The Man Who Nearly Destroyed The Monarchy
The Man Who Nearly Destroyed The Monarchy
Anthony Armstrong Jones, the man who would become the Earl of Snowdon, lived a life defined by extraordinary public success and profound, hidden transgressions. While the world watched his high-profile marriage to Princess Margaret—a union that captured the imagination of a generation—the reality behind closed doors was a labyrinth of betrayal, calculated manipulations, and shocking secrets. It was not until 2004, long after the dust of his royal life had settled, that a DNA test finally brought to light the most staggering of his deceptions: the existence of an illegitimate daughter named Polly Fry. The revelation was not just about the birth itself, but the timing and the person involved. Polly had been born just weeks before Anthony and Margaret’s grand royal wedding, and the mother was none other than Camilla Fry, the wife of Anthony’s own best man, Jeremy Fry. This revelation proved that the depravity of his personal life was far deeper than even the most cynical tabloids had ever dared to speculate.
To understand how Anthony reached such a point of cold-blooded detachment, one must look at his formative years. Born into an upper-class background with a barrister father and a socialite mother, Anthony’s life was marked by the kind of privilege that often masks deep-seated emotional instability. His parents divorced just before he turned five, a fracturing event that set the tone for his future relationships. He and his sister were placed with their mother, who soon remarried Lawrence Parsons, the sixth Earl of Ross. While this union elevated Anthony into the ranks of the nobility, it did not provide him with a sense of security or belonging. Instead, he felt perpetually like an outsider. His mother had two more children with Parsons, and the young Anthony was acutely aware of being treated as inferior, an interloper in his own home because he lacked the “noble blood” of his half-siblings.
The physical and emotional isolation of his youth was compounded by a harrowing struggle with polio. During a holiday in Wales, he contracted the disease, leading to an agonizing six-month stretch in the Liverpool Royal Infirmary. In a testament to the fractured state of his family, his sister was the only one to visit him. His parents, absorbed in their new lives, remained distant, leaving him to recover in solitude. The lasting legacy of this illness was not just a physical limp, but a hardening of his personality—a retreat into himself that would define his interactions for decades to come. He was subsequently sent to a series of boarding schools, including Eton, where he attempted to compensate for his physical vulnerability by excelling in photography, rowing, and boxing. Though he lacked the comfort of a traditional family, he began to develop the artistic eye and the social agility that would eventually propel him to the heights of British society.
His time at Cambridge University followed this pattern of restless ambition and eventual detachment. He began by studying natural history for a mere ten days before switching to architecture, only to have his academic path interrupted when he failed his second-year exams. Feeling unmoored, he turned fully toward photography, a medium that allowed him to observe the world without necessarily having to participate in it on equal footing. His early professional years were marked by a frantic effort to prove his worth. When he experienced a crushing heartbreak after Lady Barbara North chose another man over him, Anthony demonstrated his penchant for masochism and detachment by photographing their wedding just three months later. He was, by all accounts, a man who refused to be left behind, even if it meant inserting himself into the most uncomfortable of situations.
By the 1950s, Anthony had transformed his reputation from a hobbyist to a sought-after photographer. He moved through the worlds of fashion and theatre with ease, using his Pimlico Road studio as a base for a lifestyle that blended professional networking with hedonistic revelry. He was known for hosting parties where the lines between his subjects and his conquests blurred. Rumors of both heterosexual and homosexual affairs began to circulate in the London underground, yet he remained focused on his ultimate prize: the British establishment. When Queen Elizabeth II commissioned him to photograph the royal family, he found his entry point. His artistic, modern style was a refreshing contrast to the stuffy formality of the era, and he quickly became a fixture in the inner circles of the Crown.
It was during this ascent that he began his courtship of Princess Margaret. The princess, still reeling from her failed and tragic romance with the disgraced Captain Peter Townsend, was vulnerable and looking for a way to assert her independence. Anthony represented a radical departure from the traditional suitors she had been expected to marry. He was edgy, artistic, and, most importantly, he belonged to the world of “swinging London.” Their relationship blossomed in secret, a thrilling hide-and-seek game that took place in the margins of royal protocol. Neither of them realized at the time that their mutual desire for liberation would be the very thing that destroyed their union.
