In an interview with the Gentleman’s Journal, David Linley was asked how he came to start a furniture company. He smiled and gave the kind of answer royal children are trained from birth to give. Warm, brief, constructed so that nothing actually leaks through. David Armstrong Jones, now the second Earl of Snowdon, has spent four decades giving professional interviews.
Questions about his mother arrive in almost all of them. The answers follow the same architecture every time. Fond, moderate, assembled with enough care that a journalist hunting for a crack walks away with nothing but pleasantries. In 2007, when biographer Tim Heald published the most comprehensive account of Margaret’s life on record, he noted in his acknowledgements that Linley had cooperated with the book.
Not through a memoir, not through direct public statements, through a formal authorized biography with Heald as intermediary, at precisely the distance required to appear to say something while committing to nothing specific. The acknowledgements also noted that Lord Snowdon, the ex-husband, had cooperated.
The ex-husband gave more material than the son. Heald’s own description of Margaret in that biography, written with access to the royal archives and to those who knew her best, lands at this. She was also mourned by many who loved her and by those whose interests she dutifully served.
A dutiful mother to her two children. That word, dutiful, is doing considerable work. His sister Sarah has given even less on record. A Tatler profile her in three words, creative, loyal, and famously low-key. That last phrase carries weight in a family that has never had a surplus of those. The question worth asking isn’t whether either of these people loved their mother.
The question is what it actually took to survive her. Margaret stated at some point in the 1960s that her children weren’t royal. They simply happened to have the Queen for their aunt. It sounded like modesty. What it also revealed was how she categorized them. As people whose existence was defined in relation to her position, rather than as individuals she was actively shepherding toward any particular future.
David Albert Charles Armstrong-Jones was born at Clarence House on the 3rd of November, 1961. The first child of Princess Margaret and Anthony Armstrong-Jones, who became the first Earl of Snowdon that same year. Lady Sarah Frances Elizabeth Armstrong-Jones arrived on May 1st, 1964 at Kensington Palace.
Both born by cesarean section at Margaret’s request. The family’s address for the following 12 years was apartment 1A at Kensington Palace. A set of rooms that looked magnificent from the outside and functioned, by the time the 1970s were underway, as something considerably less settled within.
Both children turned out to be functional, private, quietly successful adults who built their own lives at a careful distance from the machinery that surrounded their upbringing. The evidence suggests that happened despite Margaret, rather than because of her, and that it required at critical points other people. When When Snowdons married in May 1960, the wedding was broadcast live on television to an audience of 300 million worldwide.
The first royal marriage ever transmitted that way. The early years of the marriage were genuinely glamorous by any measure. Antony Armstrong-Jones was the most interesting man Margaret had ever been permitted to consider seriously. A Welsh-born photographer who moved in the worlds of theater, fashion, and art, and who brought that sensibility into the household at Kensington Palace.
Through the early 1960s, the apartment held regular soirées. The guest lists ran from Rudolf Nureyev to Peter Sellers to the architectural and design world that Snowden inhabited professionally. Margaret and Snowden were photographed together in the styles and fashions of the decade with what appeared to be genuine shared pleasure.
By the middle of the 1960s, both were conducting affairs. By the early 1970s, they were living virtually separate lives within the same address. The glamour had become a container for something else entirely. Tim Heald, who held the most detailed picture of Margaret’s life that anyone assembled on the record, described her existence as one in which the private and the public seemed permanently in conflict.
That is the diplomatic formulation. The version contained in Anne Glenconner’s 2019 memoir, Lady in Waiting, is considerably sharper. Glenconner had known Margaret since childhood. She spent nearly three decades as one of her ladies-in-waiting, which made her simultaneously the most available witness the historical record possesses and the most compromised one.
She wrote the memoir, by her own admission, to set the record straight in Margaret’s favor. Where Glenconner’s account is flattering to Margaret, it reflects her advocacy position. Where it’s damning, and it repeatedly is, those passages carry unusual evidential weight precisely because they work against the author’s stated purpose.
