On the 31st of October 1955, BBC newsreader John Snag interrupted normal programming at 7:00 in the evening to read a statement from Clarence House. It went like this. 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 teachings that Christian marriage is indiscoluble and conscious of my duty to the commonwealth, I have resolved to put these considerations before 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 Peter Townsend.
I am deeply grateful for the concern of all those who have constantly prayed for my happiness. Margaret, read it once and it sounds like sacrifice. Read it twice and notice what it actually says. She had been aware that civil marriage was possible. She says so herself in the fourth sentence before invoking the church. A path existed.
She is the one who tells us this. She chose not to take it. And the statement tells us exactly what she told herself the reason was, but not what she was actually being allowed to keep when she made that choice. The official documents that answer those questions were locked in the National Archives for nearly 60 years and were released to the public in April 2012, 10 years after Margaret’s death.
The Evening Standard ran the story. The headline read, “Margaret’s royal title pledge. It received, relative to its significance, almost no attention.” The story those documents tell isn’t the one that became the crown. Season 1, episode 10, Gloriana, traced the origins of the affair through the early palace years, establishing Townsend as the romantic hero and the establishment as the machinery grinding down two people in love.
Season 2, episode 7, Matrimonium, sealed the narrative as sacrifice confirmed. A woman of feeling overborn by a world of rules. Vanessa Kirby won the BAFTA for best supporting actress in 2018 for playing this version of the princess. The show cost roughly5 million pounds per episode to produce and reached audiences measured in tens of millions across more than 100 countries.
The sacrifice narrative was by the time the crown had finished with it global and institutional. The show’s single most significant structural choice is one that historians have repeatedly flagged. The crown places the queen in the role of final arbiter, directly forbidding her sister’s marriage when the documented record shows something entirely different.
A government that spent the summer and autumn of 1955 actively preparing the legal machinery to permit the marriage, not to prevent it. As one historical review of the series notes plainly, the historical record shows that Margaret herself chose not to marry Townsend, and no direct ban from her sister existed. The decision was Margaret’s.
The crown made it the Queen’s. That single inversion is the loadbearing wall of the tragedy narrative, and it does not survive contact with the files. What the crown equally does not dramatize, what it has no structural interest in dramatizing, is the offer that was on the table before the statement. Not the income guarantee written into Eden’s files, not the London Registry Office provision that had already been drafted, not the Cabinet Secretary’s written assurance that she would remain HR.
The crown shows what Margaret said on the 31st of October. It never shows what she was being offered in September. The omission isn’t incidental. Without it, there is no sacrifice narrative. There is only a negotiation and one side of it walks away. We are operating 70 years after the statement.
Most of what the public knows about Princess Margaret and Peter Townsend passed through that show first, which makes it worth returning to what the documents actually say. Peter Wooldidge Townsend was born on the 22nd of November 1914 in Rangon, Burma. He joined the Royal Air Force in 1933. Trained at Cranwell and by the summer of 1940 was flying Hawker Hurricanes over southern England in the Battle of Britain.
The Battle of Britain wasn’t a romantic campaign. It was nine weeks of continuous attrition in which fighter command pilots flew multiple sordies per day, often sleeping a few hours between scrambles until their numbers were sufficiently depleted that the German high command could no longer justify its own losses. Pilots aid in their cockpits, urinated into tubes, landed on grass strips while the next wave was already forming over the channel.
The average survival expectancy for a new pilot in August 1940 was measured in weeks. Townsen flew through the entire campaign. He was shot down twice, wounded badly enough on one occasion that by one account he was conducting combat operations when he couldn’t walk without pain. He was shot down again over the Skagarak.
He led one of the first night fighter squadrons of the war. By the time it ended, he held the distinguished flying cross and bar and the distinguished service order. He participated in shooting down the first German bomber to fall on English soil and drove to the hospital the following day to visit the aircraft’s wounded rear gunner.
I thought, he recalled in a 1995 BBC interview, this may happen to any of us. So I went to see him just to say, “We’re not really enemies after all. We’re human beings.” As the campaign ground on, his account of himself shifted. “We became hardened killers,” he said, who had no thought but for destroying the enemy. He said it without romanticism.
