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household. At Cambridge he had taken no interest whatsoever in his academic work; his
one achievement had been to cox the winning boat in the annual Oxford and Cambridge
boat race, unnerving his more gentlemanly opponent by shouting at him, ‘Why don’t
you f—ing move over?’, when the two boats touched. He had a slight limp, the result of
a severe case of polio when he was a child. He was artistic, a streak inherited from the
Messels, bohemian and unconventional with a wide range of friends and lovers. He was
intelligent and amusing, tough, determined and ambitious; his friends at Cambridge
included the equally tough and determined heir to part of the Hulton publishing fortune,
Jocelyn Stevens. Armstrong-Jones had enjoyed himself at Cambridge, left without a
degree and turned his hobby, photography, into a career, learning his trade in Baron’s
studio and then setting up on his own. When Jocelyn Stevens bought Queen magazine as
a twenty-fifth birthday present to himself in 1957, he invited Armstrong-Jones to help
him liven up the magazine’s stuffy image. ‘Tony’s’ breakthrough into royal circles had
come with a commission to photograph the young Duke of Kent for his twenty-first
birthday – a job which he had gained by the simple means of writing a letter to the
Duke’s mother. From there he had graduated to photographing Prince Charles and
Princess Anne before earning the final accolade of photographing Elizabeth herself.
Margaret met Armstrong-Jones at a dinner-party given by her friend and lady-inwaiting
Lady Elizabeth Cavendish, the youngest sister of the 11th Duke of Devonshire,
in the autumn of 1958. The party was intended to cheer her out of a fit of weltschmerz
which had overtaken her after the unhappy final ending of the Townsend saga in May.
Lady Elizabeth was a highly intelligent woman, the friend of John Betjeman, and her
circle was artistic and intellectual as well as aristocratic. On that particular evening she
had invited Armstrong-Jones, probably with the hunch that he was just the type of
young man who might interest and amuse the Princess. Armstrong-Jones was
uninhibited, relaxed and in no way intimidated by royalty; he had the easy, friendly but
authoritative manner which all top photographers have with their subjects. Jocelyn
Stevens said of Margaret, ‘I have always regarded her as a bird in a gilded cage. She
would have loved to break free but was never able to.’ The young photographer
appealed to that side of her and it soon became obvious to all their friends that there
was a strong mental and physical attraction between them. Margaret was lovely and
sexy, enchanting when she wanted to turn on the charm. Tony was interested in sex and
very attractive to women; one of his first girl assistants had left when she accidentally
developed a roll of film showing his Eurasian girlfriend in pornographic poses.
Margaret introduced Tony to her mother, who was charmed by him. In order to keep
their affair secret he rented a room looking over the Thames at Rotherhithe. The house
was dilapidated eighteenth-century, its bow window straight on the river; Tony’s room,
which he painted and furnished in white, became known to her as the ‘little white
room’. It was romantic and magical: ‘One walked into the room and there was the river
straight in front,’ she recalled. ‘At high tide swans looked in. And because it was on a
bend of the river, you looked towards the Tower and Tower Bridge with the dome of St
Paul’s behind them…’ 26 Here and at Tony’s studio in the Pimlico Road, Margaret