Free Game of Crowns: Elizabeth, Camilla, Kate, and the Throne by Christopher Andersen

notes were ever taken and no one else was present—Churchill conceded that they talked “mostly about racing, and polo.” For her part, the Queen conceded decades later that of all her audiences, the ones with Churchill were by far her personal favorite. Winston was, she said, “very obstinate” but “always such fun.”
    To postwar Britain and the world outside its borders, Elizabeth was an entirely new breed of monarch: a vibrant, poised, intelligent wife and mother who, along with her beguiling young family, was already breathing new life into a musty, male-dominated institution. “It was a thrilling time,” Paul McCartney remembered. “I grew up with the Queen, thinking she was a babe. She was beautiful and glamorous.”
    So, too, was the Queen’s only sibling. Princess Margaret was just twenty-one when Elizabeth became queen. With her blue-violet eyes, raven hair, and hourglass figure, Margaret already boasted a well-deserved reputation as the headstrong, hell-raising, defiantly decadent flip side to her dutiful elder sister. A denizen of London’s nightclub scene who liked to be photographed with a long cigarette holder, Princess Margaret had what Cecil Beaton called a “sex twinkle” that made her “irresistible to the press and of course a thorn in the side of the establishment.”
    For all the young Queen’s budding statesmanship that so impressed the legendary likes of Winston Churchill, the first real crisis thrust upon her had nothing at all to do with the worlds of politics or international relations. It involved Princess Margaret’s complicated romantic life—the first in a cavalcade of Royal Family missteps, scandals, and misadventures that Elizabeth would have to wrestle with and, sadly, that would come to define her reign.
    Margaret, at the time third in line to the throne behind Prince Charles and Princess Anne, had fallen in love with Peter Townsend, a dashing Royal Air Force Group Captain who shot down eleven German planes during the Battle of Britain. Self-effacing and matinee-idol handsome, Townsend had worked for the Royal Family for nearly a decade, first as an equerry and lateras Deputy Master of the Household—a post that placed him in charge of arranging all private engagements for the Royal Family.
    Unfortunately, Townsend was also sixteen years older than Margaret and the divorced father of two young sons. Once Townsend’s final divorce decree was granted, he and Margaret went directly to Elizabeth and informed her that they wished to marry. To do so, they would need the consent of the sovereign.
    The very next day the Queen’s private secretary, Alan Lascelles, briefed her on what such a marriage would mean. Most important, the Church of England—of which Elizabeth II was head—would not recognize it. (The Church refused to remarry anyone whose marriage had ended in divorce, regardless of their status in society.) Moreover, divorced people continued to be shunned in royal circles—banned from all functions at the royal palaces, and even aboard the royal yacht.
    There was more. Churchill stepped in to make the case that, should something happen to the Queen and Prince Philip when their children were still minors, Margaret might be a logical choice to serve as regent. He also reminded Elizabeth that her sister was right behind the Queen’s own children in the line of succession—“Just a car crash away,” Churchill liked to say, “from the throne.” Given Margaret’s importance in the royal scheme of things, Sir Winston continued, her marriage to a divorced commoner could cause a rift within the Commonwealth, since parliaments in those countries might reasonably conclude that such a marriage was unsuitable. Churchill flatly informed the Queen that, if her sister insisted on marrying, she would have to renounce any claim to the throne.
    Elizabeth, spurred on by her firm conviction that there was no place for divorcees in the Royal Family, concocted a schemeof her own.