The war had cost him something that showed. By 1944, his nerves worn down by years of combat, Townsend was assigned as Equiry to King George V 6th. He was given a house in the grounds of Windsor Castle. He accompanied the family on tours and engagements. On a 3-month visit to South Africa in early 1947, he and the 16-year-old Margaret rode together frequently through the interior.
She was Margaret, her father’s joy. quick, vivid, funny, always performing slightly harder than Elizabeth needed to in order to earn the same attention. He was 32, married with two young sons. She told friends later that she had fallen in love with him during those rides. His marriage to Rosemary Paul was dying by degrees. Long absences and royal service corroded what had been left and Rosemary eventually began an affair with another man.
Townsen filed for divorce in November 1952. 6 months before that on the 6th of February, King George V 6th had died at Sandringham, aged 56 of lung cancer. Margaret’s grief was acute. She was prescribed sedatives to sleep and attended church sometimes twice daily. She and the queen mother moved from Buckingham Palace to Clarence House where Townsend was now comproller of the Queen Mother’s restructured household and where Margaret had her own apartment.
Shared loss and close domestic proximity accelerated what discretion had contained for years. By April 1953, Townsend had proposed. Margaret accepted and told her sister. The 2nd of June 1953 was the day the secret stopped being one. The coronation of Queen Elizabeth II was the largest public event Britain had staged in a generation.
Westminster Abbey held heads of state, foreign royals, and the full apparatus of Commonwealth ceremonial. The BBC broadcast the coronation live on television for the first time. Millions lined the procession routes. Outside the abbey on the lawn. As the procession formed in the aftermath of the ceremony, the household gathered in the summer light.
A tabloid reporter positioned on the lawn watched Princess Margaret brush a piece of lint from Townsen’s uniform jacket. The gesture was small, unhurried, and easy, the kind of thing people do without thinking when they are comfortable with someone. Townsend, looking back years later, said it plainly. I never thought a thing about it, and neither did Margaret.
After that, the storm broke. The reporter filed his copy. The gesture, as BBC cultures account of the episode records, was printed in newspapers around the world. The British press had maintained an informal embargo on the relationship through the spring. The foreign press had no such restraint. Within days of the coronation, the story was circulating across American and European newspapers.
On the 14th of June, the people broke it in Britain, leading its front page under the headline, “They must deny it now,” and warning in language designed to signal without quite stating that scandalous rumors about Princess Margaret are racing around the world, adding hastily that these were, of course, utterly untrue.
The paradox of that sentence wasn’t lost on Fleet Street. Within days, every British newspaper had the story. Acting Prime Minister Rab Butler asked publicly that deplorable speculation cease without naming either Margaret or Townsend, which was its own form of confirmation. The royal family’s response was swift. The Queen’s private secretary, Sir Alan Lels, had served through the abdication crisis of 1936 and wasn’t willing to preside over a second.
He reportedly told Townsen that he must be mad or bad to think he could marry the sister of the Church of England’s Supreme Governor. Prime Minister Churchill brought the matter to the 1953 Commonwealth Prime Ministers Conference. The Canadian government stated that altering the line of succession twice in 25 years would damage the monarchy.
Churchill concluded that neither his cabinet nor the Dominion prime ministers could support the marriage. Townsend was assigned to Brussels as air atache to the British embassy. The appointment was announced so abruptly that the British ambassador in Brussels learned about it from a newspaper rather than from the foreign office.
Townsen departed on the 15th of July 1953 before Margaret had returned from southern Rhdesia. They had reportedly been promised a few days together before his departure. They didn’t get them. He would serve in Brussels for nearly 3 years, writing letters to Margaret that arrived almost daily, riding in Belgian showjumping competitions, improving his French, avoiding parties, and any public association with women.
He described the Brussels posting in a 1978 BBC interview as a slightly disciplinary measure. He returned to England only to finalize his RAF retirement. The Royal Marriages Act of 1772 had been passed under King George III after his brother, the Duke of Cumberland, secretly married a widow without royal knowledge.
It required every descendant of George II to obtain the sovereigns formal consent before marrying. Without that consent, the marriage was void. This applied until the person in question turned 25, at which point the mechanism shifted. Once over 25, a royal descendant could notify the privy council of an intended marriage and proceed after 12 months unless both houses of parliament expressly disapproved within that period.
