Britain's Acting Prime Minister Richard A. Butler stood up in the House of Commons one day last week and, for all his determination not to, twanged the bowstring of Britain's royal romance. The Churchill government, announced the dry, donnish Chancellor of the Exchequer, proposes to change the law which designates Princess Margaret as regent should her sister the Queen die before Prince Charles is 18.
The 1937 Regency Act. said Rab Butler, should be altered. The plan is to make Queen Elizabeth's husband, the Duke of Edinburgh, regent. The Queen feels it proper that Prince Charles's father, not his 22-year-old aunt, should train the boy for the responsibilities of the throne and shoulder those responsibilities as regent, if need be.
Butler's proposal was adrenalin to the millions of Britons who are busily marrying off Princess Meg to the dashing, divorced R.A.F. ace, Group Captain Peter Townsend: the government, it seemed, was deliberately relieving the Princess of one great obstacle to her marrying a commoner. Butler made clear that the regency change has been in the wind for more than a year. The question of freeing Margaret to marry Townsend—a matter requiring the approval of the Queen, the government and the Church of England—had nothing to do with it. "Such a matter . . . has never come before the cabinet." said he, "and I think I am voicing the opinion of all members when I say that . . . deplorable speculation and gossip [should be] brought to an end."
Steadfast Devotion. The Chancellor hoped in vain. The gossip grew even louder (it has assumed "the shape of scandal," protested the stately London Times). And it seemed likely to continue for months to come. The latest word is that the Queen, the Queen Mother and Margaret herself have agreed to do nothing until the Queen and Philip return from a visit to Australia next May. The royal family apparently hopes that by then Margaret's ardor for Airman Townsend—now neatly isolated in an air attache's job in Brussels —will have cooled. Margaret apparently hopes that her steadfast devotion to Townsend will be so plain to everyone that a way will be found to bless the marriage.
Not alone the de-emphasis of Margaret (which caught U.S. headline writers) but the new emphasis on Philip created a stir in Britain. Lord Beaverbrook's Tory Daily Express and the Liberal Manchester Guardian, which find few issues to agree upon, both agreed that the regency should be kept "in the line of succession" rather than pass to one who is not in the line, i.e., Princess Margaret should have the regency. There was also a deep undertow of nervousness and grumbling in the starchy back benches of the Tory Party, whose men are properly silent in public and often violently articulate in private. Though the handsome and gregarious Philip takes his job seriously and is increasingly popular with the British public, he is not universally beloved by England's bluebloods. They mistrust him: his politics are comparatively liberal; he plays loose with some of the stuffier conventions of the palace; he is a foreigner—a Greek prince naturalized as a British citizen; but above all, he is a Battenberg, and a nephew of the dashing, controversial Admiral the Earl Mountbatten of Burma and his equally controversial wife Edwina.