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Sardinia when the Aga Khan was about to drive them out to dinner from the Hotel
Pitrizza, where they always stayed at his expense, Snowdon lay down underneath the
car as a gesture of defiance, certainly not one that his wife would have been able to
employ. In the end he was to be tougher than she was and to suffer less. He had his own
life independent of the family while she had banked hers on the success of her marriage.
Anything less than success would mean defeat.
For Elizabeth, the explosive state of her sister’s marriage was a source of private
worry and public concern. Margaret’s infidelities were more public than her husband’s.
She had an affair with Robin Douglas-Home, the piano-playing nephew of the ex-Prime
Minister, Sir Alec, married to the model Sandra Paul; he later committed suicide.
Unambiguously passionate letters written to him by the Princess surfaced in New York
and were published by a foreign magazine. There were other affairs, fortunately less
publicly known; while only one of Snowdon’s, with the beautiful young daughter of a
peer, became common knowledge. The word divorce was already in the air as far as the
Snowdons themselves were concerned but as yet it seemed unthinkable. In 1967,
Elizabeth’s first cousin, the Earl of Harewood, eighteenth in succession to the throne,
became the first of George V’s direct descendants to divorce, after being sued for
adultery by his first wife. Not only was he divorced, but he intended to marry the
mother of his son, Patricia Tuckwell, an Australian violinist, herself a divorcee. Under
the terms of the Royal Marriages Act he needed to obtain Elizabeth’s consent for his
remarriage; advised by the Privy Council she granted it, but as a compromise and to
avoid embarrassing his family further, Harewood married Patricia Tuckwell in a civil
ceremony in the United States. But although George Harewood might seem to have
paved the way forward, a Snowdon divorce, touching as it did Elizabeth’s own
immediate family, would be a more serious affair.
In private the Snowdons’ marriage had deteriorated so much by the early 1970s that
they led virtually separate lives. Snowdon would refuse to speak to his wife even in
front of the children, would spy on her through a hole in the wall and leave insulting
notes in drawers where she would find them: ‘You look like a Jewish manicurist and I
hate you.’ He reverted to his bohemian life, often spending nights away from
Kensington Palace. Margaret, constrained by her birth from retaliating in kind, took
refuge in her favourite whisky, Famous Grouse, and conspicuously put on weight.
Wretchedly unhappy and increasingly frustrated, she seemed no longer to care about the
effects of her behaviour on the public. Opponents of the monarchy and its cost, notably
Labour MP Willie Hamilton, made her the target of their criticism over the sensitive
years during which the Palace was negotiating a rise in the Civil List with the
Government.
Elizabeth’s patience with her sister finally snapped over the Roddy Llewellyn affair,
which began in 1973, when Margaret was forty-three and Roddy Llewellyn only twentyfive.
Roddy was introduced by Margaret’s most faithful friends, Colin and Anne
Tennant, who were hard put to it to divert her in her misery. The Tennants did not
know him personally but took him on the recommendation of a friend, the London