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British World War II flying ace (1914–1995)

Group Captain Peter Wooldridge Townsend, (22 November 1914 – 19 June 1995) was a British Royal Air Force officer, flying ace, courtier and author. He was equerry to King George VI from 1944 to 1952 and held the same position for Elizabeth II from 1952 to 1953. Townsend notably had a romance with Princess Margaret, Elizabeth's younger sister.

Townsend was born in Rangoon, Burma, to doctor's son Lieutenant Colonel Edward Copleston Townsend, of the Indian Army, and his wife, Gladys, daughter of Herbert Hatt Cook, of Hartford Hall, Cheshire; his father had married aged 42, 20 years older than his bride. The Townsend family, of Devon, tended to send its sons into the church or the armed forces.

Townsend spent much of his later years writing non fiction books. His books include Earth My Friend (about driving/boating around the world alone in the mid 1950s), Duel of Eagles (about the Battle of Britain), The Odds Against Us (also known as Duel in the Dark, about fighting Luftwaffe night bombers in 1940–1941), The Last Emperor (a biography of King George VI), The Girl in the White Ship (about a young refugee from Vietnam in the late 1970s who was the sole survivor of her ship of refugees), The Postman of Nagasaki (about the atomic bombing of Nagasaki), and Time and Chance (an autobiography). He also wrote many short articles and contributed to other books. Townsend was a director of one of Gerald Carroll's Carroll Group companies. Townsend was one of several military advisors for the film Battle of Britain (1969). He also appeared in the PBS video The Windsors: A Royal Family (1994).

On 17 July 1941, Townsend married (Cecil) Rosemary Pawle (1921–2004). They had two sons, Giles (1942–2015) and Hugo (b. 1945). The family was resident in Adelaide Cottage in the 1940s. The younger son married Yolande, Princess of Ligne, daughter of Antoine, 13th Prince of Ligne and Alix, Princess of Ligne (née Princess Alix of Luxembourg). Townsend and Pawle divorced in 1952. After the divorce, Townsend and Princess Margaret decided to marry. He had met her in his role as an equerry to her father, King George VI. Divorcees suffered severe disapproval in the social atmosphere of the time and could not remarry in the Church of England if their former spouse was still alive. Their relationship was considered especially controversial because Margaret's sister, Queen Elizabeth II, was the Church's supreme governor. When news of the relationship appeared in the press, the government posted Townsend to a position as air attaché at the British Embassy in Brussels. On 31 October 1955, Princess Margaret issued a statement ending the relationship: "I have been aware that, subject to my renouncing my rights of succession, it might have been possible for me to contract a civil marriage. But, mindful of the Church's teachings that Christian marriage is indissoluble, and conscious of my duty to the Commonwealth, I have resolved to put these considerations before others." The BBC interrupted its scheduled radio programme to broadcast the statement. In 1959, aged 45, Townsend married 20 year old Marie Luce Jamagne, a Belgian national he had met the previous year. They had two daughters and one son. Their younger daughter, Isabelle Townsend, became a Ralph Lauren model in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Isabelle Townsend and her family renovated and lived at Le Moulin de la Tuilerie in Gif sur Yvette, where the Duke and Duchess of Windsor had once lived.

Townsend died of stomach cancer in 1995, in Saint Léger en Yvelines, France, at the age of 80. The Independent wrote in Townsend's obituary that "He developed, too, a perceptible sense of relief that things turned out the way they did", because "for men like Mark Phillips and Princess Margaret's eventual husband Antony Armstrong Jones, [marrying into the royal family] turned out to be an almost impossible undertaking". In 2002, a sculpture of Townsend, designed by Guy Portelli, was erected at Townsend Square, part of the Kings Hill development, on the site formerly occupied by the RAF West Malling airfield.

Townsend is portrayed by Ben Miles, Timothy Dalton and Hamish Riddle in the Netflix television series The Crown.