Parliament could still block the marriage. The Dominion Parliaments under the statute of Westminster 1931 also retained a voice in any bill altering the succession. But the Queen would no longer have to personally and publicly refuse her sister’s choice. The constitutional landscape changed the moment Margaret turned 25. On the 21st of August, 1955, she did.
The church’s position was separately immovable. Jeffrey Fiser, the 99th Archbishop of Canterbury, had spent 16 years in office working to ensure the Church of England’s position on the remarage of divorced persons was widely and clearly understood. His opposition to the match was doctrinal, not tactical. Canon law in the 1950s prohibited remarage in church of any divorced person while their former spouse was alive. Rosemary Paul Townsend was alive.
Margaret had been told by clerics that she would be unable to receive holy communion if she married a divorced man. Fiser had reportedly threatened she would be barred from the sacrament entirely if the marriage proceeded. A Church of England ceremony was therefore off the table regardless of any other negotiation, but a civil ceremony wasn’t.
And this is the fact that disappears from every romantic retelling of this story. Anthony Eden became prime minister in April 1955, succeeding Churchill. He was himself divorced and remarried. A fact of obvious irony given his role as the government official presiding over the question of whether Margaret could marry a divorced man and a fact that made him at minimum not personally opposed to the principle.
His government spent the summer preparing documentation for multiple outcomes. The documents that survived into the national archives are specific. The Evening Standard reporting their release in April 2012 led with the central finding. Princess Margaret had been promised she would be allowed to keep her royal title and civil list allowance even if she had married Townsend.
The paper’s headline, Margaret’s royal title pledge, was for a story that destroyed the central premise of the dominant historical myth remarkably quiet. The documents show that Eden’s government prepared a series of draft parliamentary statements, each announcing legislation to remove Margaret from the line of succession for herself and any children she might have with Townsend.
That was the price. One version of the draft formal message Margaret would have sent to the queen and to Parliament read, “I have come to the conclusion that in all the circumstances, the best course for me to follow is to marry PT and to give up my rights to the succession, both for myself and for my descendants.
” The machinery of government was already written and waiting. The decision was hers to make. Then the cabinet secretary, Sir Norman Brookke, put the income question in writing. He confirmed that Margaret should receive a categorical assurance about her finances. The evening standards report is explicit.
She would continue to receive her 6,000 per year base civil list allowance and she would additionally receive the £9,000 per year marriage supplement that Parliament had already voted for any member of the royal family upon a suitable marriage combined £15,000 per year. In today’s terms, applying standard UK inflation calculations, £15,000 in 1955 is the equivalent of more than £400,000 annually.
Guaranteed in writing by the cabinet secretary, not contingent on public approval, hers to keep. She would also continue to be styled her royal highness. Ministers acknowledged carefully that whether she could continue performing public royal duties would depend on the public’s reaction, but the default position was that HR remained with her and there was a provision for the ceremony itself.
A specific clause had been drafted in the legislative statements to enable the marriage between Princess M and PT to be solemnized by a registar in London. A London registry office prepared, drafted, ready, not exile, not a quiet ceremony abroad, the capital. The documents also noted the possibility that Townsend himself might after some years receive a formal title and an official allowance from public funds.
Eden had even been prepared to repeal the Royal Marriages Act 1772 in its entirety. The Lord Chancellor, Lord Kilmir, advised him the act had no pride of ancestry, is badly drawn and uncertain and embarrassing in its effect. Eden ultimately decided to retain it, but restrict its scope to the monarch’s children and grandchildren.
a substantial reform driven partly by this crisis. The offer assembled from the documented record, give up the succession position, keep everything else. What the succession position actually meant to Margaret in October 1955, requires a moment’s consideration. She was third in line behind 6-year-old Prince Charles and 5-year-old Princess Anne.
The practical probability of the succession ever reaching her was remote to the point of vanishing. Churchill himself had acknowledged to the queen that the constitutional concern was structural rather than practical. If one person could easily leave the succession, another could too easily enter it, and the precedent was what mattered to a hereditary monarchy.
Margaret almost certainly understood that third in line didn’t mean becoming queen. What it meant was being formally, constitutionally part of the continuation of the crown, the legal architecture that made her genuinely necessary to the institution rather than merely tolerated by it. Without it, she was HR by grace and public approval.
