I didn’t fall in love with boys, but a few men have been in love with me. That’s the man himself. Lord Snowdon, born Anthony Armstrong Jones, the Welsh photographer who somehow talked his way into Westminster Abbey in May 1960 and walked out married to the Queen’s sister. A commoner on a motorcycle with a shortened leg from polio and a Pimlico studio full of actresses he’d probably slept with became the first man without a title to marry a king’s daughter in 400 years and the courtiers at Buckingham Palace called him the Jones boy, like it was a
slur. Here’s what I want you to sit with for a second. The same man who designed the Snowdon Aviary at London Zoo, who won two Emmys for a documentary about aging, who used his first speech in the House of Lords to fight for disabled people, that man left notes for his wife that read, and I’m quoting directly, “You look like a Jewish manicurist and I hate you.
” I’m going to tell you about one of the most dualistic figures of the entire 20th century. A man who modernized how Britain saw itself while privately and systematically destroying the woman he married. Tony was the charming bohemian who became an emotional anarchist. A neglected polio kid grew up to neglect everyone who loved him.
This is the scandalous life of Anthony Armstrong Jones. By the end of this, you’re going to have feelings about him. I certainly do. Anthony Charles Robert Armstrong Jones arrived on the 7th of March 1930 into a marriage that was already cracking. His father, Major Ronald Armstrong Jones, worked as a successful Welsh barrister with what biographers politely describe as a highly sexed personality.
Which in 1930s England was code for a man who could not keep his hands to himself. Anne Messel, Tony’s mother, was one of those glittering London society beauties who appeared in the gossip columns between a perfume advertisement and the racing results. The marriage lasted 5 years. By 1935, Anne had divorced Ronald and remarried way up to Michael Parsons, the 6th Earl of Rossie.
Little Tony, 5 years old and suddenly a leftover from the previous administration, got shipped off to Ireland. Birr Castle, a cold ancient pile in County Offaly, became his new home and the new Lady Rossie settled in to live her best countess life. Here’s where things get rough for young Tony. Anne already had an older child, Susan, from her first marriage and she would go on to have two more sons with Lord Rossie, the Parsons boys, and those boys were the shining princes of Birr Castle.
With his Welsh barrister father and his ordinary Armstrong Jones surname, Tony was treated as an inconvenient piece of luggage from a life Anne was actively trying to forget. Biographer Anne de Courcy, in her authorized 2008 book, describes a household where he was almost an intruder in his own mother’s new family.
The Messel side of the family was a different story entirely. Tony’s great-grandfather was Linley Sambourne, the celebrated Punch cartoonist, and his uncle was Oliver Messel, one of the most famous designers of the 20th century. Creativity ran hot in that bloodline, along with ambition, hunger for attention, and a taste for applause that would shape every choice Tony ever made.
So, here’s our baby, Tony. Ignored by a glamorous mother who had married a lord, raised half in Wales and half in Ireland, surrounded by artistic genius on one side and aristocratic indifference on the other. He was the kind of child who learned early that the only person he could count on was himself.
And then, at 16, he got polio. In 1946, and the family was on holiday at their Welsh estate, Plas Dinas, not Eton, despite what you’ll see repeated in lazy articles when Tony fell ill. A rushed ambulance journey took him to the Liverpool Royal Infirmary. Polio in the mid-1940s was the monster under every parent’s bed.
A disease that crippled and killed thousands of children every year. And that skinny Welsh-Irish kid with the creative genes and the wounded ego spent 6 months in that hospital fighting for the use of his own legs. During that 6 months, his mother visited him twice. Allegedly, she was afraid of catching the virus. And allegedly, she found illness distasteful.
Those are the reasons the biographers give. Whatever you want to call it, Ann Messel could not bring herself to sit at her son’s bedside while a disease ate his left leg. And the people who nursed him through those agonizing months were his older sister Susan, later Viscountess de Vesci, and his father Ronald, the barrister she had divorced.
Advertisements
Tony survived. But his left leg came out of Liverpool thinner and shorter than his right, and he walked with a permanent limp for the rest of his life. Something else came out of that hospital with him, too. Something harder to measure. A furnace of ambition mixed with permanent suspicion of the people who were supposed to love him.
