The dashing war hero who acted like a gentleman or the 30-year-old married rogue who took advantage of a 15-year-old girl? The tragic love story of Peter Townsend and Princess Margaret STILL divides royal fans decades later

He was the tall, handsome and fearless RAF war hero who won three medals for shooting down 11 enemy aircraft during the Second World War.

She was the young, glamorous and by all accounts hilarious princess adored all over the world.

But despite being madly in love with each other, Group Captain Peter Townsend and Princess Margaret’s romance ended in tragedy.

The pair wanted to marry but Margaret heart-wrenchingly pulled out because his position as a divorcee meant she would have had to give up her status as a royal – a move which was seen as choosing duty before love.  

But over the years, there have been questions about the age gap between the pair, who met when Townsend was a 29-year-old married father and Margaret was just 14. 

It is not known when their relationship began exactly, but one of the Queen’s ladies-in-waiting recently claimed the dashing war hero took advantage of his proximity to the young princess to encourage the romance when she was just 15.

And just after she turned 17, a request was made for the captain and Margaret to have adjoining bedrooms during a visit to Belfast.

Here MailOnline looks back at the scandalous and heart-breaking love story – and reveals how it still continues to divide royal fans decades later.

The Princess met Townsend, who was the new equerry to her father King George VI, on his first day at Buckingham Palace in 1944.

Although Margaret was young at the time, the pair seemed to be instantly drawn to each other. 

Townsend later wrote about the moment the pair met in his autobiography Time and Chance, which was published years after their relationship had ended, in 1978.

‘After my introduction, down the corridor came two adorable-looking girls; Princess Elizabeth, then 17, and her sister Margaret, 14, all smiles.

He later wrote: ‘Princess Elizabeth — our future Queen — was the King’s pride. Princess Margaret was his joy.

‘She was a girl of unusual, intense beauty, centred about large purple-blue eyes, generous lips and a complexion as smooth as a peach.

‘She could change in an instant from saintly composure to hilarious, uncontrollable joy. She was a comedienne at heart, playing the piano and singing in her rich voice the latest hits, imitating the stars.

‘But what ultimately made Princess Margaret so attractive was that behind the dazzling facade, you could find, if you looked for it, a rare softness and sincerity.’

Tall, slim, with piercing grey-blue eyes and an unwavering gaze, Townsend’s appearance was described as ‘similar to a matinee idol’. 

He was a war hero due to his status as one of ‘The Few’ – a courageous Battle of Britain pilot who had helped save the nation from Nazi invasion. His RAF uniform decorated with medals attested to his gallantry. 

The flying ace shot down 11 enemy aircraft in more than 300 operational sorties during the Second World War and bailed out of his Hurricane twice – once when he was forced to ditch the stricken aircraft in the English Channel, then after he was hit in the foot by cannon fire.

After their first meeting, palace lore claims Princess Elizabeth said to her sister: ‘Bad luck, he’s married.’ 

It is unknown when the pair’s romance formally began, but the late Queen’s lady-in-waiting Lady Anne Glenconner’s verdict on Townsend was not flattering.

Lady Anne, then 91, said in 2023: ‘I once asked her about it, actually. He was a war hero, very attractive. 

‘She was very, very young. She was only 15 [sic] when he first arrived and he was a married man. I think he encouraged her, which he shouldn’t have done.’

Asked on the Rosebud podcast if she thinks Townsend, 15 years Margaret’s senior, was taking advantage of his proximity to her, Lady Anne says she did. 

‘That isn’t something that has been brought out very much, but I couldn’t agree more,’ she adds.

More clues to when their relationship began were revealed by Daily Mail columnist Craig Brown in 2017 when he wrote that when Townsend accompanied the princess on a trip to Belfast a request was made for them to have adjoining bedrooms.

They were staying at Hillsborough Castle, the then governor’s official residence in Belfast. 

The princess was launching the Union-Castle liner on October 16, 1947, with Townsend, who was then 32 and the father of two young sons, accompanying her.

Although there is no proof they were intimate at that stage, official papers of the visit recorded that the Group Captain had asked for a different bedroom to the one he had been allocated. He asked to be moved next door to Margaret.

And although standards were different back then, more than 70 years ago, even today the idea of a married man in his 30s asking to be in such close proximity to a girl of 17 would raise eyebrows. 

Anyone who knew the diffident Townsend and the headstrong Margaret would assume the move was because she wanted it. As Brown’s biography on the Princess makes clear, what Margaret wanted, she usually got. 

Addressing the revelation, an old friend of Margaret told the Daily Mail in 2017: ‘This was playing with fire, a terrible risk for her reputation and that of the Royal Family. 

‘It’s a miracle it hasn’t come out before. I have to say, though, that having met Peter Townsend, I would be surprised if he was sleeping with the Princess when she was so young.’ 

Townsend later wrote in his autobiography: ‘I cannot help the feeling the sex-urge is a rather unfair device employed by God. He needs children and counts on us to beget them. 

‘But while he has incorporated in our make-up an insatiable capacity for pleasures which flow from love, he seems to have forgotten to build in a monitoring device, to warn us of the unseen snags which may be lurking further on. Unless it be intelligence. 

‘But sex is an enemy of the head, an ally of the heart. Boys and girls, madly in love, generally do not act intelligently. 

‘The sex-trap is baited and set and the boys and girls go rushing headlong into it. They live on love and kisses, until there are no more left.’ 

Earlier in 1947, Margaret and her sister, Elizabeth, had accompanied the King and Queen on a three-month State tour of Southern Africa. 

Townsend’s role was to chaperone the younger princess. Reports of the tour judged the 5ft 1in Margaret to be ‘livelier, prettier, more sexually charged’ than her elder sister. Yet she was then still only 16. 

