MARGARET AND A PACT WITH HER LOST LOVE

One of the most extraordinary revelations in the show is that Princess Margaret married not for love, but to avoid being humiliated by her former boyfriend Group Captain Peter Townsend. And it was ex-Cabinet minister Jonathan Aitken who told writer Peter Morgan the story. Aitken was once on holiday with Margaret and her husband Lord Snowdon at a time when they were arguing ferociously. Aitken and Margaret went for a swim, ending up on a rock, and she opened up to him about her ‘difficult’ marriage. She confided that when she and Townsend had split up they made a pact with each other not to marry anyone else; yet a few years later Townsend phoned her to say he’d met someone else and was about to announce his engagement.

‘Margaret said, “Will you give me two weeks?” because she didn’t want to be humiliated

by his news breaking first,’ reveals Morgan. ‘She’d never intended to marry Snowdon, but she did it to avoid humiliation.

‘I had initially thought the end of the affair with Townsend was a more cynical arrangement than it was – I hadn’t really thought they’d been happy together. But Jonathan’s story changed my opinion. So I went back and re-wrote the episode about her affair to make it more tender. She must have been devastated.’

Nothing epitomises the schism between the Crown and the person who wears it more than this doomed romance. Margaret (played by Vanessa Kirby, far left) had fallen for Townsend (Ben Miles, right) while he was an equerry for her father George VI. She was still a teenager, he was twice her age and married with two children. The pair began a love affair and Townsend and his wife divorced in 1952 as the princess was struggling to cope with her father’s death.

Under the Royal Marriages Act, Margaret needed her sister’s approval to marry before she was 25. The Queen, as Defender of the Faith, could not agree to let her sister marry a man who was divorced. Margaret agreed to wait until she was 25, when Parliament would decide whether she could marry, but when she reached that age in 1955, it refused to approve the match. She faced a stark choice: she could either remain a member of the Royal Family, or marry Townsend and renounce her right of succession, in a similar way to when her uncle Edward VIII chose to abdicate in order to marry Wallis Simpson.