# The Wedding That Was Doomed From the Start

The bride was nearly thirty minutes late. Princess Margaret, dressed in a gown of silk organza that had been deliberately cut with a simple line so her small frame would not be swallowed by the vastness of Westminster Abbey, stepped from the glass coach to the roar of a crowd that had camped overnight on the pavements of London. Flags lined the route. Souvenir mugs and tea towels bearing the faces of the royal couple had sold out across the city.

By most estimates, three hundred million people around the world were watching on television—the first great royal wedding of the television age. The groom waiting at the altar was a thirty-year-old society photographer named Anthony Armstrong Jones. He was slim, dark-haired, witty, and entirely unlike anyone the British royal family had ever welcomed in. He had no title.

He worked for a living. He took pictures of actors and dancers and debutantes, and he lived in a studio in Pimlico. Newspapers described it with a mixture of delight and disbelief as the first time in centuries that a king’s daughter had married a commoner. To the country, it looked like a love match that had broken every old rule.

After the heartbreak that everyone knew the princess had suffered only a few years earlier, here at last was the younger sister of the Queen marrying for love. Nobody in the abbey knew that the wedding had already come close to disaster before it even began. Weeks earlier, the man Armstrong Jones had chosen as his best man—a close friend named Jeremy Fry—had quietly withdrawn. Fry had a minor conviction from several years earlier, connected to his private life, at a time when relationships between men were still illegal in Britain, and it had been decided that he could not stand at the altar at a royal wedding.

A doctor friend named Roger Gilliatt stepped in at the last minute. And there was something else. Something that would stay hidden for more than forty years. Fry’s wife, Camilla, was pregnant.

Within weeks of the royal wedding, she gave birth to a daughter named Polly. Decades later, in 2004, a DNA test confirmed what a few insiders had long whispered. The child’s father was Anthony Armstrong Jones. He had been involved with his best man’s wife during the very months when he was courting the queen’s sister.

So as the bride made her vows in front of the world, the groom was standing on top of a secret that could have brought the whole occasion crashing down. Nobody in the abbey knew. The princess almost certainly did not know either. She had her own reasons for choosing this man, and they had very little to do with him.

—

Margaret Rose was born on the 21st of August 1930 at Glamis Castle in Scotland, the ancestral home of her mother’s family. Her father was Prince Albert, Duke of York—a shy, decent man with a stammer who never expected to be king. Her mother was Elizabeth, Duchess of York, warm and charming and much tougher than she looked. Her sister, Elizabeth, known in the family as Lilibet, was four years older.

For the first six years of her life, it was a quiet, almost ordinary upbringing by royal standards, in a townhouse at 145 Piccadilly with a Scottish governess the girls called Crawfie. Then in December 1936, everything changed. Their uncle, King Edward VIII, gave up the throne to marry an American divorcée, Wallis Simpson. Their father became King George VI overnight, and their sister became heir to the throne.

Margaret was six years old. Lilibet was now being prepared for the crown. Margaret was not being prepared for anything in particular. She was the spare, and she made up for it by being the most delightful, mischievous child in the house.

She sang. She did impressions of visiting dignitaries. She played the piano by ear, and she had a quick, sharp wit that made everyone laugh. Her father adored her.

He famously described his elder daughter as his pride and his younger daughter as his joy. She was allowed to get away with things her sister never would have dreamed of. During the Second World War, the girls spent much of their time at Windsor Castle, where they put on Christmas pantomimes, and Margaret was always the star. By the time she was a teenager, she had grown into a strikingly beautiful young woman—petite, with enormous blue eyes and a flawless complexion.

She loved everything her sister was cautious about: parties, dancing, jazz, nightclubs, late nights, cigarettes in long holders. After the war, when Britain was gray and rationed and exhausted, she became a kind of symbol of glamour and fun. Photographers followed her everywhere. Newspapers linked her to one eligible young aristocrat after another.

But none of those well-born young men was the one she fell for. The man she actually loved was already inside the palace walls. He was married. He was sixteen years older than her.

And he worked for her father. —

His name was Peter Townsend. He had been one of the heroes of the Battle of Britain in 1940—a fighter pilot in the Royal Air Force who had shot down enemy aircraft over the English coast and had been wounded in combat. He was tall, handsome, gentle, and softly spoken.