And a conviction that nobody was ever going to take care of Tony Armstrong Jones in this world except Tony. Biographers suggest that almost every destructive thing he would later do to the people closest to him can be traced back to that hospital room. Keep in mind, that’s a theory and not a fact, and we’ll come back to it.
You can already feel the weight of it though, can’t you? Tony went up to Jesus College, Cambridge in the late 1940s to study architecture. And this lasted about as long as you’d expect from a man with his temperament. He failed his second year exams and left without a degree. Before he left though, he did something that mattered to him for the rest of his life.
In March 1950, young Tony sat in the stern of the Cambridge eight as its coxswain and screamed his compact, wiry, Welsh body hoarse while the crew beat Oxford down the Thames. A boat race win in 1950 meant something in that world. The boy with the limp, the leftover from Ann Messel’s first marriage, had coxed a boat race victory, and he kept that medal his whole life.
With architecture off the table, he drifted into photography, which in retrospect looks inevitable. His apprenticeship came under Baron Nahum, known professionally as just Baron. One of the most prominent society and court photographers of the era, the man who had been doing Princess Margaret’s official portraits until his death in 1956, Tony set up his own studio on Pimlico Road, and within a few years he was photographing the entire London theatrical and Bohemian aristocracy.
Laurence Olivier sat for him, Vivien Leigh sat for him, Marlene Dietrich sat for him. Now, here’s where we need to talk about the part of his biography that the palace spent decades pretending didn’t exist. Tony Armstrong Jones was bisexual. In the tight gossipy world of 1950s artistic London, this was not a secret, it was just not printed.
The interior designer Nicky Haslam, in his memoir Redeeming Features, documented having a brief affair with him, and Snowdon himself, when his biographer asked him about it decades later, gave one of the more elegant non-denials in modern memoir, “I didn’t fall in love with boys, but a few men have been in love with me.
” Read that sentence twice. He is not denying anything. On the women’s side, his documented early loves included the actresses Jackie Chan and Gina Ward, along with a rotating cast of assistants, dancers, and fellow Bohemians. Camilla was married to Jeremy Fry, one of Tony’s closest friends, a man so close that Tony had originally asked Jeremy to be best man at his wedding, the wedding that is to Princess Margaret. Yeah.
Throughout 1959, while he was secretly courting the Queen’s sister, our Welsh photographer was also carrying on a passionate affair with his best friend’s wife. And Camilla Fry got pregnant. Polly Fry was born on the 28th of May, 1960, exactly 3 weeks after Tony married Princess Margaret on the 6th of May.
I want you to sit with the geometry of that for a second. On the morning of his royal wedding, Tony Armstrong-Jones knew that his mistress was heavily pregnant with his child. And he still walked down the aisle of Westminster Abbey in front of the Queen of England and said his vows while his daughter was born 3 weeks later into an entirely different family.
The paternity stayed a rumor for the next 44 years. Finally, in 2004, a DNA test confirmed what everyone in Tony’s social circle had whispered about for decades. And Snowdon acknowledged Polly as his daughter. She took the news with grace. Jeremy Fry, who had raised her as his own, never publicly commented. All right, let’s talk about how a freelance photographer on a motorcycle managed to marry the most famous young woman in the world.
The popular story says Tony and Margaret met at a dinner party at the Rothschild house. And this is wrong, I have to say it, because the myth keeps getting repeated. According to Christopher Warwick, Margaret’s own authorized biographer, and Anne de Courcy, the two were formally introduced in 1958 at a dinner party hosted by Lady Elizabeth Cavendish at 5 Shane Walk in Chelsea. Shane Walk, not Rothschild.
The courtship that followed was one of the great pieces of press evasion in modern royal history. Tony rented a dilapidated atmospheric room at 59 Rotherhithe Street in Bermondsey, overlooking the Thames, unheated, peeling wallpaper, cold water. The kind of place a bohemian artist pretends he loves so that a princess can come and slum it for the weekend, and the princess came over and over.
