Ma’am Darling

by Craig Brown

  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 to the Spectator in which he called the Queen Mother ‘a bit of an ostrich’, the Prince of Wales ‘such a charming man when he isn’t being whiny’, and, most memorably, the Duchess of York ‘a vulgarian, vulgar, vulgar, vulgar’.

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  How does a fairy-tale romance turn into a monstrous problem? ‘I had offended the Establishment by falling in love with the Queen’s sister,’ was the Group Captain’s simple explanation. But was it sufficient?

  In Time and Chance, Townsend declares that ‘It was practically certain that the British and Dominions parliaments would agree – but on condition that Princess Margaret was stripped of her royal rights and prerogatives, which included accession to the throne, her royal functions and a £15,000 government stipend due on marriage – conditions which, frankly, would have ruined her. There would be nothing left – except me, and I hardly possessed the weight to compensate for the loss of her privy purse and prestige. It was too much to ask of her, too much for her to give. We should be left with nothing but our devotion to face the world.’

  When Time and Chance was published in 1978, it enjoyed a largely respectful reception, most critics commending the tact with which its author covered his relationship with Princess Margaret. ‘Balanced and charitable’, read a typical review.

  But one critic broke ranks. Alastair Forbes was a cousin of President Roosevelt, the uncle of the future US secretary of state John Kerry, and a friend of the well-connected, among them Cyril Connolly, Randolph Churchill, the Grand Duke Vladimir of Russia, the Duke and Duchess of Kent, and Prince and Princess Paul of Yugoslavia. He was, however, seen as trouble by some of the more prominent royal households: Princess Margaret used to refer to him as ‘that awful Ali Forbes’, while Queen Elizabeth II was once heard to yell, ‘Will you please put me DOWN!’ as he lifted her up during a Highland reel.

  Like many of the most energetic stately-home guests, he traded in gossip, usually about those with whom he had just been staying. His fruity tales were peppered with nicknames, often based around puns. For instance, he retitled Temple de la Gloire, Oswald and Diana Mosley’s home outside Paris, ‘The Concentration of Camp’; Essex House, the home of James and Alvilde Lees-Milne, became ‘Bisex House’.

  Forbes was long rumoured to be some sort of non-specific spy, either for the CIA or MI6, or possibly both at the same time. His whole life was to some extent swathed in mystery, much of it of his own making. Sustained by a private income, he dabbled in politics and journalism and, in his sixties, took to reviewing books for the Times Literary Supplement and the Spectator. His prose had a Firbankian quality, its long, elegantly rambling sentences choc-a-bloc with foreign phrases, ribald asides, Byzantine names, incautious allegations and forensic examinations of abstruse questions such as ‘Did the Duke of Windsor have pubic hair?’

  He had a morbid side to his character. At funerals, some detected an air of triumph emanating from him as friends, enemies and chance acquaintances were lowered into the soil. He was also something of an early bird at deathbeds, pen at the ready to transcribe any last words. It was death that brought his competitive streak to the surface: he had, for instance, made it his mission to be the last man to see Diana Cooper alive.*

  Forbes was an egalitarian, in that he was as rude to the highest-born as to the lowest. Perhaps more so: he once dismissed Jesus Christ’s Sermon on the Mount as being on a par with the mottoes contained in Christmas crackers. His review of Peter Townsend’s autobiography, published under the heading ‘The Princess and the Peabrain’, followed this cock-snooking impulse. Throughout the piece he portrayed Townsend as an upstart – ‘What might be pardonable as the dream of an assistant housemaid was entirely unsuitable for an assistant Master of the Household’ – and his memoir as yet another attempt to cover the tracks of his social climbing. Rejecting the Townsend version of himself as a victim of love and circumstance, Forbes poured scorn over his every excuse and explanation:

  ‘How to consummate this mutual pleasure was the problem,’ writes the author in his best Monsieur Jordain style. You don’t say! His imagination, he adds, never at a loss for a cliché, ‘boggled at the prospect of my becoming a member of the
Royal Family’. Boggled perhaps, but no more than it had been Mittyishly boggling away on the back burner for years. ‘All we could hope was that with time and patience, some solution might evolve.’ Meanwhile, he neither felt the slightest conscientious compulsion to resign from a position whose trust he had so weakly betrayed, his perverted taste for risk overcoming his sense of duty and gratitude to his Royal employers of eight years, nor did he feel able to say, after the fashion of those pretty inscribed Battersea enamel boxes: ‘I love too well to kiss and tell.’

