The truth about Princess Margaret’s marriage to Antony Armstrong Jones

She was the most eligible princess in Europe but she married a commoner for love. Their attraction wasn’t enough to save their troubled relationship.

Warning: Spoiler Alert The Crown Season 3

Princess Margaret’s life was infamously full of indulgences and sadness. She loved drinking and smoking but it was her love life that generated the most scandals and headlines.

From her teenage years, Margaret enjoyed bombshell status in Britain. She was the vivacious, unquestionably sexy younger sister of the queen, a Princess who managed to straddle both the emerging bohemian set in London and the tiara-sporting, fusty, titled clique she had grown up with. (“She might get into trouble before she’s finished,” a British diplomat once quipped about Margaret, according to biographer Anne de Courcy.)

The heartbroken princess was coming off the devastating break-up of her relationship with her first love, Group Captain Peter Townsend, whom she was forbidden from marrying because he was divorced when she met Antony Armstrong Jones.

Bohemian, talented and rakish, he was unlike any of the men Margaret had dated before. When the couple were introduced in 1958, the spark was immediate, however their passionate union would be tested by infidelity, anger, and the stark reality of life inside the world’s most famous family.

Their tumultuous relationship is one of the key plot lines in series 3 of the hit Netflix drama The Crown.

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An official engagement portrait.

THE EARLY YEARS

While Margaret was desperate to be Mrs Townsend, the man she ultimately chose to wed was far from a conventional choice.

Antony Armstrong Jones had struggled at university, dropping out of an architecture degree to pursue his love of photography. In the late 1950s, he established himself as one of the leading society snappers up there with the legendary Cecil Beaton. In 1957, he was commissioned to shoot Prince Charles and Princess Anne before the Queen and Prince Philip also sat for the talented creative.

It was Princess Margaret’s lady-in-waiting Lady Elizabeth Cavendish who thought the royal, might find the dashing man-about-town amusing and invited him to a dinner party at the home of the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire

Margaret was coming off the devastating break-up of her relationship with her first love, Group Captain Peter Townsend, whom she was forbidden from marrying because he was divorced.

Tony, as he was known, and Margaret’s love affair started in 1958 and largely played out in secret, with her meeting him at his Pimlico Road studio in West London. She is said to have loved the artistic world he moved in, meeting the painters, actors and writers whom he entertained in the ground floor flat he rented in south East London.

There, Margaret experienced a world she had never known, enjoying Shepherd’s Pie he had whipped up for her and cheap wine and even joining in washing up.

Their attraction to one another was intensely physical.

“What he had foremost in common with Princess Margaret could be put in three words,” one of his friends told royal biographer Theo Aronson. “Sex, sex, sex. Theirs was a terribly physical relationship, they couldn’t keep their hands off each other, even with other people present … He was very well made and obviously that had a lot to do with it.”

Despite Tony’s social credentials — on her second marriage his mother had become the Countess of Rosse — he was far from a textbook partner for a Princess. To some in the aristocracy, his job reduced him to the status of a ‘tradesman’ and there are reports that when he photographed society weddings, he was forced to eat with the staff.

Margaret and Antony couldn’t keep their hands off one another. Picture: Supplied

While he was not a titled landowner or European prince, it is reported the Queen and the Queen Mother reluctantly accepted the relationship. Margaret and Tony became privately engaged in December 1959 but the news was not publicly announced until after their birth of Prince Andrew in February 1960.

While the public was thrilled their beloved Princess had finally found love, both families had their reservations, with one of his friends telling society columnist Nigel Dempster: “Never has there been a more ill-fated assignment.”

The couple walked down the aisle on Friday, 6 May 1960 in the first royal wedding to be broadcast on TV. Only one member of European royalty attended, members of numerous leading houses having turned down the invitation, shocked that a Princess had chosen to marry a working man rather than someone of similar rank.

The couple were allowed to marry, but cracks started appearing from the start. Picture: AFP PHOTO / CENTRAL PRESS PHOTO LTD

While they were initially happy, problems soon started to emerge. Tony had always worked and financially supporting himself, yet now found himself struggling to find his place in the royal family. For example, he was expected to walk two paces behind his wife in public which is said to have increasingly grated on him. When he was offered the chance to work on the launch of the Times Sunday colour magazine, he enthusiastically agreed to public controversy.

In 1961, Margaret gave birth to their son David. The thorny questions of what title Princess Margaret’s first child would receive was solved when the Queen made Tony the Earl of Snowdon, Viscount Linley only a month before David’s arrival.

Daughter Sarah was born in 1964 but apparently by this point the Snowdons’ union was already suffering.

It is believed Margaret was the first of the pair to stray when she had a fling with one of Tony’s friends, and Sarah’s godfather, Anthony Barton in 1967. (There have even been suggestions that Tony set the duo up.)

The couple had two children. Picture: Supplied

During the late 60s the Snowdons drifted even further apart. Tony bought a dilapidated property called Old House in Sussex and threw himself into renovating it. He would go there on weekends and became close to the Marquess and Marchioness of Reading.

Tony became close to the couple, regularly enjoying drinks and dinner parties. What no-one knew for quite a long time was that Tony had become very close indeed to their daughter, "It" girl Lady Jacqueline Rufus-Isaacs, and that the two had been having a passionate, secret fling since she was 19.

On one notable occasion, Margaret’s chauffeur, in cahoots with Tony, had to smuggle Lady Jacquie out of Old House by pretending he needed to get petrol for Tony’s Aston Martin. When the chauffeur opened the boot, there was the titled teenager.

Things came to a head in 1971 when news of the affair hit the front pages.

Tony would later have an affair with his assistant Lucy Lindsay-Hogg who would later become his second wife.

It was only in 1976, when Margaret’s long-term affair with the much younger Roddy Llewellyn was revealed that the couple finally separated, and later divorced.

In 2004 it was revealed that Camilla Fry, the wife of one of Tony’s closest friends, had given birth to a daughter named Polly in 1960 who was the Earl’s daughter, while the newlywed

Daniela Elser is a royal expert and freelance writer with 15 years’ experience who has written for some of Australia’s best print and digital media brands.