The Choice

See Cover The excitement, the strain, the uncertainty in Britain had reached such a pitch that it could not long continue. In a nation which sets such store by seemliness, the situation was too unseemly to last. What had begun as a simple and sentimental story of a Princess in love had now become a crisis that deeply involved institutions close to the heart of every Briton: the Crown and the Established Church.

In the beginning, almost everyone had seemed to be on the side of romance.

Young Margaret, for years the kingdom's royal darling, should be allowed to marry the man she loves, people said. It did not seem to matter that her choice, the airman who had been her father's equerry, was a commoner; it mattered only a little that at 41 he was 16 years older than she; it would matter only to some that he was a divorced man.

The Gathering Weight. That was how it began, for the news had seeped slowly upwards from the least respectable and least responsible papers. With no other way of knowing what was going on, the people who habitually read only the Times and listen to the BBC would not even have guessed at the romance until three weeks ago. Now the great weight of sedate judgment was making itself felt: the views of the Archbishop of Canterbury, of such powerful leaders of Conservative thought as the Marquess of Salisbury, and of the cautious, conservative and pious segment of nonconformist believers throughout the land. In the wake of this slow gathering of substantial opinion, many a lighter-hearted Briton was forced to forget the sentiment and take stock of the significance of Margaret's apparently firm intention to marry outside her church and outside the stern limitations of her inheritance.

At first it had seemed so easy: let Margaret simply renounce her rights to the succession, and then she would be free. Her sister the Queen could settle a million or two pounds on her, say from the large estate left by Queen Mary. All Margaret would be out would be an unlikely chance to be Queen herself.*

It was now plainly not that simple. No act of Margaret and no act of the British Parliament could sever her entirely from the fact of her birth. Margaret of Windsor is a Princess of Great Britain, her sister is the head of the Established Church, a church which frowns on remarriage of divorced persons and denies its sacraments to those who flout that proscription.

While the debate went on, many Britons, even among those who affect not to care a fig whether the young Princess marries her airman or not, found themselves caught up in it: they professed themselves sated with it, but they could not escape it. Like polite weekend guests unwillingly trapped in a family quarrel, they could not choose but hear. As the week wore on, the young Princess fulfilled her royal functions, well-armed in the impassive mask of dignity that is royalty's required uniform. In tiara and strapless pink and white gown, she helped her sister the Queen entertain the visiting President of Portugal by sitting through a performance of Smetana's The Bartered Bride, while a soprano sang to a forbidden lover, "Nothing in the world will ever part us." She snatched moments alone with Peter Townsend, whenever she could, at the homes of friends brave enough to risk disapproval by giving them shelter.

One Man's Family. The penny press dogged the Princess' footsteps, struggling to make significant gossip of every transient expression. But in the three weeks since Margaret and Peter Townsend had each returned to England, the titillating "will-she-or-won't-she" speculation of the keyhole-peepers had become only a tinkling obbligato behind the sterner voices. Whatever else the royal family may be in modern Britain--symbol of ancient legitimacy, shining emblem of Commonwealth unity, indestructible warranty of the glory that is Britain--it is first and foremost a family affair: every spinster is its maiden aunt, every shopgirl its happily envious kid sister, every vicar its parish priest, and every family man its authoritative uncle. In moments of relative calm, the country cousins can watch and enjoy the cavortings of their royal relations in London with the detachment of televiewers watch ing a soap opera, but when the affairs in Britain's perpetual One Man's Family take critical turns, the detachment vanishes.

Last week, in press and pulpit, in barroom and barbershop, in the family parlor and the public park, the British people voiced their sympathy, their shock, their approval, their disapproval, or their angry impatience at the whole affair. The circumstances were becoming familiar enough to permit a few small and very English jokes about it. In a Punch cartoon, an impressionable child thoughtfully counted the peas on her plate to the words, "Tinker, tailor, soldier, group captain." A BBC comedian asked his straight man to read the day's news. "They had tea together again," intoned the other. But back of the little jokes and the large admonitions, a disquieting uncertainty hung over the nation. Nobody in Britain expected that the Princess' romance with her divorced com moner would end in the collapse of the British throne, or believed that it could cause more than a passing disruption in Anthony Eden's government. What it could do, and had perhaps already done, was to damage a faith already weakened by repeated blows.

