Prince Harry suffered miserably when, as a young man, he was exposed for using cannabis.
However, his crime seems minor compared to the extent of the drug use that occurred when Princess Margaret and her husband, Lord Snowdon, were together at Kensington Palace.
It was an unhappy time, according to writer Tom Quinn.
In his book, Scandals of the Royal Palaces, Quinn cites testimony from a former servant that when the marriage fell apart in the late 1960s and early ’70s, Snowdon would leave packets of illegal drugs lying around his apartment for his Princess Margaret will find them.
Prince Harry appears at the 2009 wedding of his friend Nicholas Van Cutsem and Alice Hadden-Paton at the Guards Chapel.
Harry was ordered by his father to visit a drug rehabilitation clinic after it was revealed that he had been smoking cannabis and engaging in binge drinking.
A pensive Prince Harry at Cowdray Park Polo Club in July 2001
“Before they really got into a fight, he would offer her all kinds of drugs,” the servant said. ‘We heard they tried LSD and cocaine, but then a lot of people tried things like that at the time.
“But in the end, when their relationship got very bad, Lord Snowdon used to leave little packets of drugs in his flat and by Margaret’s bed with little notes saying things like, ‘Why don’t you take all this and do it to us?’ everyone?”. a favor.”‘
Perhaps he was partly joking, the servant suggests, but he was clearly suggesting that his wife commit suicide.
“We were told to remove any packages we saw and not to mention them to Margaret.”
Behind closed doors, Margaret and her husband, photographer Antony Armstrong-Jones, would torture each other, especially with their respective infidelities.
Snowdon, being the less restricted of the two, would tend to emerge victorious, Quinn says.
As the anonymous servant explains to the author, when Margaret complained that Tony had once again been unfaithful, he would wait a few days and then bring a young attendant back to Kensington Palace and make loud love to her, making sure Margaret received good care. .
“He was really sadistic,” says the source, “but interestingly, Margaret only really cared when he slept with someone aristocratic.
“She considered sleeping with what she called a “common floozy” not so worrying, and that also infuriated her husband.
“But Margaret also slept with people to annoy Tony; she had numerous affairs… I remember she was very intimate with a famous pop star, several actors and a politician.”
Drug consumption was already part of real life in the previous century.
Queen Victoria became increasingly dependent on opium after the death of her favorite servant, John Brown, in 1883.
According to historian Roger Fulford, when her doctor advised her to take less, the Queen became enraged and threw a heavy object at her.
Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon appear on the Thames for regatta day
Margaret and Tony in 1976. By then the marriage had collapsed and the two would torture each other by flaunting their infidelity.
Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon appear to be rowing – another scene from 1976
Queen Victoria on ‘Fyvie’ with John Brown at Balmoral. Victoria became dependent on opium after Brown’s death.
Tom Quinn suggests that Victoria took opium dissolved in a mixture of 90 percent alcohol (laudanum), a form that requires an increasing dose to maintain the same effects.
Meanwhile, Victoria’s daughter Helen smoked opium “through a specially made pipe that looked like a miniature water pipe.”
However, context is everything: opium was seen as a wonder drug at the time, a miracle cure for aches and pains rather than a dangerously debilitating substance that required strict regulation.
- Tom Quinn is the author of Royal Palace Scandals: An Intimate Memoir of Royals Behaving Badly. Published by Biteback, price £20