Elizabeth did ask her sister to delay the announcement of her engagement until after the birth of Prince Andrew in February 1960.

The romantic proposal depicted on The Crown, with the boxes within boxes, may be entirely fictional, although Margaret’s ring was a large ruby, which according to de Courcy cost £250. According to de Courcy, the engagement became official while Margaret and Armstrong-Jones were staying with the Frys, and Armstrong-Jones sought approval from the Queen over Christmas. She wrote in a op-ed for the Daily Mail in 2008, “Although we may like to think of our own generation as being wild and wonderful, in comparison to what our parents got up to in the swinging 60s we are mere innocents caught up in the aftermath of the postwar free-love era.” In 2004, Polly Fry took a DNA test, as revealed in de Courcy’s book, that proved Snowdon was, in fact, her father. Jeremy Fry had to step down from his role as Armstrong-Jones’s best man at his wedding to Princess Margaret after the press discovered he had been arrested in 1952 for “a minor homosexual offense.” (The reason given in the press at the time, according to de Courcy, was a recurrence of jaundice.) And Camilla Fry, as depicted in The Crown, gave birth to a daughter, Polly, in May 1960, just weeks after Armstrong-Jones married Princess Margaret. Armstrong-Jones was suspected, even by Princess Margaret, of having homosexual leanings “I enjoyed his company very much, but I didn’t take a lot of notice of him because I thought he was queer,” she later told her biographer Christopher Warwick, as recounted in de Courcy’s book. The two were among Armstrong-Jones’s closest friends, though the existence of a romantic relationship between all three of them is difficult to prove. The most vividly depicted relationship on the show, and the one that would cause scandal even today, is the one with married couple Jeremy and Camilla Fry. The result, however, was the same: Princess Margaret was unforgiving, and decided she could do better. It also happened a year before Margaret and Armstrong-Jones began seeing each other in 1958.

In real life, Wallace was in fact one of Margaret’s “favored escorts,” as described by de Courcy in a 2002 piece for The Telegraph, Andrew Alderson wrote that Margaret decided to marry Wallace because it was better to marry “somebody one at least liked.” Their engagement ended not with the drunken duel depicted on The Crown, but with a brief affair he had on a trip to the Bahamas. When Margaret first rejoins the action in The Crown’s second season, having essentially sat out the first three episodes, she’s a stone-faced guest at a wedding, still single and telling her friend Billy Wallace, “No one wants to take me on, apparently.” He then pulls out a spur-of-the-moment proposal, arguing that as her “old faithful” he would be a sensible, if not entirely romantic, husband. For more on the third season of The Crown, listen below to one of three special episodes of the Still Watching podcast:īut first, Billy Wallace. Below, a look at the true story of Margaret and Snowdon, and how it matches up with what happens on The Crown.Īnd for a much more comprehensive recounting of their relationship, read this excerpt from Anne de Courcy’s 2008 book Snowdon: The Biography, which will be cited extensively below. And The Crown’s third season tracks the implosion of this marriage with new actors- Helena Bonham Carter and Ben Daniels-playing princess and photographer. Their romance and marriage is the center of two of the most daring episodes of The Crown’s second season, which draw from the many things that are known about their explosive relationship-and infers some of the most dramatic details about what nobody but Margaret and Snowdon can know for sure. The Crown’s second season charted the intense relationship between Princess Margaret (played by Vanessa Kirby) and Antony Armstrong-Jones ( Matthew Goode), the photographer who became Lord Snowdon when he married Margaret in 1960.

La princesa margarita