THE TRUTH THE QUEEN TRIED TO HIDE
Princess Margaret’s fresh scandal
Plucking a thread off a jacket lapel. That’s all it took for the public to discover that Princess Margaret and royal aide Group Captain Peter Townsend were in the throes of a passionate romance.
It’s a famous story of thwarted love and heartbreak. The accepted version has Margaret pressured by the Establishment to give him up to preserve her royal privileges.
But recently unearthed documents tell a rather different story – one of which strongly hints that the affair began when the princess was under age.
Hit television series The Crown vividly shows Margaret’s intimate gesture spotted by a journalist at the Queen’s coronation in 1953. His report went around the world, causing a scandal: Peter was divorced. It was supposedly unthinkable that the Queen’s sister could marry him. And the Queen would have to give her consent until Margaret was 25. She was 22 at the time.
“The Queen was in an impossible position,” says a member of the royal household. “She always wanted to see her sister happy but, as head of the Church of England, she could not agree to Princess Margaret marrying a man who had been married before. Her uncle, Edward VIII, had to abdicate to marry divorcée Wallis Simpson.
“So the Queen did what she always does – she waited and asked her sister to do the same.”
Margaret held on until she was 25 and issued a statement. “I would like it to be known that I have decided not to marry Group Captain Peter Townsend,” she said.
“Mindful of the Church’s teaching that Christian marriage is indissoluble… I have decided to put these considerations before any others.”
It was put about that Margaret would lose her title and income – and Peter was not rich. He reinforced this in his 1978 autobiography, Time and Chance. He wrote, “I simply hadn’t the weight, I knew it, to counterbalance all she would have lost.”
In the book, he says he developed feelings for Margaret in 1951 but Craig Brown, author of a Margaret biography called Ma’am Darling, says the curator of a castle found its logbook for October 1947, when Margaret stayed – and in it a revelation that changes everything.
“As it happened, she had been accompanied on her overnight visit by Group Captain Peter Townsend, who was, at that time, an equerry to King George VI,” says Craig. “The log book clearly states that Townsend asked for his bedroom to be moved next to the princess’, the curator told me.”
Peter was 32, married and father to two sons. Margaret was just 17. They had known each other since she was 14 and she admitted to another friend that the romance developed earlier in 1947, when he chaperoned her on a three-month tour of Southern Africa.
“We rode together every morning in that wonderful country, in marvellous weather,” Margaret told her confidante. “That’s when I really fell in love with him.” However, a letter Margaret wrote to British Prime Minister Anthony Eden in 1955, the year she gave up Peter, shows she was having serious doubts. She tells the PM that she will not see Peter over the entire summer.
“It is only by seeing him in this way that I feel I can properly decide whether I can marry him or not,” she writes. “The Queen of course knows I am writing to you about this, but of course no-one else does.”
Margaret’s close friend and official biographer, Christopher Warwick, says, “This letter rewrites history because here you’ve got a very determined and confident young woman in control of the situation,” he says. “The perception was that she gave up the love of her life for duty and protocol, but this letter sets a question mark over that. It shows that the love, conceivably, was not as strong as it was to begin with.” Only the Queen knows the full truth – and she will never reveal it.
Royal family friend Reinaldo Herrera says the Queen and Margaret always loved each other. “The Queen lost her most intimate companion,” he says of Margaret’s death in 2002.
“Never explaining anything to the world – what she feels or why she does what she does – is part of her greatness. But for a few minutes that day, as she stood by the steps of St. George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle, watching her sister’s coffin being borne away, her eyes betrayed her.”
The Crown’s version of events has supposedly been watched by the Queen. “Happily, she really liked it, although obviously there were some depictions of events that she found too dramatised,” says one of her circle.
The second series might be a different matter as it hints at Prince Philip’s alleged – and repeatedly denied – affairs. The duke, according to Matt Smith, who plays him in the series, has not watched it. A friend of the actor had been to dinner with the Queen and Philip, and asked if he’d seen it. The duke glowered and responded, “Don’t. Be. Ridiculous.”