After the trouble the relation with divorced Captain Peter Townsend caused, Princess Margaret was known as the rebel of the royal family and everyone was delighted when her engagement to Anthony Armstrong-Jones, an Eton-educated member of the aristocracy, was announced in February 1960. Tony, as he was always called, was an irreverent and gifted photographer, and he was seen as a breath of fresh air into the royal family.

The royal wedding took place on 6th May 1960 and it was the first such event to be broadcasted live on BBC, for the whole world, and the one which drew greatest expectation of those ever celebrated. Anthony helped to design the wedding festivities, as he did with the banners and decorations for The Mall, where the cortege would go through. If in 1947 there were savings of money, in 1960 they decided to spend it and Princess Margaret’s wedding became the most spectacular ever celebrated in Britain, until it was replaced by Princess Anne’s and later Prince Charles’ weddings.

The Queen Mother saw this day with happiness but not forgetting her husband, who should have conducted Princess Margaret to the altar of Westminster Abbey. Instead, the task was accomplished by Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, who accompanied Princess Margaret in the Glass Coach from Clarence House and up the nave towards the altar. The Queen Mother arrived with the Queen and Prince Charles in Queen Alexandra’s State Coach, having taken part in a spectacular cortege of cavalry and carriages throughout London.

At the end of the ceremony, Margaret and Anthony, created later that year Earl of Snowdon and Viscount Linley, left the Abbey in the Glass Coach towards Buckingham Palace, from which balcony they greeted the hundreds of thousand of well-wishers gathered around Victoria’s Memorial and down The Mall. The royal family, who once more saw how their people loved them, reminds that day with happiness, despite all what future reserved for this marriage.

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