"Miss Churchill cannot be compared with Mrs Simpson, who had had two husbands". However, the marriage also drew the opprobrium of Evelyn Waugh, a convert to Roman Catholicism after divorce from his first wife, who professed to have been in love with Spencer-Churchill himself and who, a few years earlier, had repeatedly berated the poet John Betjeman for his Anglo-Catholic beliefs. Waugh enquired of Lady Eden, "Did you never think that you were contributing to the loneliness of Calvary by your desertion [of the faith]?" On the eve of the wedding, John Colville, a long-time private secretary of Churchill, who in his younger days had been part of the same social "set" as Churchill's niece, recorded in his diary that Spencer-Churchill, who was staying at Churchill's home at Chartwell, Kent, was "very beautiful, but ... still strange and bewildering". He added that Churchill "feels avuncular to his orphaned niece, gave her a cheque for £500 and told me that he thought she had a most unusual personality". According to the future Lady Avon herself, Churchill's wife Clementine thought her "too independent and totally unsuitable", while the marriage is said to have exacerbated the antagonism towards Eden of the Churchills' often wayward son Randolph, who, having initially defended his cousin to Waugh, gave her "two years to knock [Eden] into shape". His subsequent attacks on Eden in the press culminated in a scathing biography, The Rise and Fall of Sir Anthony Eden (1959). The issues relating to the Edens' marriage resurfaced in 1955 when Eden was prime minister. In that year Princess Margaret, sister of the Queen, announced that she had decided not to marry Group Captain Peter Townsend, a divorcé. Although recently available evidence suggests that the Eden government was prepared to be reasonably accommodating towards such a marriage and that Margaret would have needed only to renounce her right of succession to the throne, Townsend reflected in the 1970s that: Married life The Edens' marriage, which lasted until his death on 14 January 1977, was, by all accounts, an extremely happy one. The first five years of her marriage were dominated by Eden's political career and by the effects of a botched operation on his gall bladder in 1953, which caused lasting problems. Eden's private secretary, Evelyn Shuckburgh, recalled Lady Eden's role in ensuring that the complaint that led to the operation had been diagnosed properly: "When Eden acquired