On the 6th of May 1960, some 300 million people watched Princess Margaret marry the photographer Anthony Armstrong-Jones, and the royal yacht Britannia carried them off on a six-week honeymoon. But three weeks in, a baby girl was born. Her mother was Camilla Fry, the wife of one of the groom’s close friends. Her father, a DNA test would show more than forty years later, was the groom himself.

The child had been conceived while he was engaged to the queen’s sister. It was only the first thing the fairy tale was hiding. The marriage had been built on a sacrifice that came first. A princess of 25 had put her name to a statement on the last day of October 1955 that ended the only love she had chosen.

Princess Margaret Rose was born on the 21st of August 1930 at Glamis Castle in Angus, Scotland, the younger daughter of the Duke and Duchess of York. For the first six years of her life, that was all she was expected to be: a second son’s second daughter, comfortable, loved, and far from the throne. Then her uncle gave the throne away. On the 11th of December 1936, King Edward VIII abdicated, and her shy father became King George VI.

Margaret, aged six, became the king’s second daughter and the sister of the future queen. Her father died on the 6th of February 1952, and her sister Elizabeth took the crown. From that morning Margaret was the unmarried younger sister of a reigning monarch, watched, funded, and judged as a royal, given no constitutional job of her own. She filled the space with glamour.

In the grey years after the war she was the most photographed young woman in the country, about five foot one, with vivid blue eyes, quick, musical, witty, and imperious by turns. The press adored her. The court was less sure. The man she loved was Group Captain Peter Townsend, a war hero who had become an equerry to her father.

He was sixteen years older than she was, and he was divorced. In the Britain of the 1950s, that single fact outweighed everything else about him. The first public hint came at her sister’s coronation in 1953, when Margaret reached up and brushed a piece of fluff from Townsend’s uniform. It was a tiny, unthinking gesture, the sort a woman makes for a man she is close to, and the newspapers noticed it at once.

What followed was a slow separation arranged by the people around her. Townsend was posted abroad to Brussels as air attaché. Margaret was sent away on an overseas tour. The distance was meant to cool what the gesture had revealed.

Behind all of it sat an old law. The Royal Marriages Act of 1772 required members of the royal family to have the sovereign’s consent to marry. Once Margaret turned 25, she could in principle go ahead without it by giving notice to Parliament, but the price was her royal rights, her income, and her place. The shadow of 1936 hung over the whole question.

Her uncle’s abdication was less than twenty years old, and the monarchy could not be seen to bless a marriage to a divorced man. So on the 31st of October 1955, Margaret issued her statement. Its most famous lines ran: “Mindful of the church’s teachings that Christian marriage is indissoluble, and conscious of my duty to the Commonwealth, I have resolved to put these considerations before others. ” She put those words over her own name at 25 and gave up the man she loved to protect them.

The man who would take Townsend’s place came from a very different world. Anthony Armstrong-Jones was a photographer, talented, charming, restless, and crucially not an aristocrat at all. He moved through the same fashionable circle as Margaret’s friends Colin and Anne Tennant, and the accounts of how the princess and the photographer first came together differ. One places their meeting at a supper party in 1958; another traces it back to 1956, when he photographed the Tennants’ wedding.

What the accounts agree on is that by 1958 they had grown close. Colin Tennant matters to this story more than anyone could have guessed at the time. He owned a private island in the Caribbean called Mustique, and he would soon give the couple a piece of it. Armstrong-Jones had a small studio hideaway on the river in a dockland corner of London where he entertained his own artistic friends.

There Margaret could come as an ordinary guest. For a woman who had spent her whole life being announced, the chance to walk into a room as herself was a kind of freedom. In October of 1959 he proposed with a ruby surrounded by diamonds in the shape of a rosebud. By a widely repeated account, she accepted soon after learning that Peter Townsend intended to marry someone else.

