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- Herausgeber: Biteback Publishing
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
"Clive Irving's immensely readable book brings real authority, context and personal insight to our understanding of the Queen … The Last Queen is as entertaining as it is essential, and I read it with gusto." – Tina Brown, author of The Diana Chronicles "A brilliant and gripping analysis of the monarchy and the House of Windsor by the master of investigative journalism." – Robert Lacey, author of Battle of Brothers "Sensational" – Daily Express "Fascinating" – FT Magazine *** 'The Firm', as the royal family styles itself, judged by real corporate standards, is a mess. Any consultants called in from outside to scrutinise its inner workings would find all the familiar flaws of a family business that has outgrown its original scale and design. There is no overall strategy, just a collection of warring divisions pursuing their own ends. And this will be a profound problem when the Queen dies, because make no bones about it, the Queen's mortality determines the mortality of the monarchy. Under Charles III, the monarchy can never be the same; indeed, its very survival is in doubt. In The Last Queen, pioneering investigative reporter Clive Irving paints a revelatory portrait of Elizabeth II's extraordinary reign, setting it within the dramatic transformation of Britain itself over the same period. Now expanded to include the death of Prince Philip, the fallout from Megxit and the banishment of Prince Andrew, this compelling account asks: how long will the institution survive beyond the second Elizabethan era?
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020
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“Clive Irving’s immensely readable book brings real authority, context and personal insight to our understanding of the Queen. As a newspaperman in the center of the coverage for decades, he has a wonderful eye for the illuminating detail and a sense of history that pulls together the threads of social and political change, never losing sight of the remarkable woman at the center of his enquiring gaze. The Last Queen is as entertaining as it is essential, and I read it with gusto.”
Tina Brown, author ofThe Diana Chronicles
“They are privileged people who represent our past. But how do they – how can they? – represent our present, let alone our future? Turn these pages to revel in a brilliant and gripping analysis of the monarchy and the House of Windsor by Clive Irving, the master of investigative journalism. What a story!”
Robert Lacey, author ofBattle of Brothers
“Sensational”
Daily Express
“Fascinating”
FT Magazine
“A gossipy romp through a history of the British monarchy … homing in on the royal family’s efforts to block access to information, such as their connections to Nazis and the machinations of their wily uncle Mountbatten.”
Kirkus
“A clear-eyed portrait of Queen Elizabeth II … Irving puts his mark on a familiar story with his confident assessments and insider perspective on the British press. Royal watchers will delight in this richly detailed appraisal of the world’s oldest reigning monarch.”
Publishers Weekly
“A gripping account of the trials and tribulations of Elizabeth II’s seventy-year reign”
Choice magazine
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To Mimi Irving, my wife and collaborator throughout most of the period covered in this book, whose research and perceptive guidance were indispensable
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CONTENTS
PREFACE
Queen Elizabeth II is the longest-reigning monarch in British history and will likely be the last Queen of England. No British monarch has faced such an extended and turbulent period of change. The Queen adapted as best she could, but often seemed out of touch. The advisers who served her did not help. Throughout her reign, egregious family secrets threatened to break cover. Behind the throne, two sides of the royal bloodline competed for influence. And the lives of her heir and second son have become the stuff of scandal. It sometimes seemed that the monarchy would not survive, but somehow it did.
My personal perspective on the Queen is shaped by the coincidence that my career as a journalist has run parallel with the years of her reign. During that time, fawning and obsequious coverage and automatic public deference gave way to aggressive and intrusive worldwide scrutiny. Royal journalism became the most profitable stream of celebrity journalism, and the royal family assumed the role of a compulsively viewable soap opera. Consequently, it became difficult to see the Queen’s life clearly and fairly because of the way it was conveyed in the terms and language of the tabloid circus that now always follows the family. This book is partly the story told from the inside of that conflict, of its toll on the monarchy, and of the real stories that lie hidden behind the noise.x
PART ONE
2
CHAPTER 1
THE ACCIDENTAL QUEEN
WINDSOR CASTLE, 19 MAY 2018
The wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle is as glorious as any in the long line of British royal pageants. The gushing TV commentators from every corner of the world all agree that nobody does it better than the British royal family. Even the weather cooperates, with peerless blue skies, and Windsor Castle provides a spectacular backdrop, part Game of Thrones, part Camelot. It certainly has the qualities of a fairy tale – a narrative layered with legend, fantasy, tragedy, intrigue and resilience.
However, the real star here is not taking the vows but instead sits in a pew, brightly dressed and wonderfully behatted. The Queen has outlived even the venerable Victoria in her duration on the throne and is now a monarch who seems to be above reproach.
I have covered the royal family as a reporter and critic for decades. Now I am reporting on the wedding for the Daily Beast, based in New York, and I marvel:
St. George’s Chapel Windsor became, for the first time in its long history, host to a new kind of rainbow coalition, ranging from doddery old dukes to the exuberance of a gospel choir rocking the 4place with ‘Stand By Me.’ And all of this was pure Diana … Metaphorically, Diana burned down the penitential structure that had attempted to restrain her. Harry and Meghan will now enjoy and represent the spirit of that brave rebellion.
It is a thought that seems to strike many onlookers: Princess Diana, the bewitching beauty who died as ‘the People’s Princess’, seems to be the absent but spiritual architect of this apparent transformation in the appearance of the House of Windsor and this joyous display of love and ancient ritual. But Prince Harry knew the underlying reality: some time before, he said that being king or queen is a job that nobody in their right mind would want. His brother William, however, had no choice; his turn would come, while Harry and his new bride would have to try to find their own place in the system. Of course, neither was there any choice available to Queen Elizabeth II, and it would be pointless to ask her if she ever regretted it. But at that moment in St George’s Chapel, she could reflect that she had carried the monarchy through many rough patches and that it was still intact. She must also have known that she was probably the last queen her country would ever see.
