The order arrived quietly, in the final weeks before the wedding. Jeremy Fry, the man Anthony Armstrong-Jones had chosen as his best man, was told he could not stand at the altar. The reason had nothing to do with friendship, which had bound the two men for years, and everything to do with a conviction from 1952. Under the law of the time, Fry had been found guilty of what was called a homosexual offense, and the palace’s security vetting would not allow a man with such a record to appear at the center of a royal ceremony.

The official story given to the press was illness. He had jaundice, the public was told. In truth, a small circle of people inside the royal household had decided that the risk was too great, that the newspapers would find the conviction, that the scrutiny would be unbearable. Jeremy withdrew.

The best man became Dr. Roger Gilliatt, a neurologist, a respected medical man, a safe choice made essentially at the last minute. He was not Anthony’s close friend. He had no complicated history.

He would not embarrass the monarchy. The substitution was handled so smoothly that most of the public never knew any change had been made at all. This was the first act of institutional concealment surrounding the Snowdon marriage. It would not be the last.

On the 6th of May, 1960, three hundred million people around the world tuned in to watch a young photographer marry a princess. It was the first royal wedding ever broadcast on television, sold to the public as something unprecedented and thrilling. The cameras captured a beaming bride in a dress she had helped design. The commentary was breathless.

A new, modern royal era seemed to be beginning. Behind the cathedral doors, behind the carriages and the waving and the smiles, was a truth the British establishment had quietly agreed not to discuss. The man walking down the aisle had, just days earlier, fathered a child with another woman. He had a complicated romantic past that included both women and men.

And his closest friend, originally slated to be best man, had been dropped from the ceremony because his personal history threatened to expose too much. Anthony Charles Robert Armstrong Jones was born on the 7th of March, 1930, in London. His father, Ronald Armstrong Jones, was a successful Welsh barrister who would eventually marry six times over the course of his long life. His mother, Anne Messel, was a celebrated society beauty from a half-Jewish banking family that had originated in Germany.

The marriage was not a happy one, and by the time Anthony was five years old, his parents had divorced. His mother remarried the Earl of Rosse in 1935 and became the chatelaine of Birr Castle in Ireland, a vast estate filled with gardens and history and her new husband’s two sons from a previous marriage. His father drifted through his subsequent marriages. Anthony spent much of his childhood ricocheting between his parents’ separate worlds, never quite the central figure in either.

His half-siblings from both sides multiplied. He was, as he would later describe himself, always slightly the odd one out. At sixteen, while at Eton, he contracted polio. He was sent home from school and then admitted to Liverpool Royal Infirmary, where he spent six months.

His sister Susan visited him regularly. His mother, by the accounts gathered later by biographers, visited him only once during that entire stretch. The emotional weight of that memory stayed with him for the rest of his life. He spoke about it rarely, but those who knew him well understood that it had shaped him.

He emerged from the hospital with one leg permanently weaker and slightly shorter than the other, a limp that would stay with him forever, and a lasting sense that he had been left alone when it mattered most. He returned to Eton, then went on to Jesus College, Cambridge, where he read architecture. He captained the victorious 1950 Boat Race crew, rowing at bow for Cambridge in their win over Oxford. It was one of the great triumphs of his young life, but he failed his architecture exams and left Cambridge without a degree.

He had found what he wanted to do, and it was something his mother found humiliating. He wanted to be a photographer. In the Britain of the early 1950s, photography was still considered a trade rather than a profession. There had not yet been the rise of the celebrity photographer.

David Bailey was still a teenager. Photography was the work of pressmen and high street portraitists, not a path for a young gentleman from Eton and Cambridge. His mother objected strongly. He went ahead anyway.

He apprenticed himself to Baron, a society photographer of considerable reputation who was also court photographer to the royal family. Baron moved through overlapping worlds in mid-century London, worlds of high society and bohemian sexuality, and he introduced his young protégé to both. Anthony learned the technical craft of photography. He also learned how to navigate the codes of a London where sexuality was a matter of careful signaling, where what was said in public could never match what happened in private, and where a certain kind of ambiguous charm was an asset rather than a liability.

By his mid-twenties, Anthony had his own studio at 20 Pimlico Road and a rising reputation. He was photographing actresses and debutantes, theater productions and book jackets. His portrait style was more natural than the formal work of his contemporaries. He would coax his subjects into unusual positions, encourage them to laugh, catch them in moments of apparent candor that were in fact carefully engineered.