“Anthony Armstrong-Jones,” Glenconner wrote, “was spiteful in creative ways. He composed short notes for Margaret and placed them where she couldn’t avoid finding them, in her glove drawer, tucked among her handkerchiefs, slipped into the pages of books she was reading. One told her she looked like a Jewish manicurist and that he hated her.
He refused to speak to Margaret during the marriage’s deteriorating years, even when the children were in the same room. He monitored her movements through a hole in the wall. He reverted, Glenconner wrote, to a bachelor life, spending nights away from Kensington Palace. The two of them traded insults like gunfire.
And De Courcy’s 2008 biography of Snowdon, drawn from hours of interviews with him and structured to be sympathetic, still documented a marriage blighted by drink, infidelities, quarrels, lies, and betrayals, some, but not all of them, Snowdon’s. His own childhood had been fractured. His parents divorced when he was five, and he was shuttled between houses in a way that, according to De Courcy, left his emotional architecture permanently unresolved.
One of his oldest friends described him as having the emotional map of a 10-year-old, coupled with a vast appetite for work and a huge sex drive. He had fathered a daughter, Polly, in May 1960, weeks before his royal wedding. The Kensington Palace apartment wasn’t, at any point in the 1970s, a stable environment for children.
Before the weight of this accumulates in one direction only, the record requires a complication. The biographical account of Sarah Armstrong Jones that draws on Theo Aronson’s work notes specifically that both parents, especially their father, were comparatively hands-on for the time.
Snowden in particular taught both children to build and make things, carpentry, construction, physical creativity. The line of influence from those lessons to everything David Linley would later do professionally and to Sarah’s sustained commitment to painting is traceable. When David was 5 years old, he began lessons in the Buckingham Palace schoolroom alongside his cousin Prince Andrew, embedded from the beginning in the wider Windsor family network.
Tim Heald, who isn’t a hostile witness and who had direct cooperation from Linley himself, calls Margaret a dutiful mother. The case isn’t that Margaret failed her children entirely from infancy. The case is what happened as the marriage’s deterioration accelerated, as her drinking became the organizing principle of her days, and as the choices she made through the 1970s landed on two adolescents who had no way to protect themselves from the consequences.
Margaret’s documented daily routine in those years: she woke at 9:00, spent roughly 2 hours reading newspapers and smoking in bed, up to 60 Chesterfield cigarettes a day across her adult life, according to multiple biographers. Her first drink of the day arrived at noon, a vodka, reliably.
A long bath followed, run by her lady’s maid. A four-course lunch came after, often with the Queen Mother, with wine. Craig Brown’s biography records this schedule in sufficient detail that it circulated widely after her death as a cultural object, which tells you something about the distance between the official portrait and the reality her children were living around each morning.
By the early 1970s, Snowden was spending the majority of his nights elsewhere. In 1977, with David 15 and Sarah 13, Margaret was diagnosed with hepatitis and gastroenteritis. Her liver had been processing decades of sustained drinking by then, interrupted by no significant periods of abstinence. The children were old enough to understand what they were watching.
On a September evening in 1973, Anne Glenconner was in the kitchen of Glen House, the tenant ancestral estate in the borders of Scotland, managing a dinner party with a gap in it. A late cancellation had left the table one man short. Her husband, Colin, Lord Glenconner, who had developed mystique and had himself once been considered a potential husband for Margaret, rang his Aunt Nose, Violet Wyndham, whose nickname required no elaboration.
She provided a number. The name was Roddy Llewellyn. His father, Harry, had won Britain’s only gold medal at the 1952 Helsinki Olympics in equestrian show jumping. Roddy himself was 25, available, and prepared to travel to Scotland on reasonable notice. Colin drove into Edinburgh to meet him at the Cafe Royal, and Margaret came along for the drive.
They didn’t come back for hours. When the car finally pulled up at Glen House, Glenconner was outside waiting. “In the back seat,” she wrote in her memoir decades later, “Princess Margaret and Roddy Llewellyn were more or less holding hands. They had stopped at a bistro for lunch. They had gone shopping.
