May 6, 1978
Princess Margaret & Antony Armstrong-Jones, 1st Earl of Snowdon 

The beautiful and capricious Princess Margaret, younger sister of Queen Elizabeth II, married the dashing photographer Antony Armstrong-Jones at Westminster Abbey on May 6, 1960. It was the first televised royal wedding, watched in households around the world.

The marriage would also produce another first the first royal divorce in the modern era.

They were doomed from the start. Antony Armstrong-Jones was not Princess Margaret’s true love by a long shot. A decade before she had fallen madly in love with her father’s equerry, the divorced and much older Peter Townsend. A worldwide scandal erupted and Margaret was eventually forced to announce she had given Peter up. It is reported that she accepted Snowdon’s proposal shortly after she heard Townsend was marrying a woman who looked just like her.

The marriage began to crack early. Princess Margaret and Snowdon were both clever, highly egotistical and used to being the center of the same wild high society jet set. They had two children, David and Sarah, and lived a life filled with boozy parties, and according to many, rife with infidelities. The marriage finally broke apart in a public and nasty fashion in the mid 70s and they were divorced in 1978.

Princess Margaret’s later life was spent patronizing the ballet and musical charities and plagued by health problems (according to many due to her smoking and heavy drinking)  and she died in 2002. Lord Snowdon continues to photograph members of the Royal Family and live life as an unruly cad. It came out recently that he fathered a child out-of-wedlock months before his marriage to Margaret in 1960, and fathered another child while cheating on his second wife in 1998.