The royals - Kitty Kelley [73]
“Captain Townsend must go,” declared Winston Churchill. “He simply must go.”
In desperation the courtiers decided to follow Churchill’s advice and banish Townsend from England. They foolishly believed his relationship with the Princess would founder under the separation, not realizing that distance might lend enchantment. They cared only about buying time until Margaret’s twenty-fifth birthday. Until then she was not allowed to marry without her sister’s permission, and as head of the Church of England, her sister could never allow her to marry a divorced man. By separating the couple, the courtiers also quashed the publicity that threatened to overshadow the Queen’s first royal tour of the Commonwealth.
Townsend, who was scheduled to accompany Princess Margaret and the Queen Mother on their 1953 tour of Rhodesia, was suddenly yanked out of royal service and dispatched to the embassy in Brussels as an air attaché. “I came here because the position was impossible for us both,” he told a reporter. “I cannot answer questions because I am not the prime mover in the situation. My loyalty to Princess Margaret is unquestionable. I would undergo any difficulties because of that loyalty.”
Townsend was banished so quickly that he did not have time to prepare his sons, boarding at a prep school in Kent, for the news. Margaret pleaded frantically with her sister to reverse the decision, but the Princess was refused. The sisters had a terrible row.* Margaret took to her bed for three days and lived on sedatives. When she got up, she sat at her piano and poured her misery into her music. “I composed a lament, words as well as music,” she told biographer Christopher Warwick. “That was after Peter Townsend and I knew we couldn’t get married.” Townsend had left the country immediately upon his return from Northern Ireland with the royal couple and was last seen in England on the tarmac, shaking hands with the Queen and Prince Philip.† He returned quietly to visit the Princess twice before her twenty-fifth birthday, meeting her secretly at the homes of friends.
In October of 1955, a few weeks after her twenty-fifth birthday, Margaret went to Windsor Castle to talk to the Queen and Philip. In an emotional meeting they told her that the government of Sir Anthony Eden was implacably opposed to the marriage, as was the Archbishop of Canterbury.
“You are third in the line of succession,” said Philip.
“I can count,” Margaret snapped.
“You’ve caused a constitutional crisis,” continued Philip, pointing to the lead editorial in the Times, which stated that a sister to the Queen, Governor of the Church of England, Defender of the Faith, had to “be irrevocably disqualified from playing her part in the essential royal function” if she married a divorced man.
“If you persist in your plans to marry,” said the Queen, “you will not be allowed a church blessing.” She went on to say that the wedding could not take place in Britain, that the couple would have to live abroad, that Margaret would lose her title and her annual allowance and be forced to abandon her place within the royal family. The Princess left in tears.
To avoid an unpleasant scene, her mother had withdrawn to her Castle of Mey home in Scotland. As tough as she was, the Queen Mother shrank from direct confrontation. She could never abide personal collisions and avoided them by contracting bronchitis or taking to her bed with flu or a headache.
Without an advocate within the establishment, the couple were defeated. In anguish they bowed to the pressure and decided to part, knowing they could never see each other again. Townsend drafted a statement that the Princess approved, and her news was announced a week later when the BBC broke into its programming to read the text that was signed simply “Margaret”:
I would like it to be known that I have decided not to marry Group Captain Peter Townsend…. 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