Princess Margaret’s Secret Affairs And Explosive Marriage Nearly Destroyed The Monarchy

May 6th, 1960. The union between Princess Margaret and Anthony Armstrong Jones, who would one day become Lord Snowden, was the first royal wedding to be televised and watched by over 300 million viewers worldwide. Princess Margaret’s wedding turned out to be the most enormous success. A huge media event. The entire Mau had banners, silk banners with the TUDA rose and M and A initials interlin.

In contrast to previous royal weddings, Margaret sourced a tiara away from the royal collection. Rather than wearing a family heirloom, she bought one at auction in 1959 from the Polymore family. It had been designed by society couturier Norman Hartnull, very traditional man.

And in fact, it turned out afterwards that Armstrong Jones had had a big hand in designing the dress. He had persuaded the designer to cut back on all the traditional sort of flouncy wedding dresses that we were used to seeing royals get married in.

Margaret’s new husband, Anthony Armstrong Jones, or Tony as he was known, was widely regarded as a commoner, but he had charmed his way into the hearts of the royal family and enjoyed the status his relationship afforded.

I asked Tony what he felt on that day because it must have been extraordinary. He said, “I was in a complete days. I was standing there. I could hardly believe what was going on.”

I might think that he probably was a bit of a snob. And I think although he’d had quite a privileged upbringing, he wasn’t independently wealthy. And I think in we’re still in the 1950s in which you marrying up is is is a kind of consideration.

You know, it’s a snafling and a enthusiasm around the world for Princess Margaret’s wedding reveals how fondly she was thought of by the public as Queen Elizabeth’s younger sister. The nation had watched her ever since her birth on the 21st of August 1930 to her parents, the future King George V 6th and Queen Elizabeth.

Her parents, who were then Duke and Duchess of York, and then her elder sister by four years, Princess Elizabeth, were a very tight-knit little family within the broader royal family.

She was close to her sister. She was adored by her parents and they spent their time between their townhouse in London in Piccadilly and at Windsor and then visiting grandparents at Balmoral and Sandringham. Whilst Elizabeth was described by their father as uh his pride, Margaret was described as his joy.

The story of Margaret’s meeting and marriage to the future Lord Snowden might have graced a romantic novel. After the death of her father in 1952, she was on the search for a man to fill the void that he had left. For her, nobody ever really measured up to her father.

When she lost him, she lost the most important man in her life.  The teenage princess fell for the king’s equund who had been spending time with the family, but it would be an ill-fated love affair.

There was a 16-year age difference. Princess Margaret was 15. So, Princess Margaret, if you like, had a sort of schoolgirl crush on Town’s End because he was this tall, good-looking, very distinguished fighter pilot. The relationship was doomed from the outset. Townsend was a divorcee deemed an unsuitable choice for a royal princess whose sister was head of the Church of England.

The Queen Elizabeth, of course, she wanted to give her sister what she wanted and make her happy, but this really wasn’t going to be appropriate. Margaret was told she could only marry Townsend if she gave up her royal status. Their relationship broke up because she wasn’t prepared to sacrifice her privileges as a royal.

And it may be that that wouldn’t have lasted that relationship. But I think that everything that happens to Margaret in terms of her love life is conditioned by her inability to marry Peter Townsend in 1955.

By 1958, Margaret was a self- assured woman of 28 who had failed to be impressed by her potential suitors. But then, suave society photographer Anthony Armstrong Jones, the future Lord Snowden, breathed new life into her world. Tony met Princess Margaret at a small dinner party given by Lady Elizabeth Cavendish.

And Princess Margaret was really rather down at that moment because she wasn’t quite certain where her life was going. And Lady Elizabeth thought it would be cheering for her. A small intimate dinner party with fun people. And Tony was tremendous fun. He was a flamboyant figure. He was he was dressed flamboyantly. He he was a flamboyant talker.

