Ma’am Darling

by Craig Brown

  The tour ended in April 1947. In his autobiography, Townsend insists that he returned home ‘eager to see my wife and family’. But, as it happened, ‘within moments’ he sensed that ‘something had come between Rosemary and me’. He now takes a break in his narrative to detail the difficulties within his marriage.

  Townsend had married Rosemary Pawle in 1941. He paints it as a marriage made in the most tremendous haste. ‘I had stepped out of my cockpit, succumbed to the charms of the first pretty girl I met and, within a few weeks married her.’

  At this point, Townsend launches into one of the most curious parts of the book, a rambling homily against the perils of sexual attraction. ‘I cannot help feeling that the sex urge is a rather unfair device employed by God,’ it begins. ‘He needs children and counts on us to beget them. But while He has incorporated in our make-up an insatiable capacity for the pleasures which flow from love, He seems to have forgotten to build a monitoring device, to warn us of the unseen snags which may be lurking further on.

  ‘Sex,’ he continues, ‘is an enemy of the head, an ally of the heart. Boys and girls, madly in love, generally do not act intelligently. The sex-trap is baited and set and the boys and girls go rushing headlong into it. They live on love and kisses, until there are no more left. Then they look desperately for a way of escape.’

  One of the anomalies of this passage is that, when Townsend rushed into this particular sex-trap, he was rather more than a boy. In fact, he was a distinguished Battle of Britain fighter pilot of twenty-six, the recipient of the DSO and the DFC and bar.

  His marriage, he says, ‘began to founder’ on his return from South Africa. The couple’s problems were ‘intrinsic and personal’, principal among them his yearning to go back to South Africa and ‘Rosemary’s fierce opposition to my ravings about South Africa and my longing for horizons beyond the narrow life at home’. He argues that while ‘Rosemary preferred to remain ensconced in her world of the “system” and its social ramifications’, he was a rebel who reacted instinctively against ‘the conventional existence, the “system”, the Establishment, with its taboos, its shibboleths and its obsession with class status’. At this time the Group Captain was the equerry to the King, and had applied (unsuccessfully) to be a Conservative parliamentary candidate, neither the hallmark of a rebel.

  Halfway through 1948, the Princess shed the ‘Rose’ in Margaret Rose. It seems to have been her way of declaring that she was no longer a little girl but a young woman, a transition greeted with a certain lasciviousness by some of her biographers.

  ‘Never before had there been a Princess like her. Though she had a sophistication and charisma far in advance of her years, she was young, sensual and stunningly beautiful,’ observes Christopher Warwick. ‘With her vivid blue eyes … and lips that were described as both “generous” and “sensitive”, she was acknowledged to be one of the greatest beauties of her generation. In addition, she was curvaceous, extremely proud of her eighteen-inch waist … unpredictable, irrepressible and coquettish.’

  Phwoarr! Tim Heald is equally smitten: ‘At eighteen, she was beautiful, sexy … the drop-dead gorgeous personification of everything a princess was supposed to be.’ Furthermore, she was ‘a pocket Venus … an almost impossibly glamorous figure’.

  Her emergence into adulthood had its drawbacks. She was burdened with a succession of royal duties, most of them bottom-drawer and dreary. ‘The opening of the pumping station went very well in spite of the gale that was blowing,’ she wrote in a letter that year to her demanding grandmother, Queen Mary. ‘I am afraid that one photographer rather overdid things by taking a picture of me with my eyes shut.’ A little later, she oversaw the official opening of the Sandringham Company Girl Guides’ hut. The speech she delivered reflects the nature of the occasion:

  Looking around me, I can imagine how hard Miss Musselwhite and the company must have worked … I do congratulate you on the charming appearance of your new meeting place. I have been in the movement ten years as a Brownie, a Guide and a Sea Ranger … I have now great pleasure in declaring this hut open.

  At the same time, her elder sister was opening bridges, launching ships, taking parades and welcoming foreign dignitaries.

  From now on, would Margaret have to measure her life in scout huts and pumping stations? Was that all there was? As her day job as her sister’s stand-in grew ever more mundane, who could blame her if she looked for excitement elsewhere?

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  ‘Without realising it,’ Peter Townsend writes of autumn 1948, when he was chosen to accompany the Princess to Amsterdam for the inauguration of Queen Juliana, ‘I was being carried a little further from home, a little nearer to the Princess.’

  In August 1950, Townsend’s ongoing rebellion against the British Establishment continued along its mysterious path with his appointment as assistant master of the royal household, a promotion that elevated him to a smart carpeted office on the south side of Buckingham Palace, ‘a little paradise compared with the gloomy equerry’s room’. At home, though, ‘conjugal life, practically, emotionally and sentimentally, had come to a standstill’.