  … Townsend, to judge him from this book and its predecessors, still makes a living solely from exploiting his life as the courtier who went too far a-courting. One must hope that he will find alternative ways of bringing up his nice-looking family in their nice-looking house in the Paris green belt and that this will be his last shameful pot-boiler about the unhappy Princess whose coronet he failed to chalk up on his fuselage in his second Battle of Britain, a pranging fall like Lucifer’s from the first.

  For Forbes, their final decision – to marry or not? – all came down to money. ‘What would they have to live on and how would it compare to the quite unusually sybaritic train de vie of Clarence House? … In short, if the money was right the marriage was on; if not, it was off.’

  Would Princess Margaret really have faced personal and financial ‘ruin’ if she had accepted Townsend’s hand in marriage? Forbes doubted it, but observed that no one in the Royal Family had been ‘eager to put the hat around for her. In marked contrast to her sister, whose kindness and courtesy behind a natural reserve are legendary, the Princess had already in her brief years of public life displayed a disagreeable lack of good manners and consideration to all and sundry, on right as on left, and such popularity as she possessed was to be found amongst those who had been neither in her employ nor in her circle of acquaintance, many of the latter having suffered sufficiently from her spoiled rankpulling and snubs to see her indefinitely marooned on Mustique or some more convenient island with her cavalier servente. Politicians had long prayed with added fervour for God to save Queen Elizabeth II, long to reign over them, lest they one day wake to find themselves living the nightmare of Tuesday audiences with her ill-educated, ill-informed and sullen sister.’

  Forbes’s view that their parting was more pragmatic than tragic has gained traction since he first expressed it. Old friends say the marriage would never have worked, largely because of the age gap. And HRH the Princess Margaret baulked at the prospect of losing her title. ‘Who wouldn’t?’ says one friend. ‘Much more fun than being Mrs Townsend!’

  There was also the money to think about. ‘Had she married Townsend, she would have been obliged to forfeit her Civil List income and all her royal privilege, to live quietly in the country on a very small income as the second wife of a middle-aged divorcé,’ wrote Selina Hastings in a long profile of the Princess in 1986. And had Peter Townsend really been quite such a dish? ‘The prospect of marriage was no longer quite so attractive: no money, and Peter Townsend with his thin mouth and crinkly hair: so reliable, so wet.’

  Hugo Vickers is sure that the Establishment ruse had done the trick: over the course of those two years, their love had waned. ‘Princess Margaret thought that the British public deserved some sort of statement, but it was over by then, and they both knew it.’

  * The only time I met Forbes was also the only time I met Diana Cooper. It was at the launch party for my friend Hugh Massingberd’s book about the Ritz in 1980. Hugh introduced me to Forbes, and the conversation turned to the subject of Lady Diana Cooper. ‘Everyone used to go on and ON about Diana’s beauty, but to my mind she was nothing LIKE as beautiful as Charlotte Bonham-Carter,’ said Forbes. At this point, who should appear but Lady Diana herself, wearing an extremely wide-rimmed black hat. ‘DIANA!’ exclaimed Forbes, with a great beam. ‘We were just TALKING about you!’

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  On Monday, 31 October 1955, the BBC announcer John Snagge interrupted regular broadcasting to read a brief statement from HRH the Princess Margaret:

  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 teaching that Christian marriage is indissoluble, and conscious of my duty to the Commonwealth, I have resolved to put these considerations before any 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 Townsend.

  When the statement emerged from his wireless, Philip Larkin was in the middle of writing another downbeat letter to his girlfriend, Monica Jones. ‘Very cold here – large frosty moon, spilling chill light over the lifeless leaves. Mrs S. very poorly again – she appears to have been retching all day & is quite broken down by it – she is still coherent but very feeble. I tried to sit with her tonight, but she dismissed me in order to retch better. She gave me her right hand to shake. I do not like the look of her at all.’

