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enjoyed an informal style of living and entertaining which she had never experienced
before, with the emphasis on wit and amusement rather than flowers, food and fine
wine, and she could enjoy herself on equal terms with Tony’s artistic friends. In the
early summer of 1959 Tony took a series of official photographs to mark her twentyninth
birthday, which were published in August. Elizabeth invited him to stay at
Balmoral, but still the press suspected nothing; his profession providing the perfect
cover. It was while he was staying there in October that Margaret received the letter
from Townsend telling her of his engagement to Marie-Luce Jamagne. Two months later
in December 1959 the couple became privately engaged. The Queen Mother was told to
her great delight, but it was not until January at Sandringham that Tony formally asked
the Queen if he might marry her sister.
Elizabeth was almost maternally delighted by her sister’s happiness, a joy
undoubtedly tinged with relief that that difficult problem seemed to have been finally
solved. The inescapable feeling of guilt which she had felt towards her sister since the
Townsend affair was assuaged. News of the engagement was held back until after the
birth of Prince Andrew, but when Clarence House issued the announcement on the
evening of Friday, 26 February, precisely one week after Prince Andrew was born, the
surprise was almost total. Among the public at large there was a general feeling of
delight that the Princess had found happiness at last and among the young that she had
married someone outside the ‘tweedy’ circle, whose talent and not his birth had made his
career. Not everyone was pleased. Noel Coward noted a ‘froideur’ when the subject of
the engagement was raised while he was lunching with the Duchess of Kent and Princess
Alexandra. If the Queen Mother and the Duchess of Gloucester, one the daughter of an
earl and the other the daughter of a duke, had not been considered blue-blooded enough
by Princess Marina to marry into the royal family, still less did she welcome a man
called Jones who earned his living as a photographer. (When Patrick Lichfield told his
mother, a Bowes-Lyon married to Prince George of Denmark, that he wanted to be a
photographer, she sniffed that he might as well be a ballet dancer or a hairdresser.)
Many of the European royals refused invitations to the wedding on the same grounds.
There was a good deal of snobbishness about it in older aristocratic and courtly circles,
whose members enjoyed retailing the story of how Lady Pembroke had made Armstrong-
Jones eat with the servants when he came to take photographs at Wilton. One old
courtier told Harold Nicolson that he lamented the whole thing and especially the
announced plan for a honeymoon on the royal yacht. ‘The boy Jones has led a very
diversified and sometimes a wild life and the danger of a scandal and slander is never
far off.’ 27 The royal family, however, a friend said, ‘liked him a lot’ and were ‘relieved’.
While the Princess’s friends were happy to see the couple undoubtedly in love – ‘We
are so happy and blissful with each other,’ Margaret wrote to a friend – and the
Princess’s mother and sister seemed prepared to suspend judgement in aid of seeing her
safely married, some of Tony’s friends had serious reservations. Jocelyn Stevens went so
far as to cable instead of congratulations a sombre prophecy: ‘Never has there been a
more ill-fated assignment.’ The bridegroom’s father told him roundly that he was too