Lady Sarah Chateau never needed to publicly condemn Princess Margaret. She did something far more revealing. She grew up, looked at the extraordinary life her mother had built, and quietly chose almost the exact opposite. At sixty-two, Sarah is still a member of one of the most famous families on Earth, yet she has spent most of her adult life avoiding the machinery of fame that surrounded her mother.
She became an artist rather than a working royal. She married a man who preferred painting to publicity. She raised two sons largely outside the royal circus. She appears when family loyalty requires it, then disappears again.
There was no dramatic press conference announcing why. No reliable account records Sarah declaring that she abandoned Princess Margaret after one terrible argument. The truth is more interesting than that, because Sarah’s departure from her mother’s world was not one moment. It was a long education, and it began inside Kensington Palace.
Sarah Francis Elizabeth Armstrong-Jones was born there on May 1st, 1964, the second child and only daughter of Princess Margaret and Anthony Armstrong-Jones, the first Earl of Snowdon. On paper, the little girl had arrived in an enviable position. Her mother was the younger sister of Queen Elizabeth II. Her grandmother was Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother.
She was born seventh in line to the throne. Her birth came during what was supposed to be one of the happiest chapters in Princess Margaret’s life. Margaret had married Anthony Armstrong-Jones four years earlier in May 1960, in a wedding watched by millions. Anthony was not a foreign prince or an aristocratic duke.
He was a photographer, creative, clever, ambitious, and unusually comfortable moving between bohemian London and royal drawing rooms. For Margaret, this mattered. Years earlier, she had fallen in love with Group Captain Peter Townsend, a divorced man who had served in her father’s household. Their relationship became one of the great royal dramas of the 1950s, and Margaret eventually announced in 1955 that she would not marry him.
Whatever the precise mixture of duty, pressure, and personal decision behind that choice, the emotional result was obvious. Margaret had lost the future she once imagined. Then came Anthony, who seemed like an escape from the careful world of court officials. By the time Sarah arrived in 1964, Margaret and Anthony already had a son, David, born in November 1961.
Their Kensington Palace home reflected a mixture of royal tradition and creative influence. Anthony was considered unusually involved by royal standards of the period. He encouraged both children to make things, showing them how objects worked and introducing them to design and craftsmanship. David would eventually become a furniture maker.
Sarah would become a painter. Long before either child understood the unhappiness developing between their parents, they were absorbing their father’s belief that making something with your hands could be valuable in itself. Behind this unusually artistic royal household was a marriage beginning to reveal its weaknesses. Margaret and Anthony had both entered the relationship with powerful personalities, and neither was naturally suited to surrender.
Their differences began producing conflict. Anthony’s work demanded travel and independence. Margaret expected attention. Biographers of the marriage have described increasingly bitter arguments and infidelity on both sides.
What is not difficult to establish is that the marriage deteriorated badly. Sarah was growing up inside the result. In February 1976, the lesson became impossible to ignore. Photographs appeared showing Princess Margaret and Rody Llewellyn together in Mustique.
Llewellyn was a gardener, an aspiring singer, and seventeen years younger than Margaret. The relationship had continued for years, but now it was public. The photographs caused an enormous scandal. Members of Parliament commented.
Questions arose about her public role and expenses. And somewhere behind all those headlines was an eleven-year-old girl whose mother’s romantic life was being discussed by strangers. Margaret and Anthony formally announced their separation in March 1976. The divorce was finalized in 1978, making Margaret the first senior member of the British royal family to divorce in decades.
Sarah’s childhood now developed between different worlds. With Margaret there was the royal sphere: Kensington Palace, the Queen Mother, family occasions. With Anthony there was photography, design, craftsmanship, and a more bohemian atmosphere. Sarah painted landscapes.
It is tempting to make too much symbolism out of that, but there is something striking about the kind of art she preferred. Landscape painting is about looking carefully at something that does not argue back. For a girl surrounded by powerful adults and increasingly public emotion, painting offered silence and control. That was a freedom she did not have over the rest of her life.
