Princess Margaret and womanising Lord Snowdon's divorce of the decade

When in March 1976, the Queen’s spirited younger sister split with her husband of 20 years, it was a blow not only to her family but to convention – and the respect in which monarchy was held.

It would open the way to a string of Royal divorces in the following years. 

The explosive story of Princess Margaret’s relationship with her photographer husband was chronicled in Anne de Courcy’s acclaimed Snowdon – The Biography, serialised in the Daily Mail. 

Here, in this compelling Mail extract from 2017, the author  recalled how a fatal combination of Margaret’s neediness and Tony Snowdon’s philandering turned the marriage from a love-match into a battlefield. 

Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon during yet another argument. They had been viewed as one of the most glamorous couples in the world when they got together in the spring of 1960. Yet by 1972, when this picture was taken, the marriage was heading for the rocks – and a shocking Royal divorce

By the summer of 1965, five years after their May 6 wedding, the constraints of marriage to a Royal were beginning to chafe on Tony.

He was never going to spend his time as a permanent number two, his prime job to be the perfect royal consort. Chiefly, this was because of his urge to work, but it also involved the streak of contrariness in his nature that manifested itself in various floutings of established custom or order.

Equally Margaret, despite dipping her toes in Tony’s world, would go on fulfilling the royal role to which she had been brought up — and behaving in the way she had always behaved.

‘She was very much a schizophrenic in that sense,’ said her cousin, Lord Lichfield. ‘The moment people became too matey, her reaction was: “Don’t forget who I am”.’

On holiday in Rome with their friends Judy Montagu and her husband, who lived in an elegant flat in the ancient Jewish quarter, Tony climbed out of a window and on to the roof. ‘It’s the only place I can get away from her,’ he said of his wife.

He remained there until persuaded down by magazine publisher Jocelyn Stevens, who was also in Rome and who’d been rung by the frantic Margaret when her own pleas for her husband to come down had met with no response.

She did not always understand how much her behaviour frustrated him. In the winter, she insisted on coming skiing with him and his friends but spent all morning in bed while Tony, who adored skiing, got up early.

Princess Margaret Rose, as she was still known, and dashing photographer Antony Armstrong Jones at Royal Lodge, Windsor, on the day in 1960 that they announced their engagement

Newly married Antony Armstrong-Jones and Princess Margaret leave Westminster Abbey hand-in-hand on their wedding day in May the same year

The couple at the Badminton Horse Trials in 1962. Plain Mr Armstrong Jones had been created Lord Snowdon the year before, following the birth of their son, David

 She would emerge to drink several glasses of gin before lunch. In the evening, when the others, physically tired after a day on the slopes, felt like bed, Margaret wanted to stay up late drinking whisky and being entertained.

One evening, Tony and Anthony Barton, an old friend from university days at Cambridge, came back from skiing to find Anthony’s wife Eva with her hair half curly, half straight — she had been at the salon when a message came through that Her Royal Highness wanted some company, so Eva had to leave with her hair half-done.

Tony did not make things easier, deliberately arriving late back from the slopes. It made for a heavily unpleasant atmosphere.

Margaret’s almost hysterical possessiveness was partly based on the feeling that while he was away from her Tony would not be faithful. She was right to worry.

As she knew, his sexual appetite was demanding and constant — and his urge towards new conquests was unstoppable. He resisted few opportunities that came his way.

One account of him at a party given by the theatre critic Kenneth Tynan describes Margaret telephoning to find out if her husband was there, and Tony, with a beautiful black model on his lap, making negative signs.

To the embarrassment of other guests, the Princess, sitting alone in Kensington Palace, innocently asked who was there, and then asked to have a chat with those she knew.

Lord Snowdon meets Princess Margaret at London Airport in 1971 with son David waiting in the car. Although romantically drawn to one another, their married life was increasingly turbulent.

