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was unlikely that they would approve it even after Margaret’s twenty-fifth birthday.
Margaret, according to her biographer, was not to know this. She and Townsend agreed
together that they should separate for a while but that they still ultimately intended to
marry. Margaret remains very bitter that Lascelles never told her that she would never
get the Government’s consent for her marriage even if she did wait until she was
twenty-five. A fellow courtier’s impression at the time was that Lascelles was ‘very
bored by the whole thing and didn’t believe it would ever come off. The fact that
Townsend was offered the choice of Singapore, Johannesburg or Brussels as air attaché
shows he [Lascelles] didn’t take the whole thing seriously…’ Naturally, since he had two
sons of school age in England, Townsend chose Brussels.
On 30 June the Queen Mother and Margaret left for a visit to southern Rhodesia
scheduled to last sixteen days. According to Towns-end, on the morning of her
departure, ‘The Princess was very calm for we felt certain of each other and, though it
was hard to part, we were reassured by the promise, emanating from I know not where,
but official, that my departure would be held over until her return on 17 July.’
Churchill’s orders, however, were that he was to leave Britain within seven days of his
posting, two days before the Princess was due to return. Before he left, although the
news had broken in the Evening News, Elizabeth made a special gesture of friendship
towards Townsend by taking him with her as equerry on her post-Coronation visit to
Belfast. ‘I thought it was a most generous and admirable act on her part,’ he recalled.
‘She shook hands with me on the tarmac. It was the last time I saw her until many years
later.’ 4 Halfway through her Rhodesian tour, Margaret received the news that Townsend
would be gone before she got back. The effect upon her was devastating. ‘She collapsed
as she does when things go terribly wrong. She was so upset that she wouldn’t be able to
see him when she got back. Officially, it was put out that she was ill but she just
collapsed from emotional shock. The Queen Mother had to continue the tour without
her,’ a member of the party said.
The separation was to last two years instead of the one originally stipulated, but it
certainly failed in its object to make Margaret forget Peter. She felt that he had been
badly treated and she herself was, in a friend’s words, ‘utterly lost and lonely’. Elizabeth
was happily married and too busy to have much time for her. For six months from 24
November 1953 until 10 May 1954 she was out of the country on her post-Coronation
Commonwealth tour. ‘Her mother’, a friend said, ‘was completely unapproachable and
remote, she refused to believe it at all or discuss it with anyone so Princess Margaret
could never consult her about it.’ Being royal, she was automatically cut off from most
ordinary relationships and interests that other people have, so Towns-end in his
banishment took on even more importance. ‘They were real companions and soulmates,’
a friend said, while another felt ‘dreadfully sorry for her because you couldn’t
see how they were ever going to get married and they were terribly in love’. They wrote
to each other every day, ‘long, long letters’, a correspondence which no one made any
attempt to prohibit. Margaret outwardly continued with her social life, but her inward
emotions were made obvious to Elizabeth on one ‘ghastly evening’ at Balmoral on the