Despite all the scandals, Margaret remained Sarah’s mother. There is little evidence that Sarah became some bitter opponent of Princess Margaret. Quite the contrary. In later life, she remained connected to her mother, participated in family occasions, and ultimately honored parts of Margaret’s cultural legacy.
But loving someone does not mean wanting their life. Sometimes the clearest judgment a child makes about a parent is the future she chooses for herself. By 1976, Sarah had already seen a glamorous marriage turn poisonous, seen the press convert private pain into entertainment, seen a mother who possessed palaces and jewels yet could still feel trapped and desperately lonely. She was only twelve.
Sarah attended Bedales, the progressive boarding school in Hampshire, which valued creativity, individuality, and practical work. Her artistic interest strengthened. Painting became more than an amusement. She studied at Camberwell School of Art and then at the Royal Academy Schools, where students were expected to work seriously.
Sarah focused on painting and drawing, developing a particular affection for landscape and still life. She exhibited under the professional name Sarah Armstrong-Jones, and collectors began buying her paintings. Her father had established himself as a photographer before becoming Earl of Snowdon, and after the marriage failed, his career remained. That was a lesson Sarah could hardly miss.
Titles could be inherited. Public affection could change. Marriages could collapse. A skill stayed with you.
In 1983, Sarah traveled to India with her father, who was involved with the production of the film A Passage to India. Sarah worked as a wardrobe assistant. On that production she met an actor named Daniel Chateau, who came from a theatrical family. Daniel was handsome, artistic, and comfortable around creative people.
He had none of the obvious profile of a royal husband. At first there was no reason for the world to pay particular attention. For Sarah, that may have been part of the appeal. Their relationship developed quietly, over years rather than weeks.
Sarah was in no hurry to convert it into public theater. That patience separated her from her mother’s experience. Margaret had spent much of her youth under pressure from circumstance. Sarah did not need her marriage to answer anything.
She could build a career first, know the man properly, allow years to pass without treating unmarried life as a crisis. Margaret, meanwhile, was becoming harder to protect from the consequences of her own habits. In January 1985, she underwent surgery to remove part of her left lung. The growth was found to be benign, but the operation was still a warning of extraordinary clarity.
Years of heavy smoking had taken a toll. Sarah was now in her early twenties, and her mother’s health would gradually become one of the forces pulling her closer, even as Sarah’s adult life pushed her outward. That is the tension at the center of Sarah’s story. She wanted independence.
She did not want abandonment. Leaving the emotional pattern of Princess Margaret’s life did not require leaving Margaret herself. By the early 1990s, the chaos around the central royal family became almost impossible to miss. The marriages of three of the Queen’s children were in serious difficulty.
Anne divorced Mark Phillips in 1992. Andrew separated from Sarah Ferguson that same year. Charles and Diana announced their separation in December. The Queen described 1992 as her annus horribilis.
Sarah watched the royal family repeat a lesson she had learned as a child. The wedding does not protect the marriage. Rank does not protect the marriage. Public approval does not protect the marriage.
Her mother’s divorce had once seemed exceptional. Now divorce was becoming almost a family administrative category. When Lady Sarah Armstrong-Jones married Daniel Chateau on July 14th, 1994, the ceremony said almost everything about the adult life she had chosen. It took place at St.
Stephen Walbrook in the City of London. There was royal attendance naturally, but the event was strikingly restrained by the standards of her family. This was not St. Paul’s Cathedral.
There was no enormous procession designed for a global television audience. Sarah arrived wearing a simple ivory wedding dress. Her parents had been married in Westminster Abbey before millions of viewers. Sarah chose intimacy.
The Queen attended, as did Princess Margaret and Anthony Armstrong-Jones. Sarah married a man she had known for roughly a decade. After acting, Daniel concentrated increasingly on painting. It gave the couple an unusual equilibrium.
In July 1996, Sarah and Daniel welcomed their first son, Samuel. Two years later, in 1999, their second son, Arthur, was born. The boys were great-grandchildren of King George VI and the Queen Mother, grandsons of Princess Margaret, closely related to the future king. Yet they were not expected to become working royals.