Snowdon and Margaret at Badminton once again.  A decade on from their wedding, – and despite growing tensions – the couple remained ineffably stylish

Margaret’s insecurity and Snowdon’s philandering quickly poisoned the relationship – a conflict dramatised by Ben Daniels and Helena Bonham Carter in Netflix drama, The Crown

Princess Margaret and the Earl of Snowdon enjoy the Bahamas sunshine in 1967

GIFTS THE PRINCESS COULDN’T REFUSE DUE TO HER POSITION

 When Tony and Margaret stayed at his mother’s old family estate Nymans (famous for its gardens, now owned by the National Trust) in Sussex, they would sometimes visit the Lanes in Brighton.

Although the Princess wore casual clothes, usually with a headscarf and dark glasses, she and Tony were the most recognisable couple in the kingdom. If they wanted to buy something, this could be an embarrassment, as when, in one antique shop, the owner asked nervously: ‘Are you Princess Margaret?’

When she replied, smiling, ‘Yes,’ he said: ‘Can I offer you something?’

As she remarked afterwards to one of the friends she was with: ‘That often happens and you can’t say no, it would seem so rude, so you just have to find the cheapest thing that you possibly can.’ 

His minor infidelities were discreetly conducted. No one outside Tony’s immediate circle realised he had taken this or that girl home. He also maintained contact with old girlfriends, as he would do all his life.

For him, long relationships and casual encounters co-existed.

Unhappy and bored, the Princess was unfaithful, too. A regular guest at Kensington Palace was Anthony Barton, who lived in France, but stayed whenever Snowdon was in London.

Tony was usually around for his visits, but in February 1966 went to India on a job, insisting his friend should remain in his absence. Then, one evening, with no preliminaries, Margaret said to Barton: ‘Let’s go to bed.’

Startled, he replied: ‘No, I think our relationship’s not that.’ She edged closer and said: ‘Well, I think you could be a bit more cuddly.’

Few men could have resisted her, and Barton did not, though his conscience troubled him. He felt there was more than a hint of revenge in her enthusiasm for him. An affair with one of her husband’s oldest and closest friends was a classic way for a neglected wife to strike back.

‘No one need ever know,’ said the Princess. And for a while, they did not.

The tension between Margaret and Tony was obvious, sometimes descending into simple rudeness.

The society photographer Cecil Beaton recorded an incident in his diary where Tony was discussing the lighting being installed for some garden sculpture. Margaret, sucking on a long cigarette holder, sidled up and began: ‘Don’t you think it would be better if . . .’ Tony responded by telling her to ‘p*** off’.

After a while, they began communicating with each other by long, handwritten letters. One, left by Tony before he went away on a trip, reveals that he knew she was seeing other men — and expresses his irritation at her daily routine of staying up drinking into the small hours, then sleeping all morning.

‘I am so looking forward to coming home, but I am somewhat saddened that you yet again choose to ignore my advice about going to bed at a reasonable time . . .

How the Daily Mail published Ann de Courcy’s explosive biograph of Snowdon in 2017

‘It really isn’t good for you continuously to stay up so late drinking and so on . . . If things are not going very well at the moment, then please darling do discuss things with me and I’m sure we can straighten it out. I was rather shocked that you took such pride in telling me that you had only three half-hearted affairs and it was much better when I was in India. All I ask is not to make it too obvious.’

Yet amid the complaints, there remained strong affection. The letter concluded: ‘I love you very much, darling, and everything can be all right if you want it to be. Maybe we have both made a lot of mistakes. Everyone does, but let’s try . . . because you are such a marvellous person and I love you.’

Margaret, for her part, pointed out to Tony how hard it was to please him. If she asked him about his work, he did not answer, but when she didn’t ask he accused her of taking no interest.

What she found most difficult to bear, she said, was ‘the silent treatment, the dreaded fed-up sighs, the flouncing out’.

WHY GUESTS HAD TO WOLF DOWN DINNER WHEN THEY CAME

At home, the Snowdons’ life was so hectic their servants, always hard-working, were beginning to feel the strain.