The British press, honestly, blew this one spectacularly. Fleet Street was surveilling every aristocratic young man with a title and a country house, every duke’s son and earl’s nephew, convinced that Margaret was going to marry upward into one of the great landed families. A working photographer on a motorcycle was invisible to them.
Nobody on Fleet Street was looking for a coronet Tony did not have. The timing of the engagement is where this story gets genuinely painful. Princess Margaret had been in love with Group Captain Peter Townsend. You probably know this story. She had been forced to give him up in 1955 because he was divorced, and the Church of England was not going to stand for it.
And then she had spent the next four years nursing the wound. In late February 1960, Margaret received a letter from Townsend informing her that he had met a young Belgian woman named Marie-Luce Jamagne and intended to marry her. She confirmed this timeline directly to Christopher Warwick. The letter arrived, and within the same week, Margaret accepted Tony’s proposal.
The engagement was announced on the 26th of February, 1960. Tony Armstrong-Jones, 29 years old, no title, no land, two and a years of Cambridge, a Pimlico studio, a secret pregnant mistress, and a left leg that didn’t quite work was going to marry Princess Margaret. The wedding took place on the 6th of May, 1960, at Westminster Abbey.
This was the first royal wedding broadcast live by television cameras from inside the Abbey, watched by hundreds of millions of people around the world. Margaret wore a Norman Hartnell dress. Tony wore morning dress and tried not to limp too noticeably down the aisle. And somewhere in London, Camilla Fry was 8 months pregnant.
Tony was the first commoner without a title to marry a king’s daughter in four centuries, and the courtiers were appalled. Private secretaries muttered about the Jones boy. The Queen Mother, who had never warmed to him, tolerated her new son-in-law with the chilly politeness she reserved for people she considered beneath her family.
18 months later, the palace fixed the title problem. In October 1961, mere weeks before Margaret gave birth to their first child, Tony was created Earl of Snowdon and Viscount Linley by letters patent. The palace was not going to allow the Queen’s nephew to be born plain Master Jones. Now he had a title. Earl of Snowdon, master of absolutely nothing.
David, their son, was born on the 3rd of November, 1961. Lady Sarah arrived on the 1st of May, 1964. And then, everything started to fall apart. You can find a version of this marriage in every biography of Princess Margaret ever written, and they all agree on the basic shape of it. For the first three or four years, Tony and Margaret were genuinely, visibly in love.
He was charming, attentive, creatively inspired by her. She was dazzled, proud, fiercely protective of his career. Then something turned. Tony never stopped having affairs. Not during the engagement, not during the early marriage, not ever. Lady Jacqueline Rufus Isaacs, the American model Pamela Colin, the journalist Ann Hills, whose story we will come back to, and you are not going to like it.
Young assistants at his studio, friends’ wives, friends’ husbands on occasion. Snowdon treated fidelity the way most people treated dress code. Something you technically observed when the right people were watching. Abandoned emotionally and humiliated socially, Margaret started to fight back the only way she knew how.
Her documented affairs included Anthony Barton, a Bordeaux wine producer and old friend, Robin Douglas-Home, a pianist who killed himself shortly after their affair ended, and most famously, the landscape gardener Roddy Llewellyn, a man 17 years her junior. So both of them were cheating. A lot of aristocratic marriages of that era ran on exactly this arrangement and managed a kind of bitter equilibrium.
What turned the Snowdon-Margaret marriage into something historically ugly was not the affairs, it was the cruelty. The notes were the weapon. Tony would leave Margaret little handwritten messages, and not love notes. These were messages designed to wound. The most infamous of them quoted in DeCourcy, in Craig Brown’s Ma’am Darling, in Anne Glenconner’s Lady in Waiting, read in full.
“You look like a Jewish manicurist and I hate you. Now, here’s a note of honesty from me.” Different accounts place that note in different locations. Some say Margaret found it in her glove drawer, others say it was slipped into a book she was reading. The first-hand accounts don’t agree. But the existence of the note and the exact wording of it is confirmed by multiple independent sources and was effectively acknowledged by Snowdon through his silence.