That is a very different thing from being HR by constitutional right and she had grown up understanding the distinction between the two in her bones. She had watched her uncle Edward VIII give up crown, country, title, family, and institutional purpose in 1936 to marry Wallace Simpson and spend the following three decades in a gilded exile that horrified everyone who observed it closely.
Edward retained his HR after the abdication. He retained his personal wealth. What he couldn’t retain was any role, any purpose, any institutional claim on being necessary. The exile was elegant. It was also a kind of annihilation. Margaret had observed it from childhood. That template wasn’t abstract to her.
In October 1955, Margaret wrote to Eden in August 1955 saying she needed to meet Townsen before she could make her decision. The letter documented by biographer Christopher Warick reads, “It’s only by seeing him in this way that I feel I can properly decide whether I can marry him or not.” Warick’s assessment was that it showed a very determined young woman in control of the situation.
Former BBC royal correspondent Paul Reynolds noted, reviewing the documents in 2016 that the letter could suggest Margaret’s determination to marry Townsend wasn’t quite as strong as had been believed. This wasn’t someone being swept toward an inevitable conclusion. This was someone gathering information before deciding.
Her private diary from these weeks is held by the Royal Archives at Windsor and remains restricted. Biographers who have examined the accessible portions, including Hugo Vickers and Craig Brown, have worked from what those records reveal through intermediaries and secondary documentation. The picture that emerges is one considerably less elevated than the public statement.
The diary and the statement inhabit different registers. One is institutional, composed and theological. The other, according to biographers who have reconstructed this period, reflects the practical weight of what the succession position represented to her daily life and sense of self. What is confirmed is that she spent the final years of her life arranging the burning of thousands of private letters, enlisting her chauffeur, David Griffin, to help destroy correspondence she considered too sensitive for posterity’s eyes. Whatever the diary and those
letters recorded about the actual reasoning in October 1955, she made a systematic effort to ensure it didn’t survive her. Townsen returned to London in October. He spent those weeks in a borrowed flat, besieged, his own word, by 50 to 100 journalists from around the world. He described the conditions precisely in his 1978 BBC interview.
During 19 really rigorous, painful days in a London flat which was very kindly lent to me, I was besieged by 50 or a hundred reporters who came from worldwide. 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. The New York Times reported on the 20th of October that Margaret had dined with Townsen again that evening.
The princess has met the divorced airmen each day in the last 8. On the 13th of October, Townsen had been received at Clarence House for 2 hours. Newspaper billboards across Britain had spent the summer demanding resolution. At Balmoral in August, 300 journalists had staked out the estate. The headlines weren’t subtle. Come on, Margaret.
Please make up your mind. An unsigned handwritten memorandum in Eden’s files captured the political temperature with clinical precision. If she is uncertain in her mind, she will doubtless weigh carefully all the adverse considerations, which should then assume greater force. It’s clearly not a marriage which all sections of the country would welcome wholeheartedly.
On the 27th of October, Margaret told Archbishop Fischer she had made her decision. Fischer’s documented response was, “What a wonderful person the Holy Spirit is.” 4 days later at 7:00 in the evening, John Snag read the statement. The statement has a structure worth examining phrase by phrase. The opening is plain. She had decided not to marry.
The second sentence acknowledges the offer. She had been aware that a civil marriage was possible subject to renouncing succession rights. This is the sentence that disappears in the romantic retelling. She confirms in her own words that the path existed and that she knew about it. Then comes the theological language.
Mindful of the church’s teachings that Christian marriage is indiscoluble. Jeffrey Fiser had spent 16 years as Archbishop making precisely this argument that the Church of England’s position on the remarage of divorced persons was a matter of doctrine, not preference, and that the Supreme Governor of the Church couldn’t be seen to ratify a marriage the church wouldn’t recognize.
Whether Fischer personally drafted that specific phrase for Margaret’s statement can’t be confirmed from the documentary record currently available. What is documented is that his formulation of this argument had been circulating in Margaret’s atmosphere for 2 years. The language reads as his position would read because his position and this language had been rehearsed in the same conversations throughout 1953, 1954 and 1955.
