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free a spirit to put up with the restrictions of royal life. Tony could never properly
belong to the royal family, his bohemian temperament would never allow it, and
Margaret, try as she might to adapt to Tony’s way of life, could never be anything but a
part of the royal family. It was the only world she knew.
The wedding of Princess Margaret and Antony Armstrong-Jones was held at
Westminster Abbey on 6 May 1960 – staged might have been a better word. It was the
first great royal spectacular since the Coronation, designed at least in part by the
bridegroom himself. Norman Hartnell, whose speciality was the heavily embroidered
grand occasion gown such as he had produced for the Coronation and the Queen’s own
wedding, was under strict instructions from Armstrong-Jones to keep it simple. The
dress was spectacularly plain, depending for effect on simplicity of line and the subtle
deployment of thirty yards of white silk organza. A silk tulle veil ordered from Paris by
Hartnell fell in clouds from the magnificent Poltimore tiara, bought for the Princess at
auction for £5,000, skilfully placed on her dark hair swept up into a chignon. Margaret
looked the part of a fairy-tale princess as she was driven to the Abbey in a glass coach,
the focus of television cameras sending her image around the world. The sniping of the
press at the bridegroom’s unconventional circle of friends, at his ex-girlfriend Jacqui
Chan’s choice of that moment to cut a pop record and at the last-minute embarrassment
of the withdrawal of his best man, Jeremy Fry, ostensibly because of jaundice but
actually due to rumours circulating about an alleged homosexual incident in his past,
was eclipsed by the glamour of the occasion. The wedding cost £26,000 and questions
had been raised in Parliament over the use of Britannia with its crew of twenty officers
and 237 ratings for the six-week honeymoon, when the weekly cost of running the yacht
was underwritten by the taxpayer to the extent of some £10,000 a week. The Queen
Mother defused this by announcing that she would pay for it out of her own purse.
However, the Macmillan Government, eager to cash in on the ‘feel-good factor’,
contributed without a qualm. Suez, the criticisms of Altrincham, Osborne and
Muggeridge, faded into the past as the public indulged in one of its periodic orgies of
mass participation in and identification with royal family occasions. The occasion was
splendidly stage-managed by the Lord Chamberlain, and interpreted by the Great Royal
Communicator, Richard Dimbleby, without whose voice no royal occasion would have
seemed complete. Dimbleby had recently been diagnosed as having cancer (he died five
years later), but his choice of phrase to project the image which the public saw on
camera and the reverential tone of voice confirming the ritual nature of the occasion
were, as always, perfect:
For one moment we see the bride now as she looks about her at the Abbey in this lovely gown of white silk
organza, with the glittering diadem on her head, the orchids in her hand, and the comforting, tall, friendly,
alert figure of the Duke of Edinburgh on whose right arm she can rely…
The sun shone, the bride was beautiful; only the gender roles of the old fairy-tale had
been reversed. The bridegroom played the Cinderella part, symbolically connecting the
traditional royal family with the new talented generation which was to dominate the