What The Crown Got Wrong About Princess Margaret & Peter Townsend’s Reunion

Longtime viewers of Netflix’s celebrated series The Crown will be well aware of the doomed romance between Princess Margaret and Peter Townsend. 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. 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. 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. 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?

Princess Margaret’s story is no doubt a tragic one in its own way, but her romance with Townsend ended generally amicably. 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.”

After the split, Townsend married Marie-Luce Jamagne in 1959, and the pair had one daughter, Isabelle. 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. “She could have married me only if she had been prepared to give up everything – her position, her prestige, her privy purse,” he wrote. “I simply hadn’t the weight, I knew it, to counterbalance all she would have lost.”

Thirty years after they separated, Margaret and Townsend did indeed reunite, but not quite as The Crown depicts. They did met once more, in 1993, before Townsend passed away at the age of 80, in 1995, from stomach cancer. In 1993 they had lunch at Margaret’s Kensington Palace apartment. The Princess recalled that her former lover looked “exactly the same, except he had grey hair.”

In the C5’s documentary Elizabeth: Our Queen, Margaret’s close friend Lady Glencoccer said that when the princess told her of the meeting, she noted Townsend was “charming” and that he hadn’t “changed at all.” Glencoccer, however, did notice a substantial change. “I looked out the window and saw him getting out of the car, he was an old man,” she explained. “Yet in her eyes he hadn’t changed. And I thought that was very touching.”