He was exactly the kind of man that wartime Britain admired most. In 1944, he was appointed an equerry to King George VI, which meant he became one of the king’s personal attendants—traveling with him, organizing his days, and living in close contact with the royal family. The king, himself a shy man, liked him enormously. Townsend’s calm manner and quiet courage appealed to him, and over the years the king came to treat him almost like a son.

Townsend was married. His wife was named Rosemary, and they had two young sons. When he joined the royal household, Princess Margaret was just fourteen. Over the following years, she grew up with him around.

He accompanied the family on their long tour of South Africa in 1947, and on those rides across the veldt, the seventeen-year-old princess and the war hero spent a great deal of time together. By the end of the 1940s, his own marriage was falling apart, and her feelings for him were deepening into something serious. Then, on the 6th of February 1952, King George VI died in his sleep at Sandringham. He was only fifty-six.

Margaret was twenty-one, and she was devastated. She had lost the person who had always made her feel special. Her sister became queen at the age of twenty-five and was suddenly consumed by the duties of the crown. Her mother, grieving, withdrew to Scotland for a time.

The one person who seemed to understand what she was going through was Townsend, who had moved to her mother’s household. Later that year, his divorce went through. By early 1953, he and Margaret told the new queen that they were in love and wanted to marry. The queen was sympathetic.

She was fond of both of them. But the situation was enormously complicated, and it was complicated in a very specific way. The Church of England, of which the monarch is the head, did not allow a divorced person to remarry in church while their former spouse was still alive. Townsend’s former wife was very much alive.

And only seventeen years earlier, the family had been shaken to its foundations when a king gave up the throne to marry a divorced woman. The abdication was still a raw wound. The idea of the king’s daughter marrying a divorced man was, to many people in the palace and in government, unthinkable. There was also a law standing in the way.

Under an old piece of legislation called the Royal Marriages Act, passed back in 1772, members of the royal family under the age of twenty-five needed the monarch’s permission to marry. Margaret was twenty-two. The queen asked the couple to wait. —

On Coronation Day, the 2nd of June 1953, the secret slipped out in the smallest possible way.

Outside Westminster Abbey, as the royal party waited, photographers noticed the princess reach up and brush a piece of fluff from the front of Townsend’s uniform. It was a tiny, intimate gesture—the kind of thing a woman does for the man she loves—and it went around the world. Within days, the foreign press had the story. The British newspapers soon followed.

The palace’s answer to the problem was simple: separate them and hope the feeling fades. A waiting game. That summer, the princess traveled with her mother on a tour of Southern Rhodesia, in what is now Zimbabwe. Before she left, she and Townsend said goodbye at Clarence House, and she was reassured that he would still be in Britain when she came home.

He was not. While she was away, he was posted abroad as an air attaché at the British embassy in Brussels, and he left the country before she returned. She came home to find him gone. For the next two years, they were kept apart, with only letters and telephone calls between them.

The plan was simple: let time do its work. But there was one date they were both waiting for. On the 21st of August 1955, Margaret would turn twenty-five. Under the Royal Marriages Act, she would no longer need her sister’s permission.

She could give formal notice, and unless Parliament objected within a year, she could go ahead. As that summer came round, the whole country was waiting too. Newspapers ran countdowns. Crowds gathered outside Balmoral on her birthday.

The question was on every front page: Would she marry him? In October 1955, Townsend came back to London, and the frenzy became almost unbearable. Photographers camped outside every house they visited, and every glimpse of the two of them together was reported in detail. Opinion polls suggested that much of the public wanted her to marry the man she loved.

But the government, the church, and a large part of the establishment did not. The prime minister at the time was Sir Anthony Eden, who was himself divorced and remarried—a detail that did not go unnoticed. His cabinet discussed the situation, and it was made clear to the princess that the path would not be simple. By the accounts that have come out since, she understood that marrying Townsend would mean giving up her place in the line of succession and marrying in a civil ceremony rather than in church.

She feared it could mean losing her official role and the income that came with it. Papers released many decades later suggested the government may have been prepared to be more flexible about her title and allowance than she believed at the time. But what mattered in October 1955 was what she was told, and what she believed. —

On the 31st of October 1955, she issued a short public statement.

