Antony Armstrong-Jones, 1st Earl of Snowdon
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Antony Charles Robert Armstrong-Jones, 1st Earl of Snowdon, GCVO (born 7 March 1930) is a British photographer and Emmy award-winning documentary filmmaker. He sits in the House of Lords by virtue of a life peerage granted to him in 1999.
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[edit] Early life
The only son of barrister Ronald Armstrong-Jones (1899–1966) and his first wife, the society beauty Anne Messel (1902–1992, later Countess of Rosse), Snowdon, who is of Welsh and German Jewish ancestry, is a member of a notably artistic family. His maternal great-grandfather was the Punch cartoonist Linley Sambourne (1844–1910), his great-great-uncle Alfred Messel was a well-known Berlin architect, and his mother's brother was Oliver Messel, a noted British set and costume designer and architect.
[edit] Career
After being educated at Eton and Cambridge, where he studied architecture, Armstrong-Jones took up a career as a photographer in the fields of fashion, design and theatre. As his career as a portraitist began to flourish, he became known for his royal studies, among which were the official portraits of his future sister-in-law, Queen Elizabeth II, and the Duke of Edinburgh for their 1957 tour of Canada.
In the early 1960s, he became the picture editor of The Sunday Times Magazine, and by the 1970s, Snowdon had gained a reputation as one of Britain's most prominent and respected photographers. Though his subject matter includes everything from fashion models to documentary-style images of inner city life and the mentally ill, he is praised for his portraits of world notables (the National Gallery has more than 100 in its collection), many of which have been published in Vogue, Vanity Fair, and the Telegraph magazine. His subjects have included Barbara Cartland, Laurence Olivier, Anthony Blunt, J.R.R. Tolkien, and others.
In 2001, Snowdon was the subject of a career retrospective at the National Portrait Gallery, "Photographs by Snowdon: A Retrospective", which travelled to the Yale Center for British Art. More than 180 of his photographs were displayed in an exhibition that honored what the museums called "a rounded career with sharp edges".
He also co-designed, in 1960-1963, with Frank Newby and Cedric Price, the aviary of the London Zoo.
[edit] First marriage
On 26 February 1960 he became engaged to the Queen's sister, Princess Margaret, and they married on 6 May 1960 at Westminister Abbey. (Princess Margaret said she agreed to be his wife on the very day that she received a letter from the love of her life, Peter Townsend, telling her he was marrying a young Belgian woman.) On 6 October 1961, when his wife was expecting their first child and there was concern over a British princess giving birth to a child without a title, Armstrong-Jones was created Earl of Snowdon and Viscount Linley, of Nymans in the County of Sussex. (He reportedly accepted the titles grudgingly.) The Snowdon title has centuries-old royal associations, since the name Snowdon was borne by the Welsh Princes and the House of Gwynedd prior to 1282, though in this instance it was granted as a nod to Armstrong-Jones's Welsh ancestry. The subsidiary Linley title honored Lord Snowdon's great-grandfather Linley Sambourne as well as Nymans, the Messel family estate in West Sussex.
With Princess Margaret, Lord Snowdon had two children: David, Viscount Linley (born 3 November 1961) and Lady Sarah Armstrong-Jones (born 1 May 1964).
The couple's marriage was a combustible union of personalities and began to fail early on, owing to the Princess's penchant for late-night partying, her husband's working schedule, and their equally combative natures. The failing marriage was reportedly accompanied by bizarre behaviour by both parties. According to biographer Sarah Bradford, Snowdon once left a note for Princess Margaret that read "You look like a Jewish manicurist and I hate you". Private Eye claimed that during Christmas dinner at Sandringham in 1969, Snowdon leapt on to the table and performed a striptease in front of the whole Royal Family, as a result of which the Queen refused to speak to him for 18 months. Margaret's footman David John Payne published a book (banned in Britain due to the intervention of the Queen Mother)[citation needed] that claimed Snowdon sometimes dressed in drag.
Princess Margaret engaged in her own extramarital peccadillos. Insecure in the shadow of her sister the Queen, she was also fond of pulling rank and pointing out her husband's less-than-royal origins, once correcting publicly his use of the non-U word "material" (i.e. cloth) for what U-speakers offhandedly called "stuff".
The marriage finally ended in divorce in 1978.
[edit] Second marriage
After his divorce from Princess Margaret, Lord Snowdon married Lucy Lindsay-Hogg, daughter of Donald Brook Davies and former wife of film director Michael Lindsay-Hogg, on 15 December 1978. Their only child, Lady Frances Armstrong-Jones, was born seven months later, on 17 July 1979. They divorced in 1999 upon the revelation that Lord Snowdon had fathered a son out of wedlock, Jasper William Oliver Cable-Alexander (born 30 April 1998), with Melanie Cable-Alexander, an editor at Country Life magazine.
[edit] Life peerage
On 16 November 1999 Lord Snowdon was created Baron Armstrong-Jones, of Nymans in the County of West Sussex. This was a life peerage given him so that he could keep his seat in the House of Lords after the hereditary peers had been excluded. An offer of a life peerage was made to all hereditary peers of the first creation (i.e. those for whom a peerage was originally created, as opposed to those who inherited a peerage from an ancestor) at that time.
[edit] Titles and honours
[edit] Titles
- Antony Armstrong-Jones, Esq. (7 March 1930–6 October 1961)
- The Rt Hon. The Earl of Snowdon (6 October 1961–7 July 1969)
- The Rt Hon. The Earl of Snowdon, GCVO (7 July 1969—)
[edit] Honours
| Peerage of the United Kingdom | ||
|---|---|---|
| Preceded by: New Creation |
Earl of Snowdon 1961–Present |
Succeeded by: Current Incumbent |
