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

worldly, conventional barriers which separated us,’ he continues. He doesn’t mention less romantic barriers such as age, children (by now he had a second son) and his recent divorce. ‘We really hardly noticed them; all we saw was one another, man and woman, and what we saw pleased us.’

      The news of their pleasure, ‘delivered very quietly’, went down like a lead balloon with the senior courtier Sir Alan ‘Tommy’ Lascelles, at that time private secretary to the new Queen. ‘You must be either mad or bad,’ he informed Townsend. The Princess was to credit Lascelles with ruining her life. ‘Run the brute down!’ she instructed her chauffeur, decades later, when she spotted Lascelles, by now an old man, through her car window.

      Margaret had already confessed her love to Lilibet, who invited her and the Group Captain to dinner à quatre with herself and Prince Philip, an evening that passed off, in Townsend’s view, ‘most agreeably’, though ‘the thought occurred to me that the Queen, behind all her warm goodwill, must have harboured not a little anxiety’.

      Margaret also told the Queen Mother. Townsend insists that she ‘listened with characteristic understanding’, though he attaches a disclaimer to this: ‘I imagine that Queen Elizabeth’s immediate – and natural – reaction was “this simply cannot be”.’

      But one of the hallmarks of the Queen Mother was resilience, maintained by a steadfast refusal to acknowledge anything untoward. Whenever she caught a glimpse of something she did not like, she simply looked the other way, and pretended it was not there. Margaret, on the other hand, liked to let things simmer, sometimes for decades.

* Possibly not. Princess Margaret’s chauffeur, John Larkin, recalled a conversation with his employer when she replaced her Rolls-Royce Phantom IV with a Silver Shadow. Larkin asked her if she wanted her old numberplate – PM 6450 – transferred to the new car. ‘No,’ she replied. ‘It refers to an incident in my past best forgotten. I want something that doesn’t mean anything.’ Larkin worked out that ‘PM’ stood for Princess Margaret, and ‘6450’ stood for 6 April 1950. What had happened on that day? What was that incident in her past which was ‘best forgotten’? Was it, as some have calculated, the day on which the nineteen-year-old Princess lost her virginity to the Group Captain?

       25

      The romance became public at the Queen’s coronation on 2 June 1953, when Princess Margaret was spotted picking fluff off the Group Captain’s lapel. It was hardly Last Tango in Paris, but in those days interpersonal fluff-picking was a suggestive business. The next morning it was mentioned in the New York papers, but the British press remained silent for another eleven days. The People then printed the headline ‘They Must Deny it NOW’, above photographs of the two of them. ‘It is high time,’ read the front-page editorial, ‘for the British public to be made aware of the fact that scandalous rumours about Princess Margaret are racing around the world.’ The writer then added, perversely, ‘The story is, of course, utterly untrue. It is quite unthinkable that a royal princess, third in line of succession to the throne, should even contemplate a marriage to a man who has been through the divorce courts.’

      Within days, the prime minister, the cabinet, the Archbishop of Canterbury, the newspapers and the entire British public had got themselves into a flurry of alarm, delight, concern, horror, approval, dismay, condemnation, joy and despair. Everyone, high and low, had an opinion, for or against. Lascelles himself drove down to Chartwell to inform Winston Churchill of the developing crisis. ‘A pretty kettle of fish’ was the verdict of Churchill’s private secretary, Jock Colville – the very same phrase, incidentally, that Queen Mary had employed seventeen years before, on hearing that her elder son was intent on marrying a double-divorcee from Baltimore. Readers of the Sunday Express turned out to be three-to-one against the union. Mrs M. Rossiter of Whixley, York, declared that ‘I am not one of those who consider a married man with two children suitable for any girl of about 20.’ On the other hand, when the Daily Mirror conducted a readers’ poll, complete with a voting form, of the 700,000 readers who bothered to vote, a full 97 per cent thought that the couple should be allowed to marry.

      (Paul Popper/Popperfoto/Getty Images)

      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