Inside Princess Margaret and Peter Townsend’s heartbreaking love story,
Their romance had all the trappings of a classic tale of forbidden love.
He was the tall, handsome and fearless RAF war hero who won three medals for shooting down 11 enemy aircraft during the Second World War.
She was the young, glamorous and by all accounts hilarious princess adored all over the world.
But despite their strong feelings for one another, Group Captain Peter Townsend and Princess Margaret’s love story was not meant to be.
The pair had intended to be married, until Margaret heart-wrenchingly pulled out because his status as a divorcee meant she would have had to give up her royal status – a move which was seen as choosing duty before love.
Nevertheless, the couple shared an intense bond which left its mark on both of their lives.
Peter – who was 16 years older than Margaret – even went as far to claim in his autobiography, Time And Chance, that it was their ‘destiny’ to be together.
He said: ‘We had known each other for nine years, during which time she had grown up from a schoolgirl into a young woman whose beauty, charm and talent had attracted scores of admiring and faithful personal friends.
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‘Yet among none of them had she found the man of her choice. That – incredibly – was the lot that destiny had reserved for me.’
The taboo that surrounded their blossoming romance forced Margaret and Peter to meet behind closed doors in unconventional settings.
Peter recalled the first time they confessed their feelings for each other in the red drawing room of Windsor Castle after they ‘talked for hours’ and made ‘the mutual discovery of how much we meant to one another’.
Then on walks around the grounds of Royal Households – such as Sandringham and Balmoral – they grew closer and closer.
‘We talked. Her understanding, far beyond her years, touched me and helped me; with her wit she, more than anyone else, knew how to make me laugh – and laughter between boy and girl, often lands them in each other’s arms,’ Peter said.
The RAF officer wrote that deciding how to ‘consummate’ their ‘mutual pleasure’ proved difficult with both agreeing that marriage seemed a difficult prospect at the time.
As a divorcee, Peter had set himself on a collision course with the Royal Family should he want to marry Margaret.
There was a dim view at the time of divorce and remarriage in the Church of England – of which Margaret’s sister Queen Elizabeth was the head.
Divorce itself was an explosive subject for the Windsors, who had been badly shaken when the Queen’s uncle, King Edward VIII, abdicated the throne to marry the twice-divorced American Wallis Simpson in 1936.
As Princess Margaret was under the age of 25, she needed the Queen’s consent to marry a divorced man under the Royal Marriages Act of 1772.
But the couple continued courting in secret until their behaviour at Queen Elizabeth’s coronation caught the eye of the press and set tongues wagging.
Peter said: ‘Princess Margaret came up to me; she looked superb, sparkling, ravishing. As we chatted she brushed a bit of fluff off my uniform. We laughed and thought no more of it.’
But the innocent gesture was picked up by American journalists and reported widely in the foreign press.
The story was not picked up by the British press until ten days later, when the Sunday newspaper The People (now known as The Sunday People) named Peter as Margaret’s alleged lover.
It was subsequently decided that he would be sent away to work as an air attache for the British Embassy in Brussels for a year, after which, the couple was asked to wait another year.
The government, led by Anthony Eden, stated that if she married him then she would be stripped of her royal privileges as well as her income.
The Princess told the prime minister in a letter: ‘It is only by seeing him in this way that I feel I can properly decide whether I can marry him or not.’
Margaret and Peter remained apart for two years until they were reunited for the first time on October 12, 1955.
However, three weeks later, a statement drafted in the Princess’s name announced the tragic news that the pair would go their separate ways.
She revealed that, ‘mindful of the Church’s teaching that Christian marriage is indissoluble, and conscious of my duty to the Commonwealth, I have resolved to put these considerations before any others’, meaning she would not marry the divorcee.
What remained unsaid was that marrying him would have meant Margaret sacrificing her royal status, its privileges and perks. And Peter could scarcely keep her in the manner to which she had been accustomed.
He would later write: ‘She could have married me only if she had been prepared to give up everything – her position, her prestige, her privy purse.
‘I simply hadn’t the weight, I knew it, to counterbalance all she would have lost.’
The heartbreaking love story was later depicted in the hit Netflix show The Crown.
Having returned to Belgium heartbroken from Margaret’s decision, he later married a 20-year-old heiress named Marie-Luce Jamagne in 1959. They had two daughters and one son.
A great deal of people noticed the striking resemblance between the two women.
One year later, in May 1960, Margaret married magazine photographer Antony Armstrong-Jones at Westminster Abbey.
He was the first commoner to marry into the royal family in more than 400 years.
He was created Earl of Snowdon, although the pair eventually divorced in 1978.
When Margaret and Townsend met again 37 years after their split, he was happily married to Marie-Luce (with whom he lived in France) and they could talk with the same intimacy as they had before.
It was 1992 and he was in London to attend a reunion of those who had travelled with the Royal Family in 1947. To avoid the Press, Margaret declined an invitation to the reunion, but invited Townsend to tea.
Three years later he died from stomach cancer, but Margaret still had his letters, which she decreed could not be read until 100 years from her birth – in 2030.
The letters could reveal the truth about how the greatest crisis for the royals since the Abdication actually began.
Although we have to wait another five years for that deadline to expire to learn the unvarnished truth.
But despite the unclear timeline of when the romance started, for Margaret it seems to have lasted a lifetime.
A 2023 documentary included claims by the former Archbishop of Canterbury, George Carey, that the Princess had ‘a deep sadness’ on her deathbed in 2002 because the ‘love of her life’ was ‘forbidden from her’.
He said: ‘Here is a woman who longed for love and commitment, and the love of her love was forbidden from her, and there was a deep human sadness in that.’