People liked his pictures, and they liked him. Commissions multiplied. Magazine editors sought him out. By 1956, when he was only twenty-six, he had already published his first book of photographs, a collection simply titled London.

What most people didn’t see was the full complexity of his private life. Among the young women working at the Pimlico Road studio, there was a widespread assumption that Tony was gay. His own response, as recorded by his authorized biographer Anne de Courcy, was characteristically sly. He said he had not fallen in love with boys, but that a few men had been in love with him.

The phrasing was deliberate. It acknowledged something without defining it, left room for interpretation, and carried the caution of a man who had learned, from a long adolescence of hiding things, that silence and implication are safer than disclosure. One of those men, according to public claims made years later, was Nicky Haslam. In his 2009 memoir Redeeming Features, the celebrated British interior designer wrote that he had a brief romance with Anthony in 1959, the year before the royal engagement was announced.

Haslam said he had first met Anthony in 1955, when he was sixteen, and that the affair began four years later. He described Anthony as dazzlingly attractive. He also claimed, in the same memoir, that Anthony had been the lover of Tom Parr, another prominent figure in the world of interior design, who later ran the celebrated firm Colefax and Fowler. Snowdon initially denied Haslam’s claim when contacted by the Daily Mail, saying it was not true as far as he was concerned, and he should know.

Two days later, the same newspaper quoted him telling a friend that Nicky had a book out and needed to sell it, and that he really didn’t mind. The Dictionary of National Biography, the standard British reference work, identifies Snowdon as bisexual, a label he never publicly denied during his life. His closest and most significant male friendship, however, was not with Haslam or Parr. It was with Jeremy Fry, heir to the Fry chocolate fortune and a skilled inventor who would later design the famous Rotork actuators used in industrial engineering.

In 1952, Fry had been convicted of what the law of the time called a homosexual offense, a conviction that carried serious social consequences. Anthony remained loyal to him. Anthony also became deeply entangled with Jeremy’s wife, Camilla. The exact shape of that triangle has been the subject of careful biographical writing, but one fact is beyond dispute.

In the summer of 1959, Anthony and Camilla Fry conceived a child. That child, Polly Fry, was born on the 28th of May, 1960, three weeks after Anthony married Princess Margaret. She was raised as Jeremy Fry’s daughter. She grew up in the Fry household.

She had no reason to doubt her parentage for most of her adult life. It would be another forty-four years before a DNA test revealed the truth. Princess Margaret Rose was born on the 21st of August, 1930, making her only months older than the man she would eventually marry. She was the younger daughter of the Duke and Duchess of York.

In the normal course of history, her life would have unfolded as a minor royal career, with charitable work, a suitable marriage, and a comfortable and relatively private adulthood. But in December 1936, when Margaret was six years old, her uncle, Edward VIII, abdicated the throne to marry the twice-divorced American Wallis Simpson. Her father, who had never expected to be king, became George VI. Her sister, Elizabeth, who had never expected to be queen, became the heir.

Margaret, almost overnight, became a figure of international interest, the younger sister of the future monarch, permanently in the spotlight but also permanently in second place. She adored her father. He was a shy, stuttering man who had taken on a role he never wanted, and he found in his younger daughter a lightness and humor that comforted him. He famously called Elizabeth his pride and Margaret his joy.

When her father died of lung cancer in February 1952, Margaret was only twenty-one, and the loss shattered her. Elizabeth was proclaimed queen while she was still on a royal tour in Kenya. Margaret, grieving and unmoored, began spending more time with Group Captain Peter Townsend, her father’s equerry. He was sixteen years her senior, a decorated Battle of Britain pilot who had served the family faithfully for years.

He was also married. By 1952, his marriage was failing, and in 1953 he was divorced. Their romance became one of the defining scandals of the early Elizabethan age. Townsend proposed to Margaret in 1953.

She wanted to accept. Everything about the situation made it impossible. Townsend was a divorced man, and her sister was the supreme governor of the Church of England, which at the time still held that marriage after divorce was not possible for its adherents. The uncle whose abdication had transformed her family’s life had made the same kind of choice, and the establishment was determined it would not happen again.