Margaret had selected swimming trunks for him, tight ones, which Glenn Conners’ teenage son described with a phrase she reproduced verbatim, “budgie smugglers.” The princess was 43. Llewellyn was 25. 17 years between them. “Oh gosh,” Glenn Conners recalled saying to her husband, “what have we done?” Her own description of her role, delivered years later, “It was as if I was pimping for Princess Margaret.
” David Armstrong Jones was 11 years old in September 1973. He would turn 12 in November. Sarah was nine. Both were old enough to read the temperature of any room they entered, to understand that their parents no longer occupied the same domestic world in any meaningful sense, and to watch the tabloid newspapers accumulate around their mother’s name with gathering velocity.
Margaret invited Llewellyn to Les Jolies Eaux, her 10-acre villa on Mustique, the plot of land Colin Tennant had given her as a wedding present when she married Snowdon in 1960. In 1974, he visited several times over the following years. Mustique was privately owned. Press access was functionally impossible, and what happened there was invisible to the British public for nearly 2 years.
Margaret had built her bolt-hole specifically to be unreachable. The island gave her what Kensington Palace increasingly couldn’t, the feeling of existing outside the structure. The invisibility ended in February 1976. A tabloid photographer had reached Mustique and taken pictures of Margaret and Llewellyn together in swimsuits, relaxed, at close range.
The images ran on the front page of the News of the World. By contemporary standards, they were entirely unremarkable photographs. Two adults on a beach. By the standards of 1976, a country managing severe economic crisis, a civil list under sustained parliamentary scrutiny, a monarchy that had not yet normalized divorce, they were catastrophic.
David was 14. Sarah was 11. The coverage that followed wasn’t a single news cycle. It was sustained, sustained in the way that British tabloid journalism of the 1970s could sustain things when the target was right. Labor MPs rose in the House of Commons to denounce Margaret as a royal parasite and a floozy.
Columnists calculated the cost of her Mustique trips against the national economic emergency. The 17-year age gap between Margaret and Llewellyn was treated as evidence of predation. She became, in the tabloid construction, a predatory older woman pursuing a toy boy at the public’s expense. Llewellyn’s background, aristocratic but purposeless, with ambitions toward pop music that had not materialized, made him a convenient symbol of everything Margaret was accused of squandering.
The 14-year-old whose mother was on the front page of every newspaper on a given Monday had a week of school ahead, then another. The coverage ran through that spring and beyond. There was no natural end to it because there was no end to the relationship and no end to the public’s appetite for the story.
Snowden used the photographs as his exit. He communicated his departure through Margaret’s personal secretary, Lord Napier, via coded language on an insecure telephone line. The code necessary precisely because the line wasn’t secure. Her response, as it was recorded by those who heard of it, “Oh, I see. Thank you, Nigel.
I think that’s the best news you’ve ever given me.” Buckingham Palace announced the formal separation on March 19th, 1976. The divorce was finalized on July 11th, 1978. David was 14 at separation, 16 at divorce. Sarah was 11 at separation, 14 at divorce. Somewhere inside these years, the biographies don’t fix a precise date, Margaret took an overdose of sleeping tablets.
Llewellyn had left on an impulsive trip to Turkey without warning. She described what she had done afterward with the sentence, “I was so exhausted because of everything that all I wanted to do was sleep.” Her ladies-in-waiting kept Snowden away from her during recovery, afraid his presence would make the situation worse. David and Sarah were living in this household.
After the formal separation in March 1976, the children’s time divided between parents. Weekends at Nymans with Snowden and at Royal Lodge with the Queen Mother close by. The royal family’s established holiday calendar continued to place both children regularly at Sandringham and Balmoral. Sarah’s biographical record notes specifically that she spent time at Balmoral doing landscape painting during these years.
Those royal estate calendars brought both children into sustained proximity with the wider Windsor family, with Charles and Anne, with their cousins, with the Queen herself. The Mirror, reporting in September 2022 on David walking in the procession for Queen Elizabeth II’s lying in state, observed that he and Sarah were known to be close to the Queen and their cousins Charles and Anne.