And she immediately uh formed the impression that he must be g@y. Margaret was so intrigued by Armstrong Jones’s compelling personality that she jumped at the chance to be photographed by him. A few months later, this time the sparks flew.  I think he was known to be quite a ladies man. Some said that he was also a bit of a gentleman’s man. I think lots of people fancied him. He was perhaps the most fashionable photographer of that era.

He was everything that the young Princess Margaret wanted. He was glamorous. He was different. He was in some ways anti-establishment. If you think of her as feeling like some sort of caged princess within Buckingham Palace’s confines, he was her way out of that prison as she saw it. Margaret and Anthony soon fell passionately in love.

They were married within 2 years of meeting. Their wedding turned them into one of the world’s most sought after royal couples with a serious posh for partying. The Queen’s sister, Princess Margaret, had at last found a soulmate in society photographer Anthony Armstrong Jones, the future Lord Snowden. But were they a genuine match? Or was Margaret rebelling against those who had tried to control her love life?

It would be easy to say this was just a rebellion. This was a princess who felt caged by the confines of the establishment and her her position and what was expected of her. And therefore, she saw this loose young man who didn’t care about all that and that she was just using him to exact revenge or a snoop at her family. Actually, I think the relationship was much more than that.

I think she genuinely was intoxicated by everything that he offered. I think there was a lot of excitement about the fact that the Queen’s much glamorous younger sister was finally settling down. She’d been a sort of fixture of of the nightclub scene in London. And the idea that she now was going to start doing perhaps more royal duty than she had before seemed like a very good idea.

But equally, it was a case of Anthony Armstrong who nobody knew this man. Lord Snowden was born Anthony Armstrong Jones. His early family life was fractured. His mother and father divorced when he was just 5 years old and both parents went on to become preoccupied with their new families.

Tony Armstrong Jones was the son of Ronald Armstrong Jones who was a noted Qi who had several wives and his mother was an Messle who was a society beauty. He came from a very artistic and slightly bohemian background and then his parents divorced when he was about five and this obviously had a huge effect on him.

Anthony contracted polio aged 16 which left him bedridden in hospital for 6 months with few visitors. Once recovered, Anthony attended Eaton and Cambridge where his rebellious tendencies started to emerge. He left Cambridge early because he’d spent all his time rowing and hadn’t passed his exams and what he wanted to do was photography. It was very much a tradesman’s profession.

There hadn’t been the people like David Bailey or Helmet Newton and this was um his mother was horrified and did her level best to stop him doing it. Eager to prove his worth, Anthony was taken on as an apprentice by celebrity photographer Baron, who also happened to be court photographer to the royal family. And there was no looking back. He hung out with many, many celebrities, with models.

So he was considered very attractive, very wellconed, very well sought after. He mixed with elite circles easily and quickly bonded with Princess Margaret over their shared interests.

They started to realize that they’d got a lot in common. She once wrote to a friend saying, “It always amazes me that Tony is supposed to have introduced me to the theater, to the arts, and to architecture. They were reasons that brought us together in the first place.  On the surface, Antony seemed to be just the kind of husband that would suit the strong willed princess.

I think the queen and her mother were probably rather pleased that maybe the Margaret problem had been solved. Maybe she’d found somebody that was an intellectual match for her that could fulfill her artistic interests. In the eyes of the royal family, there he was, an attractive single man with no obvious obstacle. I think if they’d known how complicated his life was, there would have been a a lot of pressure for the princess to think really carefully if she wanted to marry him.

He was having a love affair with a beautiful actress called Gina Ward. He was very tied up with his best friend and his wife, Jeremy Fry, who had been indicted for a homosexual offense. And in fact, Jeremy Fry was apparently uh a man who Anthony was in a relationship with him and indeed his wife in a sort of manager. Anthony kept his private life under wraps.

His early clanderstein meetings with Princess Margaret were kept well hidden and their partnership didn’t become public knowledge until they announced their engagement. They kept their relationship secret because the press at that time tended only to write about these things when they were given a press release. And Margaret and Tony tended to congregate in places where they knew they were fairly safe.

She went to see him in his studio in Pimico. She would dress very unobtrusively. She wore a tweed skirt. She wore headscarfves. She wore sunglasses. And she was dropped in the next door street because there was a little alleyway through. He would take her on the back of his motorbike.