The timing has never been proved, and it has never gone away. The engagement was announced on the 26th of February 1960, and it surprised the press completely. The romance had been kept secret, and to the public it looked like the perfect answer to 1955. The princess who had given up love for duty was getting a second chance, with a modern, creative young man from outside the old establishment.

The country was delighted. The palace was relieved. And almost nobody had asked the obvious question about the man she was marrying, which was what kind of childhood had made him. Some years before the wedding could have been imagined, a sixteen-year-old boy lay in a hospital bed in Liverpool and almost no one came.

Anthony Charles Robert Armstrong-Jones was born on the 7th of March 1930 in Belgravia, London, the son of Ronald Armstrong-Jones, a barrister, and Anne Messel. The marriage did not last. His parents divorced in early 1935, before his fifth birthday. His mother remarried almost at once.

On the 19th of September 1935, she became the wife of the sixth Earl of Rosse, and so the Countess of Rosse. Two more sons followed, Brendan in 1936 and Desmond in 1938. The small boy from the first marriage now belonged to a mother with a new title, a new husband, and a new family. The worst of that childhood came when he was sixteen.

He was on holiday at the family home of Plas Dinas near Caernarfon in North Wales when he contracted polio. He was taken to the Liverpool Royal Infirmary and stayed there for six months. In all that time, only one member of his family came to see him. It was his sister, Susan.

His mother did not come. His father did not come. For half a year a teenage boy lay in an infirmary ward, learning that his body might not work again, and the only familiar face at the end of the bed belonged to his sister. The illness left him with a withered left leg, an inch shorter than the right, and a slight limp he would carry for the rest of his life.

What the record does show is what he did next. He rebuilt himself. At Cambridge, where he read architecture at Jesus College, he became the cox of the University boat. In 1950, he coxed Cambridge to victory in the Boat Race against Oxford, on a leg that polio had shortened.

Rowing gave him something to fight. He failed his second-year examinations and left Cambridge without a degree. It hardly mattered. He had already found the thing he was good at.

He took up photography, first as an apprentice and then on his own account, and he rose fast. Theatrical portraits, society portraits, commissions from Vogue and the glossy magazines. By 25, he was a renowned photographer. His private life was crowded.

Before the engagement, his relationships included the dancer and actress Jacqui Chan, and he was bound up closely with a married couple named Jeremy and Camilla Fry. Jeremy Fry was an engineer and an inventor, one of Armstrong-Jones’s closest friends, close enough that when the photographer became engaged to the Queen’s sister, Fry was his intended best man. Camilla Fry was Jeremy’s wife. The three of them moved in the same bohemian world of artists, designers, and late nights, a world the palace did not really see and would not have understood if it had.

Westminster Abbey had never been filmed for a royal wedding before. On that May morning, the cameras missed nothing except what mattered. The wedding took place on the 6th of May 1960, the first royal wedding ever broadcast on television. The bride wore a gown by Norman Hartnell, the royal dressmaker, famous for its stark simplicity, and on her head sat the Poltimore tiara.

Eight bridesmaids followed her, led by her niece, the young Princess Anne. Her brother-in-law, the Duke of Edinburgh, gave her away. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Geoffrey Fisher, conducted the service. The groom was 30.

The bride was 29. More than 2,000 guests filled the abbey. Some 20 million people watched in Britain and an estimated 300 million around the world. One man was missing from his expected place.

Jeremy Fry, the groom’s close friend, had been his intended best man, and he withdrew before the day. The reason given in later accounts was reportedly an old conviction in his past. As far as the public was concerned, that was the whole of the story. A best man had stood down, and the ceremony went on without him.

After the abbey, the couple sailed away on the royal yacht Britannia for a six-week honeymoon in the Caribbean. They had a wedding gift waiting there. Colin Tennant had given Margaret a plot of about ten acres on his island of Mustique. Tennant had bought the whole island in 1958 for a sum usually given as £45,000, though the figures vary from one account to another.

