Princess Margaret

British royal

Princess Margaret, in full Princess Margaret Rose Windsor, countess of

Snowdon, (born August 21, 1930, Glamis Castle, Scotland—died February 9, 2002,
London, England), British royal, the second daughter of King George VI and
Queen Elizabeth (from 1952 Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother) and the younger sister
of Queen Elizabeth II. She struggled throughout her life to balance an independent spirit
and artistic temperament with her duties as a member of Britain’s royal family

Margaret was the first member of the royal family in some 300 years to be born
in Scotland, at her mother’s family seat of Glamis Castle. Her education was supervised
by her mother, and she and her sister were entrusted to a governess. Margaret showed
an early interest in music and took piano lessons from the age of four. She was six years
old when her uncle, King Edward VIII, abdicated, and her father became king. After
that, Princess Elizabeth, as heir to the throne, received a separate education, while
Margaret continued under her mother’s supervision. In addition, she was required to
take part in public engagements.

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
tMargaret 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

Philip, duke of Edinburgh

British prince
Print Cite
original name Philip, prince of Greece and Denmark, (born June 10, 1921, Corfu,
Greece—died April 9, 2021, Windsor Castle, England), husband of Queen Elizabeth II of
the United Kingdom.

Philip, duke of Edinburgh

Prince Philip

Prince Philip, duke of Edinburgh

Queen Elizabeth II; Prince Philip

Philip’s father was Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark (1882–1944), a younger son
of King George I of the Hellenes (originally Prince William of Denmark). His mother
was Princess Alice (1885–1969), who was the eldest daughter of Louis Alexander
Mountbatten, 1st marquess of Milford Haven, and Princess Victoria of Hesse and the
Rhine, granddaughter of Queen Victoria. Reared chiefly in Great Britain, Philip was
educated at Gordonstoun School, near Elgin, Moray, Scotland, and at the Royal Naval
College, Dartmouth, Devon, England. From January 1940 to the end of World War II, he
served with the Royal Navy in combat in the Mediterranean and the Pacific.

On February 28, 1947, Philip became a British subject, renouncing his right to the Greek
and Danish thrones and taking his mother’s surname, Mountbatten. (His father’s family
name had been Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg.) His marriage to his
distant cousin Princess Elizabeth took place in Westminster Abbey on November 20,
1947. On the eve of his wedding, he was designated a royal highness and was created a
Knight of the Garter, Baron Greenwich, earl of Merioneth, and duke of Edinburgh. The
couple’s first child, Charles Philip Arthur George, was born in 1948. He was joined by
Anne Elizabeth Alice Louise (born 1950), Andrew Albert Christian Edward (born 1960),
and Edward Anthony Richard Louis (born 1964).

Philip continued on active service with the Royal Navy, commanding the frigate Magpie,
until Elizabeth’s accession on February 6, 1952, from which time he shared her official
and public life. He attended an average of 350 official engagements a year on behalf of
the royal household. In 1957 she conferred on him the dignity of prince of the United
Kingdom, and in 1960 his surname was legally combined with the name of her family—
as Mountbatten-Windsor—as a surname for lesser branches of the royal family. His
outspoken right-wing views, the public expression of which he sometimes found hard to
resist, occasionally embarrassed a monarchy trying to put aside its traditional upper-
crust image.While much of his time was spent fulfilling the duties of his station, Philip
engaged in a variety of philanthropic endeavours. He served as president of the World
Wildlife Fund (WWF) from 1981 to 1996, and his International Award program allowed
more than six million young adults to engage in community service, leadership
development, and physical fitness activities. In 2011, to mark his 90th birthday,
Elizabeth conferred on him the title and office of lord high admiral, the titular head of
the Royal Navy. In May 2017 it was announced that Philip—who was one of the busiest
royals, with more than 22,000 solo appearances over the years—would stop carrying out
public engagements in August. His last solo event took place on August 2, 2017.