The Truth About The Scandalous Romance Of Princess Margaret & Lord Snowdon | Our History

May 6th, 1960. The union between Princess Margaret and Antony Armstrong-Jones, who would one day become Lord Snowdon, 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 mall had banners, silk banners, with the Tudor rose and M&A initials interlinked. 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 Polletmore family. It had been designed by society couturier Norman Hartnell, a 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, Antony 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 daze. 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 we're still in the 1950s in which marrying up is a kind of consideration. It's a snaffling an heiress. 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 21st August 1930 to her parents, the future King George VI 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 his pride, Margaret was described as his joy. The story of Margaret's meeting and marriage to the future Lord Snowdon 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 equerry, Peter Townsend, 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 Townsend 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 Antony Armstrong-Jones, the future Lord Snowdon, 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. It was a small, intimate dinner party with fun people and Tony was tremendous fun. He was a flamboyant figure. He was dressed flamboyantly, he was a flamboyant talker and she immediately formed the impression that he must be gay. Margaret was so intrigued by Armstrong-Jones' 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 two years of meeting. Their wedding turned them into one of the world's most sought-after royal couples with a serious penchant for partying. The Queen's sister, Princess Margaret, had at last found a soul mate in society photographer Anthony Armstrong-Jones, the future Lord Snowdon. 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 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 cock 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 and she'd been a sort of fixture 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 Snowdon was born Anthony Armstrong-Jones. His early family life was fractured. His mother and father divorced when he was just five 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 QC who had several wives and his mother was Anne Messel 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 six months with few visitors. Once recovered, Anthony attended Eton 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 Helmut Newton and this was... 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 well connected, very well sought after. He mixed with elite circles easily and quickly bonded with Princess Margaret over their shared interests. They started to realise 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 theatre, to the arts and to architecture. They were reasons that brought us together in the first place. On the surface, Anthony 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 fulfil 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 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 offence, and in fact, Jeremy Fry was apparently a man who Anthony was in a relationship with him and indeed his wife in a sort of menage a trois. Anthony kept his private life under wraps. His early clandestine 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 Anthony tended to congregate in places where they knew they were fairly safe. She went to see him in his studio in Pimlico. She would dress very unobtrusively. She wore a tweed skirt, she wore a headscarf, 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 Rotherhithe. It was very romantic, really. 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 sombre post-war period and the carefree, swinging 60s were the perfect antidote. She totally straddled these two worlds of royalty 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 that I remember partying with a record player on, drinks out, cigarettes being smoked. She was a very, very lively person. The difficulty was getting her to bed. She would stay up till 3 o'clock 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 Sellers, 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 ten years and genuinely thought that he was going to achieve his goal of marrying her. The comedian Peter Sellers, who I think really wanted to get next to Princess Margaret, he became a great friend, they saw a lot of him. Peter Sellers was famous for British comedies, but his private home movies revealed his taste for avant-garde satire. May I 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. Sellers 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 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 hot 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 peerage 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 double-barrelled names. But when he became Earl of Snowden, her title changed to the Princess Margaret Countess of Snowden. Three 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 Tony would go off on holiday to Italy, to Sardinia, to wherever they were going, and the children would stay with the queen. They'd spend 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 grate and he became increasingly frustrated with its impact on his freedom. When Antony 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 Antony just found this incredibly restrictive and just something he couldn't accept. He just wasn't prepared to buy in to royal convention and he really railed against it. People say the marriage was happy for four or five years. I think there's increasing tension. There was a dispute about where their country house should be. She wanted a country house near Windsor at Sunning Hill. He wanted a country house on his family's estate at Nyman's. He won, so he spent more time there at Old House in Sussex. In a bid to reclaim his autonomy, Snowden opted to take on more photography work, including jobs abroad. I certainly think that the nature of his job not only gave him the opportunity to continue philandering, but also seeded suspicion in Margaret. You may 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 Antony Armstrong Jones, now the Countess and Earl of Snowden, had been Britain's celebrity royal couple. But seven years in, the press were beginning to question the state of their marriage. Let's start with the rumours about the marriage. You may know more about this than I do, I'm afraid. Have you spoken with Princess Margaret this morning at all? This morning? Yes. You know the time difference? Yes. No, you spoke last night. 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 consul. 