The plot he gave the princess would one day hold a villa, and she would call it the only square inch in the world I own. And while the yacht was still at sea, the first secret of the marriage was born. On the 28th of May 1960, three weeks after the wedding, Camilla Fry gave birth to a daughter. The baby was named Polly.

She was the child of the woman whose husband had been meant to stand beside the groom at the altar, and she had been conceived while the groom was engaged to the queen’s sister. For most of her life, Polly Fry believed that Jeremy Fry was her father. The truth came decades later. In 2004, a DNA test showed that her biological father was Anthony Armstrong-Jones, by then long divorced from the princess and known to the world as Lord Snowdon.

In 2008, he acknowledged his paternity. Polly Fry spoke about the discovery with restraint. “Finding out at the age of 45 that the man I had idolized and put on a pedestal higher than Nelson’s Column since I was a small child was not in fact my father was a hard burden to bear. ” Four years passed between the test in 2004 and the day Snowdon accepted what it showed in 2008.

Did Jeremy Fry know? The record does not say. Did the bride? There is no evidence that Margaret ever knew, and it would be wrong to suggest otherwise.

Nothing in the record shows that she ever learned her husband’s first child had been born while she was on her honeymoon. The couple moved into Kensington Palace, where an apartment was being renovated for them at public expense, and began their married life as the most watched couple in the kingdom. The palace had its story. The press had its fairy tale.

The friends had their silence. A newborn child had a name that was not quite hers. And the bride, as far as anyone can tell, had no idea. Before the notes, there were the good years, and they were real.

On the 6th of October 1961, the Queen created her brother-in-law Earl of Snowdon and Viscount Linley. It came just before the birth of their first child, timed by the usual account, so that the baby would carry a title. That child, David, was born on the 3rd of November 1961, and was known as Viscount Linley. A daughter, Lady Sarah, followed on the 1st of May 1964, born at Kensington Palace.

Both children were delivered by caesarean section at Margaret’s own request. Their home was Apartment 1A at Kensington Palace, renovated at public expense and ready in 1963. It was large and it was grand. Snowdon’s own career flourished alongside the marriage.

He worked for the Sunday Times magazine, and he helped design a great aviary for London Zoo, a light structure of aluminium framing and tensioned mesh that opened in the middle of the decade and still stands. In 1963 he was appointed Constable of Caernarfon Castle, a ceremonial office in the same corner of Wales where polio had found him as a boy. The child nobody had visited now held the keys to a royal castle. For a time, the Snowdens were the most glamorous couple in Britain.

They filled their rooms with actors, dancers, designers, and musicians, entertaining a fast artistic set in a way no royal couple had ever done before. They looked modern. They looked happy. The cameras saw none of it.

From the middle of the 1960s, the marriage began to curdle. Snowdon worked in a studio in the basement of the apartment. His wife lived in the rooms above, and he began to leave her notes. He hid them where only she would find them: in the books she was reading, slipped among her handkerchiefs, tucked into her glove drawer, left on her desk.

The notes were written to wound, and they were written to be found alone when he was not in the room. One of them, by the standard account, read, “You look like a Jewish manicurist, and I hate you. ”

He also made lists. The accounts disagree on their exact titles.

Lady Anne Glenconner, Margaret’s lady-in-waiting and lifelong friend, and the wife of Colin Tennant of Mustique, wrote a memoir in 2019 that is the closest thing the story has to a witness at the door. She recalled a list headed “20 Reasons Why I Hate You. ” The writer Craig Brown put the number at 24. A newspaper obituary of Snowdon described lists of “things I hate about you” left inside the books she was reading.

When she found one of those lists, Craig Brown reports, Margaret’s answer was dry and devastating. “I can’t think of 24 reasons to hate anybody,” she is said to have remarked. The most telling detail comes from Glenconner. In time, she recalled, Margaret stopped opening her own chest of drawers.

She had her maid open them for her instead, so that she would not be ambushed by whatever her husband had left inside. Snowdon’s obituarist described what the household was eventually reduced to. The marriage, he wrote, had sunk to the level of exchanged grunts when passing in the hallway. And there was no way out.

