Antony Armstrong-Jones

If fairy tales taught us anything (besides not going to strange houses in the woods, be they made of cookies or serving porridge), it's that marrying a prince makes one a princess (a useful shoe drop is a good place to start). In real life, it's a little more complex.

When Kate Middleton married Prince William, that did not make her a princess. She became the Duchess of Cambridge, and only upgraded to the Princess of Wales when her mother-in-law died. (Apparently, she also keeps being a duchess. This is all unnecessarily confusing.)

What if someone marries a princess, do they get to be a prince? Apparently not so as well, and the example we have here is Antony Armstrong-Jones, whose mother, Anne Messel, came from a Jewish family. AA-J was married to Princess Margaret, Elizabeth II's younger sister, from 1960 to 1978. They couldn't even make him a duke; he got to be the Earl of Snowdon. (Snowdon is the highest mountain in Wales. He got to lord over a mountain. Great.)

So no Jewish English prince. Just a sort-of Jewish English earl.

So much for fairy tales.