When the Queen Mother was eventually told, she was upset, although she put on a brave front. She discussed it with her daughter and wrote to Tommy Lascelles, now her daughter’s private secretary. ‘I would like to talk to you soon, please,’ she wrote to Lascelles. ‘I have nobody I can talk to about such dreadful things.’ When she finally spoke to him she wept, which was understandable: her husband was gone, her elder daughter was Queen and her younger daughter looked as if she might bring disrepute on the new reign they were trying so hard to put in place. She believed that only heartache could come out of such a liaison and she felt that if the King had still been alive it would not have happened. They had both had such high hopes for their younger daughter, believing that she would find a suitably distinguished husband. We will never know, but the King might have intervened to stop the affair sooner than the Queen Mother, who was inclined to ignore tricky situations and hope they would go away, in very much the same way her daughter did with the Princess of Wales forty years later.

In his autobiography, Time and Chance, Townsend eloquently describes the tension and drama which led up to the end of the affair. The press were essentially on the side of the lovers, but complained that, after two years since their relationship became public, they should make up their minds. The Queen was portrayed as being on the side of the Church as its Supreme Governor, and the establishment figures of the day, which included the Privy Council, were described as antagonistic and unhelpful. They could not prevent the marriage, but they could influence Parliament, to whom the veto, when relinquished by the sovereign, then passed. ‘She would have nothing left – except me,’ Townsend wrote. ‘It was too much to ask of her, too much for her to give. We should be left with nothing, but our devotion to face the world.’