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Thirty years after they separated, Margaret and Townsend did indeed reunite, but not quite as The Crown depicts. “I simply hadn’t the weight, I knew it, to counterbalance all she would have lost.” “She could have married me only if she had been prepared to give up everything – her position, her prestige, her privy purse,” he wrote. Neither Townsend nor Princess Margaret spoke of their time together in the years after their relationship ended, but Townsend shared his thoughts in his 1978 autobiography, Time & Chance. At the time their engagement was called off, the Princess made a statement which said: “I have reached this decision entirely alone, and in doing so have been strengthened by the unfailing support and devotion of Group Captain Townsend.” She would later reveal that they drafted the statement together, with Townsend adding that they’d “reached the end of the road.” As reported by The Telegraph, Townsaid added: “Our feelings for one another were unchanged, but they had incurred for us a burden so great that we decided together to lay it down.”Īfter the split, Townsend married Marie-Luce Jamagne in 1959, and the pair had one daughter, Isabelle. Princess Margaret’s story is no doubt a tragic one in its own way, but her romance with Townsend ended generally amicably. Season 5 depicts the star-crossed lovers meeting up again in later life, but how accurate is Peter Townsend and Princess Margaret’s reunion in The Crown? Due to Townsend’s status as a divorcee, Margaret would have to renounce her right of succession, and so they called off their engagement, and Townsend left the UK to start a new life in TK. By the time she was 22, they’d begun a secret affair following the passing of Margaret’s father, King George VI, and Townsend’s divorce from his first wife.

Having first met in 1944 when he was appointed as the new equerry at Buckingham Palace, a then 14-year-old Margaret fell for the handsome captain who was 15 years her senior. Longtime viewers of Netflix’s celebrated series The Crown will be well aware of the doomed romance between Princess Margaret and Peter Townsend.