* * *
The Queen’s accession to the throne was accidental. It came about because her father was obliged to replace Edward VIII when he abdicated, and Princess Elizabeth, as the elder of George VI’s two daughters, automatically had the same fate as her father thrust upon her. However, the origins of this disruption to the intended line of succession lie much deeper in Windsor family history than the abdication itself. They are embedded in the peculiar character of that family and they influenced the life of the young Elizabeth both before and well into her reign.5
It is important to realise that the reality of royal family life in the first decades of the twentieth century was never permitted to be seen by the public. Indeed, it was never admissible as a concept. It would be too glib to talk of a cover-up in the sense of how we understand that term today, as a conspiracy to control information and conceal a scandal. The belief was that the monarchy could be sustained as an institution only if it appeared at all times to be above reproach: in order for it to exist, it had to be a fantasy.
Edward VIII’s abdication began the undermining of that fantasy. Much has been written about the abdication. It is always portrayed more as a constitutional and political crisis than as a serious moral failure within the royal family, but that is fundamentally what it was. And that failure, in the first place, was the inevitable result of a wretched atmosphere created in Buckingham Palace by George V, while he was head of the family, and by the weaknesses of his wife, Queen Mary. As a result, the character and behaviour of the King’s four sons played out in such a way that the abdication ended up as a choice between two of them. One was unfit to be the King, one had the Crown thrust upon him.
Edward, the Prince of Wales, was born in 1894; Albert, the Duke of York (later George VI), in 1895; Henry, the Duke of Gloucester, in 1900; and George, the Duke of Kent, in 1902. (A fifth son, John, died at the age of thirteen in 1919.) The King and Queen were disastrous parents. George V was a bluff and dull man who frequently seemed to feel trapped in a role that he was plainly ill equipped to carry out. He rose quickly to anger and his sons were in fear of his rages. Sometimes at meals he was so rude to the Queen that she would leave the table, followed by the children. The Queen had no maternal instincts and, according to one courtier, ‘was one of the most selfish human beings I have ever known’.
As they grew up, the young princes found themselves among a 6generation permanently scarred by the ravages of the so-called Great War, with a pervasive sense that the war had been about nothing other than the senseless feuds of Europe’s royal houses, a bloodbath that should never be repeated and that pitched Europe into economic distress. Of the four, the most restive and reckless was the direct heir, Edward, the Prince of Wales.
In contrast to the grim life the princes led inside Buckingham Palace, there was a wild and hedonistic atmosphere to be savoured in the city immediately surrounding the palace. London in the late 1920s and early 1930s had some of the flavour of Weimar Berlin: a raucous libertine social scene; an upper class fearful of revolution; dynamic and radical cultural movements in literature and the arts; a rising agitation from the working class suffering severe hardship in the Great Depression; and an extreme political party that adopted the uniforms and insignia of the European fascist regimes. All four bachelor princes moved in circles where there was a general view that Soviet Russia posed a greater threat to capitalism (and themselves) than the Nazis, an opinion reinforced for the royal princes by the intimate memory of their Romanov cousins, whom they had known as children, being assassinated in a cellar by the Bolsheviks.
Of the four sons, the second, Albert, was the first to marry, in 1923, and to find the satisfaction of a settled life with a woman who was everything that his mother had not been – a caring mother and a lively partner. Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon had the granite virtues of a Scottish background and no affinity for the louche ways she saw in two of her husband’s brothers, Edward and George, the Duke of Kent. In fact, as Edward himself cut a swathe through London society with serial affairs, his youngest brother was living far more dangerously.
By all accounts, George was the cleverest and most glamorous of the princes. He was an aesthete with an interest in the arts, design and the theatre. These pursuits introduced him to a far more bohemian 7crowd than the royals usually encountered. He played the piano, spoke French and Italian and, like Edward, had developed a foppish interest in men’s fashions that gave him the style of a dandy-about-town. He was also bisexual, avidly promiscuous and addicted to morphine and cocaine. In the absence of any parental interest, it fell to Edward to offer what persuasion he could to rehabilitate George and clean up the mess of his life. That seemed to be achieved in 1934 when George married the gorgeous Princess Marina of Greece and Denmark. They ran a salon in Belgravia that attracted the leading creative talents of the time – a more aristocratic and frivolous assembly than the contemporary Bloomsbury Group. But the marriage was a façade. George was still living recklessly in his own secret world. And he watched his elder brother become equally reckless when he met and was beguiled by a new lover, Mrs Wallis Simpson, a liaison that was dangerous beyond anything that George had enjoyed.
3 DECEMBER 1936 … THE ARRIVAL OF THE TABLOIDS
The newly crowned Edward VIII and Mrs Wallis Simpson were living together in Fort Belvedere, a faux-Gothic castle on a hill that bordered Windsor Great Park. Edward had previously entertained two other mistresses at Fort Belvedere, a discreet love nest that he preferred to Buckingham Palace and that was away from the public eye. But his affair with Mrs Simpson, an American with a colourful past, was about to tip the country into the great crisis that would end with his abdication.
On this morning, the King waited anxiously for Mrs Simpson to appear for breakfast. He recorded the moment in his memoir: ‘Wallis entered the drawing room. In her hand she had a London picture newspaper.8
“Have you seen this?” she asked.
“Yes,” I answered. “It’s too bad.”’
And the King lamented, ‘The world can hold few worse shocks for a sensitive woman than to come without warning upon her own grossly magnified countenance upon the front page of a sensational newspaper.’
The ‘sensational newspaper’ was the Daily Mirror, the paper to which every modern tabloid owes its DNA. In fact, in the long and fraught history of the relationship between the media and the Windsors this can truly be seen as a watershed moment, a tipping point. It was the first time the monarchy had faced the full exposure of a scandal, led by the tabloids. When Wallis Simpson picked up that day’s issue of the Mirror, she felt a dismay that many other royals after her would come to know, all the way up to the tragedy of Princess Diana in the 1990s. (Edward’s reference to Wallis’s ‘grossly magnified countenance’ was hyperbole. The Mirror had used a studio portrait commissioned by Mrs Simpson, albeit blown-up.)