He had a room in Rotherh High. It was very romantic really. At high tide, swans would float past. They would have a meal there. And the princess, it was rather exciting for her to put on rubber gloves and do the washing up. And so they were able to have their courtship completely in private.

Anthony gave Margaret access to a world she found edgy and exciting. Britain was emerging from a somber postwar period and the carefree swinging 60s were the perfect antidote. She totally straddled these two worlds of royalty um and pop culture that was beginning to take hold in the early 1960s. They had a very modern marriage in many ways in that they did hang out with celebrities, with playwrights, with models, with actresses and actors.

And they clearly loved that life. I’ve got friends actually that remember you partying with her record player on, drinks out, cigarettes being smoked. She was a very, very lively person. The difficulty was that getting her to bed. She would stay up till 3:00 in the morning. And even Snowden found that lifestyle quite tiring.

Princess Margaret enjoyed mixing with the fast set. She hung out with the likes of Peter Cers, Warren Beatty, and the Beatles. Princess Margaret was a sex symbol in as much as Marilyn Monroe was a sex symbol.

Pablo Picasso was obsessed with Princess Margaret for 10 years and genuinely thought that he was going to achieve his goal of marrying her. the comedian Peter Cers who I think really wanted to get next to Princess Margaret. He became a great friend. They saw a lot of him. Peter Cers was famous for British comedies. But his private home movies reveal his taste for avantgard satire.

My present, ladies and gentlemen, my impersonation in 11 seconds flat before your very eyes of her royal highness, Princess Margaret. especially when Princess Margaret agreed to take on a starring role.

Cellers famously appears in a whole load of home movies that Snowden and Margaret shot at Kensington Palace. She adored having showbiz people around and sort of acting out if you like the kind of life perhaps she dreamt she might have had she not been born a royal princess.

Although the princess liked to let her hair down, she never shied away from reminding people about her royal status. She was not an easy guest to have, often extraordinarily rude to her host or hostess. And of course, you can’t start eating until your royal guest arrives.

Often staying very, very late, and nobody can leave until the royal guest leaves. You could be getting on famously and then she’d kind of pull rank or she’d remember who she was. I’m the queen’s sister and she would pop hop back onto her twig.

18 months after their marriage, the queen granted Armstrong Jones the title Earl of Snowden, a hereditary title that enabled him to sit in the House of Lords, eventually passed on to his children. Their first, David, was born in 1961.

When Princess Margaret was expecting her first baby, Snowden was elevated to the parage and he became first Earl of Snowden. She did not want to be known as Mrs. Anthony Armstrong Jones. She said to me, “I didn’t want all that fuss with doublebarreled names.”

But when he became Earl of Snowden, her title changed to the Princess Margaret, Countess of Snowden. 3 years later, in 1964, Princess Margaret gave birth to their second child, this time a daughter, Sarah.

But even parenthood failed to dampen their decadent lifestyle. whereby family is hugely important to the queen and her children hugely important. You know, Margaret and Tanya would go off on holiday to Italy, to Sardinia, to wherever they were going. Um, and the children would stay with the queen. They’d spend their their holidays with the queen.

The early years of their relationship were a whirlwind of social events and royal duties. as Margaret stepped up to fill in for the queen who was becoming increasingly occupied with her own young children.

Well, Frank Sinatra of course regarded Princess Margaret and said as much as the best ambassador Britain had. Her role was different to that of her sister. So, you know, when she was abroad on official engagements, she was also waving the flag for Britain and for the monarchy.

It was clearly going to take a huge act on Snowden’s part to sort of transform himself from the leather jacketed photographer with a studio in the East End to being the dignified partner of the Queen’s sister. He agreed that he would do royal engagements.

He accompanied his wife on several very glamorous trips overseas. And to start with, they were a huge addition to the royal family. But for Snowden, the restrictions of royal life soon began to great and he became increasingly frustrated with its impact on his freedom.