That closeness extended back four decades and was built on something repeated consistently over time. It didn’t simply happen. Sarah became godmother to Prince Harry, then to Lady Rose Gilman, then to Lady Louise Windsor. Godparent appointments within the Windsor family are made by parents who trust the appointee’s character and stability.
Three separate appointments across three separate family branches signals something about how she was perceived from inside that network during precisely the years when her mother’s household was most volatile. After Margaret’s death in 2002, Queen Elizabeth sought out Anne Glenconner. The conversation, as Glenconner recalled it in a 2018 documentary, “I’d just like to say, Anne, it was rather difficult at moments, but I thank you so much for introducing Princess Margaret to Roddy because he made her really happy.” A sitting monarch privately thanking her sister’s oldest friend for a service that had publicly embarrassed the institution represents a specific kind of management operating at a considered distance from any official record. Whether Elizabeth monitored her niece and nephew’s welfare more actively during the 1970s, whether she made
deliberate decisions about where they spent time, or communicated concerns to anyone about Margaret’s fitness as a parent is a question the available record can’t fully answer. No document confirms it. No named source records a specific conversation between the Queen and her staff about the children’s welfare.
What the record confirms is the outcome. Two children growing up inside a demonstrably volatile household who consistently had access to a stable broader family network and who didn’t become what that household could have made them. Almost everything the historical record knows about Margaret’s parenting comes from witnesses with a stake in the outcome.
Glen Conners spent three decades in her service and wrote to rehabilitate her reputation. Where her account is flattering to Margaret, it should be weighted accordingly. The Snowden camp, documented through De Courcy’s biography, reads events through a lens sympathetic to him. Heald’s biography had access to the royal archives and cooperation from both Lord Linley and Snowden and still manages to produce the word dutiful alongside everything else it documents.
Against all of this stands the testimony of two people who were actually in the household, who have been asked about it publicly for four decades and who have produced nothing. David Linley’s total on-record statement about his mother’s parenting or character is, for practical purposes, blank. The book he co-authored with Helen Chislit in 1995 is listed in Heald’s bibliography.
The content of his cooperation with Heald, what he actually told the biographer in person, isn’t reproduced in any accessible form. That silence, maintained across 40 years of professional interviews, is approximately everything he has offered on the subject. Sarah’s record is identical in its completeness.
A Country Life interview found her discussing her favorite painting, the Piero della Francesca Baptism of Christ at the National Gallery. Nothing about her mother. The Redfern Gallery’s description of her work says it grows like plants flowering or landscapes excavated over time. Nothing there, either. The silence is consistent, disciplined, and four decades old.
In 1985, David Armstrong Jones opened a workshop above a chip shop in Dorking, Surrey. He had completed two years of formal training in woodcraft at Parnham House in the small Dorset town of Beaminster between 1980 and 1982. The school at Parnham was established specifically for craftsmen in wood, and Linley was one of its more focused students.
The Dorking operation ran for 3 years. Bespoke furniture designed and built largely by hand at a deliberate remove from anything the Windsor family name required of him. He was 24 when he started. He told the Robb Report decades later that he had wanted to rattle cages. Three years after Dorking, the business moved to the King’s Road in Chelsea.
The design language was established from the start. Neoclassical forms, inlaid woods, a combination of 18th-century technique and 21st-century precision that Linley later described as his central preoccupation. By the mid-1990s, Linley was specifying furniture for Claridge’s hotel suites. By the 2000s, the brand had commissions across the Gulf States, Europe, and North America.
An academic study of the company’s growth, published in 2002, noted that by offering a commissioned service, Linley had avoided direct competition with furniture retailers and created a clear and comprehensive market position. The business logic was sound. The deeper logic was also visible. He was building an enterprise that stood entirely on what he could make, assessed by people willing to pay for it.