The national newspapers at the time were owned mostly by a small clique of self-made men whose fortunes had been made with ink and whose peerages had been paid for by political patronage. They had the influence to support or destroy political careers, but until now the press barons had on the whole protected the monarchy as a necessary institution. Though they regarded the royal family as a useful source of harmless news that boosted circulation, they had also acted to keep minor royal scandals out of their papers – that is, until this scandal became too big to stifle.
Edward had met Mrs Simpson in 1931, while she was still married. She presided over a London salon where, according to the King’s own later recollections, the conversation was ‘witty and crackling with the new ideas that were bubbling up furiously in the world of Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, the New Deal and Chiang Kai-Shek’. Hitler’s ‘new ideas’ attracted the future King, out of a mistaken belief – popular at the 9time – that fascism would turn out to be a form of social engineering that would be good for Europe. His new mistress, unbeknown to him, was already on familiar terms with fascists. She was an intimate of the gregarious German ambassador in London, Joachim von Ribbentrop. Edward’s delusion that fascism could be congenial was matched by Ribbentrop’s delusion that the British upper classes did not really want war with Hitler and would be able to persuade the whole country to follow suit – an idea that Mrs Simpson’s salon encouraged and that Edward would eventually imbibe.
None of this was reported in the London newspapers when Mrs Simpson was granted a divorce in 1936, on the grounds of her husband’s adultery. The case was heard in provincial Ipswich and the King made a deal with the press lords that they would bury the story. As Edward noted later, ‘It was the miracle I desired – a “gentleman’s agreement” among editors to report the case without sensation.’ The agreement held for a while, although American newspapers were not party to the deal and sent reporters to nose around Mrs Simpson’s new London home. They were seen off by a police sergeant and two constables, but this little drama only heightened the reporters’ appetite for a story, and they soon discovered that the King had given Mrs Simpson a $125,000 emerald necklace.
It seems extraordinary to us now, but there was so little exchange of gossipy news across the Atlantic that the British public could remain totally ignorant of what was going on. Meanwhile, the American papers soon got wind of the most sensational development: the King had made up his mind to marry Mrs Simpson. On 16 October, the New York Journal had splashed ‘king will wed wally’.
Hidden from the public, a furious conflict of loyalties had raged between politicians, the press lords, the leaders of the Anglican Church and palace courtiers. One newspaper, The Times, was regarded as way above the common herd and custodian of the nation’s integrity and 10the arbiter of royal behaviour. Geoffrey Dawson, the paper’s editor, had significant influence with the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, and was appalled by the prospect of the marriage. Baldwin felt the same way, but in the face of an erupting scandal, the two men remained silent. A government minister later noted that no ‘quality’ newspaper wanted to be first to break the story – the establishment felt that the government should give the lead, and The Times would not speak without the government’s assent.
The Mirror, without that constraint, was looking for a cue to break the story, and it came on 1 December when the Bishop of Bradford reprimanded the King in public, saying in a speech to his Diocesan Conference, ‘I ask you to commend him to God’s grace, which he will so abundantly need … if he is to do his duty faithfully. We hope that he is aware of his need. Some of us wish that he gave more positive signs of his awareness.’ On 3 December, the edition of the Mirror that had so distressed Edward and Wallis came off the presses at 3.53 a.m. The paper’s editor-in-chief, Harry Bartholomew, had arrived in the middle of the night and remade the front page, wearing an overcoat over his pyjamas. The final of five editions, it was printed so late that it was seen only in London and the surrounding Home Counties; readers elsewhere were left ignorant of the crisis.
The text, under the headline ‘god save the king’, seems from this distance flavoured with pomposity and false bravado. It read:
Until this week the Daily Mirror rigidly refrained from commenting on or publishing news of this situation. We have been in full possession of the facts but we resolved to withhold them until it was clear that the problem could not be solved by diplomatic methods. This course we took with the welfare of the nation and the Empire at heart. Such is the position now that the nation, too, must be placed in possession of the facts.11
Bartholomew, who had a brilliant gift for sensational journalism, had had enough of Fleet Street’s collective self-censorship and brought the Mirror out in support of the marriage, more from an innate distaste for the hidden hand of the ruling political class than out of any fealty to the King. In the large black type that he pioneered, Bartholomew spoke as if he represented the voice of the nation: ‘the nation insists on knowing the king’s full demands and conditions’.
This kind of language and the directness of the way it addressed the monarchy and the government was new – and shocking to the ruling caste.
One of the most conflicted players in the crisis was Winston Churchill, who was at the time regarded as a maverick without prospect of future power. He believed as strongly as anyone in the role of the monarchy, and for this reason he backed the King – but he thought Edward was suffering a temporary passion and he did not support the marriage to Mrs Simpson. Along with his close friend Lord Beaverbrook, the owner of the Daily Express, he believed that if Mrs Simpson could be scared away from England, the King ‘would retire to Windsor Castle. Close the gates. Pull up the drawbridge. Challenge Mr. Baldwin to throw you out if he dares.’
