PRINCESS MARGARET, A
With a two-part BBC documentary on the Queen’s late sister starting next week, JANE WARREN lifts the lid on her freespirited lifestyle and how she saw her doomed romance with Peter Townsend as a lucky escape
Daily Express Tuesday September 4 2018 CARIBBEAN CHARM: Margaret at home in Mustique in 1976; with first love Peter, left
THE popular perception has always been that Princess Margaret, the original wild child of the Royal Family, was deeply upset at losing the stable, avuncular influence of Group Captain Peter Townsend after she was unable to marry the dashing divorcé because both the Church of England and Parliament were firmly against the match.
However a new documentary suggests that far from feeling distraught about the marriage that never was, the Queen’s sister viewed her inability to marry him as a lucky escape.
In a forthcoming BBC documentary, Lady Jane Rayne – elder sister of the late Lady Annabel Goldsmith – believes that the Princess, who died in 2002 at the age of 71, viewed her split from Townsend with more a sense of relief at not having to become “an ordinary housewife”.
The extraordinary claim is made during a two-part programme Princess Margaret: The Rebel Royal, starting on September 11.
Margaret was just 16 when she fell in love with Townsend, a married man 16 years her senior who had worked as her late father King George VI’s equerry since Margaret was 14.
Clergy and politicians were against the relationship between the impressionable princess and the Battle of Britain war hero but the public voiced support for Margaret’s right to marry the man of her choice.
When she was 21 her father died, her sister ascended the throne and Townsend divorced his wife. Early the following year he proposed to Margaret who was forced to turn him down on the advice of her sister, now Queen Elizabeth II.
Lady Jane, 85, who was one of the late Princess’s closest friends, recalls: “She looked as if she was absolutely heartbroken but I don’t think she was. I think she thought, ‘Right, go back to my bachelor days’. She weighed up everything in her mind to realise what her life would have been like [had they married].”
For it was made clear to Margaret that if she had gone through with the marriage then she and any subsequent children would have been removed from the line of succession. This edict followed the political storm surrounding her uncle Edward VIII’s abdication in 1936 in order to marry twice-divorced American Wallis Simpson.
“She would never be a nobody but she would have lost part of her glamour,” says Lady Jane. “I think if she’d married him, she would have been rather an ordinary housewife and she didn’t want that at all.”
According to former BBC royal correspondent Jennie Bond this insight has been known to royal insiders for a while. But it is the first time the claims have been given such a high-profile platform.
“The Goldsmiths were certainly very well connected to the Royal Family,” says Bond. “I have no idea myself if the claims are true or not but I have heard it said that some people had surmised that she certainly wasn’t willing to give up her status, her title and her place in succession to the throne.”
So, who was the real Princess Margaret – a woman whose character combined the rebellious force of modernity and respect for tradition, and who in this way, according to the programme makers, “embodied the spirit of cultural change in the second