They Can't Win. "Britons today," cabled TIME'S London Bureau Chief Andre Laguerre, "lack much of their old self-confidence. The recent advent of a young Queen, the talk of a new Elizabethan era, the dynamic character of a new self-confident Toryism, the conquest of Everest by Edmund Hillary and of time by Four-Minute Miler Roger Bannister, are all factors which in the last few years have combined to bolster that waning confidence. Princess Margaret will start no revolution whatever she may do, but things are now so far advanced that if, in the end, she gives up Townsend, the outcome will be highly unpopular with many Britons, an unpopularity essentially derived not from the feeling that stuffiness has conquered love, but from the conviction that her choice was not a free one.

"By slackly refusing to recognize the crisis until it was on them, by allowing its final moments to be played out in the heat of controversy and the glare of publicity, the royal family and the Eden government have put themselves in a position where they cannot win. If, at the last minute, they persuade Margaret to send Townsend away, they will be undemocratic bullies in the eyes of many. If they give even reluctant consent, they will offend many others."

Normality in Ermine. In this no longer gay romance, there were no villains, only victims. What modern Britons have come to demand and need most of all from their royal family is example. As the London Times put it last week: "The Queen has come to be the symbol ... in whom the people see their better selves ideally refleeted." But there was a corollary: in reflecting the national ideal, the monarchy must not set itself apart and away from the people it represents. The reflection must be that of normality clothed in ermine, and while the institution remains beyond reproach, the wearers of the ermine must show themselves warm and human beneath. When romance conflicts with the canons of the Established Church, and with the Briton's inbred view of royalty, it is no easy role.

In times past, ringed about as they were with lords and ladies dependent on their favor, without the penny press to discuss their romances as they would Rita Hayworth's, the sovereigns of England could afford to be human without fear of the consequences. Worry over his subjects' approval was fairly far from the mind of King Henry VIII when he divorced his first wife, Catherine of Aragon, in favor of Anne Boleyn. The mistresses and mis-marriages of the first royal Hanovers newly come from Germany were far more scandalous than the prospect that scandalizes churchgoing Britons today; but in those days, royalty operated behind a bulwark of aristocracy that fenced it off safely from the people.

The modern respect for the monarch begins with the long reign of Queen Victoria. Her five daughters were brought up in a court peopled with carefully sifted members of a nobility as rigidly aloof as the sovereign herself, while Europe's courts abounded in eminently eligible princelings. In today's new era of democratized monarchy, the old Queen's great-great-granddaughter Margaret is blessed with no such protection.

Chop Off His Head. The monarchy into which Princess Margaret was born in Scotland on the stormy night of Aug. 21, 1930, was still securely bound in the tradition of Queen Victoria. But a scant six years later, it was dealt a severe blow in the abdication of vacillating King Edward VIII, now Duke of Windsor. In recent weeks, many have rushed to draw a parallel between that Crown crisis and this, but there is not much to compare in the two. Edward was the King-Emperor, the personal embodiment of the sovereign power in a Britain still governed by Victorian standards. Margaret is a Princess, in a predominantly socialist-minded state, who has little chance of ascending the throne.

When Edward chose the course of abdication, six-year-old Margaret herself asked with eyes wide, "Are they going to chop off his head?" It was not necessary. In choosing to give up his throne, Edward made himself, in British eyes, something less than a man without a head. The people of Britain let him go, anointed his conscientious younger brother George (Margaret's father) in his place and tried to forget him. A new royal family was established in Buckingham Palace, and the most beguiling member of it was an impish little Princess known as Margaret Rose. For the moment at least, all had become right again with the world, in Britain anyway. But the blow that Edward dealt the institution of the Crown was not forgotten.

In George VI's reign, Princess Margaret romped happily about the vast acres of her new homes, Buckingham Palace, Windsor Castle, Sandringham, Balmoral. Tales of her pixy pranks made newspaper reading for her father's doting subjects, but by and large, it was a lonely life for the little Princess. Often she was left alone while her big sister Elizabeth studied the lessons that would suit her for the throne. In all the world, Margaret's closest friend was her father, who loved her little jokes and her bounce and her kittenish ways.