You would expect a teenage princess to be bored being toted from country to country with all the pomp and ceremony involved in State visits. But in future years Margaret would speak of remembering ‘every minute’ of the tour.

The two were in each other’s company every day, riding out and taking in the sights. As Princess Margaret herself later told a confidante: ‘We rode together every morning in that wonderful country, in marvellous weather. That’s when I really fell in love with him.’

In fact, as is known, she was only 14 when Townsend arrived as Equerry and Deputy Master of the King’s Household, and immediately had a crush on him.

With his quick wit and boyish charm, Townsend rapidly became a popular member of the King’s staff. He rode with the princesses, flew planes in air races for them, played canasta with the Queen and enlivened gatherings at the royal residences.

He was, moreover, a married man who lived with his wife and children in a grace-and-favour cottage in the grounds of Windsor Castle. The then Queen and her daughters were frequent visitors to the Townsend family home.

Margaret had increasingly relied on Townsend as she tried to cope with the darkness that had overwhelmed her since her father’s death in 1952.

Whisky, pills, tranquillisers and cigarettes did little to help with the pain. Only Townsend – soothing, calm and gentle – could lighten her moods, according to royal expert Andrew Morton.

But as their relationship grew more serious, the complications of royal life became more apparent. 

Townsend eventually divorced his wife Rosemary Pawle in 1952, admitting later the pair were never really suited and they married because he ‘stepped out of the cockpit and married the first pretty girl I met’.

In April 1953, Townsend proposed to Margaret and they entered into a secret engagement, but his status as a divorced man left the couple in a precarious situation. 

Due to her sister Elizabeth’s position as head of The Church of England as sovereign, there was a dim view at the time of divorce and remarriage. 

Divorce itself was an explosive subject for the Windsors, who had been badly shaken when the Queen’s uncle, King Edward VIII, abdicated the throne to marry the twice-divorced Wallis Simpson in 1936. 

As Princess Margaret was under the age of 25, the Queen had to consent to her marriage to a divorced man under the Royal Marriages Act of 1772.

Although Elizabeth was later blamed for Margaret’s decision to not marry Townsend, in more recent times, it has been accepted that the decision to break off the relationship with Townsend was principally Margaret’s. 

On June 2, 1953, the affair became public thanks to a famous moment during the Queen’s Coronation when Margaret was seen tenderly removing a bit of fluff from his lapel while waiting outside Westminster Abbey.

It was subsequently decided that Townsend would be sent away to work as an air attaché for the British Embassy in Brussels for a year, after which, the couple was asked to wait another year.

The government, led by Prime Minister Anthony Eden, stated that if she married her love then she would be stripped of her royal privileges as well as her income.

The Princess told Eden in a letter: ‘It is only by seeing him in this way that I feel I can properly decide whether I can marry him or not’.

Margaret and Townsend remained apart for two years until the couple were reunited for the first time on October 12, 1955.

However, three weeks later, a statement drafted in Princess Margaret’s name announced the tragic news that the pair would go their separate ways.

Margaret announced that, ‘mindful of the Church’s teaching that Christian marriage is indissoluble, and conscious of my duty to the Commonwealth, I have resolved to put these considerations before any others,’ she would not marry the divorcee. 

What remained unsaid was that marrying Townsend would have meant Margaret sacrificing her royal status, its privileges and perks. And Townsend could scarcely keep her in the manner to which she had been accustomed.

Townsend later wrote: ‘She could have married me only if she had been prepared to give up everything—her position, her prestige, her privy purse.

‘I simply hadn’t the weight, I knew it, to counterbalance all she would have lost.’ 

The heart-breaking love story was later depicted in hit Netflix show The Crown.

Having returned to Belgium heartbroken after Margaret’s decision, he later married a 20-year-old heiress named Marie-Luce Jamagne in 1959 and the couple went on to have two daughters and one son.

A great deal of people noticed the striking resemblance Marie-Luce had to Margaret.  

A year later in May 1960, Margaret married a magazine photographer, Antony Armstrong-Jones, at Westminster Abbey.

Armstrong-Jones was the first commoner to marry into the royal family in more than 400 years. He was created Earl of Snowdon. The pair eventually divorced in 1978.

Townsend’s wife  Rosemary, a brigadier’s daughter, took an old-fashioned view and protected the Royal Family from scandal by declining to divorce Townsend and name the Princess as the other woman. 

Instead, she allowed herself to be the ‘guilty party’, admitting adultery with the man who became her second husband. For the next 50 years, she doggedly refused to speak up for herself.

When Margaret and Townsend met again 37 years after their split, he was happily married to Marie-Luce (with whom he lived in France) and they could talk with the same intimacy as they had before. 

It was 1992 and he was in London to attend a reunion of those who had travelled with the Royal Family in 1947. To avoid Press attention, Margaret declined an invitation to the reunion, but invited Townsend to tea.

Three years later he was dead from stomach cancer, but Margaret still had his letters, which she decreed could not be read until 100 years from her birth — in 2030.

The letters could reveal the truth about how the greatest crisis for the royals since the Abdication actually began. 

Although we may have to wait another six years for that deadline to expire to learn the unvarnished truth. 

But despite the unclear timeline of when the romance started, for Margaret it seems to have lasted a lifetime. 

Last year a documentary published claims by the former Archbishop of Canterbury that the Princess had ‘a deep sadness’ on her deathbed in 2002 because the ‘love of her life’ Townsend was ‘forbidden from her’.

He said: ‘Here is a woman who longed for love and commitment, and the love of her love was forbidden from her, and there was a deep human sadness in that.’