years younger than Margaret. They met in 1973, when she was 43 and he was 25. 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. The newspapers seized it. The carefully maintained fiction that the Snowdon marriage was merely strained collapsed in a single morning.
Within weeks, the formal separation was announced. The thing the household had spent more than a decade hiding was suddenly the most talked about story in the country. The public mood was not kind. She was cast as a wealthy older woman indulging herself with a younger man.
The cruelty she had endured for years was invisible. The companionship that finally comforted her was splashed across every front page. 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. She had been raised to perform, to keep the surface bright. The performance that had once been her armor had become a cage.
The marriage ended formally in 1978. Snowdon married again within months and moved on into a long and successful career. For Margaret, there was no neat second chapter waiting.
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. For Margaret to divorce in 1978 was to do something no senior royal of the modern era had done.
The Queen handled her sister’s situation with private sympathy and public calm. There was no banishment, no stripping of titles. 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.
The institution had refused to let her marry the man she loved in 1955 because the crown could not be seen to bless a union touched by divorce. Then it had kept her inside a marriage that was destroying her because a senior royal divorce was worse for the institution than a princess in private agony.
Margaret had smoked heavily for most of her adult life. In 1985 she underwent an operation on her lung. The damage was done, and from then on, her health became a slow downward path.
The first stroke struck in 1998 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. The woman who had once moved through ballrooms was now increasingly confined to a wheelchair.
That same year, she gave up the one thing that had been truly hers. Les Jolies Eaux was sold out of the family altogether. The sanctuary that had once been her escape now passed into other hands.
Her final years were quiet and largely hidden from public view. Further strokes followed, each one taking a little more from her. The cruelty she had endured remained unspoken.
Princess Margaret died on February 9, 2002, in a hospital bed in London, aged 71. The full truth of her marriage came out slowly, and much of it only after Snowdon was gone. He died in January 2017 at the age of 86.
It was in the years that followed, through the authorized account of his own life and the memoir of Lady 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 deepest cruelty of the story was not the notes themselves. It was the silence around them. The long understanding that a royal woman could be seen and admired without end, but must never 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. She paid for that refusal twice over, first in love, and then in marriage. The most photographed woman in Britain spent her last strength learning not to open a drawer.