When Princess Margaret chose duty over love,
‘I have reached this decision entirely alone,’ were the words Princess Margaret used to begin the statement telling how she had to choose her royal duty over marrying Peter Townsend.
The princess made the announcement 69 years ago today after spending a final 19 days with the divorcee who was 16 years her senior.
The days before October 31, 1955, ‘played out the last act of the greatest love story of this century’, Vincent Mulchrone wrote in the Daily Mail at the time.
Margaret and Townsend had ‘filled’ their final moments together ‘with each other’ after the group captain arrived at Clarence House at 6.30pm on October 13.
The princess waited for him in the ground-floor salon and the couple drank together.
Townsend returned to his home one hour and 40 minutes later.
It was the first time they had seen each for a while and newspaper reports speculated at the time whether an announcement on their future together was imminent.
Talk about a possible affair had arose at the Queen’s Coronation in June 1953 when Margaret was seen picking a piece of fluff from his uniform while waiting outside Westminster Abbey.
It was subsequently decided that Townsend would be sent away to work as an air attaché for the British Embassy in Brussels for a year, after which, the couple was asked to wait another year.
The following weekend after reuniting with Townsend, who was divorced from his first wife Rosemary in 1952, Margaret visited friends in Berkshire.
She was followed by hundreds of reporters, and even photographers hiding in trees, keen to know what was happening between the princess and her possible suitor.
Over the course of the week the couple dined together at friends’ houses, while also reconnecting at Clarence House once. Their hosts made sure the pair were left to have time alone together.
The Mail wrote how ‘it was as though they could not bear to be apart for more than a few hours at a time’.
Both were careful not to be seen together and used tactics like arriving and leaving separately, though ‘their smiles seemed to carry a message plain for all to read’.
One person who saw the princess and group captain together said at the time: ‘She seemed overcome with affection for him.’
But the happiness was not to last. Margaret was aware of the Christian views held so strongly at the time about divorce and remarriage. She would not be able to marry Townsend without being stripped of her royal privileges as well as her income.
On the Thursday before the announcement, she met the group captain again and the pair talked for 40 minutes.
When she left to return to her own home, she managed to avoid photographers who were waiting outside by leaving via a side entrance.
In the Daily Mail star writer Vincent Mulchrone described how ‘in that moment she was perhaps the loneliest woman in the world’.
On the Friday, the princess held one final discussion with her sister, Queen Elizabeth at Buckingham Palace.
She then discussed her decision with the group captain over the weekend in Sussex before a statement was drafted and released by Buckingham Palace on the Monday evening at 7.21pm.
In a statement read on BBC radio, the princess said: ‘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 teaching that Christian marriage is indissoluble and conscious of my duty to the Commonwealth, I have decided to put these considerations before any others.’
It marked the end of their romance. They first met when the princess was 14 years old and Townsend was the equerry of her father, King George VI.
The pair reconnected when Townsend accompanied the Royal Family on a three-month tour to South Africa.
In August 1950 Townsend was made Master of the Household and after the death of George VI, he moved to become Comptroller of the Queen Mother’s household.
While Peter had been married to Rosemary Pawle since 1941, with whom he had two sons, he eventually filed for a divorce in November 1952 after she had an affair.
Townsend proposed to Margaret and they entered into a secret engagement in April 1953.
However, the couple faced problems regarding Townsend’s state as a divorced man.
As Princess Margaret was under the age of 25, her only sister, Queen Elizabeth, had to consent to her marriage to a divorced man under the Royal Marriages Act of 1772, but her status as Head of the Church of England complicated things.
The couple spent some time apart before reconnecting in 1955 and the decision was made and they went their separate ways one final time.
Townsend later married a 20-year-old heiress named Marie-Luce Jamagne in 1959 and the couple went on to have two daughters and one son.
Margaret married society photographer Antony Armstrong-Jones, who died aged 86 in 2017, at Westminster Abbey in 1960.