Neither Margaret nor Tony would hesitate, on their way out to a party, to say: ‘By the way, there will be eight for dinner tonight after the theatre,’ meaning that chef, kitchen man, butler and footman would be on duty until midnight — ensured by the washing up alone, done by the footman as the butler felt that it was not part of his duties.

The head housemaid and under-housemaid worked hard at cleaning from 7am-1pm, remaining on duty until 8.30 or 9.30pm, with two or three hours off on some unspecified days of the week.

Only if the children, their nanny and a nursemaid were away for the weekend were Saturday afternoons and Sundays free. The Princess’s private secretary eventually pleaded: ‘Would it be possible for there to be one day in the week (say Wednesdays) when you did not entertain?’

At dinner parties, where naturally Margaret was served first, she would begin to eat straight away and, a quick eater, finish quite a long time before the others.

As protocol forbade anyone continuing to eat after the Princess, those who could not bolt their food often got only half a dinner.

It was the same with departure times: no one could leave before she did and if she wanted to stay until 4am — as she often did — everyone else also had to. 

‘You are such bliss to be with when you’re sweet and laughing and clever,’ she wrote to him in a conciliatory letter, ‘so I’ll try all in my power to please you if you’ll give me some nice cosy affection.’

In an effort to sort out their difficulties, Tony suggested that Margaret visit a psychiatrist. It was not a success.

‘Tony sent me to him,’ she confided to a friend later. ‘He said it would be the answer. But I only lasted one session — I didn’t like it at all. Perfectly useless!’

Then came a new blow. At home in France, Anthony Barton left one of Margaret’s letters lying about and his wife Eva picked it up and read it. The affair ended, which to Barton was a relief.

The problem was that he and Eva were about to go and stay with the Snowdons.

As nothing had come into the open, Eva felt they might as well pretend nothing had happened. But this course of action proved impossible for her to sustain — and one evening she told Tony what had been going on.

It cannot have been a total surprise, as Margaret had confided in several people; while others must have noticed those minute, seemingly insignificant but telltale signs that pass between two people with a sexual link.

SNOWDON’S RUSE TO HELP OUT A GOON WITH A GUN 

The Duke of Edinburgh, who was a crack shot, generously gave Tony five days’ shooting in late autumn at Windsor, to which he could invite his own guests.

Among others, Tony asked his great friend, Goon Show star Peter Sellers, and his wife, Britt Ekland (when the couple later divorced, Tony quipped: ‘He bit off more than he could screw’).

Sellers, who spent money like water on anything mechanical, would come down equipped with wonderful guns — one purchase was a £1,200 12-bore from Purdeys — and togged out, as Britt later recounted, in ‘padded hacking jacket, boots, breeches and a Sherlock Holmes deerstalker’.

Unfortunately, he was such a poor shot he missed every bird. Eventually Tony and another friend, one on each side of Sellers, took to standing a pace or two to the rear of his line of sight.

As Peter shot — and invariably missed — so did Tony and his friend, crying ‘Yours, Peter! Well done!’ as the bird tumbled from the sky. Sellers would beam with pride at his skill

It was what Tony had suspected — and indeed, he had almost thrown his wife and his friend together — but had preferred to ignore. He had even once said to Barton: ‘I wish to hell she’d take a lover and leave me in peace.’ Nevertheless, when faced with incontrovertible proof of Margaret’s unfaithfulness, he was deeply upset. He went to Barton in tears, but tried to cover his red eyes and sniffs by explaining: ‘I’ve got a terrible cold.’

There was no serious acrimony, but they did not see each other again for many years. When they met again, at the christening of Margaret and Tony’s daughter Sarah, a tentative relationship resumed.

Then, when the Bartons’ son, who was Tony’s godson, died, all Tony’s former warmth and affection for his old friend came rushing back. Generously, he told him: ‘I forget what that thing in the past was — it’s all forgotten now.’

For all the difficulties and the confrontations, Tony and Margaret still slept together. The mutual sexual attraction that had first brought them together was still there. One confidante remarked astutely that their fights ‘were almost a form of foreplay’.