When England was subjected to the first real threat of cross-Channel conquest since 1066, Britain's King looked for his protection not to the armored earls and barons of his ancestors but to a new aristocracy of young men flying the Hurricanes and Spitfires. These were the airborne aristocrats honored by Winston Churchill in his famed reference to "the few." And one of their brightest stars was a young man of 25 named Peter Townsend.

A Quiet Boy. Born of sturdy British middle-class stock in Rangoon, where his father was a pukka sahib in His Majesty's civil service, Peter Townsend was brought back to England at the age of four. His family settled in the peaceful Somerset village of Crowcombe. "He was a quiet boy, nothing boisterous about him, just friendly and quiet," remembers a neighbor. So unobtrusive was Peter that, in all likelihood, the neighbors would promptly have forgotten him except for the thrills he gave them later as a Hurricane pilot in the R.A.F. After leaving Haileybury College, a substantial and respected public school dedicated to the production of future Indian civil servants. Peter, like his three brothers, had chosen a career in the armed services.

In the early days of the war, his job as an R.A.F. flight lieutenant was to guard the coastal shipping that was Britain's lifeline. He flew hundreds of sorties, and in February 1940 he led the attack and fired the bursts that brought down the first enemy bomber on English soil. By the end of that dark summer, he had become one of the R.A.F.'s most famed and decorated fighters. In Crowcombe, the neighbors remember him best because he never failed, passing over their village, to slow-roll his aircraft in cheerful greeting.

In the carefree tradition of those brave days. Airman Townsend became a legend, famed for his bravery as well as for an aerial dance he used to do with his squadron mate, Caesar Hull, each flying and rolling his own plane in wild, airborne pirouettes while they shouted rumba rhythms at one another over the radio. Yet, unlike Hull, Townsend was anything but an exuberant type. "I never once heard him raise his voice, and yet everybody instantly obeyed him," remembers one of his sergeant pilots. "He was a meticulous organizer, and as far as I know he never forgot a detail."

In July 1941, a veteran of hundreds of air battles and two bailouts (one of which cost him the great toe on his left foot), Peter Townsend was married to the vivacious, hazel-eyed daughter of Brigadier Timothy Pawle, the "squire" of Didford village. The elaborate white wedding was held in a 13th century church in Much Hadham, and a guard of honor formed by the men of his squadron was on hand to line the way as Townsend came out with his bride. "I hope this doesn't mean," smiled the bridegroom, eying the turnout, "that the planes are being neglected."

Two years later, King George was looking for special equerries to help him keep in closer touch with the armed services. In an earlier day. the post might have gone to some eligible lordling, but Britain's social-minded King wanted to reward merit rather than mere birth, and Townsend's name was sent him. Wearing his best uniform, the young airman went to see the King. King George liked him from the first, and after 30 minutes of chat, he was taken on. As the King and the airman left the royal study in Buckingham Palace, they met a slightly gawky girl of 13 in the corridor. "This is my daughter Margaret," said the King.

Handsome, meticulous in dress and manner, tactful and discreet, boyish Peter Townsend in almost no time was proving himself indispensable as confidant and courtier. "If I had had a son," George VI once said, "I'd have liked a boy like Townsend." It was inevitable almost from the first that Margaret, who spent much of her girlhood close to her father's side, should have come to share his affection.

Three weeks after he was hired, Townsend and wife Rosemary were settled in a "grace and favor" cottage behind a ten-foot privet hedge in Windsor Great Park. They shared the hardships of most young married couples on service pay, and it was harder on the wife than the husband. Wing Commander Townsend had only his officer's allowances, plus an extra stipend of -L-1,000 for his royal duties, and as a result the pair were far poorer than most of the people they were called on to meet.

