On the evening of the 31st of October, 1955, a statement was released from Clarence House. It was brief. It had been written by a 25-year-old woman who had spent the previous 3 years in love with a man she was not allowed to marry. The statement read, in full, “I would like it to be known that I have decided not to marry Group Captain Peter Townsend.
Mindful of the church’s teachings that Christian marriage is indissoluble and conscious of my duty to the Commonwealth, I have resolved to put these considerations before any others.” The woman who wrote those words was Princess Margaret Rose, the younger daughter of King George VI, the only sibling of Queen Elizabeth II, and by universal agreement, the most glamorous woman in the British royal family.
She was 25 years old. She was ending a relationship with a man she genuinely loved because the Church of England told her she could not marry a divorced person whose former spouse was still living. The rule that destroyed her chance of happiness was removed 47 years later. The Church of England’s General Synod voted to allow the remarriage of divorced persons in July 2002.
Princess Margaret had died in February 2002, 5 months before the vote. This is the story of what duty cost her. And what it cost her was everything. Margaret Rose was born on the 21st of August, 1930, at Glamis Castle in Scotland, her mother’s ancestral home. She was the second daughter of Prince Albert, Duke of York, and his wife, Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon.
At the time of her birth, her father was not the king. Her uncle David was the Prince of Wales and the heir to the throne. And Margaret was simply a royal granddaughter with a comfortable future ahead of her, but no particular weight of expectation attached to it. She was, by all accounts, immediately and unmistakably herself.
Where her elder sister, Elizabeth, was serious, composed, and already instinctively suited to the role of future monarch, Margaret was something else entirely. Funny, irreverent, theatrical, possessed of a voice and a presence that filled every room she entered. She could do impressions.
She could play the piano well enough to have been a professional musician in a different life. She was, in the words of those who knew her, the one you watched. The family’s world changed forever in December 1936, when Margaret was 6 years old. Her uncle, Edward the VIII, abdicated the throne to marry the twice-divorced American Wallis Simpson, the very act that the royal family’s rules were designed to prevent.
Her father became King George the VI overnight. Her sister, Elizabeth, became heir to the throne. And Margaret, who had been born as a relatively unconstrained royal second daughter, became the sister of the future queen, which was a very different thing entirely. She understood from that moment, with the particular clarity of a very perceptive 6-year-old in an unusual family, that her life would be shaped by an institution that required everything and explained nothing.
She understood it. She did not always find it easy. Peter Townsend entered the family’s life as an equerry to King George VI after the Second World War. He was a decorated RAF officer, handsome, kind, and possessed of the kind of steady warmth that the King valued deeply. He became, over time, one of the most trusted members of the royal household.
Margaret was 16 when he first came to work for her father. He was 31. By the time she was in her late teens and early 20s, something had developed between them that went beyond the ordinary fondness of a royal family for a trusted household member. Townsend’s own marriage broke down and ended in divorce in 1952, the same year King George VI died and Elizabeth became queen.
The King’s death hit Margaret in a way that those around her found difficult to watch. She and her father had been particularly close. He had understood her in a way that not everyone in the family had responded to her warmth and her wit with genuine delight rather than the mild concern it sometimes provoked in others.
His loss left a gap that she felt acutely and that she never quite found a way to fill. She turned increasingly to Townsend and he to her. In 1953, the year of the coronation, it became known to a small circle within the palace that the two were in love and that Margaret wished to marry him. The problem was not that anyone doubted what she felt.
The problem was the same one that had brought down her uncle 17 years earlier. Townsend was divorced. His former wife, Rosemary, was still living and under the Church of England’s doctrine, which her sister as queen was the formal head of, a marriage between Margaret and Townsend was simply not possible without consequences that went to the heart of everything the family represented.
Townsend was sent away to Brussels in 1953, posted as an air attaché to remove him from daily proximity to Margaret while the family and the government worked out what to do. Margaret and Townsend corresponded throughout the two years of his absence. When he returned to England in October 1955, they saw each other again for the first time.
The press had been following the story for months. The question of whether they would marry was front-page news across Britain and much of the world. The discussions that followed were exhaustive and went to the very heart of what it meant to be a royal woman in 1955. Margaret could marry Townsend under civil law and there was a version of events in which this might have been permitted, but it would have required her to renounce her rights of succession, give up her royal status, and the financial
provision that came with it. And the Church of England had made clear it would not bless such a marriage. The Archbishop of Canterbury had told her that she would be barred from taking Holy Communion if she married a divorced man. Her sister, as the head of the church, could not make an exception without undermining the very institution she had just been crowned to uphold.
Margaret spent the weeks after Townsend’s return wrestling with a decision that was not, in any meaningful sense, a free choice. She was being asked to choose between the man she loved and everything else about her life. Her family, her faith, her position, her identity. The institution her father had died serving, that her sister had given her life to, was telling her that her feelings were less important than its requirements.
On the 31st of October, 1955, she released her statement. “Conscious of my duty to the Commonwealth, I have resolved to put these considerations before any others.” She was 25. Townsend was 40 years old. He wrote later that when they had finished drafting the statement together, they looked at each other and there was a wonderful tenderness in her eyes.
“We had reached the end of the road,” he said. “Our feelings for one another were unchanged, but we decided together to lay down the burden they had become.” She never married him. He married a 19-year-old Belgian woman four years later. Margaret received a letter telling her. In 1960, five years after the Townsend statement, Margaret married Antony Armstrong-Jones, a fashion and theater photographer who was given the title Lord Snowdon on their marriage.
The wedding was watched by an estimated 300 million people on television and was by any measure a spectacular public occasion. Those who knew Margaret well noted that she seemed genuinely happy in the early years, that Snowdon was witty and creative and matched her in the qualities that mattered to her.