In it, she said that she had decided not to marry Peter Townsend. She explained that she was mindful of the church’s teaching that marriage was for life and conscious of her duty to the Commonwealth. She said she had reached the decision entirely alone. She thanked the public for their concern and their good wishes.

The statement was written in her own words, carefully worded so that nobody else could be blamed. But everybody understood what it meant. The princess had been asked to choose between the man she loved and the life she had been born into, and she had chosen duty. Townsend left on a long journey around the world.

She went back to official engagements and late-night parties, and for the next few years she seemed to many people restless and unhappy. What nobody knew was that in the middle of that restlessness, she was quietly meeting someone entirely different. And the moment that pushed her into his arms would arrive in the form of a single letter. —

Anthony Charles Robert Armstrong Jones was born on the 7th of March 1930 in London, which made him just five months older than the princess.

His background was comfortable and artistic, but it was not happy. His father, Ronald Armstrong Jones, was a barrister. His mother, Anne Messel, came from a wealthy and creative family—her brother was the celebrated stage designer Oliver Messel. His parents divorced when he was a small boy, and his mother remarried, becoming the Countess of Rosse and having two more sons.

By many accounts, she lavished affection on her new family and was distant toward the children of her first marriage. At the age of sixteen, while he was a pupil at Eton, he caught polio. He spent months in a hospital in Liverpool, and by the account he gave later in life, his mother hardly came to see him at all. His sister Susan was one of the few people who visited regularly.

The illness left him with one leg shorter than the other and a slight limp that he carried for the rest of his life. That experience seems to have left a mark on him in more ways than one. People who knew him well described a man who could be enormously charming and funny, and who also had a cold, guarded streak—a way of keeping people at a distance and sometimes turning on those closest to him. He went on to Jesus College, Cambridge, to study architecture.

He did not do much studying. What he did do was row for Cambridge to victory over Oxford in the Boat Race of 1950. Shortly afterwards, he failed his exams and left the university without a degree. His family was unimpressed when he announced he wanted to become a photographer, which at the time was not considered a particularly respectable career for a young man of his background.

He went to work as an assistant to Baron, one of the best-known society photographers in London, and then set up on his own in a small studio in Pimlico. He was very good. Instead of stiff, formal portraits, his subjects jumped, laughed, and moved. His pictures of theater stars and dancers filled the magazines.

By the late 1950s, he had even been asked to take official photographs of members of the royal family, including portraits of the queen’s children. He lived in a bohemian world of artists, writers, designers, and dancers—a world where people slept late, drank, argued about ideas, and had love affairs with both men and women. It was about as far from palace life as it was possible to get. —

In February 1958, at a small dinner party given by a friend, Lady Elizabeth Cavendish, he was seated near Princess Margaret.

She was fascinated. He did not bow and scrape. He teased her. He talked about things she knew nothing about.

He treated her not as a princess, but as a woman. Soon they were meeting in secret. He had the use of a small, shabby room in an old building on the River Thames at Rotherhithe, in the working docklands of East London. There, far from the palaces, the two of them could cook simple suppers, drink wine, watch the barges go by on the river, and behave like any young couple.

For a woman who had spent her entire life under watch, it was intoxicating. Remarkably, the press never found out. Then, in the autumn of 1959, a letter arrived for her. It was from Peter Townsend.

He was writing to tell her personally, before she read it anywhere else, that he was going to marry again. His bride was a young Belgian woman named Mari-Louise Jamagne, still in her early twenties. According to those close to her, she received that letter, and that same evening she decided to accept Armstrong Jones. —

The engagement was kept secret for weeks.

Part of the reason was timing. The queen was expecting her third child, and it would not have been proper to announce the news before the baby arrived. Prince Andrew was born on the 19th of February 1960. A week later, on the 26th of February, the engagement was announced from Clarence House.

The country was astonished. Almost nobody had heard of Anthony Armstrong Jones, and the handful who had knew him as a fashionable young photographer. The idea that he was about to marry the queen’s sister seemed unbelievable. Some members of the aristocracy were openly disdainful.

His bohemian friends were equally surprised, and several wondered privately how someone so independent would cope with life inside the royal family. There were also questions about the princess’s motives. It had been only weeks since Townsend’s wedding. People who knew her well suspected that at least part of what drew her to this marriage was the wish to show the world—and perhaps the man in Belgium—that she had moved on.

