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hostess Mrs Violet Wyndham. As the son of the famous eventer Colonel Harry Llewellyn,
a Welsh landowner, Roddy seemed eminently suitable. He was blond, good-looking and
sweet-natured and the Tennants could afford to overlook the fact that he had led a
chequered life, at one time sharing the house of a well-known decorator. Five months
after their first meeting, Margaret invited him to Les Jolies Eaux, her villa designed by
Snowdon’s uncle, Oliver Messel, on Colin Tennant’s resort island of Mustique. The
couple enjoyed what the Princess’s biographer described as a ‘loving friendship’ and the
relationship was to continue with ups and downs over the next four years.
A year after their relationship began, Llewellyn found the situation too much to cope
with and began to behave irrationally, taking off for Turkey on the spur of the moment
without telling Margaret, then having a nervous breakdown in Barbados. Margaret also
suffered a brief breakdown in the autumn of 1974, ‘brought about by Tony’s silences
and insensitivity’; Lord Rupert Nevill and a friend became so concerned about
Margaret’s mental state during the marriage break-up that they arranged to bug the
room where she and Snowdon had a confrontation and sent the tape anonymously to a
Harley Street psychiatrist who was not given the identity of the couple. His verdict was
‘This lady needs help and needs help soon.’ One weekend when a friend was having a
house-party, Margaret telephoned threatening suicide: ‘If you don’t come over, I’ll throw
myself out of the window…’ The friend rang Elizabeth, who coolly told him, ‘Carry on
with your house-party. Her bedroom is on the ground floor…’ Margaret’s marriage was
in its final throes. On returning from Mustique after her holiday there with Roddy, she
had asked her husband to move out of their Kensington Palace apartment but he
remained there although during that time he was to begin an affair with the woman he
was later to marry, Lucy Lindsay-Hogg. ‘There he was, living in my house, thinking he
could have a lovely affair,’ Margaret said. ‘I asked him for a separation but he laughed
in my face. He was becoming a virtual stranger and we would meet on the stairs and
growl at each other. And I had to go on behaving as if nothing was happening.’ 7
Unfortunately for Margaret and the Royal family, events conspired to make her
appear publicly as the guilty party. So far her relationship with Roddy had remained
unknown to the general public although it was well known in royal and society circles;
she had been lucky to ‘get away with it’ for so long. Early in 1976 the News of the World
published what appeared to be an intimate photograph of the Princess and Roddy, in
swimming costumes sitting side by side at a beach bar in Mustique. The implications
were obvious – the profligate Princess on holiday with her toyboy. The newspaper had
cut out the Princess’s friends, Viscount Coke and his wife Valeria, sitting opposite, but
that fact was considered irrelevant. The spotlight was now turned on Roddy and his
unroyal way of life on a rural commune at Surrendell, a forty-seven-acre farm in
Wiltshire, where, it emerged, Margaret had not only lunched but also spent the night.
Margaret had thoroughly enjoyed these excursions into a different world, but the image
of a middle-aged hippy princess mixing with upper-class drop-outs was not one which
commended itself to the public. The photograph precipitated the public crisis in the
Snowdon marriage which had been threatening for so long. On its publication, Snowdon