But who, exactly, would do the scaring? Measures were, in fact, taken to frighten Mrs Simpson. Bricks were thrown through the windows of her apartment and vitriolic, threatening letters were sent. Asked many years later if he had personally thrown a brick through her windows, Churchill replied, ‘No, but Max [Beaverbrook] did.’ Beaverbrook denied it but said it was possible that somebody from the Daily Express had done so. ‘It was all a lot of fun,’ he said. Like many details of the abdication crisis, that particular anecdote took a long time to emerge, surfacing only in 1985 in the diaries of Sir John ‘Jock’ Colville, one of Churchill’s closest aides during the war and the palace press secretary when Queen Elizabeth came to the throne.12
The Mirror may have thought it was in complete possession of the facts, but that was far from the case. Nor did it have any ability to make royal lives more transparent, cheeky and insubordinate though it may have been. Edward’s abdication provides a revealing prologue to future problems that would be caused by the gap between what the public thinks it knows about the monarchy and the reality. At that time, nobody holding power, secular or sacred, believed that it was important or even decent for the public to know anything about the inner life of the monarchy. Had it been possible, it would have been shocking.
Moreover, there was no serious journalistic commitment to making any significant change. The insolent tone of the Mirror’s new tabloid vocabulary was just noise – there was never any intention of backing it up with serious reporting. Nor were the proprietors and editors ever close to toying with or supporting republicanism; they remained instinctively supportive of the Crown.
Some years afterwards, an editor of the Mirror recalled the suppression of coverage of Edward’s relationship with Mrs Simpson, and warned, ‘A newspaper that wishes to retain the confidence of its readers should be ruthless and remorseless in revealing all the news it can get.’ Many editors today would happily accept those words as a reasonable mission statement, but few then ever really matched up to it.
Royal historians have generally been kinder in their portraits of the Windsors than any reporter should be. This is not to say that they are all hagiographers (although some of them are) but rather that the royal family has been remarkably diligent in controlling their archives and protecting their skeletons. In the 1950s, when James Pope-Hennessy wrote an acclaimed biography of Queen Mary (knowing full well the nightmare of the marriage), the proofs were submitted to Sir Alan Lascelles, known as Tommy, a long-serving and omnipotent courtier who guarded the Windsors with the avidity of the ravens who watch 13over the Tower of London. Lascelles approved: ‘Is there anything in the book that could offend, or distress, The Queen herself, or any members of her family? – Answer, No, nothing. It is throughout written in perfect taste – the book of a gentleman, rare in these days…’
Well, yes, if you equate being a gentleman with being party to a cover-up. Censored and bowdlerised biographies drain the life from their subjects. Amazingly, we are still discovering things about Queen Victoria that make her seem far more human than the figure depicted in those rebarbative public statues of her that remain in cities across her former empire – for instance, we now have ample evidence that she enjoyed a very healthy sex drive.
Edward’s abdication was a serious distraction for both the government and the people at a time when Hitler’s aggressive plans were clear and Britain was ill-prepared to meet them. Against this background, the King cut a woeful figure. He was self-absorbed, petulant and uxorious to a fault. The secret service knew of Mrs Simpson’s liaison with the German ambassador, and they also knew that the King was attracted to the authoritarian style of rule as manifested by Mussolini and Hitler, as were many around him.
To be fair, the taste for appeasement in the 1930s was shared – for a while, at least – by both the honourable and the dishonourable, patriots and traitors. But none of this really lessens the odium that is now justifiably attached to the Duke of Windsor, as Edward became after the abdication. His character fell far short of what is necessary in a monarch – and especially of what would be required of a monarch in a war to save western civilisation.
It’s important to remember that none of the Duke’s flirtation with fascism was public knowledge at the time, nor for many years afterwards. For decades following the abdication, the royal family’s advisers ensured that any details of the Duke and Duchess’s meetings with the Nazis while they were travelling in Europe were purged from 14public records. As we will see, by the end of the war, Churchill was so concerned that the monarchy would be harmed if the Duke’s treachery were revealed that he assigned civil servants to comb the German archives for any damning documents and remove them.
When the new King, George VI, moved into Buckingham Palace in 1937, both the country and the monarchy required calm. Prince Albert deliberately chose the regnal name of George to signal continuity with his father, subtly implying that his brother had been an aberration. The British press was more than ready to welcome to the Crown this wholesome-looking family, with its pleasant mother, Queen Elizabeth, and two charming daughters, Elizabeth and Margaret, then aged ten and six.
The family had lived away from the limelight and the traumas of the palace, at 145 Piccadilly, a grand eighteenth-century mansion on the fringe of Mayfair. Despite its twenty-five bedrooms and a ballroom, it was considered relatively modest for a royal residence. To the press, the new royal family presented a perfect picture of the refurbishment of the monarchy; scandal involving them seemed unimaginable.
On being parachuted on to the throne, the King had complained to his cousin, Lord Louis Mountbatten, ‘I never wanted this to happen. I’ve never even seen a state paper. I’m only a naval officer, it’s the only thing I know about.’
As it turned out, the King needed a lot of tutoring in world affairs. We have recently learned that in September 1939, shortly after the outbreak of war, he asked Churchill (who was by then serving as First Lord of the Admiralty) whether it would be better for Britain to side with Germany against Bolshevism. This clearly echoes the thinking of his brothers and might seem shocking: it certainly undermines the standard view of George VI as a sound patriot untainted by his predecessor’s attraction to tyrants. But in view of what we now know about George V’s sons, and the atmosphere in which they grew up, perhaps 15it is not anomalous after all. Prince George, the Duke of Kent, was as forgiving and tolerant of Hitler as Edward, perhaps more so. And so it is entirely possible that Edward, rather than being an outlier, has been deliberately used as a convenient scapegoat to draw attention from the opinions of the other princes. The Duke of Kent was spared ignominy when he was killed in 1942 in an air crash in Scotland while serving in the RAF. Someone who had served a long time in the Windsor court said of him, ‘I always said what luck he died a hero’s death, otherwise…’ The ‘otherwise’ hangs in the air ominously and hides a lot, as we shall discover. Churchill’s anxiety to remove the damning evidence about Edward from the German records after the war could well have been fuelled by his personal knowledge of the similar opinions of the Duke of Kent and his memory of what the King had said to him in 1939. Had this history come out, it would have been a devastating blight on the House of Windsor.