They could afford little entertaining, but when their second son was born, the King himself served as godfather and the entire royal family went to the christening. From then on, Margaret and her sister Elizabeth formed the habit of dropping in at the Townsend cottage on Sunday mornings, Elizabeth to chat with Rosemary and Margaret to play with the babies. Margaret never went alone to the Townsends, but in the family it was generally understood that she was his special charge, and Peter was frequently at the Princess' side in line of duty. Elizabeth often made their party a threesome, but after the elder sister's engagement to Philip Mountbatten, things changed. Elizabeth sometimes dropped by the cottage for tea or a cocktail with her fiance, but Peter Townsend and Navyman Philip never got on.

Equerry Townsend was often away from home. When the royal family went on tour, he went along. He spent hours playing canasta with the Queen, parlor games with the Princesses or simply chatting with the King. In 1947, he was away for 3 1/2 months while the royal family toured South Africa. "I don't know what I'd do without you, Peter," the King told him on that trip. Rosemary Townsend, back in Windsor, was also struggling with the problem of what to do without him.

By 1950, King George had promoted acting Group Captain (equals U.S. colonel) Townsend to Deputy Master of his Household. As his health failed, the King leaned more and more on the young airman who became his constant companion. Never long, the King's temper became testily short in illness, and only Townsend and Margaret seemed to know how to soothe him.

Get Rid of Him. In February 1952 King George died. Stricken deeply by the first real blow ever dealt in her sheltered life, Princess Margaret turned for comfort to the church and to Peter Townsend, himself a deeply religious man. Meanwhile, the circumstances that put Elizabeth into Buckingham Palace and sent her mother and sister to the comparative obscurity of Clarence House made Peter Townsend more indispensable than ever. In the midst of a domestic crisis of his own, he took complete charge of readying the new residence, managed the Queen Mother's purse strings and even supervised the mixing of the colors for Margaret's private suite.

In December of 1952, Townsend resolved his personal problems by divorcing Rosemary for adultery,** but even though he was in constant attendance on Margaret and her mother, the divorce caused scarcely a ripple of speculation or gossip. Peter Townsend was too much a fixture in the royal family; the press of Britain, vainly trying to marry the Princess off to a whole parade of eligible earls and marquesses, was too busy to notice. Too busy, that is, until the coronation, when a sharp-eyed reporter in an Abbey anteroom caught Margaret affectionately brushing off the lapels of Airman Townsend's jacket. The simple gesture was enough to set off a fever of speculation in the press, and the speculation was enough to send the faithful aide winging into exile, as air attache in Britain's embassy in Brussels. Alerted by Royal Secretary Alan Lascelles, Winston Churchill himself had given the new Queen some blunt advice: get rid of him. Elizabeth complied, but at their last meeting she was careful to shake Peter Townsend's hand in public with a smile that seemed to many onlookers a token of encouragement.

To Be or Not to Be. In the years since Peter Townsend had first gone to serve his King, the coltish teen-ager in the corridor had grown into a woman fully conscious of her position and proud of its prerogatives. Warmly magnetic when she wants to be, she can stiffen into icy frigidity at any affront to the protocol she feels is her due. Even her best friends call her "Ma'am," and a brash acquaintance who once inquired solicitously after the health "of your father," was instantly frozen with the reply, "I presume you mean His Majesty?"

As a mere younger Princess at Clarence House instead of the darling of Buckingham Palace, Margaret has considerably more freedom than she once did. But at Clarence House, by her own design, Margaret's life is almost as strictly circumscribed by protocol as it was at the palace. Like Peter Townsend, she is a stickler for perfection, and whatever she does, she wants to do well, even to being a Princess. When Princess Margaret goes to a nightclub, it is never on an informal twosome with a single escort. The party is carefully planned in advance to include half a dozen matched couples. All of them must be known to her. Occasionally she dances, lightly and expertly, but despite the well-publicized glamour of such occasions she often seems bored to tears.

At the end of the evening, the first to leave, Margaret departs accompanied only by a lady in waiting.

More and more in the past year, Margaret has preferred small, equally formal gatherings at Clarence House. Her royal duties are less arduous than they once were, but she performs them all with conscientious care, managing to look always alert and interested during the windiest dignitary's speech, making her own speeches short and dignified, and flashing her warm smile discreetly where it is most needed. The greatest freedom she enjoys today is that of being able to go shopping alone with a lady in waiting in London's smartest shops. This pleasure, like others in the grown-up Princess' life, requires money that only a Princess can afford.