A senior member of the royal family did not divorce. The same church teaching that Margaret had put her name to in 1955, that Christian marriage is indissoluble, now held her inside a marriage that was going bad. She had been refused the man she loved because he was divorced. She could hardly become divorced herself.

The rule that had closed one door on her now locked the other. What he was doing away from home with other women was another matter. A close friend once summed up the husband in six words: “If it moves, he’ll have it. ” The record of Snowdon’s private life during the marriage bears the summary out.

The names that appear in the record are several. There was Lady Jacqueline Rufus Isaacs. There was Gina Ward. There was the journalist Ann Hills, described as his long-term mistress.

And near the end there was his assistant Lucy Lindsay-Hogg, the woman he would marry within months of the divorce. Ann Hills stands apart from the others because of how long she lasted. One account describes her as his mistress for twenty years. That is longer than the marriage to Margaret itself, which ran for eighteen years from the abbey to the decree.

None of this showed in his public life, which through those same years went from strength to strength. In 1969, the Queen’s son was invested as Prince of Wales at Caernarfon Castle, and the ceremony watched around the world was designed and organized by its Constable, Lord Snowdon. He turned to television and made documentaries. The first, Don’t Count the Candles in 1968, was about growing old and won seven awards, two of them Emmys.

By the 1970s, he was described as one of Britain’s most respected photographers. And there was a side to him that fits none of the rest of the picture. The boy who had spent six months in the Liverpool Royal Infirmary grew into a man who worked for decades for disabled people. He sat on the council of the Polio Research Fund.

In 1971, he patented an electric wheelchair. When he rose to make his maiden speech in the House of Lords in April of 1972, his subject was the problems disabled people faced. The same man, in the same years, was hiding notes in his wife’s handkerchief drawer. The record offers no way to reconcile the two.

Margaret was not sitting at home waiting. In the summer of 1964, five godparents stood at the font for a baby girl in the private chapel at Buckingham Palace. The baby was Lady Sarah Armstrong-Jones, ten weeks old, christened on the 13th of July. Among her godparents was a friend of her father’s named Anthony Barton, a producer of Bordeaux wine.

About two years later, by the standard account of Margaret’s life, Anthony Barton became her lover. It is one of the details that the familiar version of this marriage tends to leave out. It happened inside the same small glittering circle the couple shared. It was not the last.

In 1967 came Robin Douglas-Home. His uncle was Sir Alec Douglas-Home, who had been prime minister. Robin had married the fashion model Sandra Paul and divorced her in 1965, a break so public it became the subject of a BBC television documentary. He had also, by the time he met the princess, been suffering from depression for several years.

Margaret always maintained that their relationship was platonic. Her letters to him, by the standard account, were intimate. The affair, whatever its nature, did not last long. It ended in 1967.

On the 15th of October 1968, about eighteen months after the relationship ended, Robin Douglas-Home took his own life at his country home at West Chiltington in West Sussex. He was 36 years old. No honest account can draw a straight line from the princess to that death. He had been ill for years before he met her.

What the record allows is only the sequence: a divorce in 1965, a romance with the queen’s sister in 1967, its end the same year, eighteen months, a death at 36. By the late 1960s, both of them were unfaithful. Both drank, both could wound. Margaret could be imperious and sharp-tongued, a woman capable of real warmth and of real cruelty, and she was never merely a victim.

The notes in the drawer were his. The rest of the damage was shared. By the start of the 1970s, the princess had one refuge that belonged to her and not to him. The plot of land on Mustique, Colin Tennant’s wedding gift, was about to become a house.

And when it was finished in February of 1972, it would turn out to be the work of a member of her husband’s own family. In September of 1973, at a house party in Scotland, Colin Tennant introduced a princess of 43 to a young man of 25. His name was Roddy Llewellyn. He was the youngest son of Sir Harry Llewellyn, the show jumper who had won Olympic gold in 1952, and he was studying landscape gardening.

