Princess Margaret knew nothing while fiance Tony Armstrong slept with best friend's wife and got her pregnant
While the Queen's sister Princess Margaret's life was ideal for tabloids as it was bejeweled with one scandal after the other, few have stopped to ponder at how she constantly strove to be happy but failed in her trainwreck of a life that also included her husband going behind her back and having an affair with the wife of his best friend.
After her very bitter breakup with Group Captain Peter Wooldridge Townsend, who was equerry to King George VI as well as Queen Elizabeth II, Margaret got attracted to Antony Charles Robert Armstrong-Jones, a British photographer and filmmaker who captured her heart after they were introduced at a private dinner party in 1958. Although the two began a love story that eventually led to marriage, the union was far from being a fairytale as they soon realized that they were very different from each other and as such, not compatible at all.
A new Smithsonian documentary, 'Private Lives of the Monarchs', delves into Margaret's disastrous marriage with Armstrong-Jones.
"I do think that the decision to marry Tony Armstrong was an absolute disaster because the two were completely ill-fitted temperamentally. You see Princess Margaret who set great stock by rank, by religion. You see Tony Armstrong really running with dogs and sadly it was Princess Margaret who caught the fleas," author and broadcaster, James Sherwood said.
As a result, Armstrong-Jones, who took the title of the 1st Earl of Snowdon after his marriage, soon began a slew of affairs and flings in secret. What Margaret did not know was that her husband was never very faithful to her as he had been having an affair with his best friend Jeremy Fry's wife Camilla even before they got married — a relationship that led her to get pregnant with his child.
"What we have to remember is that Tony's already in the relationship with Princess Margaret and at the same time he was having an affair with the wife of his best friend, Camilla Frye. Margaret knows nothing about this going on. They get married in May of 1960. They are on honeymoon in the Caribbean. And it's three weeks after they've married that Camilla Fry gives birth to her daughter Polly, who only as recently as 2004, through a DNA test that she asked (for), turns out Tony was her biological father," Margaret's authorized biographer, Christopher Warwick said in the documentary.
He further added: "It's awfully difficult to kind of picture Tony Amstrong-Jones not in one affair or another. You know this was a man who became, when he was married, a serial adulterer. He really was. He was going around the block like it was going out of fashion."
According to Newsweek, Polly grew up believing Jeremy was her biological father until she discovered the sad truth that left her sad.
Following the discovery, Polly wrote in an op-ed for the Daily Mail in 2008: "Finding out at the age of 45 that the man I had idolized and put on a pedestal higher than Nelson's Column since I was a small child was not, in fact, my father, was a hard burden to bear. Rather than being twisted with guilt and shame at what I've done in uncovering a secret that I should have been told long ago, I can just carry on being little old me, the person I am today."
She continued: "Despite my recent discovery, I still believe in the sanctity of family life even if in my own case it has proved to be a tad more complicated than I had previously thought."