Increasingly, however, each was feeling isolated inside the marriage. Used to male adoration, and all too aware of Tony’s interest in other women, Margaret ran into an old friend, Robin Douglas-Home, a charming, light-hearted dilettante who played piano at smart hotels like the Ritz and who was well known for his love affairs.

Intuitive, empathetic and a practised seducer, Douglas-Home quickly realised that the Princess —depressed, lonely and neglected — was ripe for an affair.

Her feelings of unhappiness were exacerbated by Tony’s absence on location in Tokyo. The two had argued violently about it, Margaret begging him to postpone his trip but he had refused. A man who made her feel a desirable woman again, who wanted to be near her rather than away from her, was a huge comfort — in the short term.

One evening she made a gesture of affection to Douglas-Home, saying what a support he was to her and adding: ‘I don’t know what I’d do without you.’

A passionate but brief liaison followed, with Margaret visiting Douglas-Home at his house, Meadowbrook, in Sussex.

Here were all the felicitous attentions that turn a pleasant evening into a memorably romantic one: soft lights, candles, a delicious meal cooked by Douglas-Home, music and loving words.

On Monday, the day before Valentine’s Day, he drove her back to Kensington Palace.

The next day, she wrote him a letter: ‘Darling, thank you for a perfect weekend . . . Thank you for making me live again. Thank you for being gentle when it was unexpected, which gave me back self-confidence. Thank you for everything nice, which everything was. With best love. M.’

When Tony was alerted by a friend, he was again furious and jealous. Forcefully, he told Margaret that Douglas-Home was never to be allowed into Kensington Palace again.

She agreed to break off the relationship, assuring Tony: ‘He wasn’t nearly as good a lover as you, darling.’ This was a phrase she would use to her husband several times in the future.

In a tender, indeed loving, letter to Douglas-Home, she wrote: ‘A real effort must be made on my side to make the marriage work. I shall try to speak to you as much as possible, but I am in fear of him, and I don’t know what lengths he won’t go to, jealous as he is, to find out what I am up to, and your movements, too. . . . Know always that I want you . . . all my love, my darling, M.’

In a depression exacerbated by gambling debts and alcohol, Douglas-Home later committed suicide. Seeing the news on television while having supper with an old friend, James Cousins, Margaret did not show a flicker of emotion.

The next day, however, she fell deeply asleep during a meeting — something she had never been known to do. Cousins suspected she had spent the night weeping. On the surface, the glittering facade of the royal marriage was intact. But friends found themselves witnessing ever more painful scenes.

Several told me: ‘She would ring at one or two in the morning and one would dress and go round, and there she’d be in floods and the whisky bottle would be empty and he’d be in the basement.’

The actor Peter Sellers talking with Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon at a film premiere in 1969. Margaret enjoyed rubbing shoulders with the leading actors and artists of the day

Margaret sitting next to jazz pianist and socialite Robin Douglas-Home in 1966. Margaret turned to the aristocrat when her marriage started to unravel

Alcohol was not the only stimulant fuelling their lives. Marijuana was widely used among Tony’s set, its distinctive aroma hanging over their dinner parties. Tony often kept a lump of hashish in his pocket. Then the film star Peter Sellers introduced Tony to ‘poppers’, capsules of amyl nitrate that heightened sexual pleasure and endurance.

At Kenneth Tynan’s hedonistic parties, blue films were sometimes shown. ‘Do her good,’ said Tony, when Tynan expressed doubts about watching them in Margaret’s presence. Strange as it seems, however, what caused the greatest trouble in the Snowdon marriage was a house.

Finding a bolt hole in the country had preoccupied them for some time, and Tony’s choice was his childhood refuge, Old House, deep in the woods on his grandfather’s Nymans estate in West Sussex. It was a ramshackle building with no heating, lighting or plumbing — but it was a magical place that he adored. At the same time, the Queen offered the couple a site near Sunninghill in Berkshire, on which to build something new.

