Margaret’s forbidden romance...
TRAGEDY OF THE PRINCESS WHO WAS ALWAYS A LOSER IN LOVE
It was a simple gesture, one that could easily have been missed on a day that was all about Queen Elizabeth II as she celebrated her coronation in 1953
But that tiny act was to blow open a crisis to rival the abdication.
The new Queen’s younger sister Princess Margaret territorially picked a piece of fluff off the uniform of RAF Group Captain Peter Townsend who had been her late father George VI’s equerry.
It was to become the public’s first knowledge of the couple’s affair, which by then was already in full swing.
The pair had become close after Margaret was left feeling griefstricken and lonely following the death of her father and her sister’s accession to the throne.
Townsend had been appointed Comptroller to the Queen Mother and he and Margaret sought comfort in each other.
He once said: “She could make you bend double with laughing – and could also touch you deeply in your heart.”
By now the dashing Townsend had already proposed to 22-year-old Margaret following divorce from his first wife.
He adored her “unusual, intense beauty”, as well as her “large purpleblue eyes, her generous, sensitive lips and a complexion as smooth as a peach”.
She was desperate to accept, to follow her heart. He was 16 years older than her but it was not the age gap that was the big issue. Duty and protocol came first.
Under the Royal Marriages Act 1772, Margaret would need the monarch’s consent for the relationship because she was aged under 25.
It was a tricky situation for the Queen – who wanted her sister to be happy but had to follow protocol too. So she asked Margaret to wait.
However, the affair was now in the open – and, at that time, was truly scandalous. How could a royal marry someone divorced?
The Church of England said no, Prime Minister Winston Churchill hated the thought and the press, initially at first, were against the “unthinkable” event.
So Churchill arranged for Townsend to be posted to Brussels, at least until Margaret was 25 and could marry without the consent of the Queen.
But even then she would have to renounce her claim to the throne, as well as to her royal allowance – just like her uncle Edward had before her.
Would love or duty win? After two years the country found out.
Margaret issued a statement: “I would like it to be known that I have decided not to marry Group Captain Peter Townsend.
“I have been aware that, subject to my renouncing my rights of succession, it might have been possible for me to contract a civil marriage.
“But, mindful of the Church’s teachings that Christian marriage is indissoluble and conscious of my duty to the Commonwealth, I have resolved to put these considerations before others.
“I have reached this decision entirely alone and in doing so I have been strengthened by the unfailing support and devotion of Group Captain Townsend.”
In his autobiography Time and Chance, Townsend wrote: “I simply hadn’t the weight, I knew it, to counterbalance all she’d have lost.”
Margaret married photographer Antony Armstrong-Jones in 1960.
They divorced 18 years later and she died in 2002 aged 71.
Townsend, who died seven years earlier, wed a young Belgian said to look very like his ex-lover.
I had not the weight to make up for all she would have lost
PETER TOWNSEND IN HIS AUTOBIOGRAPHY