Lady Sarah Chatto and David Linley Walked Away From Princess Margaret — And Both Survived Her D
There were two of them, David, born in 1961, and Sarah, born three years later in the spring of 1964, the son and the daughter of Princess Margaret and Anthony Armstrong-Jones, the most photographed couple in London in a marriage that was already quietly coming apart.
They grew up in the same 20 rooms at Kensington Palace. That figure is a press shorthand, not an architect’s survey, but Vogue’s own description confirms five reception rooms, three main bedrooms, and a scale the coverage consistently compares to an English country house. They kept the same late hours because the household ran on their mother’s hours.
They learned the same lesson about temper because the household ran on their mother’s temper. And when their parents separated in March 1976 and divorced in July 1978, the first divorce within the immediate family of a reigning British monarch in modern times, David was 14 at the separation. Sarah was nearly 12. By the time the decree absolute was issued, David was 16, Sarah was 14.
Here is what makes their story worth the next 35 minutes. They were handed the identical inheritance, the same name, the same expectation, the same so-called curse. And then, separately, without conspiring, without announcing it, in slow motion across 30 years, they each put it down. One into a studio, one into a workshop.
This is the story of the only two people who were ever offered the Margaret inheritance in full and the matching silent decision they made to refuse it. The word curse will come up throughout this video. It’s a device, a name for a real pattern of transmitted behaviors, the temper, the entitlement, the certainty that the world owed you its attention.
Those behaviors can be passed on. They can also, it turns out, be declined. Apartment 1A, Kensington Palace, had been Margaret’s address since before either child was born. She moved there ahead of her May 6th, 1966 wedding to Anthony Armstrong Jones, the society photographer she’d met 2 years earlier at a party.
The marriage was the first televised royal wedding in British history, watched by an audience of some 20 million. Armstrong Jones was created first Earl of Snowdon in 1961, the year David was born. By any outward measure, the household that followed was dazzling. According to Anne Glenconner, who served as Margaret’s lady in waiting for nearly 30 years and documented the experience in her 2019 memoir Lady in Waiting, the interior ran on Margaret’s timetable.
Late rising, newspapers and cigarettes in bed, the household held in suspension until its mistress chose to begin the day. Evenings began late and ended later. The children, who attended Bedales, a progressive arts-focused boarding school in Hampshire, were away for much of the year, but they came home to this atmosphere on weekends and during school holidays at the ages when patterns install themselves.
They weren’t inside it every day. They were inside it enough. What the household gave them, alongside the schedule, was a world. Anthony Armstrong Jones’s maternal uncle was Oliver Messel, one of the foremost stage designers of the 20th century, a man whose credits ran from West End theater to Hollywood film to country house interiors.
It was Messel who designed Les Jolies Eaux, Princess Margaret’s villa on Mustique, at the request of Colin Tennant. The great uncle who shaped their mother’s most private retreat was himself a craftsman. Theater people, photographers, decorators, and what multiple biographers describe as the bohemian aristocracy of 1960s and 1970s London circulated through Kensington Palace.
Art and design weren’t hobbies in this household. They were the atmosphere. The marriage underneath all of this was deteriorating from at least the late 1960s. Lord Snowdon conducted affairs, several, and one long-running. And Margaret had begun her own relationship in 1973 with Roddy Llewellyn, 25 years old, whom she’d met at the Café Royal in Edinburgh while traveling to a house party hosted by Colin Tennant.
Paparazzi caught them together on Mustique in February 1976. Photographs of Margaret and Llewellyn in swimwear appeared in a British tabloid. Members of Parliament described her publicly as a royal parasite, and Llewellyn issued a formal statement expressing regret for any embarrassment caused to the Queen and the royal family.
On 19 March 1976, Buckingham Palace announced the separation. David was 14 years and 4 months old. Sarah was 11, turning 12 in May. The decree nisi came on 24th May 1978. The decree absolute on 11 July 1978. Press coverage routinely described this as the first royal divorce since Henry VIII.