That suspicion has followed the marriage ever since. But none of that was visible on the 6th of May 1960, when the two of them stood on the balcony of Buckingham Palace and waved to the cheering crowds below. —

The honeymoon was spent on board the royal yacht *Britannia*, cruising around the Caribbean for six weeks. One of their stops was a small, almost undeveloped island in the Grenadines called Mustique.

It belonged to an eccentric aristocrat and old friend of the princess named Colin Tennant, and as a wedding present, he gave her a plot of land there. Over the following years, she built a villa on it called Les Jolies Eaux, designed by her new husband’s uncle, Oliver Messel. The island would become her refuge—and later the setting for the scandal that ended the marriage. When they returned, the couple settled into life in Kensington Palace.

At first, Armstrong Jones refused a title. He wanted to keep working as a photographer, and he did not want to be seen as a man who had married his way into the aristocracy. But in October 1961, shortly before their first child was born, he accepted the title of Earl of Snowdon. From then on, the world knew them as Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon.

Their son, David, was born on the 3rd of November 1961. Their daughter, Lady Sarah, followed on the 1st of May 1964. For those first years, they were the most glamorous couple in Britain. It was the beginning of the 1960s, and London was about to become the most exciting city in the world—the London of the Beatles, Mary Quant, the miniskirt, Carnaby Street, and a new generation of photographers, actors, and designers who did not care about class or birth.

The princess and her husband were at the very center of it. They went to theater first nights and threw parties at Kensington Palace, where royalty mixed with pop stars, comedians, and film actors. The comedian Peter Sellers became a close friend. For a while, it seemed the royal family had finally joined the modern world, and it was the princess and her photographer husband who had brought them into it.

Lord Snowdon kept working, and his work was often remarkable. In 1962, he became an artistic adviser to the new *Sunday Times* magazine, and over the years he produced serious photographic essays on subjects such as mental illness, poverty, and old age. He helped design a large, striking aviary for London Zoo that still stands today. In 1969, he was put in charge of designing the investiture of Prince Charles as Prince of Wales at Caernarfon Castle—a ceremony watched by millions.

But even in those early years, there were signs of trouble. He was often away working. When he was at home, he would disappear for hours into his darkroom. He had a cottage in Sussex on the Nymans estate that had belonged to his mother’s family, and he spent more and more time there.

She liked to stay up late and sleep late, surrounded by friends and cigarettes and whiskey. He liked to work. She was used to deference, even from her husband. He hated being told what to do.

By the middle of the 1960s, the quarrels that had once looked like playful teasing were becoming something much darker. —

It was never a gentle marriage, but around the mid-1960s, it became a cruel one. People who spent time with them described arguments that started over nothing and escalated quickly, often in front of guests. They could both be wounding.

She could be imperious and cutting, reminding him who she was. He could be cold, sarcastic, and deliberately hurtful, and he seemed to know exactly where to aim. Then there were the notes. According to his biographers, Lord Snowdon began leaving written messages for his wife in places where he knew she would find them—tucked between the pages of the books she was reading, left among her gloves, or placed in the drawers of her desk.

They were not love notes. They were lists of things he disliked about her. Cruel remarks about her appearance and her personality, some of them written specifically to wound. She would open a book in the evening, looking for her place, and find one waiting for her.

By this point, both of them were being unfaithful. Lord Snowdon had a series of relationships with other women during the marriage—some brief, some long-lasting—and his friends were not surprised. He had never pretended to be a man who belonged to only one person. The princess, too, looked elsewhere.

Around 1966, she began a relationship with a wine merchant named Anthony Barton, one of her husband’s friends and the godfather of her daughter. It caused deep bitterness when it came to light. In 1967, she became involved with Robin Douglas-Home, a pianist and a nephew of the former prime minister, Sir Alec Douglas-Home. It was a brief, intense relationship, and when it ended, he was heartbroken.

He had struggled with depression for a long time, and in 1968 he died in tragic circumstances. It was a loss that deeply affected the people around him, and it added to the darkness of those years. Within Kensington Palace, the couple began living almost separate lives—with their own friends and, increasingly, their own rooms. They still appeared together at official events and smiled for the cameras, but the public was getting only the smallest glimpse of what was really going on.