Margaret was told she could marry Townsend only by renouncing her royal status, her income, and her place in the line of succession. In October 1955, she issued a public statement that became one of the most famous texts of the era. She would not marry Townsend. She had chosen, in her words, duty to the Commonwealth and to the teachings of the church over personal happiness.

The press called it a great sacrifice. Her friends knew it had broken something in her that would never entirely heal. She met Anthony Armstrong-Jones in February 1958 at a dinner party given by her friend Lady Elizabeth Cavendish. Anthony had already photographed her once for her twenty-ninth birthday portraits earlier the same month, but the dinner was where they actually connected.

She was, by many accounts and by her own later admission, initially convinced he was gay. He was flamboyant, witty, surrounded by artistic people. She enjoyed his company without any sense of being pursued or pursuing. That changed over the course of the following year.

It changed completely. For almost two years, they conducted their courtship in secret. Margaret would slip out of Kensington Palace in a headscarf and dark glasses, sometimes carrying a small bag, always arranging to be dropped somewhere indirect. She would be driven to an alleyway near his Pimlico studio or to the small flat he had access to in Rotherhithe on the Thames, where they could be alone.

The flat was in a converted building on the river. At high tide, swans floated past the window. She would cook simple meals there and do the washing up in rubber gloves. It was, by the standards of her life, astonishingly ordinary, and she loved it for that.

Anthony proposed in 1959. The engagement was announced in February 1960. The wedding followed on the 6th of May. Margaret was radiantly happy, in a way her friends had not seen her for years.

She believed she had found, at last, her great love. She did not know that less than two weeks earlier, Camilla Fry had given birth to Anthony’s daughter. The early months of the marriage were, by most accounts, genuinely happy. Margaret was delighted with her new husband.

Anthony threw himself into royal life with apparent enthusiasm. They set up home in apartments at Kensington Palace. They entertained friends. They traveled.

Margaret, who had been rattling around the royal family for years as a somewhat awkward second daughter, suddenly had a partnership, a shared life, a sense of purpose. Eighteen months after the wedding, in October 1961, Anthony was granted the title Earl of Snowdon, along with the subsidiary title of Viscount Linley. Margaret was expecting their first child. She reportedly did not want to be known as Mrs.

Anthony Armstrong-Jones, and the peerage solved that problem while giving her husband a hereditary title to pass on to their children. Their son, David, Viscount Linley, was born in November 1961. Their daughter, Sarah, followed in May 1964. For the first several years, the marriage appeared to work, and in important ways it did work.

The Snowdons were London’s most glamorous couple. They entertained Peter Sellers, Mick Jagger, Rudolf Nureyev, Margot Fonteyn, a parade of actors and artists and musicians and aristocrats. They hosted parties at Kensington Palace that became famous for their mix of royalty and bohemia. They were photographed constantly, always smiling, always the picture of modern marriage.

Anthony also did serious work that had nothing to do with fame. From the late 1960s, he became deeply involved in advocacy for disabled people. He designed a motorized wheelchair, the Chairmobile, which was produced and used. He campaigned for accessibility in public buildings at a time when the idea that disabled people had a right to access public spaces was still considered radical.

He produced and directed documentary films about disability and about mental illness, including a 1968 film called Don’t Count the Candles about aging, which won two Emmy Awards. This side of his life was real, sustained, and admirable. But inside Kensington Palace, something was going wrong. Anthony had not anticipated what royal life would actually require of him.

His time was no longer his own. His schedule was managed by private secretaries. His movements were tracked. He could not take a commission without it being cleared.

He could not travel freely. He could not quite be the person he had been before the marriage, and he began to resent it intensely. The cruelty of the Snowdon marriage has been documented by multiple witnesses, and the picture that emerges is remarkably consistent across sources. Lady Anne Glenconner, Princess Margaret’s closest friend and a lady-in-waiting for decades, wrote about it explicitly in her 2019 memoir Lady in Waiting.

Craig Brown’s 2017 biography Ma’am Darling: 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret records one particularly infamous example. A note left on her desk was headed “24 reasons why I hate you. ” Margaret reportedly said to a friend that she could not think of twenty-four reasons to hate anybody. The remark captures something essential about her response.

She did not understand it. She was wounded by it, but she also could not comprehend the internal logic that produced it. It was outside her emotional vocabulary. Those present at such moments have described a particular quality in Anthony’s cruelty.