When Anthony married Margaret, they moved into Kensington Palace and of course they moved into a court effectively courtiers who would be asking them what they were doing, where they were going. And Anthony just found this incredibly restrictive and just something he couldn’t accept. He just wasn’t prepared to buy into royal convention and he really railed against it.

People say the marriage was happy for four or 5 years. I think there’s increasing tension. There was a dispute about where their country house should be. She wanted a country house um near near Windsor at Sunning Hill. He wanted a country house on on the his family’s estate at Nimman’s. he won.

Um, so he spent more time Merit Old House in Sussex. In a bid to reclaim his autonomy, Snowden opted to take on more photography work, including jobs abroad.  So, I certainly think that the nature of his job not only gave him the opportunity to continue philandering, but also seeded suspicion in Margaret.  What started the rumors about her marriage? You know more about this than I do, I’m afraid.

I mean, sometimes there were only one night stands and if he was away somewhere, I mean, nobody would know and the princess would not know. And certainly, I don’t think the royal family would have known.

I think Princess Margaret was too proud to have gone crying to them or even told them. Soon the marriage of the decade became strained and the famous union of Princess Margaret and Lord Snowden descended into scandal and bitterness.

It seems the relationship really became quite dramatically vindictive with Snowden leaving messages for Margaret with 20 reasons why I hate you. I mean really sort of poisonous angry messages which you know one can only imagine how much they hurt her.

Throughout the swinging 1960s, Princess Margaret and Anthony Armstrong Jones, now the Countess and Earl of Snowden, had been Britain’s celebrity royal couple. But 7 years in, the press were beginning to question the state of their marriage. >> Started the rumors about your marriage.

You know more about this than I do, I’m afraid. Have you spoken with Princess Margaret this morning at all? This morning? Yes, sir.  You know the time difference? Yes.  Mhm. No, we spoke last night on the What was her reaction last time  when you talked to her? We just talked about family.

Tony had become disenchanted with the life he was leading as Princess Margaret’s husband as her console, just walking two paces behind his royal wife. In effect, being Mr. Princess Margaret was not something that he came to enjoy.

Tony would sometimes get impatient. the princess could be difficult. More and more Tony was working and that took him away from the princess. The Sunday Times began to realize that Tony was always very pleased when he got chance to work away and he would also go abroad for the Sunday Times where he would feel completely free.

So she got slightly more possessive which again he didn’t like that. So I certainly think that the nature of his job not only gave him the opportunity to continue philandering but also seeded suspicion in Margaret. Snowden always had a reputation as a ladies man. Now it was becoming clear that despite being married to the Queen’s sister, nothing had changed.

As his biographer reveals, he fined for England. Tony never really dropped earlier girlfriends. There was a constant succession of women and I think men, but it’s difficult to say about the infidelity because it it never really stopped. I think the most significant affair at that time of the marriage was his relationship with Lady Jackie Rufus Isaacs.

She was a a very glamorous model uh the daughter of the Marquis of Reading uh whom Snowden had befriended um several years earlier. And by 1968, the two of them were involved in a a rip roaring affair.

A very passionate affair. Uh lots of subtifu. She was working in the Eve San Lauron shop in London and he would have a code word about you know his lady Jacqueline there. Tony was some 18 years older than her. Jackie was you know only 21 at the time and for some considerable time they managed to keep this romance secret.

The question really was well did he really care? Um he I don’t think he really did. Margaret of course was devastated by this but I think this was the one romance that um at that stage when Tony actively considered walking out on the marriage.

The affair was finally revealed by the press in 1971. But Snowden wasn’t the only one straying. After her death in 2002, details about some of Princess Margaret’s relationships came to light. Her authorized biographer believes that Snowden may have played a part in engineering what was believed to be her first affair.

One of his friends put it to me that if you’re playing the field, if you’re playing around, then it eases your conscience if your spouse is doing the same thing. So around about 1966 when he was going off on one of his assignments, he had asked Anthony Barton, who was a wine maker in Bordeaux, uh to come and keep Princess Margaret company.

