I am discussing this from memory too, I'm afraid. I thought that Princess Margaret was the more honourable person in the affair with Townsend. I got the impression that she took the pact that she made with him that neither of them would marry very seriously, and she married Snowdon on the rebound. She was very upset when Townsend married.
Apparently the Royals didn't want another scandal like they had with the Duke and Duchess of Windsor.
Yes, and apparently they thought they could get away with the same underhanded and stunningly cruel behaviour. The thing is that the 1950s weren't the same as the 1930s - a lot of things had changed after the War - and also Peter Townsend wasn't as universally despised as Wallis Simpson. I think some of this stuff rebounded on them fairly badly, one way and another.
Mind you, I did read somewhere (I wish I could remember where I read some of these things!) that Peter Townsend was a young girl's fantasy of the perfect lover and wasn't really a viable real-life partner. That could well be hindsight, but I thought it was an interesting perspective.
I was surprised to read in the Heald book that Margaret was determined never to marry if she couldn't marry Townsend, and felt so betrayed when he finally married (so she married Tony Armstrong-Jones in the rebound, as you said). From all the descriptions of her as a girl and a young woman, she doesn't seem like the sort of person who would have happily remained single for ever, and it seems as though this would have been a declaration made in the heat of the moment that she'd have gone back on a couple of years later when it became clear that she couldn't marry him. The fact that she was apparently determined to see this "if I can't marry him I won't marry anyone" attitude through to middle age and maybe beyond was rather strange to me, and showed a side of her character that I hadn't expected. It seemed so self-destructive and unnecessary.
I have been reading Phillip and Elizabeth by Giles Brandreth. He writes that the PM was very much against the match, even though he was divorced himself, and he was instrumental in the law which would strike the Princess off the Civil List if she married Townsend. I won't swear here, but a certain word starting with 'B' comes to mind!
These bloody Prime Ministers and their infernal interference in the private lives of royals! I wonder if he had some strange idea that as long as Princess Margaret wasn't allowed to marry a divorced man, so that the royals symbolically did things that everyone else thought was the right thing to do but didn't want to do themselves, it made it OK for him to have been divorced. "Do as I say, don't do as I do."
I liked the Brandreth book; what do you think of it?
The thing which really struck me about the two chapters for this week's reading - the 1970s and 1980s - was the way her earlier experiences conspired to make her later life so unhappy and meaningless. It's easy to look back with hindsight, but the system where everything is invested in the eldest child is really very hard on younger siblings, especially when there's only one of them. It's a shame she wasn't encouraged to compensate for her position by getting a decent education and maybe channelling her abilities and skills into something worthwhile. She was probably of the generation (to say nothing of the social class) where a career was out of the question, but it's a shame that an equivalent to the Duke of Edinburgh Awards, but maybe in the performing arts or something, couldn't have been set up for her.
Society was going through a lot of changes in the late 1960s and the 1970s, and the Queen and her family seemed to deal with it by sticking firmly in the 1950s in their outlook and habits. Margaret, on the other hand, tried to move with the times and didn't seem to be properly equipped to do so after her very rigidly circumscribed upbringing. Then in the 1980s, as the Queen's children married and had children, as as Margaret was displaced as a Counsellor of State, she was written off as a has-been after not really ever having been anything. The royal duties she was doing - which read almost exactly the same as the ones she was doing back in the late 1940s and 1950s - don't seem to have given her a lot of scope either, especially once the Queen's children started taking over some of the duties and patronages and she was relegated to an even lower position in the pecking order.
I always find it terribly sad to read about this part of her life, because you really can see her life unravelling before your eyes. It's such a wicked waste of a lot of potential, and she seemed to shoulder the blame for all of it, when the seeds were sown very early on by other people as well as by her.