It was not hot-tempered, not the kind of anger that bursts out and is then regretted. It was cold, deliberate, performed. He seemed to enjoy it. He seemed to take a particular satisfaction in humiliating his wife in front of witnesses, perhaps because her status as princess had been the thing that elevated him, and humiliating her was a way of asserting that he was not, in fact, elevated, that he was still the man he had been before.

There was another dimension that made it particularly difficult for Margaret to respond. Anthony was extremely charming in public. At dinner parties, he was witty and attentive and generous with his conversational energy. To outsiders, he often appeared to be the more sympathetic partner, the creative soul being dragged down by the demands of his wife’s royal position.

He performed the role of good husband with such skill that when Margaret tried to describe to friends what was actually happening at home, she sometimes struggled to be believed. The gap between his public persona and his private behavior was vast, and it isolated her. Margaret began to drink more. She had always enjoyed whiskey and cigarettes, but during the 1960s and early 1970s, the drinking became heavier and more constant.

Her smoking, already substantial, became extreme. She would smoke sixty cigarettes a day. The bright, witty young princess of the 1950s began to develop a harder, more brittle edge. Her famous wit, which had once delighted people, now often cut.

Her famous hauteur, which had once been charming, now often wounded. She was becoming someone she had not been before, and the change was visible to those who loved her. While this was happening at home, Anthony was conducting an extraordinary parallel life outside the marriage. Anne de Courcy’s authorized biography confirms what had long been rumored among those who knew the couple.

A close friend’s summary of Anthony’s sexual behavior, quoted by de Courcy, was blunt: “If it moves, he’ll have it. ” The documented affairs from the marriage years are extensive and often overlapping. Anthony had been involved with the actress Jackie Chan before his marriage, and the relationship did not entirely end when he married Margaret. He had been involved with Gina Ward, another actress, and that relationship also lingered.

There were models he met through fashion shoots. There were assistants. There were journalists he encountered on assignments. There were society women at parties.

De Courcy’s biography describes a succession of relationships that essentially never stopped across the seventeen years of the marriage. The most significant affair of the middle marriage period was with Lady Jacqueline Rufus Isaacs, daughter of the third Marquess of Reading. Anthony had known her family for years. Jacqueline was strikingly beautiful, twenty-one years old in 1968 when the affair began in earnest, and working in the Yves Saint Laurent shop in London.

She was eighteen years younger than Anthony. Their affair, by de Courcy’s account, was passionate and sustained. They met secretly, often using code words to arrange rendezvous. Anthony would phone the shop and ask for his Lady Jacqueline.

They managed to keep the relationship out of the newspapers for a surprisingly long time, partly because they were careful and partly because the British press of the period still observed conventions about what could be reported regarding royal private lives. There was also Anne Hills, with whom Anthony maintained a relationship, by de Courcy’s account, for roughly twenty years. Hills was a journalist. The relationship overlapped with his marriage to Margaret and then with his subsequent marriage.

It was not a secret among those who knew Anthony well. Hills died in 1997 in circumstances that were reported as suicide. Then there were the relationships with men, which the palace had to manage with particular care. These included the claims made publicly by Nicky Haslam about a 1959 affair, the continuing close friendship with Jeremy Fry across multiple decades, the alleged relationship with Tom Parr, and other associations that biographers have described using careful coded language.

The Dictionary of National Biography’s matter-of-fact identification of Snowdon as bisexual reflects the general view among those who knew him best. Anthony himself never categorically denied the label. Margaret knew. She could not have avoided knowing.

Palace staff knew. Courtiers knew. Friends knew. And the institution made a quiet collective decision that it would not allow any of this to become publicly admitted.

Margaret was not, by the mid-1960s, faithful to her marriage either. Her situation was different from Anthony’s in important ways. She had married a man who was already conducting multiple affairs. She had been humiliated privately for years before she sought any consolation of her own.

And she was trapped in a position where the options available to any ordinary woman in a bad marriage were not available to her. She could not walk out. She could not publicly confront. She could not even really confide openly.

Everything had to be managed. Her relationship with Anthony Barton, a wine maker in Bordeaux and an old friend of Anthony’s, began in 1966. According to de Courcy’s biography, Anthony had actually pushed Barton toward Margaret. He had asked Barton to keep Margaret company while he was traveling for work.