And so it seemed with almost kind of vindictive glee, he pushed the two of them together, which of course made Margaret’s own sense of being abandoned by her husband even worse. In 1967, the princess took another lover, Robin Douglas Hume, nephew of the former prime minister, Alec Douglas Hume. And this time, Lord Snowden was in the dark.

Robin uh fell madly in love with uh Princess Margaret um and thought that this was the whole future. He, you know, he had an entire future with her. He he he’s always been uh rather euphemistically described in the tabloids as as an upper class jazz and nightclub musician. I think there was a bit more to him than that.

They allegedly shared a great passion for Gershwin songs and show tunes. She would sing apparently quite often quite uh out of tune. Unfortunately, after only a few weeks, rumors started to spread about this affair that was ongoing. And it’s thought that Snowden got wind of what was going on and really came down on her like a ton of bricks.

I think probably his pride was hurt more than anything and he banished Douglas Hume uh from Kensington Palace and and told him or he was told quite smartly he was never to return.

Some have said that Margot and Snowden had an open marriage, but royal commentators disagree. As behemian as she liked to think she was, as central to the swinging 60s as she probably saw herself, I very much doubt she saw herself as the wife of an open marriage.

I think Margaret above all was an attention seeker and as soon as she felt that her husband’s attention was not on her, she needed that attention from somewhere else. And I think that’s what the affairs were about. She also was clearly somebody who loved male attention. The princess, she did not really want to be party to an open marriage.

This was not what she signed up for, if you like. She wanted to be with the man she loved and the man she’d married. >> It was not to be. By the end of the decade, their marriage had soured into open warfare.

Snowden had a very cruel streak, and he liked nothing more to humiliate and belittle his wife, particularly in public. Why did he do it? I think she out of sheer boredom and because he could.

On one occasion, they were house guests of someone, and Tony, bored with the conversation, flipped open a book of matches, lit them, and started flicking them at Princess Margaret, uh, who was wearing some elaborate or ganza ball gown. Um, and there was a very real danger that it might catch fire.

And when she reprimanded him for doing it, said, “Look, you might set fire to my dress.” He said, “Good. I hate that material. I hate that dress.” This man, for all his charm, could be incredibly cruel. He would, for example, leave notes where she’d find them in in a book she was reading, maybe in the drawer that she kept her gloves.

There’d be little notes like 10 reasons why I hate you. And it got to the point where she’d actually ask one of her ladies in waiting to check for these notes because of course, needless to say, they were incredibly distressing to her.

You know, I mean, this was going beyond nasty.  In 1973, Margaret met a man who would bring her happiness. Rody Llewellyn was 17 years her junior, the son of a baronet and establishing himself as a landscape gardener for the high society set.

He was fun. He was charming, very presentable, had sort of shoulderlength hair, had a an earring in one ear. And what he gave back to Princess Margaret was everything that Tony had stolen from her. Her self-esteem, her confidence, her sense of worth in in the way she looked.

I suspect that the three years at the beginning of this relationship before it became public knowledge were the happiest years of Princess Margaret and Rody Llewellyn’s affair. their relationship. The fact that they managed to keep it out of the newspapers to stop it being public knowledge was an extraordinary feat in itself.

The biggest factor in keeping the affair secret was that much of it was conducted at Princess Margaret’s villa on the private Caribbean island of Mystique. She had been given the land as a wedding present from her friends Colin and Anne Tenant, who later inherited the titles of Lord and Lady Glenn Connor. It was here that Princess Margaret built a villa she called Leolio or the beautiful waters.

Of course, the key thing about Mustique was it was a private island. So, there was uh no members of the public, no riff raff there who could see with their own eyes what was going on. So, it was somewhere where Princess Margaret and Rody Llewellyn could truly be themselves.

Perhaps the most critical thing it had going for it was it was paparazzi proof and that’s why it attracted the likes of of Mick Jagger and David Bowie and other bigname celebrities in the 60s and 70s and Margaret was probably the biggest name of all. The other great attraction of Mystique was that Tony never went there. He hated the place. He hated the mosquitoes.