Sarah appears to have used that distance. The boys grew up with royal relatives but without their childhoods being turned into continuous public performances. By the late 1990s, Princess Margaret needed protection more than ever. Decades of smoking had already resulted in lung surgery.
In February 1998, while staying in Mustique, she suffered a mild stroke. In early 1999, she badly scalded her feet after stepping into a hot bath. The injuries were severe enough to affect her mobility for months, and she increasingly relied on a wheelchair. For a woman who had spent decades presenting herself with precision, the loss was especially cruel.
Sarah found herself witnessing another dismantling of the image that had shaped her childhood. But illness took mobility before it took personality. Margaret’s humor could still emerge, and so could her irritation. On February 9th, 2002, Princess Margaret died at King Edward VII’s Hospital in London.
She was seventy-one. She had suffered another stroke the previous day, followed by cardiac problems. For Sarah, there was no public denunciation, no final declaration of grievances. She mourned her mother.
Margaret’s funeral was held on February 15th at St. George’s Chapel, Windsor, the fiftieth anniversary of the funeral of her father, King George VI. The Queen Mother, by then 101 and physically frail, attended. Seven weeks later, on March 30th, 2002, the Queen Mother died.
Within less than two months, the Queen lost both her sister and her mother. Sarah lost both her mother and grandmother. In June 2006, more than four years after Princess Margaret’s death, hundreds of objects from her estate went under the hammer at Christie’s in London. Sarah and David had inherited the responsibility as well as the value of Margaret’s possessions, and inheritance tax had to be met.
The famous Poltimore tiara, which Margaret had worn at her wedding in 1960, sold for more than £900,000. The auction raised many millions of pounds. Part of the proceeds went toward the tax obligations, and the siblings also made charitable donations. Sarah did not publicly turn the sale into a sentimental performance.
But she was learning what outsiders often resist. You cannot preserve a person by preserving every object they touched. Sarah’s father died in January 2017 at the age of eighty-six. Sarah had now lost both parents.
Once again, she did not turn grief into confession. No autobiography appeared. No interview revealed what she had really thought about her parents’ disastrous marriage. Her silence had become almost radical by then.
Publishers understood that conflict sold. A daughter saying her mother was misunderstood could sell. A daughter saying her mother was impossible could sell even better. Sarah sold paintings.
In September 2022, Queen Elizabeth II died at Balmoral. Sarah was fifty-eight. The aunt who had connected her to the earliest years of her life was gone. Elizabeth had been there before Sarah’s parents divorced, before Daniel, before Samuel and Arthur, before Margaret became ill, before Margaret died.
The Queen had known every version of Sarah. The funeral brought Sarah back into full public view. She attended. She mourned.
She went home. That simple sequence contained the philosophy Sarah had spent an entire adult life perfecting. Belong deeply. Perform only what is necessary.
Keep the rest. By the time Lady Sarah Chateau reached her sixties, the young girl who once moved between Kensington Palace, her father’s world of photography, and her mother’s complicated emotional orbit had become one of the quietest survivors of modern royal life. Survivor does not have to mean victim. Sarah was not exiled.
She was not disowned. She did not spend her adult life fighting the monarchy. She remained close to it. She attended weddings, funerals, jubilees, and coronations.
She loved the Queen. She honored her mother’s connection with the arts. What she escaped was not the family. It was the pattern.
Sarah left gradually. First through school, then through art, then through work, then through Daniel, then through marriage, then through motherhood. Each choice created another room in a life Margaret did not control. And Sarah kept opening those rooms until she had a complete home of her own.
The remarkable part is that she did this without destroying the relationship. Margaret remained loved. She simply stopped being the center. For a woman like Margaret, that may have been painful.
For Sarah, it was necessary. Sarah continued the art, the loyalty, the appreciation of beauty, the connection to family. But she redirected her mother’s quiet stubbornness. Instead of insisting that the world bend around her, she used it to protect the life she wanted: a husband, children, paint, privacy.
She belonged to the royal family without allowing the royal family to become her entire life. She loved her mother without becoming her mother. And when the time came to leave, she discovered the gentlest way possible.
She stayed close enough to hold on to the woman, and far enough away to break the pattern.