The royals - Kitty Kelley [72]
Townsend had known Margaret since she was fourteen years old and, as a favor to her parents, had escorted her to dances and horse shows. He had served as her riding companion and flown her plane in the King’s Cup air races. By the time she was twenty-one she had fallen in love with him. She pursued him openly, and each time he resisted her advances, she resorted to her royal prerogatives.
Coming home from a dance one evening, she demanded that he carry her up the stairs. He demurred. She insisted. He still resisted.
“Peter, this is a royal order,” she said, stamping her foot.
The handsome equerry laughed and scooped her into his arms. “Ever your obedient servant, ma’am,” he said, sweeping her up the staircase of Clarence House.
“Margaret was quite blatant,” said her friend Evelyn Prebensen, whose father, the Norwegian Ambassador, was dean of the Diplomatic Corps in London. “I spent a lot of time with her in those days and remember one Christmas when the King had promised Peter time off to be with his family. Margaret got it into her head that she wanted to play cards, and she insisted Peter play with her. So he was forced to forgo the holiday with his family and dance attendance on Margaret. No wonder his wife wandered.”
In 1952 Townsend was granted a divorce on the grounds of his wife’s adultery and received custody of their two sons. Although he was the aggrieved party, his divorce traumatized the Queen’s courtiers, who still felt haunted by the 1936 divorce that had led to the only voluntary abdication in British history and resulted in exile for the disgraced King. Divorce was considered such an abomination that the Lord Chamberlain,* Head of the Queen’s Household in England, had to insure that no divorced person was ever allowed into the Queen’s presence.† He even excluded from the royal enclosure at Ascot such a distinguished figure as Laurence Olivier, considered England’s greatest actor, because of his divorce. In Scotland, Lyon King of Arms was the moral arbiter, and he, too, struck the names of all divorced persons from royal guest lists. One Scottish nobleman protested his exclusion from a royal visit to Edinburgh because he had been divorced.
“My marriage was annulled,” said the nobleman, “and I’ve been remarried in the church.”
“That may well allow you into the Kingdom of Heaven,” said the Lyon King of Arms, “but it will not get you into the Palace of Holyroodhouse.”
In 1953 Princess Margaret’s love affair with Townsend, a divorced man, shook the British establishment, and the government, the church, and the royal family became intensely embroiled in the romance. As a royal princess, Margaret Rose, who was third in line to the throne, was excused for falling in love, while Townsend, a commoner, was condemned for crossing class lines.
“What cheek!” said the Duke of Edinburgh. “Equerries should look after the horses!”
The Queen’s courtiers were equally outraged. They believed in the supremacy of the class system as defined by the doggerel they had learned as children:
God bless the squire and all his relations.
And keep us in our proper stations.
When Peter Townsend confided he had fallen in love with Princess Margaret, the Queen’s private secretary, Alan Lascelles, snapped, “You must be either mad or bad.” Lascelles