One of Anthony’s friends later told de Courcy that when you are playing the field yourself, it eases your conscience if your spouse is also straying. There was in this arrangement an almost deliberate quality, as though Anthony were constructing the conditions of his own exoneration. The affair was brief, but it marked a turning point for Margaret. It was the first time she had crossed the line.

After that, the terms of the marriage were different, even if the appearances remained the same. The following year, on the 15th of October 1968, Robin Douglas-Home was found dead at his home in West Chiltington, Sussex. He had taken an overdose of sodium amytal, a barbiturate, combined with alcohol. He was thirty-six years old.

His mother attributed his death to clinical depression, which he had suffered from for years and which had worsened recently because he had become convinced his brain function was deteriorating. His romance with Margaret was not the cause of his death, but it was part of the context of his final years, and Margaret carried the weight of it privately for the rest of her life. There were other briefer relationships through the late 1960s and early 1970s. None of them were more than episodes.

Margaret was not really seeking affairs. She was seeking relief, companionship, some small corner of her life that was not defined by her husband’s cruelty and her own institutional trap. What she found in those years was not happiness. It was only temporary distraction from unhappiness.

In September 1973, at a house party at the Scottish estate of her friend Colin Tennant, who would later become the third Baron Glenconner, Margaret met Roddy Llewellyn. He was twenty-five, she was forty-three. He was the son of the Olympic equestrian Sir Harry Llewellyn, a would-be landscape gardener with long hair and an easy laugh. He was, crucially, kind to her.

He listened to her. He did not humiliate her in public or leave cruel notes in her books. Their relationship deepened over the following years, much of it conducted on the Caribbean island of Mustique, where Margaret had built a villa called Les Jolies Eaux on land given to her as a wedding present by the Tennants. Mustique was, by the early 1970s, a private island resort developed by Colin Tennant into a refuge for wealthy guests and celebrities.

Mick Jagger owned a house there. David Bowie would later own one. The island was remote, accessible only by small boat or plane, and it offered something genuinely rare in Margaret’s life: privacy. She was happy there.

Those who visited her on Mustique during this period describe a different woman from the one who existed in London. She wore caftans and went barefoot. She swam in the sea. She hosted informal dinners on the beach.

She laughed more than she had laughed in years. Roddy was not, perhaps, a serious love in the sense her father had been or Townsend had been. He was something else. He was relief.

He was evidence that another kind of life was still possible for her, that she was still capable of being loved without being punished. In February 1976, the arrangement collapsed. A photographer for the News of the World, a British tabloid specializing in sensational reporting, had managed to infiltrate Mustique. He had traveled there on a tourist pretext, watched Margaret’s villa, and waited for his moment.

The photograph he eventually took showed Margaret and Roddy in swimwear sitting together at a beachside table with Colin Tennant’s estate manager and another guest. The two other people in the photograph were cropped out before publication. The image that ran on the front page was of the forty-five-year-old princess and her twenty-eight-year-old lover. The reaction was ferocious.

Members of Parliament called for Margaret to lose her civil list income, the public funding that supported her royal duties. Newspapers denounced her in editorial language that would have been unthinkable a decade earlier. One Labour MP called her a royal parasite. Others demanded that she be reprimanded by the Queen.

The press coverage continued for weeks. Anthony, who was in Australia on a photography assignment with Lucy Lindsay-Hogg when the story broke, saw the opportunity the scandal presented. Before the palace could release a coordinated statement, he went to the press himself. He expressed his regret at the breakdown of the marriage.

He positioned himself as the dignified, wounded husband, a man who had tried his best against impossible odds. The framing worked. The public narrative that emerged blamed Margaret. And de Courcy’s biography reports that most people, including much of the royal family, took Anthony’s side.

What the public did not know, and what did not enter the discussion, was that Anthony had been conducting a long-running affair with Lucy Lindsay-Hogg for years. What the public did not know was that he had fathered a child before the marriage even began. What the public did not know was that his private life continued to include multiple ongoing relationships with women and, by many accounts, men. The cover that had been erected before the wedding was still holding, even as the marriage it had been designed to protect was visibly ending.

The separation was announced on the 19th of March 1976. The divorce was finalized on the 11th of July 1978. It was the first divorce of a senior royal since Henry VIII, and it happened essentially on Anthony’s preferred terms. On the 15th of December 1978, just over five months after the divorce, Anthony married Lucy Lindsay-Hogg at Kensington and Chelsea Register Office.