On 1st December, 2006, Linley took up the post of chairman of Christie’s UK, having joined the board the previous year as a non-executive director. By 2015, that position expanded to honorary chairman across Christie’s Europe, the Middle East, Russia, and India. He was by this point one of the more prominent figures in the international art market, his name attached to the world’s second largest auction house, and his calendar connecting him to collectors on four continents.
The deliberate obscurity reading of his life requires calibration. He isn’t invisible. He chairs a major auction house. He works with King Charles through the King’s Foundation. And at a November 2023 event marking the foundation’s 35th anniversary, he spoke about his conviction that craftsmanship holds something irreplaceable.
“There is something rather lovely about a piece that’s come from the hand of a human,” he said. “It resonates with the human spirit.” He walked in procession at his mother’s funeral in 2002 and his aunts lying in state in 2022. His profile is lower than working royals, but what he chose was a professional identity anchored in craft and commerce, built from what he could make, at one deliberate remove from the working royal machinery that would otherwise have defined him.
Throughout his career, he was known professionally as David Linley, rather than Viscount Linley, even before he inherited the Earldom of Snowdon following his father’s death in January 2017. The hereditary distance he kept was minor in form. It was consistent in practice. He married Serena Stanhope on the 8th of October, 1993 at St.
Margaret’s Church in Westminster with 650 guests including Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, Princess Margaret, Princess Diana, Princess Anne, King Constantine II of Greece, the Aga Khan, and Elton John. The introduction had come through commission. Serena’s father, then Viscount Petersham, later the 11th Earl of Harrington, had hired Linley to make a walnut dining table for his Chelsea home.
Through her father, Serena’s lineage traces to Henry FitzRoy, a son of Charles II. She is deeply aristocratic. She isn’t royal. Their son, Charles Patrick Inigo Armstrong-Jones, styled Viscount Linley, was born on July 1st, 1995. Their daughter, Lady Margarita Elizabeth Rose Elaine Armstrong-Jones, arrived on May 14th, 2002, 3 months after Margaret’s death.
The name Margarita is a version of Margaret. The naming of a child after a grandmother who has just died is one kind of statement. David and Serena announced their separation in February 2020. Sarah Armstrong-Jones left Bedales School with a single A level. The subject was art. She enrolled at Camberwell School of Art, then moved on to the Royal Academy Schools, one of the oldest and most selective fine art training institutions in Britain, where admission requires demonstrated ability rather than name recognition. She subsequently spent 2 years in India with her father while Snowden was contracted to photograph the production of A Passage to India. The film’s producer was John Brabourne, 7th Baron Brabourne, son-in-law to Lord Mountbatten, who gave Sarah an internship assisting in the wardrobe department and arranged for her to study
wood gilding under her father’s cousin, Thomas Messel. On that production, she met Daniel Chatto, who was working on a different British film shooting in India, Heat and Dust. Daniel Chatto’s father was Tom Chatto, an actor who died in 1982. His mother was Ros Chatto, a theatrical agent. He proposed to Sarah with a vintage cluster ring.
They married on July 14th, 1994 at St. Stephen Walbrook, a Christopher Wren church in the City of London. Not Westminster Abbey, not a royal chapel, but a specific building in the financial district chosen for its own particular character. The Reverend Chad Varah, who founded the Samaritans in 1953, officiated. The gown was by Jasper Conran.
Her bridesmaids included her half-sister Lady Frances, Zara Phillips, and a family friend, Tara Noble-Singh. Samuel David Benedict Chatto arrived on 28th July, 1996. Arthur Robert Nathaniel Chatto on 5th February, 1999. Samuel studied history of art at the University of Edinburgh, completed yoga teacher training in India, and now works as a sculptor in West Sussex.
He contributes artwork to charity auctions, including those associated with Princess Eugenie. Arthur attended Eton, studied geography at Edinburgh, and was serving with the Royal Marines by June 2022. Neither son carries a royal title. Neither maintains a public-facing profile. Their grandmother was one of the most photographed women of the 20th century.
Most people in Britain can’t recall their names unprompted. Sarah has been exhibiting paintings at the Redfern Gallery since 1995, always under the name Sarah Armstrong-Jones, not Lady Sarah, not Chatto, not any variant that draws on the Windsor connection. She won the Winsor & Newton Prize in 1988 and the Cresswick Landscape Prize in 1990.