  Not so his enchantment with the Princess, who was now within an inch of her twentieth birthday. Townsend was entranced. ‘If her extravagant vivacity sometimes outraged the elder members of the household and of London society, it was contagious to those who still felt young,’ he writes, adding, a touch dolefully, ‘whether they were or not.’

  Written when he was in his sixties, his memories of the young Princess retain their sense of wonder. ‘She was a girl of unusual, intense beauty, confined as it was in her short, slender figure and centred about large purple-blue eyes, generous lips and a complexion as smooth as a peach. She was capable, in her face and in her whole being, of an astonishing power of expression. It could change in an instant from saintly, almost melancholic, composure to hilarious, uncontrollable joy. She was, by nature, generous, volatile … She was coquettish, sophisticated. But what ultimately made Princess Margaret so attractive and lovable was that behind the dazzling facade, the apparent self-assurance, you could find, if you looked for it, a rare softness and sincerity. She could make you bend double with laughing; she could also touch you deeply.’ No one else, before or since, has written about the Princess in quite such adoring terms.

  By this time, a group of bright young blades surrounded the Princess. Townsend looked on with a sense of yearning, perhaps even entitlement. ‘I dare say that there was not one among them more touched by the Princess’s joie de vivre than I, for, in my present marital predicament, it gave me what I most lacked – joy. More, it created a sympathy between us and I began to sense that, in her life too, there was something lacking.’

  While Princess Margaret admitted to having fallen in love with the Group Captain in the spring of 1947, when she was sixteen years old, Townsend claims to have noticed the first spark in their romance over four years later, in August 1951, following a picnic lunch in the middle of a day’s shooting. He was dozing in the heather when he became aware that someone was covering him with a coat. ‘I opened one eye – to see Princess Margaret’s lovely face, very close, looking into mine. Then I opened the other eye, and saw, behind her, the King.’ At this point, Townsend whispered to the Princess, ‘You know your father is watching us?’ In response she laughed, straightened up, and went over to her father’s side. ‘Then she took his arm and walked away,’ adds Townsend, ‘leaving me to my dreams.’

  King George VI died early the following year. The Princess had been devoted to him, and he to her. ‘Lilibet is my pride. Margaret is my joy,’ he once said, adding on another occasion, ‘She is able to charm the pearl out of an oyster.’ Lilibet was dutiful and serious; Margaret wilful and fun. ‘She it was who could always make her father laugh, even when he was angry with her,’ wrote John Wheeler-Bennett, the official biographer of George VI. On one occasion she interrupted a telling-off by saying, ‘Papa, do you sing, “God Save My Gracious Me”?’ The King h
ad burst out laughing, and all was forgiven.

  His death hit her hard. ‘It was a terrible blow for Princess Margaret,’ a friend remembered. ‘She worshipped him and it was also the first time that anything really ghastly had happened to her.’ Margaret confirmed this to Ben Pimlott, the biographer of her sister: ‘After the King’s death there was an awful sense of being in a black hole. I remember feeling tunnel-visioned and didn’t really notice things.’ In her grief, did she seek refuge in love?

  After the King’s death, everyone moved up or down a notch: Queen Elizabeth became Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, Princess Elizabeth became Queen Elizabeth II, and Townsend was appointed comptroller of the Queen Mother’s household. Only Margaret stayed the same, but now she had to live alone with her mother in Clarence House, eclipsed and to some extent marginalised by her sister, the new Queen, and with no clear role of her own.

  The following December, after eleven years of marriage, nine of them in the service of the Royal Family, Peter Townsend divorced Rosemary, who was named as the guilty party. Two months later she married John de Lázsló, son of the fashionable society painter Philip de Lázsló.

  That winter, according to Townsend, he and the Princess found themselves alone in the Red Drawing Room of Windsor Castle. They spoke for hours on end. ‘It was then,’ he writes, ‘that we made the mutual discovery of how much we meant to one another. She listened, without uttering a word, as I told her, very quietly, of my feelings. Then she simply said: “That is exactly how I feel, too.”’

  Or that’s how his story goes. But had this impetuous young woman really managed to hide her feelings for a full five and a half years? And had the Group Captain somehow exercised a similar restraint?*

  According to Townsend, they pursued their romance in the open air, walking or riding, always ‘a discreet but adequate distance’ from the rest of the party. ‘We talked. Her understanding, far beyond her years, touched me and helped me; with her wit she, more than anyone else, knew how to make me laugh – and laughter, between boy and girl, often lands them in each other’s arms.’ Once again, he describes himself as a boy; but by now he was thirty-eight years old, and middle-aged. ‘Our love, for such it was, took no heed of wealth and rank and all the other 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?

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  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, e
ven 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!’