Princess Margaret's Daughter Walked Away — And the Palace Didn't Blame Her

Princess Margaret had two children, and by every reasonable expectation, they shouldn't have turned out well. Their mother was the most glamorous and the most self-destructive royal of her generation — the drinking, the affairs, the much-younger lover, the Caribbean island, the public divorce. Their father, the photographer Antony Armstrong-Jones, was no calmer. Anne de Courcy, in her authorised biography of Snowdon, describes the marriage as a collision between two strong-willed people, each accustomed to having their own way, bringing drugs, alcohol, and affairs into a relationship that eventually became a source of national fascination and scandal. David Armstrong-Jones and Lady Sarah Armstrong-Jones grew up in the middle of all of it, two children in the nursery of Apartment 1A at Kensington Palace, watching two famous, charismatic, and deeply unhappy people take each other apart while the whole country followed the story. Children raised amid that kind of glamour and mutual destruction often carry the same patterns into their own lives. The Windsor family itself provides many examples — three of Queen Elizabeth II's four children divorced, with private troubles becoming public spectacle throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Statistically and historically, the children of charismatic, alcoholic, or chronically self-destructive parents often repeat the behaviors they witnessed growing up. The pull of the familiar is not a character flaw; it is often how damage is passed from one generation to the next. And yet, David Armstrong-Jones took a very different path. In the early 1980s, he attended a woodworking school in Dorset to learn joinery. After graduating, he established a small carpentry workshop above a chip shop in Dorking, Surrey, where he spent three years working alone and making furniture. In 1985, he transformed that workshop into a company.