Princess Margaret of Connaught (Maj 2024)
Prinsessan Margaret i sin helhet Prinsessan Margaret Rose Windsor, grevinnan av Snowdon, (född 21 augusti 1930, Glamis Castle, Skottland - dog 9 februari 2002, London, England), brittiska kungliga, den andra dotter till kung George VI och drottning Elizabeth (från 1952 Queen Elizabeth, Queen Mother) och den yngre syster till Queen Elizabeth II. Hon kämpade under hela sitt liv för att balansera en oberoende anda och konstnärligt temperament med sina uppgifter som medlem av Storbritanniens kungafamilj.
Prins William och Catherine Middleton: The Royal Wedding of 2011: Princess Margaret och Antony Armstrong-Jones
1961 publicerade Årets bok en biografi om prinsessan Margaret Rose, syster till drottning Elizabeth
Margaret var den första medlemmen av den kungliga familjen på cirka 300 år som föddes i Skottland, på hennes mors familjesäte i Glamis Castle. Hennes utbildning övervakades av hennes mamma, och hon och hennes syster anförtrodes till en guvernör. Margaret visade ett tidigt intresse för musik och tog pianolektioner från fyra års ålder. Hon var sex år gammal när hennes farbror, kung Edward VIII, abdikerade, och hennes far blev kung. Därefter fick prinsessa Elizabeth, som tronarvinge, en separat utbildning, medan Margaret fortsatte under sin mors övervakning. Dessutom var hon skyldig att delta i offentliga engagemang.
Margaret, who became known for her glamour and beauty, displayed an early love for nightlife and the arts. When she was in her early 20s, she fell in love with Group Capt. Peter Townsend, a war hero who had served as an equerry to her father. Their romance became public knowledge when Margaret was seen brushing lint off Townsend’s jacket at her sister’s coronation in 1953. Although Townsend and Margaret wished to marry, the fact that he was divorced made the marriage unsuitable, and Margaret gained worldwide sympathy in 1955 when she publicly renounced their plans to wed.
Margaret was already a fixture on London’s social and arts scene when she began secretly seeing photographer Antony Armstrong-Jones in 1958. The announcement of their engagement in February 1960 caught many by surprise. They were married on May 6, 1960, in the first royal wedding to be televised. (Armstrong-Jones was created earl of Snowdon in 1961.) The marriage was at first successful, and they had two children: David, Viscount Linley, born in 1961, and Lady Sarah, born in 1964. By the 1970s, however, the couple had grown apart. Both of the Snowdons engaged in public love affairs, and the princess scandalized conservative monarchists, cultivating friendships and romances among actors, writers, ballet dancers, and artists. She spent much of her time on the Caribbean island of Mustique, in the Grenadines. When her long-standing affair with Roddy Llewellyn, a landscape gardener 17 years her junior, was exposed in 1976, she lost public sympathy, and her volatile marriage finally ended in 1978, the first divorce in the British royal family in 400 years.
Eventually her extensive charitable work, combined with a new, more modern sympathy for the restricted options she faced, gained her a measure of public respect. Princess Margaret, who smoked and drank heavily throughout her adult life, was often in ill health. She had surgery for possible lung cancer in 1985 (the tissue proved to be benign) and later suffered a series of strokes.
