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The story is one that's been recently popularized in Netflix's drama The Crown, and it's the tale of a royal princess refused the right to marry a divorced airman. According to the version popularly told, Princess Margaret fell in love with Captain Peter Townsend, pilot from the Battle of Britain and equerry to both King George VI and Elizabeth II. The problem was that he was divorced, and to marry him would have been a major scandal in the eyes of the royals and the Church of England. Elizabeth II is said to have put her foot down and forbid the marriage, not only not giving the permission required (as dictated by the Royal Marriages Act of 1772), but telling her that if she disobeyed, she would find herself an exile no longer part of the family.
The truth, though, is even more complicated.
At the time, the Prime Minister was a man named Anthony Eden. He, too, had been divorced, and he amended the act so that Margaret's marriage to Townsend wouldn't remove her (or her children) from the line of succession at all. Elizabeth II agreed to the change, and Eden would write in at least one letter to his ministers that the queen had no desire to keep her sister from what would make her truly happy. The official documents that would have allowed the marriage are in the National Archives, and they've been publicly accessible since 2004. It wasn't until 2009 that a letter from Margaret to Eden revealed her own doubts as to whether or not she truly loved him. In it, she tells Eden that she plans on deciding in the upcoming months whether or not she was going to marry Townsend, and it's a letter that makes it clear Margaret was the one who made the decision based on her own feelings, not based on threats of being ostracized from the royal family.
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