He hated the heat and he hated the people more to that because they all fed over his wife and he did not like that. So he stayed well away.  It was somewhere where she felt she could forget her troubles, where she could be herself, where she could literally and figuratively let her hair down, where she wasn’t wearing ball gowns, she was wearing calf tans. She was walking barefoot on the beach.

But paradise was lost in 1976 when a paparazzi photographer sneaked in and got the shot that would shatter Princess Margaret’s world. So, there was a huge shock when the News of the World published on its front page a picture of the Queen’s sister in a swimsuit with a young man whom the paper called her toy boy, Rody Llewellyn, in his tight fitting trunks.

The photograph was published by the News of the World on the 22nd of February 1976 and immediately made a huge impact worldwide. >> Of course, once it was out with the News of the World, it was out. Of course, the public didn’t know that in fact there had been four people in that photograph and two of them were cut out. But the message was just exactly the same.

Princess had been having this long love affair with uh Rody Llewellyn, the man who was 17 years younger than her. And the scandal broke >> and that was enough to blow apart Snowden and Margaret’s marriage to cause huge scandal in London.

And it ended up with MPs discussing it in a parliamentary debate, calling Margaret a hussy, implying she was a scarlet uh woman. These days, she probably would have been called a cougar in the press.

And even the queen is said to have talked to the then prime minister James Callan about it. And in the words of uh one of her former private secretaries, she said, “What are we going to do about my sister’s gutter snipe life?”

Now, whether they were the actual words, I wouldn’t stake my life on it, but that was the sentiment. That is what was quoted. The palace planned to issue an official statement announcing the couple’s separation on the 19th of March, but they hadn’t told Lord Snowden. The statement was leaked early and Snowden got his response in first.

And he was in Australia and he himself issued a further statement which was very moving talking about his regret and he emerged in fact as the innocent sinned against party. Nobody knew that he was actually there with his mistress, but he was the one who gained public sympathy and indeed he had the sympathy of the palace. >> I’m uh naturally desperately sad.

It seems incredible that that Snowden could could claim the moral high ground because he had been uh involved in a full-on affair with Lucy Lindseay Hog who was the ex-wife of a very prominent theater and cinema director. Uh they’ve been having an affair for the best part of four years and in fact he would go on to marry Lucy.

It was one rule for men in those days and one rule for women. Women having extrammarital affairs was a very big no no. Women having a toy boy, as they were called in those days, was really considered not the done thing. Very grubby.

The failure of the Snowden marriage was pretty much stacked at Margaret’s door. You know, it wasn’t true that Margaret was wholly responsible for the breakdown in this marriage. You know, it takes two to tango, and they knew how to tango.

In 1960, Princess Margaret had married Anthony Armstrong Jones in Westminster Abbey in front of a worldwide television audience of 300 million people. 18 years later and 2 years after they separated, the marriage was over. The princess was terribly against divorce.

She was what most people didn’t realize about her was that she was tremendously religious. when the marriage was going wrong, she went to prayer groups and she thought deeply about her religion.

The Queen is supreme governor of the Church of England. So, she had to be mindful of that. I think the fact that the Queen was prepared to acknowledge that her sister’s marriage had broken down showed that times had moved on and the Church of England of course had moved on. The Church of England’s position on divorce was different in the 70s from what it was in the ‘ 50s.

There had been a divorce in the extended royal family in 1967 after the queen’s cousin, the Earl of Harwood, scandalously sired an illegitimate son. This time it was the queen’s sister, one second in line to the throne. But while the divorce created headlines and caused upset, it was not a constitutional crisis.

Now, it’s actually said that theirs was the first divorce since Henry VIII. To be pedantic, Henry VIII wasn’t divorced. That marriage was unulled. So it was though it had never taken place. So really Margaret’s was the first proper divorce in royal history.

nd it did kind of pave the way for what would come in the 80s and the ‘9s with three of the Queen’s own children being divorced. When Princess Margaret was involved with Peter Townsend in the 50s was scandalous. It was taboo. Now it was a part of everyday life.