Their daughter, Lady Frances Armstrong-Jones, was born in July 1979. On the surface, it looked like a quieter, more settled life. The Kensington Palace apartments were exchanged for a more ordinary kind of London existence. It was not, however, a faithful marriage.

Anthony continued his pattern of affairs, including the long relationship with Anne Hills. And in 1998, the pattern produced another public scandal. Anthony fathered another child with another woman. The woman was Melanie Cable-Alexander, an editor at Country Life magazine.

The son, Jasper William Oliver Cable-Alexander, was born that year. The revelation effectively ended Anthony’s second marriage. He and Lucy separated and were divorced in 2000. Five children across two marriages and two outside relationships, fathered across nearly forty years.

A private life that, according to decades of reporting and his own authorized biography, involved a continuing pattern of affairs with both women and, by multiple accounts, men. In 2004, the story of Polly Fry finally broke into public view. The Sunday Telegraph reported that Snowdon had fathered an illegitimate daughter shortly before his marriage to Princess Margaret. Polly Fry, who had grown up believing Jeremy Fry was her father, had pursued the question as an adult.

She stated that a DNA test had confirmed Snowdon as her biological father. The initial response was denial. Jeremy Fry, who was still alive, rejected the claim. Snowdon told reporters he had never taken a DNA test.

Polly Fry stood by her account. For four years, the story sat in the public record as an unresolved dispute, with Polly’s assertion on one side and Snowdon’s denial on the other. This was the deepest layer of the cover-up, and the one that most clearly reveals how the system worked. Jeremy Fry had raised Polly as his own daughter for decades.

Camilla Fry had kept the secret through her entire marriage and beyond. Anthony had married Princess Margaret without ever telling her, and everyone who had any reason to suspect the truth had, for decades, said nothing. The child who was the living evidence of the deception grew up without knowing until she was in her forties who her father actually was. The question of what the palace actually knew, and when, can only be partly answered from public sources.

The royal household does not release its internal security files. The people who worked in positions of sensitivity during the 1960s and 1970s have, for the most part, maintained their discretion to the end of their lives. The archives that might someday open are still closed. But the general shape of what was known and managed can be reconstructed from the biographical record.

The palace knew before the wedding that Anthony had a complicated sexual history, including relationships that in 1960 were still criminal under English law. The palace knew Jeremy Fry could not be best man and arranged the substitution. The palace knew Jeremy Thorpe had similar vulnerabilities. The palace knew, throughout the marriage, about the affairs with women, because the Queen’s private office was kept informed of anything that might generate press coverage.

De Courcy’s biography, written with Snowdon’s cooperation after Margaret’s death, discusses these matters with a candor that would have been impossible during Margaret’s lifetime. It reflects a level of internal knowledge that clearly extended to Margaret’s ladies-in-waiting, to Glenconner, to the wider royal circle. Glenconner’s own 2019 memoir confirms that she knew a great deal, that she watched the marriage unfold from a position close enough to see the notes and hear the tears and witness the slow damage. The institution was not ignorant.

The institution was discreet. So the pattern became one of protection by omission. Official statements were carefully worded. Biographies published during Margaret’s lifetime hinted but did not state.

Journalists who pressed too hard were redirected, sometimes through quiet words to editors, sometimes through direct legal pressure. Memoirs from palace insiders were vetted. The truth filtered out slowly over decades, arriving in fragments in later memoirs and in the authorized biography, and eventually in the Dictionary of National Biography’s neutral acknowledgement of bisexuality. There is one more dimension to the cover-up worth noting, and it is perhaps the most uncomfortable.

The protection extended to Anthony also functioned, in a certain limited sense, as protection of Margaret. If the full truth of Anthony’s behavior had been publicly exposed in 1965 or 1970, Margaret would have been destroyed. She would have been the publicly humiliated wife of a serially unfaithful and privately cruel husband whose sexual life had been revealed in tabloid detail. The palace chose a slower erosion over a sudden catastrophe.

Whether this was actually the kind choice, given what the slow erosion did to Margaret over the course of seventeen years, is a question the biographical record cannot fully answer. Margaret lived for twenty-six years after the divorce. She never remarried. Her relationship with Roddy Llewellyn evolved into a lasting friendship after their romance ended.