Two children followed, David, Viscount Linley, born in 1961, Lady Sarah Chatto, born in 1964. Margaret threw herself into her public duties, opening hospitals and attending functions, and carrying out the endless calendar of royal obligations that constituted the official life of a working member of the royal family.
But the marriage was not what it had seemed. Snowdon and Margaret were, beneath the glamour of their public image, two people who could wound each other with considerable precision. Both had affairs. The press, which had adored Margaret in the 1950s, turned on her in the 1960s and 1970s with the particular cruelty that British tabloids reserved for royal women who did not behave as expected.
In 1976, photographs emerged of Margaret with Roddy Llewellyn, a landscape gardener 17 years her junior, taken on the island of Mustique, where she had built a house and spent increasing amounts of time in the 1970s. The photographs ran on front pages across Britain, and the coverage was merciless. That same year, Margaret and Snowdon separated.
In 1978, their divorce was finalized, making Margaret the first senior member of the royal family to divorce since Henry VIII separated from Catherine of Aragon in the 16th century. The press had a particular gift for making Margaret feel the weight of that distinction. She was 51 years old when the decade ended.
The most glamorous woman in the British royal family, the one who had lit up every room she entered, had become someone the newspapers used to illustrate what went wrong when royals forgot their place. Margaret’s public role diminished through the 1980s as her health began to show the effects of decades of heavy smoking and a lifestyle that had never been gentle on the body.
She remained a presence at major royal occasions and continued to carry out some official duties, but the magnetic centrality she had once had in the public imagination had passed to a new generation. Diana, Princess of Wales, arrived in the royal family in 1981 and absorbed the kind of global attention that Margaret had once commanded almost alone.
She watched this with the complicated feelings of a woman who understood better than most what that kind of attention cost. She had some sympathy for Diana and some of the wariness that comes from recognizing in another person’s situation echoes of your own. Both of them were royal women who had found that the institution’s requirements and their own emotional needs did not align neatly and both of them paid for that misalignment in different ways.
By the 1990s, Margaret’s health was becoming a genuine concern. She had suffered from pneumonia in 1978, had a small part of her left lung removed in 1985, and continued to smoke despite these warnings. She attended functions with diminishing frequency and increasing visible effort. Those who encountered her in these years described a woman who still had the wit and the warmth that had always defined her but who was also carrying something heavier than she had been built to carry for quite this long.
In 1997, Peter Townsend died in France at the age of 80. He had been married to his Belgian wife for 38 years and had three children. Margaret was not publicly reported to have commented on his death. Whether she allowed herself to do so privately is not something the record tells us. In February 1998, Margaret was on Mustique, the Caribbean island that had been her escape from the formal weight of royal life for nearly 30 years.
She fell ill during a dinner with friends and was taken to hospital in Barbados. She had suffered a mild stroke. The following year, back on Mustique, she scalded her feet severely in a bathroom accident involving a faulty thermostat. The injury affected her mobility permanently. She required assistance when walking and began, on occasions, to use a wheelchair.
Further strokes followed. In January 2001, she was hospitalized in London following a stroke that caused loss of appetite and swallowing difficulties. By March 2001, the cumulative effect of the strokes had left her with partial vision in both eyes and paralysis on the left side of her body. In August 2001, she made one of her final public appearances at her mother’s 101st birthday celebrations.
Photographs from that day showed her in dark glasses, seated in a wheelchair. Those who had known her longest found the images painful to look at. The Queen was reported to have been deeply distressed by them. This was Princess Margaret, the woman who had been the most photographed, most admired, most glamorous member of the family for three decades.
The woman who had lit rooms simply by walking into them. In December 2001, she attended the 100th birthday celebration of her aunt, Princess Alice, Duchess of Gloucester. It was her last public appearance. On the 9th of February 2002, Princess Margaret died in her sleep at King Edward the 7th Hospital in London at half past six in the morning.
She was 71 years old. Her two children, David and Sarah, were at her side. The public reaction was muted in a way that surprised some people and did not surprise others. There was genuine sorrow among those who had loved her particular quality of presence. There was also, in some quarters, a response that to little more than acknowledgement.
She had been, in the public imagination, a figure from another era. The Queen did not make a televised address. She asked her son, Prince Charles, to speak on behalf of the family instead. In her Christmas speech later that year, she said, simply, “Many of you will know only too well the grief that follows the death of a much-loved mother or sister.
Mine were very much a part of my life, and always gave me their support and encouragement.” At the funeral, held on the 15th of February at St. George’s Chapel, Windsor, on the 50th anniversary of King George VI’s funeral, the Queen stood on the steps of the chapel as her sister’s coffin was carried out.
A friend of Margaret’s who was present later said it was the only time he had ever seen the Queen show her emotions in public. “Her eyes,” he said, “betrayed her.” On the 9th of July, 2002, 5 months after Princess Margaret died, the General Synod of the Church of England met in York and voted on a motion that had been debated for years.
The vote was 269 in favor, 83 against. The motion affirmed that some marriages, regrettably, do fail, and stated that there are exceptional circumstances in which a divorced person may be married in church during the lifetime of a former spouse. The rule that had told Margaret in 1955 that she could not marry Peter Townsend had been removed.
The institution that had required her to put her duty before everything else had decided, 47 years later, that it had been wrong about this particular question. She had been dead for 5 months. Her ashes were interred in the King George VI Memorial Chapel at Windsor, beside her father, the king she had loved and lost when she was 21.
Her mother, who had attended the funeral aged 101, died 7 weeks later and was buried in the same place. Margaret’s statement from October 1955 sits in the public record unchanged. Conscious of my duty to the Commonwealth, I have resolved to put these considerations before any others.
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