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Elizabeth, for all the best human reasons – sympathy for her sister in her grief and
loneliness after their father’s death – took the line that her sister must be left to work
out her own destiny, but in the end was blamed for precisely the opposite, for sacrificing
her sister’s happiness on the altar of the monarchy.
The late King himself had noticed the attraction between his daughter and his
handsome equerry probably as early as late May or early June 1951, when he, the
Queen and Margaret were on holiday at Balmoral, a break which was intended to be a
period of recuperation for him after a recent bout of ill-health (which had proved to be
the onset of lung cancer). Townsend quotes an incident on the moors at Balmoral when
they returned for the traditional late summer holiday:
One day after a picnic lunch with the guns, I stretched out in the heather to doze. Then, vaguely, I was aware
that someone was covering me 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 leaning; on his stick,
with a certain look, typical of him: kind, half amused. I whispered, ‘You know your father is watching us?’
At which she laughed, straightened up and went to his side. Then she took his arm and walked away leaving
me to my dreams. 1
What those dreams were, Townsend did not specify, but earlier that year he had
confessed to Margaret that he loved her and that his own marriage was in trouble. He
did not admit this in his memoirs; according to him, nothing explicit happened between
him and Margaret until the new year of 1953, when, in a moment of spontaneous
combustion, they declared their love for each other.
The King had not taken the possibility of a romance seriously for various reasons;
there were always clustered round Margaret a selection of younger and more suitable
men – single, titled heirs to large fortunes and stately homes – who would be able to
maintain her in the style to which she was accustomed. There had been ‘Sunny’,
Marquess of Blandford, a man with the prominent eyes and lack of chin characteristic of
the Spencer-Churchills, who, as heir to the Duke of Marlborough, could have offered her
Blenheim, a far grander palace than most of the royal homes. Margaret had flirted with
him and told her parents that he would make an ideal husband, but Blandford became
engaged to one of her friends, Susan Hornby, and married her in 1951. Margaret had
her twenty-first birthday at Balmoral in August that year; her parents had high hopes
that she would marry the most eligible of the young men around her, johnny Dalkeith,
heir to the Duke of Buccleuch, three huge estates and beautiful houses filled with
fabulous furniture and paintings, including the only Leonardo da Vinci in private
hands. 2 As one of her closest friends, Colin Tennant, son and heir of the millionaire Lord
Glenconner, said later: ‘If the King had lived, he would have made Princess Margaret
marry Johnny Dalkeith. With his houses and his land, she would have had a virtual state
of her own.’ But after the King’s death, Dalkeith became engaged to and married a
beautiful model and ex-debutante, Jane McNeill.
The King would have thought it inconceivable that his daughter would contemplate a
serious romance with a married member of his household and the possibility of allowing