In setting her heart on Peter Townsend, Princess Margaret has given no indication that she wants to give up the privileges, duties or emoluments of the royal life. What has given her pause over the past weeks and kept a nation and a world on tenterhooks awaiting her decision is the Princess' sudden, clear awareness of the fact that she cannot have her royal cake and eat it too.

This was a fact brought home to her with the force of a thunderbolt one day early last week when she picked up a copy of the London Times, which up to then had maintained a stern silence on her romance. Wedlock with a divorced man, warned the Times, would require the Princess to enter into "a union which vast numbers of her sister's people, all sincerely anxious for her lifelong happiness, cannot in all conscience regard as a marriage." The peoples of her sister's Commonwealth, it went on, "would see her step down from her high place with the deepest regret, for she has adorned it, and is everywhere honored and loved." But there was no question in the Times's mind that marriage to Townsend would require the Princess to "step down."

Other voices in the land were equally stern. The contemplated marriage, said an Episcopal minister in Scotland, would be "an illicit union . . . adding something very like the sin of apostasy to the violation of Christ's marriage law." The head of Britain's Methodist Conference granted the Princess' right to marry a divorced man. but he was no less firm than the Anglicans in denying Margaret and her prospective issue the right to ascend the throne.

Not all the voices of propriety spoke in such severe terms. The liberal Manchester Guardian, which speaks with equal authority, replied to the Times with an earnest question. "Is the democratic instinct of the country in this twentieth century," it asked, "really in favor of hedging royalty in with ecclesiastical proscriptions of arguable historical and theological validity? Or does it not rather prefer to give royalty the same rights and freedoms in their personal affairs as ordinary, decent citizens? If we can have a Prime Minister.*** Cabinet ministers and judges who are 'innocent parties.' we can, without feeling unduly disturbed in our moral fibre, give the same latitude to the Queen's sister."

Vox Populi. To the troubled Princess, it was small comfort that there were some who tried to dismiss the whole matter as a moss-backed anachronism. Racing to the Princess' defense, the cocky tabloid Daily Mirror (circ. 4,665,000) asked its more influential brother (circ. 221,972): "Would the Times have preferred this vivacious young woman to marry one of the witless wonders with whom she has been hobnobbing these past few years? Or to live her life in devoted spinsterhood? Luckily the Times cannot banish Princess Margaret. It speaks for a dusty world and a forgotten age."

Nobody knew better than the Princess, who was trained to her station, that monarchy's duty to please the majority often consists in not offending the influential minority, especially when the minority stands on time-honored tradition. She could only hope that if she married outside the Established Church, of which her sister the Queen is head, even the church itself might in time prove forgiving. In a pamphlet published last December, the Primate of that Church, her family's close friend and spiritual guide, the Archbishop of Canterbury, had written: "I do not find myself able to forbid good people who come to me for advice to embark on a second marriage. I tell them that it is their duty as conscientiously as they can to decide before God what they should do."

There was little chance that Parliament would make the Princess' lot easier by so amending the Royal Marriages Act as to eliminate the necessity of a choice. The alternatives before Margaret had become hard and clear, and this week she made her painful choice. She announced: "I have decided not to marry Group Capt. Peter Townsend . . . 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 is third in line, after her nephew Prince Charles, 6. Duke of Cornwall, and her niece, 5, Princess Anne. Following Margaret come 4) the Duke of Gloucester, 5) Prince William of Gloucester, 6) Prince Richard of Gloucester, 7) the Duke of Kent, 8) Prince Michael of Kent, 9) Princess Alexandra of Kent, 10) the Princess Royal, Margaret's aunt and the daughter of King George V and Queen Mary. ** She is now married to John de Lazlo, the co-respondent in the suit. Her two sons, though awarded to Peter by the court, live with her. The elder boy is at Eton. ***Anthony Eden divorced his first wife, Beatrice Beckett, in June 1950, was married to Winston Churchill's niece Clarissa in a London registry office in August 1952.

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