repeatedly unfaithful. Among his dalliances was with the daughter of the Marquis and Marchioness of Reading, neighbors near his house in Sussex. Margaret’s lovers included one of Tony’s best friends, Anthony Barton.
Publicly Tony was diligent about his role accompanying her on royal engagements, walking two steps behind and always allowing her to speak first. They were at their best on royal tours abroad, smiling amiably during endless meet-and-greet receptions. In November 1965 they conducted a charm offensive during a three-week tour of five cities in the United States that included a formal dinner at the White House. President Lyndon Johnson called the princess “little lady” and offered a prescription for a happy marriage that couldn’t have been more inappropriate for the royal pair: “First, let her think she’s having her way. Second, let her have it.”
The Snowdons lived increasingly separate lives, especially after Margaret began escaping to a villa on the Caribbean island of Mustique given to her by her friend Colin Tennant (later Lord Glenconner). Although Margaret talked to her sister and her mother nearly every day, she was circumspect about her marriage. As the Queen Mother said to one of Margaret’s confidants, “I didn’t bring up my daughter to discuss her husband with me!” Both the Queen and the Queen Mother were dazzled by Tony’s artistry and ingenuity, not to mention his charm. In their company, he was always on his best behavior. “He pulled the wool over their eyes,” said Anne Glenconner. “The Queen probably didn’t realize what Tony was up to. It was not the sort of thing the Queen would talk about. She doesn’t gossip.”
The Queen did see Margaret behaving badly—when she took out her frustrations in rude remarks to the Queen Mother, or when she flouted protocol by refusing to turn when her sister did during meals, leaving the Queen to stare at the back of her dinner partner’s head. She knew Margaret was drinking heavily; when her cousin Pamela Hicks had to cancel a party because of her husband’s problems with alcohol, the Queen said, “I understand. I’ve been through it with Margaret.” But as was her habit, the Queen avoided confronting the princess. “How’s Margaret’s mood?” she asked a friend of her sister before lunch at Royal Lodge. “Shall I venture out on the terrace?”
In 1973 Margaret fell for Roddy Llewellyn, an attractive and pliant dilettante nearly eighteen years her junior. The liaison infuriated Tony, and the Queen was upset by her sister’s indiscretions, above all when Margaret began staying with Roddy at his bohemian upper-class commune in Wiltshire. By November 1975 the Snowdons had reached the breaking point. Tony sent a letter to the Queen telling her that “the atmosphere is appalling for all concerned,” and they needed to separate. Several weeks later the Queen replied, saying that Tony’s letter “had been devastating,” wrote Snowdon biographer Anne de Courcy. “She intimated that she was aware of how bad their relationship had become before saying that she realized the situation was now intolerable for both of them.” She asked only that they wait until after Christmas, and following discussions at the Palace, she advised that they make the separation announcement during the Easter holidays when their children could be with them. The Palace intended to say only that the Snowdons would “live apart” and that “there are no plans for divorce proceedings.”
The Palace game plan blew up in late February 1976 when a tabloid photographer snapped a picture of Margaret and Roddy in their bathing suits, sitting together at a table in Mustique. Rupert Murdoch’s
Always deft with the media, Snowdon held his own press conference on the 17th in which he wished his wife well, asked for the understanding of their children, and professed his undying admiration and love for the royal family. His clever spin reinforced the view of Margaret as the guilty party, a self-indulgent and outre princess. “The Queen and the Queen Mother never took sides with Tony Snowdon over the separation,” said one of the Queen’s relatives, “but they never made an enemy of him. They realized their daughter and sister could be impossible to live with.” Snowdon kept in the good graces of the Queen and her mother by never saying another unkind word about Margaret, and by remaining forever silent about the rest of the royal family.