Conscious of my duty to the Commonwealth, the Dominion governments had been the political obstacle since Churchill raised the matter at the 1953 Prime Minister’s Conference. Cabinet language about the Commonwealth’s interest in succession stability had been in circulation throughout 1955. Whether this phrase was directly drafted by cabinet officials can’t be confirmed from primary sources currently available.
What is confirmed is that it reflects the argument the Dominions had been making for 2 years. I have reached this decision entirely alone. Valentine Lowe’s Corders, a Sunday Times bestseller drawing on Palace sources, states that the statement was one Townsend helped Margaret draft. PBS Frontline described it separately as composed by her divorced wouldbe fiance.
If either account is accurate, the statement’s most emphatic claim about the decision’s solitary nature is itself a performance. The man she is refusing to marry helped write the refusal and together they constructed the sentence declaring she was entirely alone. The public response was instantaneous and overwhelmingly sympathetic.
The New York Times ran a secondary headline the following day. Reaction of Nation summed up, “Poor Margaret, isn’t she brave?” Time magazine received letters praising her as a young woman with high principles. The sacrifice narrative was fully formed within 24 hours of the broadcast. It served everyone. It made Margaret noble.
It made the church and cabinet look like reluctant obstacles rather than parties who had already prepared a negotiated exit. and it transformed a calculation about succession rights into a spiritual drama. Townsen left London before the broadcast that evening. He didn’t wait to hear the statement read.
He returned to Belgium, retired from the RAF in 1956, and spent the next 2 years traveling and writing. In 1958, he met Marie Lu Shamana, a 20-year-old Belgian woman from a tobacco manufacturing family. Contemporary press coverage consistently noted that she bore a striking resemblance to a young Princess Margaret.
He married her in 1959. In 1978, he published Time and Chance with Collins in London. He appeared on BBC’s Nationwide program on Valentine’s Day of that year to discuss it. He said he still believed Margaret had made the right decision. his characterization of what she had given up. I was hardly 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. Stripped of practically everything. Townsen believed this in 1978. The National Archives documents weren’t released until 2012. What Townsen understood the terms to have been in 1978 and what Margaret understood them to be in 1955 may not have matched what the formal documentation shows was actually being offered.
Either the terms as formally prepared were more generous than what was communicated to the couple privately or both of them had accepted a harsher account of the offer than the files support. The files confirm she was being offered the income, the title, and a London ceremony. What Townsen says she would have lost was practically everything.
The cabinet secretary said in writing that she would keep her income. The gap between those two accounts is the space where the myth lives. Townsen’s memoir is by multiple accounts of those who worked through it carefully notably vague about the specifics of the 1955 decision. He does not claim she was spiritually compelled.
He does not describe the decision as imposed by external authority. His account of the final days quoted in secondary sources describes something closer to a shared resolution. We looked at each other. There was a wonderful tenderness in her eyes which reflected, I suppose, the look in mine. We had reached the end of the road.
Our feelings for one another were unchanged, but they had incurred for us a burden so great that we decided together to lay it down. We decided together. The most sympathetic witness, the man with every reason to cast himself as the victim of institutional cruelty, describes a mutual choice. On the 6th of May, 1960, Princess Margaret married Anthony Armstrong Jones at Westminster Abbey.
The Queen made him Earl of Snowden that same day. Lady Anne Glen Connor, who had known Margaret since childhood, who served as her lady in waiting for more than 30 years, and who published her account of all of it in Lady in Waiting in 2019, describes the marriage as one made on the rebound, a characterization the evidence supports.
Margaret’s friend’s father, reportedly assessing the new husband, referred to him dryly as Tony Snapshot. Armstrong Jones had genuine photographic talent and a temperament that was combustible at close range. He would leave notes for his wife that read, in the phrasing recorded in multiple published accounts, “You look like a Jewish manicurist and I hate you.
” He pursued at least one long-term extrammarital relationship. The marriage produced two children. David Armstrong Jones Vicount Lindley born the 3rd of November 1961 and Lady Sarah Armstrong Jones born in 1964 and ended in formal divorce in 1978. Margaret became, as multiple biographies confirmed, the first member of the royal family to divorce since Henry VIII.