Prizes awarded for what was on the canvas, not who had painted it. In 2004, she became vice president of the Royal Ballet, the position her mother had held as president. In 2024, she was appointed its president. The role is appropriate, earned by decades of genuine engagement with the art form, and it requires nothing from the Windsor name to justify it.
Tatler’s profile of her chose three adjectives: creative, loyal, and famously low-key. Within a family where low-key isn’t a hereditary trait, that description covers considerable ground. By 2000, Margaret’s body was communicating what decades of smoking and drinking eventually communicate. A long operation in 1985 had preceded a cancer scare that turned out to be benign, but required surgery regardless.
Pneumonia had required hospitalization in 1993. Strokes had begun in 1998. In February 2001, she suffered a stroke at Sandringham. Another followed in March 2001. Her feet had been damaged in a bathing accident during one of her final visits to Mustique, and the burns complicated her mobility permanently.
By 2001, she was wheelchair dependent for significant portions of each day, having lost much of the physical independence that had always been central to the person she considered herself to be. In 2000, before the February 2001 stroke, as her trajectory became clear, David, Serena, and their young son moved into Kensington Palace to be close to her through the deterioration.
They lived there for the final 2 years of Margaret’s life. This is worth stating plainly. A family moved house, sustained residency at a different address for 24 months, in order to be physically present with a failing parent. Whatever complicated history produced that arrangement, it happened. Princess Margaret died at King Edward VII’s Hospital in London on the 9th of February 2002.
She was 71. The cause was a stroke. One secondary source, the historian Gareth Russell, places Sarah at the hospital during the final hours. That claim is consistent with everything known about Sarah’s sense of obligation, but it hasn’t been confirmed in any primary published source, and should be held as reported.
Both children issued statements after their mother’s death. The texts aren’t reproduced in any accessible source. They were careful, dignified, constructed to say nothing that would outlast the occasion. Their one concrete joint decision in the immediate aftermath was to auction the Poltimore Tiara, the diamond and ruby circlet Margaret had worn at her 1960 wedding to Snowdon, and one of the most photographed objects in her personal history.
They agreed to sell it. Whatever combination of practical necessity and deliberate intent produced that decision, it isn’t the act of people principally occupied with maintaining a mythology. In the years following 2002, both children drew measurably closer to the Queen. David’s ceremonial presence at the lying in state in September 2022, walking in the procession alongside the Prince of Wales and the Duke of York, confirmed a relationship built across decades of genuine proximity.
Sarah has been observed at Easter services at Windsor wearing a brooch that belonged to her mother, carrying the thing forward rather than selling it, which is one kind of answer to a question nobody has formally asked her. The full record adds up to something precise. The household at Kensington Palace was volatile throughout the years that mattered most.
The marriage between Margaret and Snowdon was a sustained act of mutual destruction, documented most clearly by the witness who set out to write its defense. The Roddy Llewellyn years brought sustained public scandal into the household at the exact developmental moment, early adolescence, when two children needed stability, followed by formal separation and then divorce.
The drinking defined the domestic calendar for years, an overdose had occurred. The departures to Mustique repeated across seasons, each one a choice made in favor of escape. The mitigating evidence is also real. Snowdon was destructive in ways that matched Margaret’s, but he taught the children to make things with their hands, and that shaped who they became.
The extended family network absorbed both children during the worst years, and gave them something to orient themselves by. The Queen’s consistent presence across four decades was genuine, even where any deliberate protective decision she may have made remains undocumented. Both children, as adults, made choices that built lives rather than patterns, which is neither guaranteed nor accidental when the household you grew up inside looked the way theirs did.
Sarah Chatto is a successful painter, married to an actor, with two grown sons who almost no one in Britain can pick out of a lineup. That she ended up there, instead of where her cousins Andrew and Edward did, is the most damning thing anyone has ever said about Princess Margaret. Subscribe for more stories like this.