By the early 1970s, the marriage was in private all but over. She was lonely, drinking more, and often unhappy. He was spending most of his time elsewhere. They remained married largely because of their children, because of her position, and because divorce in the royal family still felt almost impossible.

And then, in the autumn of 1973, at a house party in Scotland, the princess met a young man seventeen years her junior. Within three years, a single photograph of the two of them would end the marriage in front of the whole world. —

His name was Roddy Llewellyn. He was the son of Sir Harry Llewellyn, a Welsh baronet and Olympic showjumping champion.

In September 1973, he was twenty-five years old. The princess was forty-three. They met at a house party in the Scottish Borders at Glen, the family home of her old friend Colin Tennant—the same man who had given her the land on Mustique. Llewellyn was handsome, gentle, a little lost, and interested in gardening, music, and the kind of easygoing, hippie-ish life that was fashionable among young people in the early 1970s.

He had no career to speak of and no particular ambition. By the accounts of those who knew them, he made her laugh. He looked after her. And perhaps most importantly, he did not seem to want anything from her.

After years of arguing with a husband who seemed to take pleasure in wounding her, she found him restful. Their relationship developed quickly. He began to join her at Les Jolies Eaux on Mustique, where, far from London and the photographers, they could relax together. He spent time at the villa, helped with the garden, and became part of her circle there.

At one point, the pressure of it all seemed to overwhelm him. The attention, the secrecy, and the situation he found himself in reportedly became too much, and he fled abroad for a time before returning. The relationship survived. Friends knew, and people on the island knew.

But in the mid-1970s, the British press still observed a certain restraint about the private lives of senior royals. As long as there was no photograph, there was no story. Then, in February 1976, there was a photograph. —

A photographer managed to take a picture of the princess and Roddy Llewellyn sitting together at a beach bar on Mustique, both in their swimming costumes.

The original image reportedly included other people from their group, but it was cropped so that it showed only the two of them. On the 22nd of February 1976, it appeared on the front page of the *News of the World*. The effect was explosive. The queen’s sister, married to the Earl of Snowdon, was pictured on holiday on a tropical island with a much younger man.

The story was everywhere within hours. The palace, for the first time in the history of this marriage, would have to say something in public. What it said less than a month later would shake the royal family to its core. —

On the 19th of March 1976, Kensington Palace issued a short statement.

It announced that Princess Margaret and the Earl of Snowdon had agreed to live apart. It made clear that there were no plans for divorce proceedings. It was carefully written, formal, and brief. But it was the first time in modern memory that the marriage of such a senior member of the royal family had publicly broken down.

Much of the press turned on her with a ferocity that is hard to imagine now. She was portrayed as spoiled, lazy, and self-indulgent—a princess who lived on public money and spent it on holidays in the Caribbean with a younger lover. Some members of Parliament openly questioned whether the taxpayer should continue to fund her. Lord Snowdon, by contrast, came out of it well, at least in public.

When he spoke briefly to reporters around the time of the announcement, he appeared visibly emotional. He said he was sad, asked people to understand, spoke with love of their children, and said he hoped they would all be happy. Many people saw a dignified, wounded husband. The cruel notes, the arguments, and his own affairs were all unknown to the public.

The photograph on the beach had shown one part of the story, and one part was all the country saw. For the princess, it was a humiliating period. She was forty-five. Newspapers followed Roddy Llewellyn relentlessly, mocking his clothes, his hair, and his attempts to launch a career as a pop singer.

Cartoonists had a field day. Their two children, still young teenagers, were caught in the middle. The separation left one question hanging over everything. The royal family had lived through the abdication of 1936 precisely because a king had wanted to marry a divorced woman.

Princess Margaret had given up Peter Townsend in 1955 because he was divorced. Now, twenty years later, the princess herself was heading toward the thing she had once been told was impossible. —

In May 1978, the marriage was formally dissolved. The divorce became final in July 1978.

It was the first divorce so close to the throne in living memory. The queen’s own sister—the woman who had been told as a young woman that she could not marry a divorced man—was now divorced herself. The irony was lost on almost nobody. Lord Snowdon remarried very quickly.

