On June 2, 1953, at the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, the first ever televised coronation, watched by an estimated 27 million people in Britain alone, Princess Margaret noticed a piece of fluff on a man’s uniform. She reached up and brushed it away. That was all. A gesture that took perhaps two seconds.
But a reporter saw it, and a camera may have caught it. Group Captain Peter Townsend stood very still as the princess tended to his jacket, and he later wrote just six words about what followed: after that, the storm broke. The storm had been building for years, and that two-second gesture during a national celebration was the moment a private love story became a public crisis. It would take two more years, a cabinet deliberation, an archbishop, and a quiet evening at Clarence House to finish what started at that moment.
Peter Wooldridge Townsend was born in Rangoon, Burma, in November 1914, the son of a British Army colonel. He joined the Royal Air Force in 1933, trained at Cranwell, and by 1939 was a flight lieutenant with Number 43 Squadron at RAF Tangmere flying Hawker Hurricanes. On February 3, 1940, Townsend was one of three pilots who shot down a Heinkel 111 near Whitby, the first enemy aircraft to crash on English soil in the Second World War. The following morning he went to visit the wounded German rear gunner in hospital.
He told the BBC decades later, I thought this may happen to any of us, so I went to see him just to say, well, we’re not really enemies after all. We’re human beings. His citations were substantial. In April 1940 he received the Distinguished Flying Cross, with the London Gazette recording leadership, skill, and determination of the highest order with little regard for his own safety.
By September 1940 he had earned a bar to the DFC for leading Number 85 Squadron in convoy protection operations, personally destroying four enemy aircraft while his unit destroyed at least ten more. In May 1941, having flown more than three hundred operational sorties, he was awarded the Distinguished Service Order. By 1944, his nerves worn down by years of combat, Townsend was posted away from operational flying. On February 16, 1944, he walked into the Regency Room at Buckingham Palace and was formally received by King George VI as his new equerry.
He was twenty-nine years old. He was also married with two sons. The equerry’s role required constant proximity. Townsend lived in Adelaide Cottage on the grounds of Windsor Castle, organized royal engagements, attended public duties, and traveled with the family.
The king, who never had a son, reportedly regarded him as close to one. When Townsend arrived at the palace, it was Princess Elizabeth, eighteen years old, who first noticed him. She reportedly turned to her thirteen-year-old sister and said, bad luck, he’s married. Margaret was too young for the observation to carry any weight.
Townsend himself recalled her as entirely unremarkable, as one might expect of a fourteen-year-old girl. Then came February 1947. The whole family left for a three-month tour of South Africa, Margaret’s first trip abroad. She was sixteen.
Townsend accompanied them as equerry. A chaperone on the horse rides near the royal train would often be Townsend, and it was noticed he could be quite sharp with Margaret. Something was shifting between the thirty-two-year-old and the teenager, though none of it had been named to the other. Margaret told friends afterward that South Africa was when she really fell in love with him.
Back in Britain, the courtship remained invisible. Townsend was so constantly near the family that gossip columnists overlooked him entirely. At Margaret’s twenty-first birthday party at Balmoral in August 1951, the press photographed her only with Townsend in the background, which simply confirmed his irrelevance as a story. One guest recalled the atmosphere to the BBC more than fifty years later: like the proverbial gooseberry, I felt I shouldn’t have been there.
They never kissed or held hands or anything, but you could just feel it. By this point Townsend’s marriage had quietly collapsed. His wife began an affair in August 1951, and Townsend filed for divorce in November 1952. On December 20, 1952, the High Court granted a decree nisi on the grounds of her adultery.
Townsend emerged as the innocent party and was granted custody of their two sons. In civil law, this distinction mattered enormously. In the eyes of the Church of England, it meant nothing whatsoever. A civilly divorced man with a living former spouse remained, in ecclesiastical terms, still married.
It didn’t matter who had caused the divorce. Townsend’s legal innocence was irrelevant: he had been married in the sight of God, and he still was. By April 1953, accounts indicate that Townsend proposed and Margaret accepted, subject to obtaining the Queen’s permission under the Royal Marriages Act of 1772. She was twenty-two.
He was thirty-eight. The coronation was six weeks away. No one outside a very small circle knew. After the coronation, foreign press began running rumors almost immediately.
On June 14, 1953, The People published the first British acknowledgement under the headline They Must Deny It Now. Churchill’s government advised the Queen that Townsend needed to be removed from the household. In July 1953, Townsend was posted as air attaché to the British embassy in Brussels. Most observers called it what it was: exile.
He would serve there until 1956. The understanding was simple: the two would be kept apart, and over time the attachment would cool. They wrote to each other nearly every day. The machinery assembled against the marriage was structural and interlocking.
The Royal Marriages Act of 1772 required all descendants of King George II to obtain the sovereign’s consent before marrying. Under twenty-five, Margaret needed the Queen’s direct permission. After twenty-five, she could give formal notice to the Privy Council but would then have to wait twelve months, during which Parliament could block the marriage. Classified cabinet papers released in 2004 reveal that Prime Minister Anthony Eden and the Queen had developed a specific compromise.