He was 17 years younger than the Queen’s sister. Its home was Mustique. The house on Colin Tennant’s plot had been completed in February of 1972, a villa called Les Jolies Eaux, the pretty waters. Its designer was the stage designer Oliver Messel, Lord Snowdon’s own uncle.

Messel gave it the look of a stage set, a theatrical Georgian villa built of stone on a single floor on a private peninsula at the southern tip of the island. It had five bedrooms, two guest lodges, and a pool. Margaret called the place the only square inch in the world I own. In 1974, she invited Roddy to stay there, and he planted its gardens.

It did not bring peace, at least not at first. In 1974, Roddy left abruptly and impulsively for Turkey. Margaret was left behind distraught, and she took an overdose of sleeping tablets, reportedly the drug Mogadon. Her own explanation, as it has come down in the standard account, is one of the saddest lines in the whole story.

“I was so exhausted because of everything,” she said, “that all I wanted to do was sleep. ” Her ladies-in-waiting kept her husband away from her while she recovered. They feared, it is reported, that his presence would only distress her further. Then in February of 1976, a photographer from the News of the World flew to Mustique on a tip.

What he photographed was ordinary, and it was enough. Margaret and Roddy on the beach in their swimwear, at ease with each other. Nothing explicit, nothing that would have been news about anyone else. But the woman on the beach was the queen’s sister, and the man beside her was 17 years younger and not her husband.

The News of the World ran the pictures on its front page on the 22nd of February. The papers cast her as a predatory older woman and him as her toy boy. Two decades of glamour turned in a single Sunday into a caricature. Every one of her husband’s affairs had stayed private.

His child with Camilla Fry was still a secret. His mistress of many years was still unknown to the public. Hers was the relationship that got photographed. The double standard that had run quietly under the marriage for sixteen years was now on the front of a Sunday paper.

On the 19th of March 1976, Kensington Palace announced that a marriage had irretrievably broken down. The statement said that Princess Margaret and the Earl of Snowdon had agreed to separate. Nearly sixteen years had passed since the wedding at the abbey. In the apartment at Kensington Palace there were two children.

David was 14. Sarah was 11, weeks away from her 12th birthday. Sarah, one account notes, was reportedly quite shaken by her parents’ split. That is very nearly all.

From then on, the children spent their weekends with one parent or the other, either at Nymans in West Sussex, a house belonging to their father’s family, or at Royal Lodge in Windsor, the home of their grandmother, the Queen Mother. The public reaction fell almost entirely on their mother. Some Labour members of Parliament denounced her as a royal parasite and a floozie. Some suggested that she should be removed from the civil list altogether.

Her husband’s side of the ledger drew almost none of it. The legal ending took two more years. The separation in March of 1976. The decree nisi, the provisional order of divorce, on the 24th of May 1978.

The decree absolute, the final order, on the 11th of July 1978. Sarah was 14 when it was over. David was 16. That same month of May, before the decree absolute, Margaret was diagnosed with gastroenteritis and alcoholic hepatitis.

It is one of the harder facts of the story and it is contested. Her authorized biographer, Christopher Warwick, has always denied that she was ever an alcoholic. The diagnosis and the denial both stand in the record. By one account, she had not wanted the divorce at all.

It was the first divorce of a senior member of the royal family since 1901, when a granddaughter of Queen Victoria, Princess Victoria Melita, had ended her own marriage. Within her own adult life, the same institution had told her she could not marry a divorced man and keep her place. She had given up Peter Townsend over exactly this. Now the king’s own daughter was a divorced woman herself.

Twenty-three years earlier she had written that Christian marriage is indissoluble. In the summer of 1978, a court dissolved hers. Her former husband did not wait long. On the 15th of December 1978, five months after the decree absolute, Lord Snowdon married Lucy Lindsay-Hogg, the assistant with whom he had been having an affair.