The children she had preserved her succession rights to protect never held HR. David became an Earl in 2017 when his father died. Lady Sarah Cado takes her husband’s name. Craig Brown published Ma’am Darling 99 Glimpses of Princess Margaret in September 2017. The book won the James Tate Black Memorial Prize for biography the following year, placing it among the most formally recognized works of British literary non-fiction.
Brown had worked through an extraordinary range of material, memoirs, diaries, staff accounts, palace announcements, newspaper cutings, and interviews spanning decades, and built from them what the Guardians Julian Barnes called a roystering quasy biography. The Vogue reviewer called it rollicking, irresistible, unputd downable.
Brown’s central conclusion about the 1955 decision was stated plainly by the Times reviewer who assessed the book. When push came to shove, she valued her title and wealth more than the love of the group captain. Brown documents in granular detail what that valuation looked like in practice across the following decades.
From her mid20s onward, Brown describes Margaret as the world’s most difficult guest, demanding, volatile, petty, systematically setting people at their unease. She exploited royal protocol, requiring guests at her dinners not to sit down, not to leave, and not to finish eating until she had done so, with a precision that went beyond ceremony into something that looked like compulsion.
She once invited the actor Derek Jacabe to dinner, and when he raised a lighter politely in her direction, she snatched it from his hand, passed it to a neighboring ballet dancer, and told Jackabe, “You don’t light my cigarette, dear. Oh, no, you’re not that close.” At a reception attended by the journalist Keith Waterhouse, the ash on the royal cigarette grew and grew, while no one dared reach for an ashtray.
She resolved the situation by tapping it directly into Waterhouse’s passing palm. She had a talent for what Brown characterized as a peculiarly royal form of Tourette’s syndrome, an apparent compulsion to deliver the most wounding observation to the person least able to respond to a disabled architect at a reception.
Have you ever looked at yourself in the mirror and seen the way you walked? Cecil Beaton noted her as vulgar. Alan Clark found her revoltingly, tastelessly behaved. Christopher Isherwood called her quite a common little thing. Roy Strong kept diary entries cataloging her behavior at such length that the documenting was evidently therapeutic.
And yet the same people returned. The royal presence was, as Barnes observed, as warm and bronzing as a John Lewis sunlamp. They came for the warmth and went home to write about the heat. Lady Glenn Connor asked about Ma’am Darling in a 2019 Guardian interview responded, “That horrible book.
We won’t mention the name of the somebody who wrote it. I don’t know why people want to rot her like that.” The woman who had been closer to Margaret than almost anyone outside the immediate royal family didn’t dispute Brown’s evidence. She disputed his right to present it. Brown’s framing of Margaret’s fundamental predicament cuts close.
Born in an age of deference, the princess was to die in an age of egalitarianism, attempting to straddle the two, wanting to be treated as both equal and superior, and vacasillating from one moment to the next between the easygoing and the hoidy toidy. Her behavior often led to tears before bedtime. This is diagnosis, not cruelty. It describes a woman whose entire identity had been architected around a status she had chosen to protect in 1955 and who needed that status confirmed continuously in small rituals of precedence because without confirmation
it felt contingent and contingency was precisely what she had spent the autumn of 1955 buying her way out of. The smoking had intensified after her father’s death in 1952. By various accounts, she was smoking 60 cigarettes a day at the height of it. Doctors had warned her repeatedly. George V 6th himself had died of smoking related illness.
She was hospitalized with serious pneumonia in January 1993. Within 6 months, she was reportedly back to 40 cigarettes a day. A lung operation in January 1985 after she developed chest pain produced a sample that proved benign. She resumed smoking anyway. Mystique was her retreat. Colin Tenant, who had bought the island cheaply in 1958 and was married to Anne Ko, Margaret’s childhood friend and later her lady in waiting, gave Margaret a plot of land there as a wedding gift in 1960.
She built a house called Leoli O and used the island as the place where the performance of royalty could briefly be suspended. Neighbors understood that the island was required to stock famous grouse whiskey and that failing to do so was a social failure of some gravity. Tatiana Copeland, a neighbor, recalled, “If you didn’t have her whiskey, then that was probably the last time she would go to you.