Margaret could marry Townsend in a civil ceremony, renounce her own and her children’s succession rights, but retain her HRH title and civil list income. She could remain in Britain and continue her public duties. The irony of Eden’s central role was not lost on Margaret. The man who informed her that the cabinet had agreed she must relinquish succession rights if she married Townsend was himself a remarried divorcee, having married Clarissa Churchill in 1952.
The formal argument was about the monarch’s symbolic role. The Queen was supreme governor of the Church of England. Her sister marrying a divorcee with a living former wife, while the church held that no divorce could dissolve a Christian marriage, was a doctrinal matter. And then there was the shadow of 1936 that nobody needed to name aloud.
Edward VIII had given up the throne to marry Wallis Simpson, destabilizing the monarchy and obliging Margaret’s father to assume the crown. A second high-profile royal marriage to a divorcee couldn’t be survived. Margaret turned twenty-five on August 21, 1955. Townsend returned from Brussels in October, and their reunion on October 12 was the first time they had seen each other in two years.
The press was waiting. For the next nineteen days, Townsend recalled on BBC television in 1978, he was besieged by fifty or a hundred reporters from around the world outside a London flat lent by a friend. And it was in these conditions, with the world’s press discussing this situation and with us being discussed in every capital of the world, we had to come to this decision. On October 27, Margaret went to Lambeth Palace at her own request and had a private audience of approximately one hour with Archbishop Geoffrey Fisher.
What was said has never been fully documented, but Fisher’s theological position had not shifted. He believed that a Christian marriage was indissoluble, that Townsend’s civil divorce didn’t dissolve his first marriage in the eyes of God, and that Margaret couldn’t marry him in good conscience. He reportedly warned of spiritual sanctions. On the afternoon of October 31, 1955, Townsend arrived at Clarence House at approximately 4:10 p.
m. He left at 6:17 p. m. Margaret dined alone that evening.
Shortly after 7:00 p. m. , the BBC announcer John Snag interrupted scheduled programming to read a statement from Princess Margaret:
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 resolved to put these considerations before any 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. The statement acknowledged in plain language that a civil marriage was legally possible. She wasn’t telling the country she had been forbidden.
She was telling the country she had chosen not to. The British press the next morning was almost uniformly sympathetic. The New York Times summarized the nation’s reaction in a single line: poor Margaret, isn’t she wonderful? Townsend, asked about it on Valentine’s Day 1978 while promoting his memoir, was measured and final: I believe her decision was absolutely right in the circumstances.
I wasn’t enough to compensate for these very serious, admittedly material losses that the princess would have to suffer. She would have been stripped of practically everything. He had written that their love took no heed of wealth and rank and all the other worldly conventional barriers which separated us. He also wrote that public curiosity killed our long and faithful attachment.
Both things were true simultaneously. Margaret was twenty-five years old. She resumed her social life in London, the parties, the famous wit, while carrying something she never spoke about publicly. She never wrote about Peter Townsend, not once in any public forum for the rest of her life.
In 1958 she met Anthony Armstrong-Jones, a society photographer, at a dinner party. Their affair was conducted in complete secrecy for approximately a year. The engagement was announced on February 26, 1960, and they married at Westminster Abbey on May 6, 1960, the first televised royal wedding, watched by more than twenty million viewers. Armstrong-Jones was created Earl of Snowdon in October 1961.
Their son David was born in 1961, their daughter Sarah in 1964. The marriage that followed functionally ended well before it was formally dissolved. Multiple biographies chart mutual infidelity and increasing distance. In 1973 Margaret met Roddy Llewellyn, and their relationship became public in February 1976 when paparazzi photographs were published, triggering a major scandal.
The separation was announced the same month. On May 10, 1978, it was confirmed that Margaret and Snowdon would divorce, the first senior member of the royal family to do so in more than four hundred years. Townsend moved on. He retired from the RAF in November 1956, settled primarily in France, and became a prolific author.
On December 21, 1959, he married Marie-Luce Jamagne, a young Belgian woman. They had two daughters and a son. He died of stomach cancer on June 19, 1995 in France, aged eighty. Margaret was reported to be saddened by the news but didn’t attend his funeral.
Three years later she suffered the first of several strokes. She died on February 9, 2002 in London, aged seventy-one. The Independent’s obituary of Townsend observed his perceptible sense of relief that things turned out the way they did, noting that for men who married into the royal family, it had turned out to be an almost impossible undertaking. He had been spared that.
The Townsend decision wasn’t the only factor in the shape Margaret’s life took. Her position in the family, the spare, the one without a constitutional role, was genuinely stifling independent of any romantic loss. But there was something specific about what that decision cost her. It wasn’t only a relationship.
It was the only time in her life she was chosen as a woman, not as a princess, not as a symbol. And in the end, the wealth and rank won. She kept the title. She kept the place in the succession.
She never got a second attempt at what she gave up on the evening of October 31, 1955.