It was not a one-off. According to Anne Glenconner, Margaret’s lady-in-waiting for decades and the person who knew the interior of that marriage better than almost anyone else alive, Tony would mock his wife at dinner parties in front of her own friends, tell her she looked ridiculous, lock himself in his study at Kensington Palace for days on end, and refuse to speak to her while presenting a charming, urbane face to the photographers the next morning.
Glenconner’s verdict on Snowdon in her memoir is acid. She describes a petty, spiteful man who seemed to derive genuine pleasure from emotionally torturing his wife. Craig Brown in Ma’am Darling goes further. He paints Snowdon as a master manipulator, a man who understood Margaret’s deep loneliness, her royal isolation, her lifelong sense of being the spare to Elizabeth’s heir, and who used all of that as leverage against her. He gaslit her.
That’s the word Brown uses in 2017, long before the term became a dinner party cliche. Tony gaslit her while his own career, built on the access her royal status gave him, accelerated year after year. Tony had spent 6 months in a Liverpool hospital bed at 16, abandoned by a mother who found his illness inconvenient, and biographers, I’m going to keep saying biographers suggest, because this is theory, not fact, biographers suggest that he spent the rest of his life recreating that dynamic in reverse.
He would not be the abandoned one again. He would be the one who inflicted the wound first before anyone could inflict a wound on him. You can buy that reading, or you can reject it. Either way, the notes existed, the public humiliations happened, and the years of silent treatment in Kensington Palace are on the record.
By the early 1970s, Kensington Palace was not so much a royal residence as a Cold War demilitarized zone. The servants developed entire elaborate protocols for moving through the apartment without triggering an incident between its principal residents. David and Sarah, the two children, grew up inside a psychological minefield that they would talk about carefully and briefly for the rest of their lives.
Margaret had been involved with Roddy Llewellyn since roughly 1973. Young and gentle and in love with her, he was for the first time in years someone who was actually kind to her. She took him to Mustique, the tiny private Caribbean island where her friend Colin Tennant, Lord Glenconner, and Glenconner’s husband had built her a villa called Les Jolies Eaux.
In February 1976, a photograph appeared in the News of the World showing Princess Margaret and Roddy Llewellyn in swimwear on Mustique. The British press went absolutely feral. This was tabloid Britain at the start of its most aggressive era and a princess in a bathing costume with a gardener 17 years her junior was catnip.
Here is where Snowdon played his cruelest card of all. Tony did not commiserate, did not defend her privately. He used the scandal. Long before the photographs ever appeared, Tony had been waiting for an opening and the Mustique photos gave him one. He went to the palace and pushed for a formal separation positioning himself as the wronged husband whose wife had embarrassed the monarchy and he knew exactly how to frame it.
Cornered, humiliated, watching her affair become global news, Margaret had no leverage left. The separation was announced in March 1976. The divorce was finalized on the 11th of July 1978. Here’s a fact that tells you everything about where the British monarchy was in that moment. The Snowdon-Margaret divorce is widely described as the first divorce of a senior royal since Princess Margaret Tudor, the sister of Henry the VIII in 1527.
Pedantic historians will correctly point out that Queen Victoria’s granddaughter, Princess Victoria Melita, divorced in 1901 fair, but in the immediate, senior, right at the center of the firm royal family, the comparison holds and 451 years is how long it had been. Margaret never remarried.
She kept Le Jolies Eau, kept drinking, kept smoking, and kept a framed picture of Peter Townsend in her bedroom until the day she died in 2002. Tony, meanwhile, was already moving on to his next wife. The ink on the decree absolute was barely dry. Now I have to do something that I find genuinely difficult when I’m covering a man like this.
I have to tell you about his art because Snowden was a legitimately brilliant artist. In 1962, 2 years into the marriage, he joined the newly launched Sunday Times Magazine as its artistic adviser. This was the first color supplement in British newspaper history, and Snowden used it to effectively reinvent British photojournalism.
Tony sent photographers into mental hospitals, into mining communities, into the slums of the industrial north, commissioning work that the British establishment did not want to see and publishing it in full color in a newspaper that showed up on the doorsteps of middle England every Sunday morning. His own portraits from that era, the Olivier sitting, the Vivian Leigh portraits, the David Bowie studies from the 1970s, are in the permanent collections of the National Portrait Gallery today.
