38656356325923

switched to London, where Peter Townsend had arrived en route to the Farnborough Air
Show. To the consternation of the courtiers, he was making absolutely no attempt to
keep a low profile, moving round the city in a chauffeur-driven red Daimler pursued by
a posse of newsmen, who staked out houses of friends of Margaret’s from which he put
through private calls to the Princess at Balmoral. ‘He thought everyone was being
beastly and there was no reason why he shouldn’t go to Balmoral,’ a courtier said. ‘He
talked a lot about religion and was very intense and incredibly egocentric. “It was God’s
will that he should make this marriage…” He seemed to have no thought for Princess
Margaret’s difficulties or anything else.’ One evening, when one of the go-betweens
commissioned to put in the calls to Balmoral was late, he took the bit between his teeth
and rang the castle himself. ‘You should have seen the look on their faces when the page
came in and said Group Captain Townsend was on the telephone for Princess Margaret,’
one of those present said. Townsend then returned to Brussels with nothing resolved.
And at Balmoral nothing was discussed. The Queen Mother, when approached by
Margaret for her advice, became so upset that the discussion had to be abandoned.
Elizabeth, honest and honourable as always, was determined that no pressure should be
put on Margaret and that she should be free to come to her own decision without being
told by her sister what she owed to the monarchy or the Church. She therefore resolutely
sidestepped Margaret’s attempts to sound her out, although personally feeling that the
marriage would not be a happy one as, in her view, Peter Townsend, like many people
in the wake of a divorce and in a difficult emotional situation, was fantasizing and not
living in the real world. It was a pattern she was resolutely to adopt in future family
crises. Margaret’s anxiety to consult her family was an indication of the doubts she
herself felt and of a natural desire to shift the weight of responsibility on to other
shoulders. Elizabeth, even though she was now Queen and head of the family, enclosed
in the familiar surroundings of Balmoral, shrank from taking up the dynastic position of
‘the Monarch’ and spelling out the position to her sister. She seemed, said one observer,
not to have any idea of the seriousness of the situation and the intensity of public
feeling. Her attitude was the same as that of any wise elder sister (or indeed mother,
since Queen Elizabeth had abdicated the responsibility). She said that she wanted friends
to ask the couple together so that they could see as much as possible of each other in
normal surroundings before they decided. Margaret, however, was at last beginning to
face up to the potential consequences of her decision. At the Glassalt Shiel, which of all
places at Balmoral is the most haunted by the shade of Queen Victoria, she sat down and
wrote ‘Reasons why I shouldn’t marry Peter: because it does harm to the Queen’ and
‘Reasons why I should marry Peter: because I couldn’t live without him…’
Elizabeth’s new Prime Minister, Churchill’s successor, Anthony Eden, came to
Balmoral after five months in office for his first visit as Prime Minister on 1 October.
There was a good deal of speculation at the time that the question of Margaret’s
marriage was high on the agenda. It seems likely that Elizabeth raised the possibility
with Eden and asked him to sound out his Cabinet’s reaction as to the likelihood of
parliamentary consent to it, although, as we have seen, Margaret had not yet had any