  He had, he added, turned on the wireless ‘to drown the sound of retching from below, which is really upsetting, groaning & noises similar to those utilised by persons in the article of death’. ‘As I write this I’m listening to one of the best Just Fancy programmes I’ve ever heard … Now it’s over, & I’ll have to switch off. Can I write any – Whoops! Just heard Princess M. isn’t going to marry Group Captain Fiddlesticks – well, what a frost! And at 6.15pm tonight I was saying that any announcement wd be bound to be of an engagement, since you couldn’t announce nothing. Well, apparently you can. How curious & strange. Well, well. What a romantic incident. Christian marriage. Well, well …’

  On Alderney, the irascible author T.H. White was writing an awkward letter to his old friend David Garnett, who had posted him an advance copy of his new novel, Aspects of Love. Unfortunately, White had not liked the book, and was determined to let Garnett know:

  Dearest Bunny, this is a hateful and stupid letter but I must face it and write it, otherwise I shall never be able to look you in the face again.

  First of all, the letter you sent me with Aspects of Love filled me with such pride and pleasure that I could hardly sleep all night, I was so happy. But second, as you predicted, I DON’T like Aspects of Love. I kept fidgeting about and putting it down and starting again, it was only at the bottom of page 144 that light suddenly dawned on me like an atomic flash. You like cats and I loathe them. This is not a rational criticism, and God knows I don’t claim to be right in loathing cats or that you are wrong in loving them …

  … I hate Rose, like a cat, for going to bed with Alexis first, then tossing him over for Sir George, and then taking him and other lovers. Surely women are dependable people as well as men? My adored grandfather on my mother’s side was a judge, but not a hanging judge. He would have simply … have answered your various dilemmas in two ways. He would have said … if a woman cannot behave herself according to the laws I have given all my career to, as an Indian Civil Servant – the laws of honour – then take down her crenellated, lace, Victorian pants, and give her one resounding blow with the flat of the hand on the buttocks. In short, I think your Rose is a selfish, short sighted, self-admirer and a bore. Obviously you don’t think so, and neither of us is right. It is the dog and the cat.

  Perhaps to sweeten the pill of this forthright letter, White added this short paragraph:

  Before I end this letter – which is bound to wound you – I must make one other confession. I was truly delighted a week or two ago to learn that Princess Margaret had decided not to marry Group Captain Townsend.

  In London, Lady Violet Bonham Carter was far from delighted. She had spent the evening of the announcement with her brother, the film director Anthony Asquith, at a Royal Command Performance screening in Leicester Square of Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘very bad and slow’ movie To Catch a Thief, followed by dinner at the Savoy Hotel. As they left the Savoy in the early hours, Asquith ‘overheard someone saying something abou
t Princess Margaret which sounded like “off”’. He immediately went back and bought early editions of two different newspapers. ‘They had banner headlines, “Princess Margaret decides not to marry Group Captain Townsend”. Underneath was a most poignant statement, perfectly expressed. It is a heroic decision and rends one’s heart. She is so vital, human, warm and gay – made for happiness. And what she must be suffering doesn’t bear thinking of.’

  ‘Thank goodness that’s over!’ was the verdict of Nella Last’s husband in Barrow-in-Furness. Mass-Observation charted the reactions of its predominantly middle-class panel of ordinary men and women. There was a sharp division of opinion between the sexes: the men largely indifferent or unsympathetic, the women more emotionally engaged. ‘It is a pity she did not marry Townsend and thereby leave the country,’ said a thirty-six-year-old man, a married bank cashier. ‘I am no lover of Princess Margaret and the National Press does not help by its continuous publicity of this so called glamour girl. Princess Alexandra beats her hands down.’ A twenty-five-year-old bachelor told Mass-Observation, ‘My interest in this matter has not been raised above the “luke warm” stage and I have no opinions on this very personal subject.’

  A forty-seven-year-old commercial traveller was among those men who came down hard on Townsend. ‘Had Group Captain Townsend been a Gentleman he would not have put the Princess to the necessity of making such a decision. He would have gone off to Darkest Africa to shoot elephants or something.’

  ‘Now perhaps we’ll hear a little less of that over-publicised little lady,’ observed Anthony Heap, a forty-six-year-old local government officer from St Pancras.

  The women panellists of Mass-Observation were, on the whole, more sympathetic. A retired teacher aged sixty-five said, ‘I am very sorry for Princess Margaret – as I feel their decision has been a hard one. At the same time, she realises that Great Privileges imply Great Responsibilities, which the Duke of Windsor was too selfish to do!’