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

Convinced that the romance would cool off if she could put distance between her mercurial sister and the dashing Townsend, the Queen suggested he be reassigned to serve in the British embassy in Brussels as air attaché. The couple agreed, believing that, once she turned twenty-five, Margaret was free to marry without her sister’s approval.
    But that was not the case. The headline-grabbing love affair between the Princess and the war hero stretched on another agonizing two years, and soon Elizabeth was consulting with the new prime minister, Anthony Eden, on how best to handle the delicate matter. With both the Church of England and Parliament opposing the marriage, the Queen was in no position to grant her sister’s wish.
    At Windsor Castle the Princess was told that if she insisted on marrying Townsend in a civil ceremony, a Bill of Renunciation would be placed before Parliament, stripping Margaret of all her rights, privileges, and income. It was not a sacrifice the Princess was willing to make.
    Concerned that Townsend might still put up a fight, the Queen secretly enlisted the help of the Queen Mother. “I know what a great decision you have to make fairly soon,” the Queen Mother wrote Margaret, “and I beg you to look at it from every angle, and to be quite sure that you don’t marry somebody because you are sorry for them.”
    Defeated, she phoned Townsend in tears. “We reached the end of the road,” he later wrote. “Our feelings for one another were unchanged but they had incurred for us so great a burden that we decided, together, to lay it down.”
    On October 27, 1955, Margaret informed the Archbishop of Canterbury of her decision. Four days later, she announced in astatement that was submitted to the Queen for her approval that any prospect of marriage with Townsend had ended. “I would like it to be known,” Margaret’s statement read, “that I have decided not to marry Group Captain Peter Townsend. Mindful that Christian marriage is indissoluble and conscious of my duty to the Commonwealth, I have resolved to put these considerations before others.”
    Although Elizabeth had never intended to allow the marriage to take place and had deftly maneuvered behind the scenes to thwart it, she appeared to sail above the controversy. Even Margaret, who felt that she had been misled to believe that at twenty-five she was free to marry anyone she wished, blamed the Queen’s senior staff and not her sister. Ironically, within just a few years attitudes toward divorce would change dramatically. In 1978, Princess Margaret’s eighteen-year marriage to photographer Anthony Armstrong-Jones (later Lord Snowden) would end, making her the first royal to divorce since Henry VIII. By the end of the century, three of the Queen’s own children would be divorced.
    From Berlin to the Cuban Missile Crisis to Vietnam to the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Robert Kennedy to the rise of the counterculture, the 1960s were a time of unparalleled political and social upheaval. Yet, remarkably, during the first thirty years of Elizabeth’s reign the Royal Family was relatively untouched by scandal—a streak that was broken in 1981 when news of Prince Andrew’s steamy affair with American soft-porn actress Koo Stark hit the tabloids, earning Elizabeth’s second son the sobriquet “Randy Andy.”
    There were early exceptions, to be sure. During the Profumo spy scandal of the early 1960s, speculation arose that a member of the Royal Family was the infamous “naked waiter” who serveddrinks at a sex party wearing only a hood over his head and a pink ribbon tied to his genitals. (In fact, it turned out to be a top cabinet minister.) Of more direct concern to the Queen was her sister’s continued unpredictable behavior. Princess Margaret kept making headlines with her freewheeling lifestyle and a string of rumored lovers that included Mick Jagger, Peter O’Toole, Peter Sellers, and Warren