As the German blitzkrieg was unleashed on France, the Duke and Duchess ended up in a villa in the Portuguese resort of Estoril, not far from Lisbon. Aware that German agents were reaching out to the Duke to enlist him as a possible King-in-waiting should Britain fall, Churchill ordered that he should be bundled off to the Bahamas and to the sinecure position of Governor General. Nonetheless, in Britain’s darkest hour, Churchill was forced to endure complaints from the Duchess about being trapped in a colonial backwater. I found a note in the National Archives that was personally typed by the Duke, asking Churchill for permission for the Duchess to go to New York to do some shopping. Churchill forbade it.
* * *
The phantoms of that time, with many lingering questions about loyalty and allegiances within the royal family, continued to dog Elizabeth 16II as late as 2018, when her father’s conversation with Churchill about whether communism was a greater threat than fascism was revealed in a new biography of Churchill by Andrew Roberts. The Queen seemed to be subtly responding to this in her Christmas message when she reminded us of her father’s service fighting the Kaiser:
My father served in the Royal Navy during the First World War. He was a midshipman on HMS Collingwood at the Battle of Jutland in 1916. The British fleet lost fourteen ships and 6,000 men in that engagement. My father wrote in a letter: ‘How and why we were not hit beats me.’
In fact, the real story was more dramatic than her version of it. Her father had been sick in his quarters when the Collingwood came under heavy attack by torpedo fire, but leapt out of bed and went directly to command the response from a gun turret. He ended a letter to his father, George V, with jingoistic enthusiasm: ‘It was certainly a great experience to have been through and it shows that we are at war and that the Germans can fight if they like.’
CHAPTER 2
THE WAYWARD SISTER
To those of us able to remember it, the Britain in which Elizabeth came to the throne in February 1952 was a grim place. The war had drained the Treasury and exhausted the nation. The euphoria of a great victory was short-lived. Churchill and the Tories were thrown out of office. A Labour government under Clement Attlee attempted a mammoth task – to create a welfare state, with radical changes to health care and education, while still maintaining the apparatus of a global empire. Six years of war were followed by nine years of austerity, including food rationing. All fit men were conscripted into the military at the age of eighteen to serve two years of national service. Many of them went to war – dealing with an insurgency in Malaya and, more deadly, serving in the hot surrogate of the Cold War, the Korean War.
The winter of 1946–47 was the most severe for fifty years. The Thames froze at Westminster. The nation’s fuel supplies ran low and coal had to be rationed. Later in 1947, the wedding of Princess Elizabeth and Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten brought some light relief after the months of misery. Nominally as a wedding present, British communities abroad sent hundreds of tons of non-perishable food to Britain. It was Elizabeth’s choice to distribute it as she saw fit. Under her direction, it was sent to the kitchens of Buckingham Palace and carefully sorted into food parcels that went out to widows and pensioners, each with a personal note from the princess.18
So one thing that should frame any assessment of Elizabeth’s long reign is the perception that she – as much as any of her subjects – has made the journey from that grim condition of Britain and that concept of British imperial power to a time when there are few if any remnants of that world. She must remember. To her it must seem like two different planets. And she must remember this at a different level from most people, because as an inexperienced young woman she was thrust into the role of personally embodying the nation in all its pretensions, however absurd. She had no choice. Who could not remember something like that?
On the surface, Elizabeth’s coronation in 1953 seemed like a great moment of national harmony. Although barely 2 million homes had television sets, more than 20 million people watched the ceremony broadcast by the BBC. Gathered around the small, hazy, flickering black and white projections of a cathode ray tube, people felt they were part of a rare moment of national communion, similar to the celebrations held in every city, town and village to celebrate Admiral Nelson’s victory at the Battle of Trafalgar 150 years earlier, when beacons were lit on every chain of hills to send forth the news.
The vision of a young queen passing through a sacred medieval ritual for the first time in the full view of all of her subjects was as compelling as it was novel. Televising the coronation was a radical step in palace policy. It promised an enlightened intention to make the monarchy more approachable. It was a spectacle that gripped the world with its anachronisms and its magic.
Another and more cynical view of this is that Elizabeth was being used by politicians in what would now be called a rebranding exercise, under the rallying rubric of A New Elizabethan Age. Her youth and beauty were obvious. She was perfect for the part. The coronation was stage-managed to be a carefully controlled display of extravagance at a 19time when millions were living in under-heated homes and carefully planning every meal within the rationing regime.
One of the architects of the display was Churchill, Prime Minister once again after his post-war banishment. Against the advice of the Minister of Food, he ordered that sugar and sweet rationing should be ended in time for the coronation. The ministry warned that chaotic shortages would follow, but they were overruled.
The nation did seem to be on a sugar high, as the Queen was swept up in a carnival designed to reinforce the great imperial narrative and make her people feel good. She rode from Westminster Abbey in a gold coach first used by George III in 1762, although her escort was based in military barracks that were freshly painted but a squalid slum inside. There followed a review of the Royal Navy’s fleet, a great ball at Windsor Castle, replete with fireworks, and at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden the premiere of Gloriana, a suitably unctuous concoction by Benjamin Britten dedicated to the monarch.
Elizabeth’s reign had opened with a box office hit on a scale that Hollywood could only dream of. There were other balls, banquets and parties displaying an extravagance that had not been seen since before the war. When it came to putting on a show, it seemed that even in straitened circumstances no country could do this kind of thing with more élan. It was part Cecil B. DeMille, part Ruritanian romance and part Noël Coward, with a dress code out of P. G. Wodehouse.
Three years later, the promise of a New Elizabethan Age had lost any conviction. The edifice of imperial power disintegrated with the debacle of the Anglo-French invasion of Egypt at Suez, at a cost to the Treasury of more than £300 million and a great deal of prestige and moral authority. But the warnings of a sugar shortage were false. There were plenty of sweets.
