Marie-Luce Jamagne was 20 when she married Peter Townsend

Peter Townsend’s Belgian wife first met him when she fell from her horse at his feet, six years before their wedding.

Marie-Luce Jamagne was 20 when she married Group Captain Peter Townsend at a town hall on the outskirts of Brussels on 21 December 1959. He was a divorced Battle of Britain pilot of 45, and four years earlier Princess Margaret had announced that she would not marry him.

The morning after their engagement was announced that October, the Daily Mirror columnist Eve Perrick asked whether Townsend could really be considered “a matrimonial catch”. In his 1978 memoir, Time and Chance, he repeated the question and listed the obstacles himself. He was divorced with two sons and twice Marie-Luce’s age, while she was a Catholic and he a Protestant. “Few marriages can have looked less likely to succeed than ours,” he wrote.

What troubled Marie-Luce most, according to the memoir, was “the fear that she might always be, for me, the substitute, the second best”. His answer, in the same passage, was that “she was no substitute, but the ultimate”.

They were married for 35 years, until his death in 1995. As far as the public record shows, she is still living and has never given an interview about the marriage.

How Marie-Luce met Peter Townsend

They met by chance at a horse show in Brussels in the autumn of 1953. Townsend had just arrived as air attaché at the British embassy, a posting that followed newspaper reports of his romance with Margaret. Marie-Luce, a 14-year-old rider from Antwerp, was jumping when her horse fell, and she ended up, in his words, “senseless, practically at my feet”. Isabelle, the couple’s eldest daughter, told Vanity Fair Italia in 2025 that her mother broke her collarbone in the fall.

A judge who knew Townsend introduced him to her parents, and early in 1954 they invited him to their home in Antwerp. It became his refuge from the gossip in Brussels, and in time, he wrote, “I became one of the family”.

When he left Brussels on 21 October 1956 to drive round the world, Marie-Luce was 17, and he remembered her as “an adorable girl who made me laugh”. Before he went, she scratched her initials, M-L, on the back door of his Land Rover, the only mark the car carried.

By 1958 she was 19, a show-jumping champion and a talented amateur actress. That June, at the Brussels World’s Fair, Townsend agreed to make a film retracing his travels, and her parents let her join the tour as its photographer.

He later called the four-month trip “an appalling publicity stunt”. A professional photographer who joined the crew wrote a series for a London Sunday paper that cast Marie-Luce as the heroine.

Some accounts give her age at the wedding as 19, which is how old she was during the tour.

A lunchtime wedding in Boitsfort

In August 1959 Townsend was still denying any engagement. It was announced in October, and British Pathé filmed the couple in the garden of her family’s house near Antwerp and on the quayside, buying ice creams. The narrator called the family home “a tobacco millionaire’s house”. According to Townsend, her father, Franz Jamagne, earned nothing from tobacco beyond a director’s fees, and his real interests were literature and the theatre.

In December a Dutch newspaper reported that Marie-Luce was in Paris, playing a part in Merci Natercia, a film by Pierre Kast, Townsend’s collaborator on a documentary series at the time. IMDb lists the small role, uncredited, as her only film appearance.

Margaret’s statement of 31 October 1955 had said she was aware that, if she gave up her rights of succession, “it might have been possible for me to contract a civil marriage”. She decided against it. Townsend, as a divorced man, could not marry in church, so his wedding to Marie-Luce was a civil one, at the town hall in Boitsfort.

Two reporters had been tipped off and were watching the town hall on the morning of 21 December. The couple waited at the home of the mayor, Jacques Wiener, until midday, when the main doors closed for lunch and the reporters went off to eat, then slipped in by a back entrance. Her parents were with her, and Wiener had the doors reopened, as the law required, and closed again 20 minutes later.

The Associated Press report of the wedding described the bride as Townsend’s “secretary and photographic assistant”, and The Tennessean in Nashville headlined it “Weds Ex-Secretary”.

A home in France

After a honeymoon in Switzerland, the couple spent early 1960 in a flat in Paris. In August they moved to a house at Sainte-Gemme, west of the city, which Townsend called “our first home”. Their three children, Isabelle, Marie-Françoise and Pierre, were born in a Paris clinic while they lived there, between 1961 and 1964.

The next few years were less settled:

• February to August 1965: Connecticut, for a job with a wine business
• 1965 to 1966: Belgium, where Townsend was, by his own account, “homeless and jobless”
• October 1966: a rented house at Lévis-Saint-Nom, south-west of Paris

The family found a run-down farm on a Sunday outing in the summer of 1968. It stood near Saint-Léger-en-Yvelines, about 30 miles south-west of Paris, and an elderly widow, Madame Lecourt, lived there alone. Writing in the village bulletin in 2005, Marie-Luce described the evening the widow told them her story: her husband had hidden three English airmen in his barn in 1943, and people in the village had denounced him.

Some months later, in 1969, Madame Lecourt said she wanted to sell the farm to “le pilote anglais”, the English pilot, because her husband would have approved. She turned down better offers from local estate agencies to keep it for him.

Marie-Luce’s brother, an architect, drew up the plans, and the family spent whole Sundays clearing the banks of the pond with their bare hands. She later remembered the astonished faces of her two small daughters on the ladder to the cobwebbed loft when they were told it would be their bedrooms. The house was ready by November 1971, and she called the whole project “la grande histoire de nos vies”, the great story of their lives.

In the same interview, Isabelle said her parents shared a love of horses, nature and gardening, and that her mother made her father smile. Marie-Luce was much younger, Isabelle said, but she made a secure place for him to write in and looked after the home, even when that was hard.

In the memoir, published in 1978, the year Margaret and Antony Armstrong-Jones divorced, Townsend called the failure of her church marriage “infinitely sad”. The ultimate irony, he added, would come when his own town hall marriage met the Church’s ideal of “to have and to hold till death us do part”. The book ends at the farm:

“Here, among the swallows, with my wife and children, I have found my true home.”

After Townsend’s death

Townsend died at home on 19 June 1995, aged 80. The Queen sent Marie-Luce a message of condolence, and Buckingham Palace said Princess Margaret was saddened by the news. The funeral four days later began at Les Invalides in Paris and ended in the village church. Sir Archibald Winskill represented the Queen. Townsend is buried in the churchyard at Saint-Léger.

Ten years after his death, Marie-Luce wrote of the farm, in French: “We were very happy there, and we still are today, because Peter’s presence lives on in this place.”

The rules that kept Townsend and Margaret apart have been relaxed in her lifetime. In July 2002, five months after Margaret died, the Church of England’s General Synod voted to let divorced people remarry in church in some circumstances. In 2005 Prince Charles, who was divorced, married Camilla Parker Bowles, also divorced, in a civil ceremony at Windsor Guildhall, and in 2023 they were crowned King and Queen.

Is Marie-Luce still alive?

In July 2024 The Sun published a profile saying she had died in 1995, the same year as her husband. That is wrong. She wrote her piece for the village bulletin ten years later, and no death has been reported since. Born in 1939, she would be 87 this year.

At a screening at Japan House London in August 2023, Isabelle Townsend showed a photograph of her mother in Kyoto in 1958, taken on the film tour, and told the audience:

“My mother is, I was going to say ‘was’, but still is, a fantastic photographer.”