A line that overstates things slightly, since George Lascelles, 7th Earl of Harewood and grandson of George V, had divorced in 1967. But Harewood was a cousin. Margaret was the Queen’s sister. The proximity was different. The visibility was different. And for two children at Kensington Palace, the experience was different. What they watched at 14 and 11 was the full performance of the script.
Public spectacle. Royal status combined with personal wreckage, the certainty that one’s romantic life commanded national attention because one’s blood demanded it. David Albert Charles Armstrong Jones was born at Clarence House on 3rd November 1961. Styled Viscount Linley from birth by virtue of his father’s earldom.
Bedales first, then from 1980 to 1982 Parnham House in Beaminster, Dorset, the school for craftsmen in wood. He graduated at 20. The Linley website records what came next. He set up a carpentry workshop above a chip shop in Dorking. A future earl, the Queen’s nephew, a man who at birth had been five places from the throne, spending the early 1980s making furniture in a rented space above a takeaway.
He did this for 3 years. Then, on 26th April 1985, David Linley and Co. Limited was incorporated at Companies House, registered under company number 01908943. That is a primary documentary record, and it tells you something precise. His career began not as a royal gesture, but as a formal commercial undertaking filed on a specific date with a registration number.
The company name warrants a careful look. He used Linley, drawn from his courtesy viscountcy title, as the brand. He didn’t use Prince because he wasn’t one. He didn’t use Armstrong Jones, the family name that gestured toward photography rather than furniture. What he chose was the title’s name without the title’s prefix.
The Linley brand was positioned in the luxury and heritage market, and press coverage routinely identified him as the Queen’s nephew. He wasn’t pretending the blood was irrelevant. But he was foregrounding the craft and attaching the name to the skill rather than attaching skill to the name as an afterthought.
That distinction held for 40 years. Linley’s founding mission was fusing striking design with exemplary craftsmanship. Bespoke furniture, upholstery, and interior design in a neoclassical style made with inlaid woods, sold through Belgravia and Harrods. David wrote multiple books on furniture design, lectured at the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Smithsonian, and the Art Institute of Chicago.
In 2005, he joined Christie’s board as a non-executive director. On 1st December 2006, he took up the post of chairman of Christie’s UK. That exact date confirmed by Christie’s own press record. The 2015 statement he gave when Christie’s promoted him to honorary chairman for Europe, the Middle East, Russia, and India discussed shifts in global collecting, passion for design, the dialogue between objects from different periods and artists.
10 years of work. He didn’t mention his mother, who had died 4 years before his chairmanship began. A Guardian interview from January 2007 was conducted inside his shop. His choice of venue, the interviewer noted, because he wanted to show the craft. A palace or an office would have said something different about who he thought he was.
He married Serena Elan Stanhope on 8 October 1993 at St. Margaret’s Westminster with 650 guests. They had two children, Charles, born 1st July 1999, and Lady Margarita, born in 2002. He and Serena separated in February 2020 and announced a divorce after 26 years. The marriage’s end belongs in the story, not as a failure against some standard of perfect restraint, but as a reminder that declining a particular kind of performance isn’t the same as immunity from ordinary difficulty.
When his father Anthony died on 13 January 2017, David inherited the earldom. He became the second Earl of Snowdon at 55, after 32 years running a furniture company. The title arrived as a fact of inheritance, rather than the foundation of a career. That sequence, craft first, title later, by accident of death, is its own kind of argument.
Lady Sarah Frances Elizabeth Armstrong-Jones was born at 8:20 in the morning on 1st May 1964 at Kensington Palace. She left Bedales with a single A-level in art. She enrolled at Camberwell School of Art for a foundation course, then the Royal Academy Schools, where she completed a two-year postgraduate course, finishing in 1988.