Their daughter Frances was born in July of 1979, a half-sister for David and Sarah. The second marriage would last until 2000. Margaret never remarried. Roddy Llewellyn stayed in her life for a few more years until the relationship faded around 1980 or 81.

In 1981, he married Tatiana Soskin, and Margaret remained close friends with both of them. The strange coda is that she remained on good terms with Snowdon, too. By the standard account, the two of them stayed friends after the divorce. The marriage had ended in 1978.

Its consequences were still arriving twenty years later. In 1998, twenty years after his second wedding, a son was born to a woman who was not Lord Snowdon’s wife. Her name was Melanie Cable-Alexander, an editor at Country Life magazine. The boy was named Jasper.

When the birth came to light, it ended Snowdon’s second marriage. He and Lucy divorced in 2000. The pattern that had begun with a baby born during a royal honeymoon had run unbroken for almost forty years. One more life had ended along the way.

Ann Hills, the mistress of some twenty years, had died on New Year’s Eve 1996 of an overdose, as later accounts report it. The princess, meanwhile, was running out of time. Decades of heavy smoking had taken their toll, and in January of 1985, part of her lung was removed. In 1996, she gave Les Jolies Eaux, the house on Mustique, to her son.

On the 23rd of February 1998, she suffered a stroke there. In early 1999, she badly scalded her feet in a bath, an injury that left her barely able to walk. The same year, David sold the villa for about £2. 4 million.

Further strokes followed in 2001. On the morning of the 9th of February 2002, at King Edward VII’s Hospital in London, Princess Margaret died in her sleep, aged 71. Both her children were at her bedside. Her funeral was held at St George’s Chapel, Windsor, on the 15th of February, 50 years to the day after her father’s.

She was cremated at Slough, which was highly unusual for a senior royal, reportedly so that her ashes could rest in the King George VI memorial chapel beside him. Her mother, the Queen Mother, died on the 30th of March. On the 9th of April, Margaret’s ashes were placed beside her father. Lord Snowdon lived for another fifteen years.

In 1999, he was made a life peer, Baron Armstrong-Jones. He died at home in Kensington on the 13th of January 2017, aged 86, and he was buried in Wales at Llansaintffraid. It was in Wales seventy years before that polio had found him. He left nothing in his will, it is reported, to Polly Fry.

What those two children did with their inheritance is the quiet ending the story rarely gets. Sarah trained as a painter at Camberwell School of Art and then at the Royal Academy Schools, where she won the Windsor and Newton Prize in 1988 and the PresciA landscape prize in 1990. She has exhibited with the Redfern Gallery in London since 1995, always under her maiden name, Sarah Armstrong-Jones. On the 14th of July 1994, she married the actor turned painter Daniel Chatto, and they raised two sons, Samuel and Arthur.

She undertakes no public duties and gives no interviews. When Prince Philip was buried in April of 2021 with only about thirty mourners allowed, she was one of them. David became a furniture maker and later chairman of Christie’s in Britain. In 2017, he succeeded his father as the second Earl of Snowdon.

In February of 2019, he spoke publicly about the way his mother was remembered. “My mother is often portrayed as being a socialite who was only interested in parties. She was so much more than that. ” And of the mother he grew up with, he said, “She never pressured us to do things.

She was always enthusiastic and made everyone feel included. ”

Roddy Llewellyn, the gardener the papers had called a toy boy, built a long career as a garden designer, writer, and broadcaster, and in 2009 he became Sir Roddy, the fifth baronet. The royal divorces that followed Margaret’s came in a wave. Of the Queen’s four children, two were divorced in the 1990s: Andrew in 1992 and Charles in 1996.

The door Margaret had been the first to walk through stayed open. The woman who perhaps had the most right to bitterness is the one who put it best. Polly Fry, the child born during the honeymoon, had learned the truth about her father in middle age, and when she spoke about it, she chose her words with care. “I still believe in the sanctity of family life,” she said.

“Even if, in my own case, it has proved to be a tad more complicated than I had previously thought. “