Just 7 months later, Lord Snowden married again. Tony then very quickly married his long-term lover, Lucy Lindsey Hog, who became Countress of Snowden and went on working and went on having affairs. In 1979, the couple had a daughter, Lady Francis.

But after the birth of an illegitimate son in 1998, Snowden’s second marriage ended in divorce.  I mean, I think there are two things that motivated Snowden throughout his life and his work and s_x, and he wanted as much as the one as the other.  He’d flirt with the letter box. He would flirt with anything. And uh Lady Reading put it a little more succinctly.

She said he’d jump on anything that moved. For Princess Margaret, life after Lord Snowden was for a while relatively stable. >> I mean, many people thought uh that Rody would have been so shocked by what had happened um he would retreat from the whole Halabaloo, but he stuck by Margaret and eventually peted out in about 1981.

Rody had met the lady he married, Tanya Soskin. Princess Margaret would have attended the wedding had it not clashed with an official tour that she was making, an official visit she was making to Canada in July of 1981. So, she wasn’t there. But their friendship was very very firmly maintained. >> The queen herself acknowledged that Rody had made Margaret happy.

And so although the relationship hadn’t been born in auspicious circumstances and wasn’t um welcomed by the royal family at the time, there’s no doubt that it it wasn’t just a fling and it had been in a sense good for Margaret. After Roddy left, Princess Margaret very quickly became middle-aged. She had her friends.

Uh she had a very loyal circle of friends. She was still in her way an imperious princess. And there is no doubt that attitudes towards her from the the late 70s and then throughout the 80s hardened. Um she was often criticized for the amount of time she spent on holiday. She was criticized for her drinking. She was criticized for her smoking.

Her health suffered and there is no doubt that that she became a rather sad figure. Um slightly marginalized on on the edge of royal life. >> Princess Margaret died in 2002. Her funeral attended by both Lord Snowden and Rody Llewellyn. But the astonishing story of her life with Lord Snowden still had secrets to reveal.

In fact, it wasn’t until 2004, sometime after Princess Margaret’s death, that perhaps the most salacious, sensational story about Snowden’s extramal affairs came out. Before Princess Margaret and Snowden got married, there were already plenty of rumors that the man he wanted to be his best man, Jeremy Fry, who was married to Camila Fry, that in fact that friendship between Snowden, Camila and Jeremy was much more than a friendship with both of them.

A rumor had been buzzing around for some time that one of Jeremy Fry’s daughters was actually by Tony and I asked him if I could talk to this girl. was this. So, and he he said yes. And so I wrote to her and she told me all about it. I went to see her.

Her name was Poly Fry and she had persuaded Tony to have a DNA test done and it proved conclusively that she was Tony’s daughter and she had actually been conceived while he was courting Princess Margaret.

She was born while they were on honeymoon. Well, of course, if that had happened, that had broken in 1960, it would have put paid to any idea of marriage, and God knows what would have happened if it had uh broken while they were newly married. I simply can’t imagine.

Lord Snowden died at the age of 86 in 2017, taking to the grave any further revelations about one of royalty’s most remarkable and most controversial of love stories. The Snowden’s marriage was a one-off. It was not a traditional or a conventional marriage.

We tend to think these days that we’re more liberal than society was in the 50s and 60s. And I think that depends on which part of society you’re in or you’re looking at because certainly what this couple got up to individually and together in those days would not be acceptable by most people these days.

Of course, the royal family has modernized. So, in some ways, you can see the Snowdens as as trailblazers for for a new sort of royal, but they’re still the the same issues, I think, of duty and service against personal freedom.

With the benefit of hindsight, uh you’d have to say that their relationship almost certainly was doomed from the start, and there was a lot of sexual animal magic between the two of them. There, no doubt about it. But once that first flush of passion had passed, what did they really have in common?

It was really a marriage of two stars and it ended up with a sort of supernova explosion. I think the very fact that you and I are sitting here talking about Princess Margaret and Lord Snowden says a great deal about how their lives and how their stories are regarded by audiences today.