The Royal Academy’s own artist database confirms her enrollment. She won the Winsor and Newton Prize that year and the Creswick Landscape Prize in 1990. These aren’t honorifics given to a princess. They are an artist’s credentials, awarded by the institution where she trained. Daniel Chatto was an actor and artist.
His father Tom was an actor. His mother Roz, a well-known theatrical agent. He proposed with a vintage cluster ring and they married on 14 July 1994. The church was St. Stephen Walbrook, a Wren church in the city of London near the Mansion House, not a royal chapel, not Westminster Abbey. The officiant was the Reverend Chad Varah, founder of the Samaritans.
The wedding dress was by Jasper Conran. Approximately 200 guests attended a 30-minute ceremony. Bridesmaids included Zara Phillips, Lady Frances Armstrong-Jones, and a family friend. By 1994, the measure of a royal adjacent wedding was calibrated against Diana walking into St.
Paul’s Cathedral before 750 million viewers. Sarah walked into a city church before 200 people and had a Wren ceiling above her and 30 minutes of service, and that was that. Since 1995, she has been represented by the Redfern Gallery at 20 Cork Street, Mayfair, one of the oldest commercial galleries in London. She exhibits under the name Sarah Armstrong-Jones, not Lady Sarah, not Chatto, not her title.
Sarah Armstrong-Jones, her maiden name, the name she was born with, the name that carries her father’s legacy and none of her mother’s fame. Auction records document her works in private collections from 1997 onward. A South India still life at Roseberys with clear Redfern Gallery provenance. A Beach Norfolk study at Dreweatts, acquired in 2003.
An Interior Scotland from 2010, acquired through the same gallery. Three decades of paintings in private hands sold through commercial channels on the strength of the work. In her most recent Redfern Gallery solo show, over three quarters of the paintings sold. Curator Patrick Kinmonth has described her work as a profound contemplation of the world she seeks to know and the method she has mastered.
Her sons are Samuel David Benedict Chatto, born 28 July 1996, and Arthur Robert Nathaniel Chatto, born 5 February 1999. Both use Chatto. Neither holds a title. This isn’t because Sarah formally refused titles on their behalf. The peerage rules don’t extend courtesy titles through a female line to children of an untitled husband.
So, Samuel and Arthur were always going to be Mr. Chatto. But a structural fact can still be a biographical one. They grew up without titles, built careers without titles, and carry the name of their father’s theatrical family. Samuel is a sculptor based in West Sussex, exhibiting internationally. Arthur commissioned as an officer in the Royal Marines in December 2022.
Arthur’s service and his earlier years as page of honor to Queen Elizabeth from 2009 to 2015 complicates any simple claim that the refusal extended cleanly to the next generation. It didn’t entirely. What continued was something more modest and more accurate. No titles, no working royal platform, no professional identity built on royal celebrity.
Arthur’s service is institutional and earned. That distinction is worth naming because the argument here is about a specific kind of performance being declined, not about severing all connection to the institution of family. In 2024, Sarah became president of the Royal Ballet, stepping into a role her mother had long held.
She wore Margaret’s diamond star earrings and matching brooch to Royal Ascot that June, 22 years after her mother’s death. These aren’t the acts of someone performing the Margaret script. They’re the acts of someone carrying her mother forward on her own terms, in her own time. David graduates from Parnham House in 1982 and sets up a workshop in Dorking.
Sarah is at the Royal Academy Schools, 1985 to 1988. David incorporates his company on 26th of April, 1985. Sarah wins her first professional award in 1988. David marries in October, 1993. Sarah marries 9 months later, in July, 1994. By the mid-1990s, both children of Princess Margaret are working professional artists.
One in furniture and design, one in painting. Both attached to institutional contexts that have nothing to do with royal blood. Both in marriages to people from creative, rather than purely aristocratic backgrounds. They did different things in different spaces under different names. David built furniture companies and lectured at museums.
Sarah painted landscapes and South India still lifes, and sold them through a Cork Street Gallery. One works in three-dimensions with wood, the other works on paper and canvas. Neither has given an interview describing their career as a conscious rejection of anything. David talked about design. Sarah talked about Piero della Francesca.