They have a quality I can only describe as compressed intimacy. Every subject looks like they’ve just said something interesting and are waiting to see if you caught it. In 1964, alongside the architect Cedric Price and the structural engineer Frank Newby, Snowden co-designed the Snowdon Aviary at London Zoo.
If you have ever walked past Regent’s Park and seen that extraordinary angular tension steel birdcage, that’s his. The aviary is one of the most recognized pieces of post-war British architecture and it was conceived by a man who never finished his architecture degree. He made documentaries, too. Don’t count the candles, his 1968 meditation on aging won two Emmy Awards.
The man who could barely sit through a dinner party without emotionally destroying his wife could direct a film about old age that made millions of viewers cry. Then there was the disability work and this is the part that complicates him the most for me. Snowdon used his limp and the experience of polio as the foundation of a lifelong public commitment to disabled people.
He designed a motorized platform for wheelchair users called the chairmobile. He chaired commissions on disability access. In his maiden speech in the House of Lords, delivered with a fierce detailed fury, Tony advocated for the rights of disabled Britons at a time when almost no other peer in that chamber wanted to talk about the subject. None of that was performance.
All of the evidence suggests he actually cared about this, cared deeply, cared in a way that he never managed to care about the people sharing his bed. Five months after his divorce from Margaret, five months, Snowdon married Lucy Lindsay-Hogg. Lucy was a film researcher and the daughter of a baronet, 27 years old to Tony’s 48.
Their wedding was on the 15th of December, 1978. In July of 1979, Lucy gave birth to their daughter, Lady Frances Armstrong-Jones. If you’re wondering whether Tony had changed, whether maturity had touched him, whether the second marriage was going to be the redemption arc, reader, it was not.
Throughout his second marriage, Snowdon continued to have affairs. The one that matters most, and the one I need you to know about because it is one of the saddest stories in any is Ann Hills. Ann Hills was a journalist. She had been Snowdon’s mistress on and off for roughly 20 years. 20 years, she was not a casual fling, but a permanent feature of his private life running parallel to both marriages.
Her friends described her as deeply intelligent, funny, and increasingly unhappy about her position as the woman Tony would never leave his wife for. On the 31st of December, 1996 New Year’s Eve, Ann Hills took her own life. She was 57. Snowdon was informed of her death that evening. Then he went to the New Year’s Eve party he had been planning to attend.
You think he would cancel it? No. Tony attended the party. I’m going to let that sit there without an editorial. You can decide what that tells you about him. By 1997, Snowdon was 67 years old and still married to Lucy Lindsay Hogg, and he began an affair with Melanie Cable Alexander, an editor at Country Life magazine. Tony was 37 years older than her.
On the 30th of April, 1998, Melanie gave birth to a son. His name is Jasper Cable Alexander, and he is Snowdon’s son. When Lucy learned about Jasper and the birth made the papers, so learning about him was not optional, she filed for divorce. That second divorce was finalized in 2000. Let’s do the ledger on Antony Armstrong-Jones, 1930 to 2000, aged 70.
Two marriages, both ended by his affairs. Three acknowledged legitimate children with two different wives. One daughter born during his first marriage whose real father was him, but who was raised by another family. One son born during his second marriage whose mother was not his wife. At least one long-term mistress who killed herself.
And many, many other affairs that never reached the newspapers. This is the man who, in 1999, following the House of Lords Act, which expelled most hereditary peers, was given a life peerage as Baron Armstrong-Jones on the 16th of November, so that he could keep his seat and continue his disability advocacy work.
His friends called him Tony. His lovers called him difficult. Princess Margaret died in 2002, still wearing the ring he gave her. Lucy never spoke publicly about him again, and his children, when asked, choose their words with extraordinary care. Post-polio syndrome is a condition that hits decades after the original infection.
When the surviving muscles, which have been compensating for the damaged ones for 60 years, finally begin to fail. Tony had been limping his whole life. In his 70s, the limp became a cane. The cane became a wheelchair, and the wheelchair became his whole world. He kept working, though. Into his late 70s, the man who had once sprinted around Pimlico on a motorcycle was still taking portraits, still holding court in his Kensington studio, still sending Christmas cards with his photographs printed on them.
