How heartbroken Princess Margaret broke off her secret engagement to Group Captain Peter Townsend on this day. She chose duty – and her privileges as royalty – over love…

Forced to choose between duty to her country and the man she loved, it was a monumental clash of loyalties. And in the end, duty won.

Princess Margaret had become secretly engaged to a royal equerry, Group Captain Peter Townsend, who was not only 16 years older than Margaret, but also divorced.

But on October 31, 1955, the dramatic news came that it was all over.

In a statement on BBC radio, the Princess said: ‘I would like it to be known that I have decided not to marry Group Captain Peter Townsend.

‘I was aware that, provided I renounced my inheritance rights, I could have entered into a civil marriage.

“But mindful of the Church’s teaching that Christian marriage is indissoluble and conscious of my duty to the Commonwealth, I have decided to place these considerations above all others.”

It was long believed that her older sister, The Queen, had refused Margaret permission to marry.

There might have been a good reason. Elizabeth was head of the Church of England, which took a dim view of divorce and remarriage.

Divorce itself was an explosive topic for the Windsors, who were deeply shocked when the Queen’s uncle, King Edward VIII, abdicated the throne in 1936 to marry the twice-divorced Wallis Simpson.

However, in more recent times it has been accepted that the decision to sever the relationship with Group Captain Townsend was primarily Margaret’s.

The princess was undoubtedly more than aware of the difficulties her romance had caused her sister, the queen.

But there was more to it: marrying Townsend would have destroyed Margaret’s world, forcing her to live a life much closer to that of a commoner.

In every respect it was too big a leap.

Townsend and Margaret first met when he became equerry to her father, King George VI. The princess was 14 years old.

They met again when Townsend accompanied the royal family on a three-month tour to South Africa.

In August 1950, Townsend was appointed Master of the Household and after the death of George VI he became Comptroller of the Queen Mother’s Household.

Recalling his first impressions, Townsend later wrote: ‘She was a girl of unusual, intense beauty, contained in her short, slender figure and centered on large purple-blue eyes, generous, sensitive lips and skin as smooth as a peach.

‘She could make you double over with laughter and also touch your heart deeply’.

Although Peter had been married to Rosemary Pawle since 1941, with whom he had two sons, he eventually filed for divorce in November 1952 after she had an affair.

Less than a year later, in April 1953, Townsend proposed to Margaret and they entered into a secret engagement, but his status as a divorced man left the couple in a precarious situation.

Because Princess Margaret was under 25, her only sister, the Queen had to consent to her marriage to a divorced man under the Royal Marriages Act of 1772, but her status as head of the Church of England complicated matters.

All of this happened largely behind closed doors.

But speculation about a possible affair surfaced during the Queen’s coronation in June 1953, when Margaret picked a piece of lint from his uniform as she waited outside Westminster Abbey.

It was then decided that Townsend would be sent as an air attaché to the British Embassy in Brussels for a year, after which the couple were asked to wait another year.

The government, led by Prime Minister Anthony Eden, declared that if she married her love, she would be deprived of both her royal privileges and her income.

The princess told Eden in a letter: “Only by seeing him in this way do I feel that I can properly decide whether I can marry him or not.”

Margaret and Townsend remained apart for two years until the couple was reunited for the first time on October 12, 1955.

However, three weeks later, a statement issued on behalf of Princess Margaret announced the tragic news that the couple would be going their separate ways.

After returning to Belgium heartbroken following Margaret’s decision, he later married a 20-year-old heiress named Marie-Luce Jamagne in 1959, and the couple had two daughters and a son.

A year later, in May 1960, Margaret married a magazine photographer, the late Antony Armstrong-Jones, at Westminster Abbey.

Armstrong-Jones was the first commoner to marry into the royal family in more than 400 years. He was created Earl of Snowdon.

The couple eventually divorced in 1978.

Twenty-three years after his divorce from Margaret, Townsend released his autobiography, Time and Chance, in which he expressed his peace with her choice.

He wrote: ‘She could only have married me if she had been willing to give up everything: her position, her prestige, her secret wallet.

“I simply didn’t have the weight, I knew, to make up for all she would have lost.”

Margaret was not without compensations. A recent memoir reveals that despite her secret romance with Townsend, she enjoyed a torrid – and even more secret – relationship with American film star Eddie Fisher.