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 realise that Tony was always very pleased when he got a 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 philandered 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 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 very glamorous model, the daughter of the Marquess of Reading, whom Snowden had befriended several years earlier, and by 1968, the two of them were involved in a rip-roaring affair. A very passionate affair. Lots of subterfuge. She was working in the Yves Saint Laurent shop in London and he would have a code word about, you know, is 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, did he really care? I don't think he really did. Margaret, of course, was devastated by this, but I think this was the one romance that, 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 authorised 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'd asked Anthony Barton, who was a winemaker in Bordeaux, 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-Hughes, nephew of the former Prime Minister, Alec Douglas-Hughes, and this time Lord Snowden was in the dark. Robin fell madly in love with Princess Margaret and thought that this was the whole future. You know, he had an entire future with her. He's always been rather euphemistically described in the tabloids 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 out of tune. Unfortunately, after only a few weeks, rumours 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 tonne of bricks. I think probably his pride was hurt more than anything, and he banished Douglas-Hughes from Kensington Palace and told him, or he was told quite smartly, he was never to return. Some have said that Margaret and Snowden had an open marriage, but royal commentators disagree. As bohemian 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 out of sheer boredom and because he could. On one occasion, they were houseguests of someone, and Tony, bored with the conversation, flipped open a book of matches, lit them, and started flicking them at Princess Margaret, who was wearing some elaborate organza ball gown. 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 a book she was reading, maybe in the drawer that she kept her gloves. There'd be little notes like, ten 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. Roddy 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 shoulder-length hair. Had 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 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 Roddy 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 Tennant, who later inherited the titles of Lord and Lady Glenconner. It was here that Princess Margaret built a villa she called Les Joliots, or the Beautiful Waters. Of course, the key thing about Mystique was it was a private island. So there was no members of the public, no riffraff there who could see with their own eyes what was going on. So it was somewhere where Princess Margaret and Roddy 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 Mick Jagger and David Bowie and other big-name 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 than that because they all fawned 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 ballgowns, she was wearing caftans, 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, Roddy Llewellyn, in his tight-fitting trunks. The photograph was published by the News Of The World on 22nd 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 Roddy 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. It ended up with MPs discussing it in a parliamentary debate, calling Margaret a hussy, implying she was a scarlet 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 Callaghan, about it. And in the words of one of her former private secretaries, she said, what are we going to do about my sister's guttersnipe 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 19th 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 Snowden could claim the moral high ground because he had been involved in a full-on affair with Lucy Lindsay Hogg, who was the ex-wife of a very prominent theatre and cinema director. They'd 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 extramarital 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 two years after they separated, the marriage was over. The Princess was terribly against divorce. What most people didn't realise 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 time 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, once 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 annulled, so it was though it had never taken place. So, really, Margaret's was the first proper divorce in royal history and it did kind of pave the way for what would come in the 80s and the 90s with three of the Queen's own children being divorced. When Princess Margaret was involved with Peter Townsend in the 50s, it was scandalous, it was taboo. Now, it was a part of everyday life. Just seven months later, Lord Snowden married again. Tony then very quickly married his long-term mother, Lucy Lindsay Hogg, who became Countess of Snowden, and went on working and went on having affairs. In 1979, the couple had a daughter, Lady Frances. 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, his work and sex, and he wanted as much as the one as the other. He'd flirt with the letterbox, he would flirt with anything, and 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 that Roddy would have been so shocked by what had happened, he would retreat from the whole hullabaloo. But he stuck by Margaret and it eventually petered out in about 1981. Roddy 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 Roddy had made Margaret happy, and so although the relationship hadn't been born in auspicious circumstances and wasn't welcomed by the royal family at the time, there's no doubt that 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, 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 late 70s and then throughout the 80s hardened. She was often criticised for the amount of time she spent on holiday, she was criticised for her drinking, she was criticised for her smoking, her health suffered. And there is no doubt that she became a rather sad figure, slightly marginalised on the edge of royal life. Princess Margaret died in 2002. Her funeral attended by both Lord Snowdon and Roddy Llewellyn. But the astonishing story of her life with Lord Snowdon still had secrets to reveal. In fact, it wasn't until 2004, some time after Princess Margaret's death, that perhaps the most salacious, sensational story about Snowdon's extramarital affairs came out. Before Princess Margaret and Snowdon got married, there were already plenty of rumours that the man he wanted to be his best man, Jeremy Fry, who was married to Camilla Fry, that, in fact, that friendship between Snowdon, Camilla and Jeremy was much more than a friendship with both of them. A rumour had been buzzing round for some time that one of Jeremy Fry's daughters was actually by a tony. And I asked him if I could talk to this girl, was this so? And he said yes, and so I wrote to her, and she told me all about it. I went to see her, her name was Polly Fry, and she had persuaded Tony to have a DNA test done and 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. Of course, if that had happened, that had broken in 1960, it would have put pain to any idea of marriage, and God knows what would have happened if it had broken while they were newly married. I simply can't imagine. Lord Snowdon 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. Snowdon'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 modernised, so in some ways you can see the Snowdons as trailblazers for a new sort of royal, but they're still the same issues, I think, of duty and service against personal freedom. With the benefit of hindsight, you'd have to say that their relationship almost certainly was doomed from the start. I mean, there was a lot of sexual animal magic between the two of them, there's 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 Snowdon says a great deal about how their lives and how their stories are regarded by audiences today.