Tony insisted on Old House; Margaret was adamant on the virtues of Sunninghill. Disagreement escalated into constant, furious rows in which neither would give an inch. Francis Legh, the Princess’s comptroller, would arrive home exhausted from the strain. ‘Get me a drink, quick,’ he would demand, then describe what to a courtier of the old school was almost unbelievable behaviour: ‘They were shouting and screaming at each other up the stairs, in front of the butler.’

What the Princess did not know was that Tony had brought in a builder to start work on modifying Old House. Willy-nilly, she had to give in. But she hated the place and her visits were few and disastrous.

Tony, by contrast, would vanish there at every opportunity to entertain his friends — pausing only to raid the Kensington Palace larder for lobster, cheese and wine to pack in his Aston Martin.

‘Why should I be expected to feed all your friends?’ she would explode. ‘Can I not take food from my own home?’ he would shout back.

The relationship degenerated into open warfare, with Tony’s quickness of wit and lack of scruple giving him the edge.

He made lists of ‘things I hate about you’ and left them in the book she was reading, on her desk, under her pillow or lying around the house — the most famous was ‘You look like a Jewish manicurist’, found in her glove drawer.

If she was singing at the piano with friends, he would stand behind her and mimic her, make faces or perform a mock curtsey.

He was invariably very funny when he did this, but it was horribly embarrassing for others, as was his habit of asking everyone except Margaret what they would like to drink, and when she asked for a glass of whisky simply ignoring her.

Margaret, ashamed, would not know what to do.

En route to official occasions, he would open the window of the Rolls so that Margaret’s carefully done hair blew all over the place and a violent scene would ensue as she shouted, ‘put that window back up’, and he refused.

Dinner parties were another minefield. Patrick Lichfield remembered: ‘I always hoped there would be other people there, because they were so prone to fight and then each of them would try to draw one to their side.

Princess Margaret pictured at Gatwick Airport after returning from a trip to Mustique in 1976 – the year the collapse of her marriage was announced. The divorce was finalised in 1978

How The Daily Mail reported on the split, the first royal divorce since the time of Henry VIII 

‘And I always felt obliged to be on Princess Margaret’s because she was my cousin and it was through her that I got to know Tony. Whom I thought in a class of his own as a photographer.’

Most of the rows were about trivia, a constant battling to show who was ‘top dog’. Margaret’s upbringing had convinced her she was always the most important person in the room; Tony was determined not be bossed around.

If his wife asked him to sit in the front of the car, he would climb into the back. If she was chatting to their friends, he would tell her sharply: ‘Shut up and let someone intelligent talk.’ They even fought in front of the Queen Mother, shouting at each other across the drawing room at Clarence House.

One argument was so ferocious the Queen Mother said to her page, William Tallon: ‘Come on, William, we’re going into the pantry. We’re not being privy to this.’

Occasionally, Margaret managed a crushing riposte.

One day the couple’s children — David and Sarah — came back from school complaining that the other children would jeer ‘here come the Royals’ when they arrived. ‘But darlings, you’re not royal,’ the Princess told her children, adding pointedly: ‘And Papa’s certainly not royal.’

Such victories were rare. Margaret’s unhappiness was affecting her health: she was drinking heavily, putting on weight, and there were sudden, desperate forays into flirtation.

‘Sometimes she almost threw herself at men,’ said one of her friends. ‘Partly it was to make Tony jealous, partly to prove to herself she was still attractive.’

Her misery was largely because, despite everything, she wanted her marriage to continue: a divorce was against her religious faith and her own inclinations.

Divorce, to her, spelled failure. But her relationship with Tony was reaching the point of no return.

Extracted from Snowdon: The Biography by Anne de Courcy, published by Weidenfeld & Nicholson. Copyright © 2008 Anne de Courcy. Anne’s latest book, Five Love Affairs and a Friendship: The Paris Life of Nancy Cunard, Icon of the Jazz Age, is now available in paperback

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