” Rody Llewellyn, the relationship that ran through the Mystique years in the 1970s. He was 17 years her junior, unimposing without dynasty or agenda, was described by Nikki Hasslam, reviewing Brown’s book in the oldie as perhaps the only man Margaret truly, even selflessly loved. When Llewellyn married someone else in 1981, she accepted it without the protocol of resentment she deployed elsewhere.
In February 1998, Margaret suffered a stroke during dinner on Mystique and was flown to Barbados for treatment. In early 1999, she severely scalded her feet while getting into a bath on the island, an accident that permanently damaged her mobility. She spent much of her final years in a wheelchair. Further strokes followed in 2000 and 2001.
Her final public appearance was at Princess Alice, Duchess of Gloucester’s 100th birthday party in December 2001. She died on the 9th of February, 2002 at King Edward IIIth’s Hospital in London at 6:30 in the morning following cardiac arrest. She was 71. Lord Lindley and Lady Sarah Chado were at her bedside.
Her estate was valued at 7.6 million pounds gross. After inheritance tax at 40% approximately4.5 million was divided between her two children. The estate consisted mainly of cash investments and works of art largely inherited from George V 6th. She was cremated among the first members of the royal family to be so because she wanted to be buried near her parents and there was only room for ashes.
Lady Glenn Connor, who had watched her friends last years from the closest possible vantage point, explained the decision simply. Margaret wanted to be beside her father, and there was only room for ashes. They were brought to Windsor and interred in the King George V 6th Memorial Chapel at St. George’s Chapel beside George V 6th.
Peter Townsend had died on the 19th of June 1995 of stomach cancer. He was 80 years old. His New York Times obituary was headlined, “Peter Townsen dies at 80, Princess Margaret’s Love.” Margaret outlived him by nearly seven years. The formal revision of this story assembled from Eden’s papers, the National Archives documents released in April 2012, and the biographical work done in the two decades since Margaret’s death runs as follows.
She was offered marriage on specific terms. Those terms required her to give up her succession position for herself and any children she might have with Townsend. They didn’t require her to give up her income. The government guaranteed £15,000 per year in writing worth more than £400,000 in today’s money. They didn’t require her to give up her HR.
They didn’t require her to leave the country. A civil ceremony in London was explicitly prepared and drafted. She thought about the offer through the weeks of September and October 1955. She and Townsend spent 19 days together under press siege, reaching a decision. His own account describes a choice they made together.
On the 27th of October, she told the Archbishop, “On the 31st, the statement went out.” The statement framed the decision as theological and civic. The archival record frames it as a calculation about succession rights, about whether to remain constitutionally tied to the institution she had grown up inside. Townsend himself framed it as admittedly material.
He knew she was giving up something tangible. He simply overstated how much. She was 25 years old in October 1955. She had grown up watching her uncle Edward give up everything and be never forgiven for it. She had seen Edward and Wallace at close enough range to understand what their gilded exile looked like from the inside. The elegance, the purposelessness, the slow eraser.
She was Margaret, her father’s joy, her sister’s shadow, always slightly surplus to what the monarchy strictly required. always performing slightly harder than Elizabeth needed to in order to earn the same attention. The succession position was the answer to a question that would otherwise have no answer. What exactly is a princess when the queen is already queen? She kept it.
She chose the constitutional architecture over the marriage. She spent the following 46 years as Princess Margaret. Through the failed marriage and its documented cruelties, through the smoking and the drinking and the midnight demands for show tunes, through the strokes and the scalded feet and the wheelchair, through mystique and the burning of thousands of private letters in the fireplace at Kensington Palace, the thing she chose to preserve outlived her, and passed to her children in diminished form, an earldom by inheritance
a surname taken from a husband. The HRH she spent the autumn of 1955 protecting didn’t travel with either of them. There is a story Margaret told in October 1955. And there is a story the government’s own files tell and the two disagree about what was at stake. The first became the crown. The second became a headline in the Evening Standard in April 2012 that most people missed entirely.
The first made her tragic. The second makes her comprehensible. A woman who priced a choice, decided the price was too high, and arranged for the explanation to be about something else entirely. Her ashes are at Windsor beside her father’s chapel. The succession position she chose to protect in 1955 does not go with her there.
And in that place, finally, she does not have to perform anything. Subscribe for more stories like
