Princess Margaret was no stranger to royal scandal during her lifetime. The Queen’s younger sister provoked a constitutional crisis when she fell in love with the divorced Group Captain Peter Townsend in the Fifties, and found the sympathy of the nation when she chose royal duty over her true love. However, when the princess finally did get engaged in 1960, she again sent shockwaves through the British establishment.

Biographer Andrew Morton in his 1983 book “Andrew: The Playboy Prince”, discusses the engagement, which came just a week after Prince Andrew’s birth in February 1960.

Mr Morton writes: “Andrew wasn’t the only one to hog the headlines.

“A week later, Princess Margaret announced her engagement to Antony Armstrong-Jones, later Lord Snowdon. 

“Again the news came as a shock to the public.

“When he was in the presence of the Royal Family, it was assumed he was there in his profession as a photographer, not as a suitor.”

When Margaret and Antony Armstrong-Jones met in 1958, he had in fact already been employed as a photographer to the Royal Family, taking portraits of the Queen and her young family at Buckingham Palace the year before.

In her 2008 book “Snowdon: The Biography”, Anne de Courcy writes: “Nobody knew about their relationship, there wasn’t a whisper about it. 

“She would see him in secret at his studio and he would join her at parties, but no one could pinpoint which man she was in interested in.

“The press focused more on the ones who were seen to be eligible. 

“They didn’t think of Tony who was often in the background.”

When the pair became engaged in 1960, Margaret asked her sister the Queen to delay the news until after Prince Andrew had been born that February.

Their royal wedding in May 1960 was the first ever to be televised, with Life Magazine calling their partnership a “wildly unconventional union”.

However, Margaret and her husband did not stop attracting scandalous attention.

Their tumultuous relationship reportedly involved repeated infidelities on both sides, however it was Margaret’s affair with the much younger Roddy Llewellyn that hit the front pages in 1976 and presaged the end of their marriage. 

They divorced 18 years after their royal wedding, in 1978.

The move that was seen as shocking at the time, being the first royal divorce since Henry VIII.

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