The parallelism in their choices is an analytical conclusion drawn from 40 years of separate documented facts, not a claim either sibling ever made for themselves. But the documents are real and the pattern is clear. Companies House registered David Linley and Co. on 26th of April 1985. The Redfern Gallery has represented Sarah Armstrong Jones since 1995.
Christie’s press records confirm his chairmanship from 1st of December 2006. Auction provenance records her paintings into private collections from 1997. 40 years of institutional records show the same thing. Two people from the same household who built careers from craft and skill rather than status.
Princess Margaret died at King Edward VII’s Hospital on 9th of February 2002. She was 71. She had suffered strokes from 1998 onward. By 1999, a scalding accident had left her with lasting paralysis and limited mobility. Both David and Sarah were at her bedside. The Queen Mother died 5 weeks later. Both losses in one spring.
4 years on in 2006, Christie’s held a sale of 896 items from Princess Margaret’s private collection. That figure registers as something more than a count. It’s a measure of accumulated grandeur. The physical record of a life built on the expectation that objects would accrue because of who she was.
The sale raised approximately 13.6 million pounds, commonly rounded in press coverage to about 14 million. The children had initiated it to deal with the estate. David was simultaneously the UK chairman of Christie’s. He took up that post on 1st December 2006, the year of the sale. He used his earned institutional authority to liquidate the material record of the inheritance.
No contemporaneous conflict of interest controversy has been identified, but the overlap is real and worth acknowledging. The cleanest version of the refusal narrative would have David nowhere near an auction house selling his mother’s things. The actual version has him running it. These are both true.
What Sarah kept is the other side of the ledger. The Snowdon Floral Tiara, reportedly assembled in 1994 by Wartski using three floral diamond brooches that Anthony Armstrong Jones gave Margaret as a wedding gift in 1960, is documented in specialist jewelry records as having been converted into a tiara the same year as Sarah’s own marriage.
She wore it at St. Stephen Walbrook on 14 July 1994, and it passed to her after Margaret’s death. She has been photographed in it at family occasions in the years since. The provenance connects a 1960 wedding gift, a 1994 marriage, and a 2002 inheritance in a single object. She carries the connection.
She doesn’t perform it. The 896 items released at Christie’s represent the performance, the accumulated grandeur of a life lived as though status was a substance that could be collected. What the children retained were the things that carried a story. Objects don’t lie about the relationship their owner had with them.
The public reached its verdict well before the biographies did. Across decades of royal commentary, in print and broadcast coverage and reader reaction, the characterization of David Armstrong Jones and Lady Sarah Chatto has been consistent. They built things, they stayed quiet, they caused no drama.
A sentiment that circulated widely in the years after Margaret’s death put it plainly. Her children did it right. Kept a low profile, made their own living, lived clean. Three decades of watching two people from a household where drama was the default setting, choose work and restraint instead.
Neither David nor Sarah ever positioned themselves as survivors of anything. No memoirs about the Mustique photographs, no long interviews about what it felt like to be 14 when the separation was announced. They just didn’t become it, and the public, watching the evidence accumulate across 30 years, drew the conclusion the evidence supported.
These two people, handed the same inheritance, made the same choice. The family had a script. It had been written by a grandmother and performed by a daughter. And by the time it reached the third generation, it had hardened into something that looked like fate. The temper, the entitlement, the certainty that the world owed you its attention. Margaret had two children.
She handed each of them the same pages, and one took them into a workshop, and the other took them into a studio. And somewhere in the quiet of those two ordinary rooms, 30 years apart and never once discussing it, they each set the script down and refused to read the rest. That is the whole story.
Not a curse broken by magic, a script declined by two people who were patient enough and tired enough of the noise to simply stop performing. The Margaret inheritance was offered in full exactly twice, and exactly twice it was politely, permanently returned. Subscribe for more stories like this.