Harold Wilson’s retirement came as a surprise, not only to the public, but to members of his own party, which elected as its leader Foreign Secretary James Callaghan. The new prime minister, who kissed hands on April 5, 1976, had also served as chancellor of the exchequer and home secretary, so he was a known quantity in the corridors of Buckingham Palace. To honor the retiring premier, the Queen agreed to attend Wilson’s farewell dinner at 10 Downing Street, the first time she had done so since Churchill left office twenty-one years earlier. The inspiration came from Charteris, and Wilson was flattered by the gesture. The sly wit of the Queen’s private secretary was unmistakable as well, when she referred in her speech to herself and Wilson as the tenants of tied cottages at either end of the Mall.
THE QUEEN HIT her fiftieth birthday on April 21, 1976. She looked enviably youthful, a combination of good genes, healthy living, and an unfussy beauty regimen. “She doesn’t sit in the sun and she doesn’t hunt, which is very weathering,” said one of her good friends. Her brown hair, which now showed some gray strands, was tended by her longtime hairdresser, Charles Martyn. Facing forward rather than the usual bending backward, she rested her chin inside a sink equipped with a large sprayer to have her hair washed with egg and lemon shampoo. Between setting and drying, Martyn would spend an hour and a half creating her unvarying hairstyle as she reviewed a stack of correspondence in her lap, scarcely glancing up to check her reflection in the mirror. For her skin she used an assortment of Cyclax products including milk of roses moisturizer, and she washed with milk and honey cleanser. She spent little time applying makeup, with just a dusting of powder, and she used bright red lipstick because it was more visible in public.
That June she hosted French president Valery Giscard d’Estaing for a state visit and shrewdly orchestrated a public show of support for the supersonic Concorde airplane, an Anglo-French venture that French officials regarded as a useful collaboration, despite concerns about its high cost. Giscard was apprehensive about the Concorde because he had heard the British had lost enthusiasm for it. Before the state banquet at Buckingham Palace, the Queen instructed Martin Charteris to depart from protocol and applaud loudly when she mentioned the airplane in her speech. Charteris clapped on cue, and because of his senior position as the Queen’s private secretary, he was joined resoundingly by the other British guests. At a press conference the next day, the French president said that after hearing the “spontaneous and loud applause,” he was reassured of Britain’s wholehearted support. Nicholas Henderson, a seasoned diplomat who watched the scheme unfold, considered it “a tribute to the Queen’s understanding of the workings of guided democracy.”
The following month, she returned to the United States for the first time in seventeen years. The idea of a state visit around the Bicentennial of American independence had been broached by President Nixon in early 1973, eighteen months before his resignation in the wake of the Watergate scandal. British officials thought the timing needed “careful consideration.” As Robert Armstrong, Heath’s principal private secretary, wrote to Martin Charteris at the time, “One would wish to consider whether it was right for The Queen to be associated in this way with the celebration of a rebellion from the British Crown.” He added that the British Ambassador in Washington, Rowland Baring, the 3rd Earl of Cromer (husband of the Queen’s lady-in-waiting Esme Cromer), “has some feeling that there may be a certain degree of uninhibited zest about the American celebrations of the Declaration of Independence with which it might not be entirely desirable that The Queen should be associated.… A certain amount of ballyhoo is inseparable from this sort of celebration in America, which would conspicuously lack dignity.”
Despite those initial misgivings, a grand six-day state visit was arranged, beginning on July 6 with a stop in Philadephia. “July 4th was really pushing it,” said David Walker of the British embassy. “Forgiveness can go so far.” Among the Queen’s entourage would be her good friend Virginia (Ginny) Airlie, the forty-three-year-old wife of the 13th Earl, who was her first American lady-in-waiting. Diminutive like the Queen, and described by Cecil Beaton as “a paragon of gaiety & dignity,” Ginny Airlie had been appointed in 1973. She had initially demurred, saying she was an American subject with six children, the youngest only two years old, and suggested that the Queen “should get someone more steeped in it all.” But the Queen had insisted. The unpretentious peer’s wife fitted well with the royal household and adapted readily to the royal ways she had observed at parties and during shooting weekends at Sandringham and Balmoral. Even so, Woman of the Bedchamber Susan Hussey couldn’t resist calling her “the American.”
The royal party of twenty flew to Bermuda, where they embarked on