To facilitate his entry into the royal family, Anthony was required to make the ultimate sacrifice: he had to effectively abandon his career. While the press release in 1960 caught the public and the royal establishment off guard, it was a carefully orchestrated move. Anthony’s father, ever the cynic, famously compared his son’s move into Buckingham Palace to being “confined in barracks,” a warning that proved prophetic. The wedding itself was a watershed moment in history, the first to be broadcast on television to an audience of 20 million people. It was a spectacle of modern glamour, but the undercurrents were already turbulent. Even his choice of best man, Jeremy Fry, was fraught with potential disaster, as a last-minute scandal involving solicitation in a public restroom threatened to derail the ceremony before it began.
The honeymoon period, quite literally, did not last. Upon their return from a six-week Caribbean getaway, the couple moved into Kensington Palace, only to find themselves besieged by a press and a household staff that viewed Anthony as a commoner out of his depth. The friction was immediate and intense, particularly with Prince Phillip, whose rugged, traditionalist sensibilities were fundamentally at odds with Anthony’s artistic temperament. Within months, the cracks in the marriage were visible to anyone looking closely. As Princess Margaret became pregnant, Anthony accepted the title of Earl of Snowdon, but the title did not fix the lack of intimacy or the growing professional resentment that began to fester between them.
By 1964, the birth of their second child, Sarah, did nothing to stop the decay of their marriage. By 1965, the situation had devolved into a cold war of infidelity. Anthony, ever the wanderer, began spending extended periods away, ostensibly for work, while actually conducting affairs with women like the married Vogue editor Pamela Colin. Margaret, realizing she was being treated as a secondary priority, began her own path of retaliation. Her dalliances with figures like Anthony Barton and Peter Sellers were not just acts of passion, but desperate attempts to reclaim a sense of agency. The palace walls, once a sanctuary, became a prison where they played out a bitter, public, and highly choreographed game of social sabotage.
The most infamous episode in this downward spiral involved Robin Douglas-Home. When Anthony caught Margaret in the middle of a correspondence with him, he did not seek a divorce; he sought a tactical victory. By intercepting a letter and presenting it to the Queen Mother, he effectively neutralized the threat of the affair, but he also permanently shifted the power dynamic of the marriage. He used the incident to paint Margaret as the villain, thereby gaining further latitude for his own indiscretions. The tragedy of this period was underscored by the eventual suicide of Douglas-Home, a dark reminder of the very real consequences that followed their careless pursuit of personal satisfaction.
As the 1960s gave way to the 1970s, their marriage had become a hollow shell. They moved on to separate lives, with Margaret finding solace on her private island in Mustique, where her long-standing relationship with Roddy Llewellyn—a man nearly two decades her junior—became the catalyst for the end. It was the publication of photos of them together that finally forced the hand of the royal family. Anthony, seeing an opportunity, seized the narrative by announcing their separation before the palace could officially authorize it. When the divorce was finally finalized in 1978, it was a moment of profound relief for both parties.
Anthony’s transition to his second marriage to Lucy Lindsay-Hogg was swift, almost breathless. He married in December 1978, just five months after his divorce from the princess. Yet, the pattern of his life remained unchanged. Even while married to Lucy, he continued a twenty-year affair with the journalist Anne Hills. This was not a casual fling; it was a deep, corrosive entanglement that took a heavy toll on everyone involved. Anne, who harbored hopes that Anthony would eventually choose her, was repeatedly let down by his refusal to commit. Her eventual suicide in 1996, in the wake of losing her job and facing the reality of her unrequited devotion, exposed the full, ugly extent of Anthony’s double life. Her diaries, published by the press, revealed that he had been unfaithful throughout the entirety of his second marriage.
The fallout was immense. Lucy, who had been a pillar of patience, finally reached her breaking point when she discovered that Anthony had also fathered a child with another woman, magazine editor Melanie Cable-Alexander. The house of cards that Anthony had spent his life building finally collapsed. Financial strain, the public airing of his private betrayals, and the emotional wreckage of his discarded partners left him isolated. Even in his final years, after he had retreated from the intense scrutiny of the limelight, the ghosts of his past—the affairs, the illegitimate children, and the rumors of his bisexuality—remained fixed to his legacy.
When Anthony Armstrong Jones passed away in 2017 at the age of 86, he left behind a life that served as a masterclass in the dangers of unbridled ambition and emotional detachment. He had traveled from the margins of the nobility to the center of the monarchy, only to spend his later years as an architect of his own misfortune. His story is not merely one of royal scandal, but a haunting reflection on the cost of living a life without truth. While he found fame, artistic success, and the proximity to power he had craved since childhood, he was ultimately unable to maintain the most basic human connections. His life remains a cautionary tale of a man who possessed the world, yet failed to ever truly own his own heart, leaving behind a trail of shattered lives that serve as a permanent, dark footnote to the history of the British royal family.