* * *
20During the broadcast of the coronation, a few sharp eyes noted what seemed like a remarkable moment of intimacy between two of the wedding guests, as the Queen’s younger sister, Princess Margaret, removed a fleck of dust from the uniform of a royal aide, Group Captain Peter Townsend. This suggestive glimpse of affection gave a fleeting clue that there was a ticking time bomb in the palace. The British press did not draw attention to the incident, even though editors knew full well what it signified. By contrast, in America and Europe a liaison between the two had been suspected for some time and hinted at in gossip columns. Sharman Douglas, the daughter of the American ambassador in London, was a close friend of Margaret and warned her that the episode in the Abbey had been covered sensationally in New York. In some ways, the charade of Edward and Mrs Simpson was being replayed, with the British public left unaware of a story that was titillating millions of people abroad.
For the Queen, the affair would be a first trial by public scrutiny that could be damaging to her. What could be more sensitive and personal than to see her young sister’s private life suddenly caught in the glare of worldwide attention? And yet the moral framework that dictated the outcome was not the Queen’s to decide. Even worse, the Queen was torn between being two different people: the supportive elder sister and the monarch, who by tradition as the head of the Church of England was supposed to uphold the strictest codes of behaviour. Her response was not made any easier by the advice of her courtiers, who, on the whole, had no grip on the public mood.
* * *
Back in February 1944, with the Allied invasion of Europe only a few months away, a slim and somewhat gaunt RAF officer had been called in to the Air Ministry in Whitehall. Peter Townsend was a veteran 21fighter pilot who had flown in the Battle of Britain. The rate of attrition for front-line pilots had been high, and Townsend seemed older than his years. He had suffered what would now be recognised as post-traumatic stress disorder and after being promoted to Group Captain had been withdrawn from active service and asked to head a training unit. Then, having made the move, he was summoned by Sir Charles Portal, Chief of the Air Staff, who told him that George VI was looking for a new equerry. Townsend had only a vague idea of what an equerry did, but Portal explained that it was his job to attend to the King from the moment he woke to when he retired. Moreover, the King was dissatisfied with his current equerries, who were traditionally chosen on the basis of family or regimental connections, and he was keen to recruit somebody noted for their fighting record. It was typical of George VI that he wanted the company of people who were familiar with the world beyond the gilded cage of the palace.
Townsend was interviewed by the King, and his life was completely transformed. After the interview, Sir Piers Legh, Master of the Royal Household, known as ‘Joey’ to a few intimates, was leading Townsend from the royal apartments in Buckingham Palace when they encountered two young women. Legh introduced Townsend to Princess Elizabeth, then seventeen, and Princess Margaret, who was fourteen.
Townsend was so successful at the job that he became indispensable to the family as Deputy Master of the Household. After the King died in February 1952, his widow, now Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, asked Townsend to become the comptroller of her new home, Clarence House. Townsend took the post and a few months later was granted a divorce from his wife Rosemary, who was given custody of their two sons. Two months later she married John de László, son of the portrait painter Philip de László.
Townsend’s palace duties had placed a strain on his marriage, made worse by the King’s illness and death. Princess Margaret had been 22particularly close to her father, and she and Townsend found solace in each other’s company, and fell in love, despite the enormous implications. The London newspapers had voluntarily covered up the affair until the coronation, hoping that the palace would acknowledge it themselves. Commander John Colville, who had served Churchill subtly and skilfully as a Whitehall mandarin during the war, and been appointed private secretary to Elizabeth before she became Queen, was badly miscast as the official contact between editors and the palace, bumbling along hoping the affair would fizzle out, not realising that the situation had become very serious.
Less than two weeks after the coronation, the story broke in Britain. A blistering front-page editorial in The People stated:
It is high time for the British public to be made aware of the fact that newspapers in Europe and America are openly asserting that the Princess is in love with a divorced man and that she wishes to marry him … Every newspaper names the man as Group Captain Townsend.
Taking aim at Colville, The People stressed that this story had appeared ‘without meeting any official denial’.
To many of the Queen’s subjects, rather than being shocking, the affair was a touching romance, and a heart-warming news story. The fact that Townsend was fifteen years older than Margaret was hardly disgraceful; at twenty-three, she was surely old enough to know her own mind. Moreover, Townsend had not been the guilty party in his divorce.
In the palace, Townsend reported to the queen’s private secretary, Tommy Lascelles. When Townsend told his boss how deeply he and Margaret were in love, Lascelles said, echoing Lady Caroline Lamb’s description of Lord Byron, ‘You must be either mad or bad.’ Lascelles has been cast as something of a pantomime villain in the TV series The Crown – a reactionary who stood in the way of anything at odds 23with rigid Victorian protocol. He certainly looked the part, with an old-fashioned wardrobe of dark vested suits with narrow trousers, a watch chain, shirts with starched collars and a moustache worthy of a First World War general. His background was typical for his position: he came from a well-connected family where royal service was regarded as a vocation that required humourless discipline. He had also been in palace service long enough to know – and conceal – a lot of scandalous history. Both Townsend and Margaret detested Lascelles; she later said, ‘I shall curse him to the grave.’
In his memoir, published in 1978, Townsend said that Winston Churchill opposed the affair, but Colville’s diaries, published seven years later, tell a different story. Colville records that Lascelles drove to Churchill’s country house, Chartwell, in Kent to tell him that Margaret wanted to marry Townsend. Churchill’s first reaction, after Lascelles had left, was to remark that ‘the course of true love must always be allowed to run smooth’ and that nothing should stand in the way of ‘this handsome pair’. Lady Churchill disagreed, and warned her husband that he would be making the same mistake as he had in the abdication crisis by supporting the King.
