The Society Photographer Who Married A Princess

The Earl of Snowdon 1930-2017.

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Lord Snowdon was an accomplished photographer, a talented designer, and a champion of the disabled, said The Guardian, but he was chiefly known as the commoner who married into the Royal Family: he was the first to wed a king’s daughter for some 450 years. Antony Armstrong-Jones was 28 when, in 1958, he met Princess Margaret. She was said to be on the rebound from Peter Townsend, a divorcee whom she’d been forbidden from marrying. Armstrong-Jones was said to be temperamentally unsuited to royal life. He wouldn’t, his own father warned, relish spending the rest of his life walking two steps behind his wife. (Margaret may have loved escaping into his bohemian world, but as her biographer, Tim Heald, noted, “she was a king’s daughter and a queen’s sister – facts she seldom forgot, and then not for long”.) So it proved: 18 years after they married, they became the first royal couple to divorce since Henry VIII rid himself of Anne of Cleves in 1540. But in between, they were the most glamorous couple in Swinging London, said The Times. And afterwards, Snowdon remained on good terms with the Royal Family: in 2006, he was invited to photograph the Queen to mark her 80th birthday.