He married Tania Soskin in 1981. Margaret would have attended the wedding had she not been on an official visit to Canada. The Queen herself reportedly acknowledged, in private, that Roddy had been good for Margaret during a difficult period of her life, a recognition that came too late to mean anything in public terms but that mattered to those who cared about Margaret. But Margaret never fully recovered from the marriage.

Her health declined through the 1980s and 1990s. She had been a heavy smoker for most of her adult life, and she drank steadily. In 1985, she had surgery to remove part of her left lung. She suffered a nervous breakdown in the same period.

In 1993, she was admitted to hospital for pneumonia. In 1998, while on holiday in Mustique, she suffered a mild stroke. She had further strokes in 2001 that left her partially paralyzed and visually impaired. She appeared in public for the last time at her aunt Princess Alice’s hundredth birthday celebrations in December 2001, in a wheelchair and wearing dark glasses.

She died at King Edward VII’s Hospital in London on the 9th of February 2002, at the age of seventy-one. Her funeral was held at St. George’s Chapel, Windsor, the same day the Queen Mother was celebrating her hundred and first birthday. The Queen Mother would die herself seven weeks later.

The royal family lost two generations of women in rapid succession. At Margaret’s funeral, both Anthony and Roddy Llewellyn were present, the two men she had loved most intensely in her adult life. One of whom had nearly destroyed her, and one of whom had quietly saved her from the worst of that destruction, stood together in Windsor to mark her passing. Margaret had lived a life in which the people who loved her and the people who had hurt her were often the same people, or at least people who had to be kept in the same rooms.

Anthony died at his home in Kensington on the 13th of January 2017, at the age of eighty-six. His funeral was held on the 20th of January at St. Baglan’s Church in the remote village of Llangaffan in North Wales, where he was buried in the family plot. The obituaries focused mainly on his photography, with careful and relatively muted references to his marriages and affairs.

The full picture, the picture that had emerged slowly through de Courcy’s biography and Haslam’s memoir and Glenconner’s later account and the DNA revelation, was present in the record but not centrally framed. He was remembered primarily as an artist. Princess Margaret is buried at the royal burial ground at Frogmore, her ashes placed near her parents. She had lived seventy-one years.

She had been Britain’s favorite glamorous princess, then its most scandalous royal, then a figure of diminishing public interest, then a quiet invalid, then a memory. Of her adult years, perhaps the happiest had been the ones she spent quietly and briefly on a small Caribbean island with a young man who was simply kind to her. Anthony Armstrong-Jones was a man of real talent. His photography was often extraordinary.

His advocacy for disability rights was genuine and consequential, and improved lives that had nothing to do with his fame. He was capable of charm so effective that people who knew his worst behavior still found themselves drawn to him. These things are also true, and any honest account has to include them. But he was also a man who caused sustained and documented harm to his wife over a period of seventeen years.

He left her notes telling her he hated her. He conducted affairs in numbers so large that even his authorized biographer found them hard to enumerate completely. He fathered a child with his best friend’s wife while courting a princess, and allowed that child to be raised in ignorance of her true parentage for more than four decades. He maintained a hidden second life that included, by a considerable weight of evidence, relationships with both women and men, and used the institutional discretion of the British monarchy as protective cover for behavior that, if exposed in his own time, would have destroyed him.

The palace covered it, not through any single conspiracy, but through the accumulated weight of a thousand small discretions across decades. Jeremy Fry was quietly removed from the wedding. Journalists were redirected. Biographies published during Margaret’s lifetime carried their revelations in coded language.

Statements were worded carefully. The truth came out slowly, over decades, in pieces small enough that by the time they assembled into something resembling the full picture, most of the people who might have been scandalized by any single revelation were gone. The story of Lord Snowdon is not a simple story of a bad marriage. It is a story about how institutions manage inconvenient truths, and about how the people closest to the center of those truths pay the cost of the management.

A woman who gave her life to an institution, who was failed by a man who should have loved her better, and who was protected from the worst of the truth by the same institution whose rules had already cost her, years earlier, the man she had wanted to marry in the first place. The cover held during her lifetime. Most of it held during his.

What remains in the public record now 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, for reasons that seemed compelling at the time and seem less so now, to let it continue.