Her view was shared by much of the country’s establishment. They insisted that the Queen should be protected from such scandal and invoked both the Royal Marriages Act, which decreed that until she was twenty-five Margaret needed her sister’s consent to marry, and Canon 107 of the Church of England’s laws, which forbade divorce. This view prevailed and Townsend was exiled to Brussels to serve as an air attaché at the British embassy.
The Queen had struggled to balance the competing pressures of political, legal and ecclesiastical advice on one side and her feelings for her hot-blooded sister on the other side. When first told of the romance, the Queen and Prince Philip invited Margaret and Townsend to supper at the palace, much in the way that parents concerned about 24a proposed union would want to test out the seriousness of the couple’s feelings. Of course, this wasn’t an audition in which Townsend needed to prove his character; he had been serving the family for nearly twelve years. Knowledge of the Townsends went back even further than that: Philip had served on a Royal Navy destroyer under Captain Michael Townsend, Peter’s brother. At Buckingham Palace and Windsor, Philip and Townsend had played squash and badminton together. During the supper Philip showed no concern about the couple’s age difference, and in his man-to-man style of banter he was more openly optimistic that a way would be found for them to marry than the Queen. ‘He was on our side, a real chum,’ Margaret said later.
But there was a third voice with influence over the Queen: her mother. Nobody knew Townsend better than the Queen Mother – after all, she had taken him from the palace to oversee her own household. Before that, she had witnessed Townsend’s devotion to the King, and the King’s pleasure in his company. But this was a memory that influenced what she now felt about the affair – there was no way, she believed, that the King would have approved the marriage of his youngest daughter to Townsend. There is no record of how much weight the Queen gave to the different voices. In the end, she advised her sister that if she waited two years until she was twenty-five, she and Townsend would be allowed to marry. And Margaret believed her.
Thus ended the first act in a two-act tragedy that would dog Princess Margaret for the rest of her life, expose the monarchy to ridicule and embolden the newspapers to begin scrutinising the Crown in a way that was new and far more invasive than anything in recent history.
* * *
I gained a far closer view of these events by arriving in London on the eve of Act Two. In the summer of 1955, I took a job as a sub-editor on 25a tabloid, the Daily Sketch, located in the half square mile between the Inns of Court and Ludgate Circus that was referred to collectively as Fleet Street. Rarely has any profession been shaped more palpably by a specific locus than British journalism: since the eighteenth century, this area – first known as ‘Grub Street’ – had served as the national listening post for everything from political and financial intelligence to scurrilous gossip. From here, pamphleteers like Daniel Defoe and William Cobbett had fired off broadsides against the monarchy and ruling caste. Charles Dickens had been a gumshoe reporter exposing rascals of many kinds. In the late nineteenth century came the first popular daily newspapers, their fortunes rising with the appearance of a new middle class. In 1955, this concentration of the power of print journalism was at its apogee. To a young journalist arriving from the provinces (in my case from a tabloid in Liverpool), it was one of the most mesmerising places in which to pursue a career.
Like many papers of that era, the Daily Sketch is now long gone. It was soon clear to me that the staff had the hunger of underdogs, something I recognised from having seen a similar situation in Liverpool. In Fleet Street, the tabloid to beat, the mother of all tabloids, was the Daily Mirror. The sui generis Bartholomew tabloid that had shaken Edward VIII had evolved into the bestselling paper in Britain, a daily firebrand that, under a visionary editor, Hugh Cudlipp, had allied itself with the Labour Party to become a political force. Bert Gunn, editor of the Daily Sketch, is far less remembered now than his poet son Thom, but in 1955 he was an experienced and respected editor with a big problem on his hands. The Sketch was superficially similar to the Mirror but lacked its mass-market instincts. Gunn had been hired from Beaverbrook’s Daily Express to breathe new life into it. His idea was to combine the sophistication of the features in the Express with the robust ‘common man’ appeal of the Mirror. I was assigned to the features department.26
A few weeks after I joined the paper, on 21 August 1955, Princess Margaret reached her twenty-fifth birthday.
Like the rest of Fleet Street, we knew that Townsend had returned from exile and that, with Margaret’s birthday approaching, the saga of their relationship was about to be publicly reignited. Townsend was free from the constraints imposed by the palace and was shadowed every day by reporters. Margaret was on a royal tour of the Caribbean, where she was able to read the American papers. Once more, they regarded it as the biggest royal story since the abdication. ‘meg, flier will wed’ was a headline in the New York Post, displaying a certainty in the success of the relationship that the couple themselves lacked.
Editors at the Sketch were also aware that during Townsend’s banishment to Brussels, Margaret had been orchestrating a brilliant charade. There were continual reports of the revels of ‘the Margaret set’, a crowd of aristocratic hedonists she collected around her, which included a number of male escorts. However, we weren’t aware that Margaret and Townsend had been able to keep their affair alive with weekend trysts at the country houses belonging to discreet friends. The birthday came and went, and nothing happened.
Gunn, quoting unnamed sources, said that the Prime Minister, Anthony Eden, who had succeeded Churchill, was opposed to the marriage. He didn’t need to underline the hypocrisy of this: Eden was a divorcee who had remarried a much younger woman himself. But all the old players in the palace and the clergy were once more lining up against Margaret and Townsend. Nobody knew what the Queen herself thought, and it seemed clear that the monarchy was heading for a debacle that would sell a lot of newspapers.
CHAPTER 3
ROYAL FAMILY VALUES
Bert Gunn was wrong in his suggestion that Eden was opposed to the marriage. In fact, the Prime Minister had worked out a plan to circumvent the Royal Marriages Act, but nobody outside a small circle of ministers and the palace officials was aware of this. The truth about these events was withheld until the release of official papers nearly fifty years later, in 2004, which is a telling sign of how little Fleet Street ever really knew and how the Queen’s own feelings and role were obscured by the inept officials around her.