In December 1978, just months after the divorce, he married Lucy Lindsay-Hogg, with whom he had been involved for some time. Their daughter, Frances, was born the following year. The princess did not remarry. She could have, in theory, but she never did.

That same year, Peter Townsend published his memoirs. In them, he wrote with warmth and discretion about his time with the royal family and his feelings for the princess, and people who read them sensed how much that old love had meant to both of them. He was living quietly in France with his wife and children by then. Roddy Llewellyn stayed with her for several more years, but he was much younger, and he wanted a family of his own.

In 1981, he married a young woman named Tatiana Soskin. By all accounts, the princess took it gracefully, and they remained friends for the rest of her life. In the years that followed, she carried out royal duties, supported dozens of charities, and escaped to Mustique whenever she could. She also had a reputation—fairly or not—as the difficult royal, the one who could be rude to people, who stood on ceremony, and who never quite found a place for herself.

Her relationship with her former husband, meanwhile, slowly thawed. They were united by their children, and in later years they could be civil and even friendly with each other at family occasions. But there were more secrets still to come out about him. And in the final years of both their lives, the full picture of what the marriage had really been would finally emerge.

—

She had smoked heavily since her teenage years, and in the end, her health paid the price. In January 1985, she had an operation to remove part of her left lung. The growth turned out not to be cancerous, but it was a warning. She cut back, but she did not stop entirely.

In February 1998, while staying at her villa on Mustique, she suffered a stroke. The following year, again on the island, she badly scalded her feet in an accident in the bath, and the injury left her unable to walk properly for a long time. More strokes followed in 2001. By then, she was often in a wheelchair.

Her eyesight was failing, and she was rarely seen in public. One of her last appearances was at a family celebration, where she looked frail and was partly hidden behind dark glasses. She died on the 9th of February 2002 at King Edward VII’s Hospital in London, at the age of seventy-one. Her funeral took place at St.

George’s Chapel, Windsor, on the 15th of February 2002—exactly fifty years to the day after the funeral of her beloved father, King George VI. At her own request, she was cremated, which was highly unusual for a member of the royal family, and her ashes were later placed in the same chapel alongside her parents. Her mother, the Queen Mother, died less than two months later, at the age of 101. Lord Snowdon attended the funeral.

Peter Townsend had died years earlier, in 1995, in France. In the early 1990s, according to those close to her, the two of them had met again privately in London for the first time in decades and had spent time talking together. What was said between them, nobody else knows. —

After the princess’s death, more of her former husband’s secrets surfaced.

In 2004, the DNA test confirmed that Polly Fry, born weeks after the royal wedding in 1960, was his daughter. It was also revealed that he had fathered a son, Jasper, born in 1998 to a journalist named Melanie Cable-Alexander, while he was still married to his second wife. His second marriage ended in separation. He also had a long relationship with a woman named Ann Hills that stretched over many years through both of his marriages.

Her death in 1996 was a very sad one, and it too became part of the story told about him in later years. Biographers later described a man who was brilliant, funny, deeply insecure, and at times capable of great cruelty to the people who loved him. He died on the 13th of January 2017, at the age of eighty-six. —

Looking back now, it is hard to find the moment when this marriage might have been saved.

She was a princess who had been raised to expect deference. He was a man who could not stand to be owned by anyone. She loved late nights, parties, and the familiar comforts of palace life. He loved his work, his freedom, and a world she could never really enter.

They were also, in their way, very much alike. Both were clever, funny, stylish, and easily bored. Both had grown up feeling that they came second—she to her sister, he to his mother’s new family. Both could be charming to strangers and wounding to each other.

Two people like that can have a thrilling love affair. They rarely have a peaceful marriage. And behind all of it stood the decision of 1955—the young princess told she could not marry the war hero she loved because he was divorced, only to end up divorced herself twenty-three years later. In the years after her marriage ended, the rules that had kept her from Townsend slowly began to change.

Within a generation, three of her sister’s four children would also go through divorces, and the royal family would learn to live with them. But that change came too late for her. Today, the old black-and-white footage of that spring day in 1960 still looks like a fairy tale. The glass coach.

The Hartnell gown. The crowds along the Mall. The tiny princess walking up the long aisle of Westminster Abbey toward the handsome young man who had made her laugh.

The whole country believed it was watching a love story finally coming right.