Princess Margaret’s doomed relationship with Group Captain Peter Townsend has been documented—and dramatized—extensively through the decades. Queen Elizabeth’s younger sister wasn’t permitted to marry a divorced man and still retain her royal status, and after two years in limbo, made a public statement that she was choosing the Crown over love. But according to royal biographer Sarah Bradford, the drama surrounding the “Townsend affair” caused a rift between Margaret and the Queen Mother.
Margaret had fallen in love with her father’s much-older equerry, Townsend, who was a married man, but even after his divorce, it was made clear that the royal aide was an unsuitable match for the third-in-line to the throne. Townsend became comptroller of the Queen Mother’s household after King George VI’s death in 1952, and author Gyles Brandreth wrote that the relationship was swiftly denounced by courtiers when Margaret and Townsend approached Queen Elizabeth ahead of her coronation.
“Martin Charteris, then the Queen’s assistant private secretary, said to me, ‘I don’t think he was mad or bad, but he was naïve,” Brandreth wrote in Elizabeth: An Intimate Portrait. “He was a commoner and a divorcee.”
Latest Videos FromMarie Claire
Princess Margaret, Queen Elizabeth and Group Captain Peter Townsend are pictured at Royal Ascot in 1952.
(Image credit: Getty Images)
Elizabeth: the No.1 Sunday Times Bestselling Biography of Britain’s Longest-Reigning Queen
Noting that divorced people couldn’t be “presented at court” or even “formally introduced to royalty,” Charteris told Brandreth that he didn’t believe there “was ever a serious prospect of a marriage.”
But Princess Margaret and Townsend held on to hope. Queen Elizabeth asked them to wait a year, given the coronation and her new role, but the Queen Mother “seemingly put the matter out of her mind,” Brandreth wrote, noting that Charteris called it “the old ostrich approach.”
Sarah Bradford went further in her biography of Queen Elizabeth. Recounting the night that Princess Margaret released a statement saying she’d “decided not to marry Group Captain Peter Townsend,” Bradford wrote that the stress had left the Queen Mother in deep distress.
Noting that the Queen Mother “kept an official engagement at London University” that evening, Bradford wrote, “The Queen Mother did not say goodnight to her daughter on her return. For some time they had barely been on speaking terms; the Townsend affair had been as traumatic as the Abdication had for Queen Mary.”
The Queen Mother and Princess Margaret are pictured in 1960.
(Image credit: Getty Images)
Elizabeth: a Biography of Her Majesty The Queen
The author added that between King George VI’s death, Queen Elizabeth’s marriage to Prince Philip and Princess Margaret’s love affair, there was a feeling that the strong “family bonds” between Elizabeth, Margaret and their mother had been “weakened.”
Brandreth questions Bradford’s account of the story, noting that although the dynamic between the three royals had certainly charged due to huge changes in their lives, the Queen Mother’s behavior on the night of Margaret’s renunciation wasn’t peculiar.
“Of course, the Queen Mother fulfilled a long-standing official engagement. Duty always comes first,” he wrote. Brandreth also pointed out that the Queen Mother once wrote in a letter to Princess Margaret that October, “It is so difficult talking of anything personal on the telephone, because one feels that so many people are listening most eagerly.”
Princess Margaret went on to marry (and later divorce) Anthony Armstrong-Jones and never remarried, while Townsend started a new life in Belgium with a bride who, as Brandreth noted, “looked uncannily like the teenage Princess Margaret.”
Explore More
