One of Fisher's aims during his 16 years as archbishop was to make the position of the Church about the marriage of divorced people widely understood and accepted. He staunchly upheld the rules that would have prevented Princess Margaret and Townsend from marrying in church, but in the words of "The Guardian", he "combin that undoubted rigour with a profound compassion for all those whose lives had been ... wrecked by a disastrous marriage. That road lay over a knife-edge of perplexity and contradiction, but he trod it creatively."