Eden’s proposal was that Margaret could keep her title and her civil list allowance of £6,000 a year and would also receive another £9,000 when she married. The key device was that the Act could be amended to remove her from the succession, meaning that she would no longer need her sister’s permission to marry. As Eden explained it to Commonwealth Prime Ministers, ‘Her Majesty would not wish to stand in the way of her sister’s happiness.’
Eden’s hand had been strengthened when Lord Kilmuir, the Lord Chancellor and the government’s chief law officer, sent a note to Eden saying that in his view the Act would not even apply to Margaret: ‘This Act has no pride of ancestry, is badly drawn and uncertain and embarrassing in its effect.’
The draft of the plan was completed on 31 October, and Eden prepared to tell Parliament that the Royal Marriages Act ‘was out of 28harmony with modern conditions’. Three days later, however, Margaret announced that the marriage was off.
In August, though this was unknown until the release of the papers in 2004, Margaret had written to Eden explaining that her feelings about Townsend were uncertain: ‘It is only by seeing him that I feel I can properly decide whether I can marry him or not.’ In his memoir, Townsend gives no sign of being aware that Margaret has cooled towards him. He describes being reunited with her in the sitting room of Clarence House: ‘As we rediscovered one another, we realised that nothing had changed. Time had not staled our accustomed, sweet familiarity.’
No attempt was made to conceal this meeting from the press, but Commander Colville remained as unhelpful as he had been two years earlier, answering that ‘no statement is at present contemplated’ and never moving beyond that inflexible position.
The Mirror reflected the general opinion: never had the Crown been given such appalling advice. ‘If not “at present”, then when?’ A Berlin tabloid, Morgenpost, felt the same: ‘The basic error was the unbelievably amateurish fashion in which public opinion was being led by the nose.’
Townsend’s recollections suggested that he had enjoyed the drama: ‘Each time the Princess and I saw one another or dined with friends, the suspense and the speculation mounted.’ The Queen joined the couple for tea at Clarence House in what must have been a tense encounter. Townsend never disclosed what was said. Nor did Margaret. Townsend knew that the Cabinet was being briefed on the Royal Marriages Act but interpreted this as a sign that Margaret would be allowed to marry only ‘at crushing cost to herself’.
At the Daily Sketch, we were still in the dark about the Prime Minister’s efforts on behalf of the couple but sensed that public opinion was growing restless. The people wanted an end to the farce, and a 29majority wanted the marriage to go ahead. Still nobody knew what the Queen herself thought – or intended. Suddenly that no longer mattered, because she found herself being advised that she had no choice in the matter. An editorial in The Times on 26 October argued that the real issue was neither theological nor legal but related to the status of the Queen – millions of people saw themselves reflected in her, and her family provided a role model for them. Given this standard, thundered The Times, the vast numbers of the Queen’s subjects could not regard the marriage of Margaret and Townsend as marriage at all.
It is doubtful that the Queen agreed. This line of attack invoked a popular attitude that was at least thirty years out of date, and disclosed a view of society that was also way behind that of the Prime Minister. But the paper had effectively spoken for the Queen, whether she liked it or not. At the Sketch, we did not know what was really happening in Westminster any more than Townsend, who, on the day The Times editorial appeared, went to see Margaret at Clarence House, having drafted a public announcement for her that began ‘I have decided not to marry Group Captain Townsend’. A week later, on 31 October, Margaret delivered an amended version, beginning, ‘I would like to make it known that I have decided not to marry Group Captain Townsend … Mindful of the Church’s teaching that Christian marriage is indissoluble, and conscious of my duty to the Commonwealth, I have resolved to put this consideration before others.’
Margaret’s words were probably disingenuous. One of her biographers, Christopher Warwick, said that during the twenty-two years he knew her, she clammed up whenever the Townsend affair was raised, saying, ‘It was a long time ago and I have forgotten it.’ She was more explicit in 1980 with another biographer, the Daily Mail columnist Nigel Dempster: ‘If Lascelles hadn’t told me that marriage was possible, I would never have given it another thought. The relationship 30would have been out of the question and Peter could have gone off quite peacefully. Instead we waited for ages and then discovered it was quite hopeless.’
Weighing up all the differing accounts of the affair, Margaret comes across as a skilled dissembler who used the crisis to cast herself in the most sympathetic light. In the established narrative, she was the victim of an establishment stitch-up, an idea that she went along with, though it had, in fact, collapsed. The Times had fired off the final salvo of a past generation, but it was enough to unnerve Townsend.
Margaret must have felt gratified when, at the end of that tumultuous week, she opened the Sunday Times to find that one of the nation’s most esteemed historians, Sir Arthur Bryant, had written a tribute to her. Completely embracing the idea of her noble act of self-sacrifice, he absurdly compared her to British heroes such as Elizabeth I, Thomas Becket, Admiral Lord Nelson, Florence Nightingale and – bewilderingly – Scott of the Antarctic. Margaret’s decision, Sir Arthur asserted, ‘was an act of history and one that will not be without its effect on the future of our time’.
The role of the thwarted lover was a perfect part for Margaret to play for the rest of her life, but it was based on a fairy tale. Eden’s plan that would have allowed her to marry Townsend had required very few sacrifices from her; after all, succession was never going to be an issue as Charles and Anne had already arrived. Over time, even the most conservative of subjects would have come to terms with the marriage, especially since Townsend was a model of propriety.
But Margaret had got over Townsend: absence had not made the heart grow fonder, and when he returned from Brussels, the age difference was more apparent. He was less exciting than some of the people she now knew. She was ready to have some fun, and marrying Townsend would have ended it.
The affair changed Margaret for ever, not by inflicting a wound 31of love that would not heal but because she had become a world celebrity, and she liked it. Eventually the cost of this level of celebrity would be lethal. In the process, the royal family had been made to look careless in its handling of what was, at its heart, a family crisis, as well as a national one. Afterwards the lives of the two sisters would increasingly diverge. One had escaped the glass cage; the other was indentured to it.
