I ' ll be 624 months in February . <| sep |> The Anglican Church allowed divorce , but it didn ' t allow a person to remarry within the Anglican Church if their former spouse was still alive . With Edward VIII the issue is that Wallis Simpson had two living exhusbands . As the Head of the Church the King could not marry a woman who was actively seeking her second divorce at the time . Which is why he abdicated in place of George VI . With Princess Margaret and Peter Townsend it was a similar situation where Townsend ' s exwife was still alive and he had two sons . Since Margaret was third in line for the Crown it wasn ' t unreasonable to ensure that she remain qualified for the line of succession . In 2004 a document was released that showed that Queen Elizabeth and Anthony Eden had drawn up a plan to simply remove Margaret and any children from the line of succession . Obviously this did not happen as she never married Townsend . The problem was that all the marriages had to be approved by Parliament , who are all elected officials and therefore are subject to the will of the people . Even if they could have come up with some legal loophole or could have made an amendment , people would have been morally opposed to the marriages and it would have hurt them in the elections . While the show paints the people as loving Margaret and Townsend ' s romance , there was a significant portion of the population that were deeply opposed to it .