Ma’am Darling: 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret. Craig Brown

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      Nella Last, who kept a diary for the Mass-Observation archive, noted that ‘My husband was in a dim mood – & Mrs Salisbury [their cleaner] was in one of her most trying. Her disgust & indignation about Princess Margaret being “such a silly little fool” held her up at times … “It’s not nice Mrs Last. I’d belt our Phyllis for acting like that. And a lot of silly girls who copy Princess Margaret’s clothes will think they can just do owt! … And fancy her being a stepmother … And I bet she would miss all the fuss she gets …”’

      Churchill agreed to Lascelles’s curiously old-fashioned suggestion that Townsend be posted abroad, out of harm’s way, and so too did Lilibet. And so, on 15 July 1953, Townsend found himself shunted off into exile, to the almost transparently farcical post of air attaché to the British embassy in Brussels. The idea was that in two years’ time Margaret would be twenty-five, and would no longer require the official consent of the monarch, who would thus avoid being compromised. Those with harder hearts argued that absence makes the heart grow weaker, and that two years would be more than enough time for the fairy-tale romance to wither and die.

      Townsend was unable to say goodbye, as he had been whisked abroad before the Princess and her mother had returned from their official tour of Rhodesia. For his part, Lascelles was glad to see the back of him: in a letter to a friend he described him as ‘a devilish bad equerry’, sniffily adding that ‘one could not depend on him to order the motor-car at the right time of day, but we always made allowances for his having been three times shot down into the drink in our defence’.

      Life has its consolations, even in Belgium. A few months into his involuntary exile, Townsend went ‘by pure chance’ to a horse show in Brussels. There he watched ‘spell-bound, like everyone else, a young girl, Marie-Luce Jamagne, as she flew over the jumps with astonishing grace and dash’. As if in a fairy tale – or rather, a competing fairy tale – the horse fell, and the dashing young girl lay senseless ‘practically at my feet’. Townsend rushed over to her, and was reassured to learn from one of the judges that she would make a full recovery.

      At the time she landed at his feet, Marie-Luce was fourteen, a year older than Princess Margaret had been when he first set eyes on her, some eight years before. A friendship grew. Marie-Luce’s parents invited Townsend to their home in Antwerp. It became a safe haven. ‘It was always open to me and in time I became one of the family. That is what I still am today. Marie-Luce, the girl who fell at my feet, has been my wife for the last eighteen years.’

      Quite how close had he grown to Marie-Luce by the time he returned to England, a year after his enforced departure? Did he mention her to Princess Margaret when they were briefly reunited in 1954? ‘Our joy at being together again was indescribable,’ he recalls in his autobiography. ‘The long year of waiting, of penance and solitude, seemed to have passed in a twinkling … our feelings for one another had not changed.’ We must take his word for it. By now they had only one more year to go until the Princess’s twenty-fifth birthday, when she would be free to marry without her sister’s consent.

      The next year, Townsend returned from his unofficial exile, prompting fresh speculation that marriage bells would soon be ringing. ‘COME ON MARGARET!’ ran the Daily Mirror headline, imploring her to ‘please make up your mind!’

      Once again, everybody, high and low, had an opinion on the matter. Harold Macmillan noted, ‘It will be a thousand pities if she does go on with this marriage to a divorced man and not a very suitable match in any case. It cannot aid and may injure the prestige of the Royal Family.’ Mass-Observation’s Nella Last entertained similar misgivings, while her husband was resolutely against the match. ‘Mrs Atkinson came in. She had got me some yeast,’ Mrs Last recorded in her diary. ‘She said idly, “Looks as if you’re going to be right, that Princess Margaret will marry Townsend – seen the paper yet?” We discussed it. We both felt “regret” she couldn’t have married a younger man. Mrs Atkinson too has “principles” about divorce that I lack. We just idly chatted, saying any little thing that came into our minds, for or against the match. I wasn’t prepared for my husband’s wild condemnation or his outburst about my far too easy-going way of looking at things! I poached him an egg for tea.’ By now, the nation as a whole seemed to have swung behind the idea of the marriage. A Gallup poll discovered that 59 per cent approved of it, and 17 per cent disapproved, with the remainder claiming indifference.

      On 1 October the new prime minister, Sir Anthony Eden (himself on his second marriage), informed the Princess that it was the view of the cabinet that if she decided to go ahead with the marriage, she would have to renounce her royal rights, and forgo her income.

      Townsend and Margaret were reunited once more on the evening of 13 October. ‘Time had not staled our accustomed, sweet familiarity,’ Townsend recalled, fancily. But after a fortnight of press attention, things no longer seemed quite so straightforward. ‘We felt mute and numbed at the centre of this maelstrom.’

      Ten days later, the Princess went to lunch at Windsor Castle with her sister, her mother and the Duke of Edinburgh. According to the Queen’s well-connected biographer Sarah Bradford, the Queen Mother grew tremendously steamed up, declaring that Margaret ‘hadn’t even thought where they were going to live’. Prince Philip, ‘with heavy sarcasm’, replied that it was ‘still possible, even nowadays, to buy a house’. At this, the Queen Mother ‘left the room, angrily slamming the door’.

Towards the end of his life, Lord Charteris* voiced misgivings about the Queen Mother’s behaviour throughout the Townsend affair. ‘She was not a mother to her child. When the Princess attempted to broach the subject her mother grew upset, and refused to discuss it.’

      After this fraught lunch, the imperilled couple spoke on the phone. The Princess was, according to Townsend, ‘in great distress. She did not say what had passed between herself and her sister and brother-in-law. But, doubtless, the stern truth was dawning on her.’

      The following day, The Times ran an editorial arguing against the marriage, on the grounds that the Royal Family was a symbol and reflection of its subjects’ better selves; vast numbers of these people could never be persuaded that marriage to a divorced man was any different from living in sin. Townsend himself regarded this argument as ‘specious’, and would never have allowed it to sway him. But, he claimed, ‘my mind was made up before I read it’.

      That afternoon, he ‘grabbed a piece of paper and a pencil’, and ‘with clarity and fluency’ began to write a statement for the Princess. ‘I have decided not to marry Group Captain Townsend,’ it began. With that, he went round to Clarence House and showed her the rough piece of paper. ‘That’s exactly how I feel,’ she said.

      ‘Our love story had started with those words,’ he recalled in old age. ‘Now, with the same sweet phrase, we wrote finis to it … We both had a feeling of unimaginable relief. We were liberated at last from this monstrous problem.’

* 1913–99. Assistant private secretary to HM Queen Elizabeth II, later private secretary, and later still Provost of Eton. Aged eighty-one, and imagining he was speaking off the record, he gave an interview СКАЧАТЬ