Snowdon died at home in Kensington on the 13th of January, 2017. He was 86 years old. The obituaries were long and careful. The Times ran a front-page photograph. The Telegraph described him as the commoner who modernized the monarchy, and the BBC led its evening news with the story. At the funeral, David, his son, now the second Earl of Snowdon, spoke briefly and beautifully.
Lady Sarah did not speak. Frances and Jasper attended. Polly Fry, his oldest child, was not mentioned in the official proceedings, and Princess Margaret had been dead for 15 years. Here is the problem with Antony Armstrong-Jones, and here is why I find him one of the most difficult figures I have ever covered. You cannot reduce him.
Tell the story of the cruelty alone, the notes, the silent treatment, the public humiliations, the New Year’s Eve party, and you end up with a monster, and monsters are easy. We know what to do with monsters. Just dismiss them. Tell the story of the art alone, the Sunday Times magazine, the Bowie portraits, the Snowdon aviary, the two Emmys, the genuine championing of disabled people when nobody else in the House of Lords wanted to hear about it, and you end up with a flawed genius.
And flawed geniuses are all so easy. We forgive them because they gave us beautiful things. Snowdon was both, one man, one nervous system, one Welsh-Irish photographer with a shortened leg who could in the same week commission a piece of photojournalism that changed how Britain saw its own poverty. And leave a handwritten note in his wife’s glove drawer telling her she looked like a Jewish manicurist.
Anne de Courcy, his authorized biographer, had extraordinary access to him in his final years, and the portrait she produced is devastating precisely because he did not try to manage it. By the end of his life, Snowdon did not seem to care whether history thought he was a good man.
He cared very much whether history thought he was a good photographer. That ordering of priorities is itself a kind of confession. Craig Brown, in Ma’am Darling, delivers the coldest and perhaps the fairest verdict. Brown argues that Snowdon rode Margaret’s royal status to the career he wanted, drained her of the emotional resources she had, and discarded her when the tabloid era offered him a way out that he could frame as her fault.
That’s a harsh reading. It is also difficult to disprove. Anne Glenconner, who watched the marriage from the inside for 16 years, is harsher still. Her Snowdon is petty, spiteful, a man who delighted in torture. When Glenconner speaks about him in interviews, her voice changes. You can hear the decades of accumulated witness in it.
And yet, the disability work was real. The journalism was real. Those photographs are in the National Portrait Gallery. The Snowdon Aviary is still there in Regent’s Park with the birds flying around inside the steel and none of that disappears because of the notes. I lied to you a little bit at the beginning.
I said you were going to have feelings about him by the end of this and what I should have said is that you were going to have contradictory feelings, that you were not going to be able to reconcile them and that that is the actual point. Tony Armstrong Jones was the new Britain arriving at Buckingham Palace on a motorcycle.
He was the bohemian who kicked open the door and he was also the first of a new kind of royal adjacent figure, the man who would live his private life in the tabloids, who would treat the people around him as material, who would let the cameras into places they had never been allowed to go. He was the future of the royal family.
And a lot of what happened to that family in the 40 years after he arrived, the leaks, the affairs, the tell-all books, the slow-motion public unraveling of marriage after marriage started with him. That ordinary Welsh boy with a limp walked into Westminster Abbey in 1960 and brought the 20th century in behind him.
Everything that has happened to the Windsors since has been in some sense a reckoning with what he let through that door. Thanks for watching everybody. Sources for this one include Anne de Courcy’s Snowdon, the biography, Craig Brown’s Ma’am Darling and Glen Conners’ Lady in Waiting, Christopher Warwick’s Princess Margaret, A Life of Contrasts.
If you have not read the Glen Conner, you should. It will ruin your week in the best possible way. Tell me in the comments of all the people Snowden hurt, which one do you find yourself thinking about the most? Margaret with her broken heart and her empty villa in Mustique, Ann Hills who loved him for 20 years, Polly Fry who learned at 44 that her real father was the man in all those newspaper photographs, or Lucy Lindsay Hogg who thought she would get something different and got exactly the same thing. And can you please tell me which
