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Chapter 8

ANY HOPE THAT, by leaving London for a supposedly private honeymoon in the country, Elizabeth and Philip could escape national attention or at any rate pretend it did not exist, was quickly disappointed. The public hunger, raised to such a level, could not simply be switched off at the moment when it became convenient to do so. The couple were due to spend the first part of their honeymoon at Uncle Dickie’s house Broadlands, near Romsey in the New Forest. When they got off the train at Winchester, the Princess was observed to have a corgi with her – symbol of the domesticity she longed for. But the crowds would not allow it. Having learnt of the whereabouts of the Princess and the Duke, sightseers lay in wait. On the first Sunday after the Wedding, in a foretaste of what was to come, a mass of them surged into Romsey Abbey, where the couple were due to attend Matins. Some – unable to get seats in the church – carried ladders, chairs, and even a sideboard into the churchyard to stand on, in order to get a better look. After the service, less voracious royal enthusiasts queued (it was an age of queuing) outside the Abbey, in order to take their turn at sitting in the seats that royalty had sat in.¹

After a week under siege at Broadlands the royal couple at last evaded their pursuers by travelling north to Birkhall.² They returned to the Palace in time for the King’s fifty-second birthday on December 14th. ‘The Edinburghs are back from Scotland,’ Colville wrote the following day. ‘She was looking very happy, and, as a result of three weeks of matrimony, suddenly a woman instead of a girl. He also seemed happy, but a shade querulous, which is, I think, in his character.’³ One reason for querulousness was that, among all the prewedding preparations, one aspect of their future had been neglected: where they planned to live. Following their engagement they had chosen Sunninghill Park, near Ascot, as their future country home. In August, however, Sunninghill was gutted by fire. Chips Channon recorded that he had been asked if he would let or lend his house to the couple for several months while they found somewhere else, but had turned down the request on the grounds that it would mean too much upheaval.⁴ Instead, they obtained a lease on Windlesham Moor, near Sunningdale in Surrey. This was not immediately available, and in any case was only for weekend use. Their London residence was to be Clarence House in Stable Yard, at the south angle of St James’s Palace. This imposing four-storey mansion had been built for William IV when Duke of Clarence in 1824. Its most recent occupant had been the Duke of Connaught, who had died in 1942, since when it had been unoccupied. In addition to the neglect of an elderly royal duke, there had been serious damage from bombing. Renovations took more than eighteen months, and the couple were unable to move in until July 1949.

In the meantime, they lived in Buckingham Palace. Crawfie believed that this was a mistake, that the Princess needed to get away from her parents.⁵ Philip – beginning to experience the brutal consequences to his own life of such a marriage – may have felt the same. However, as the popular papers eagerly pointed out, the Palace was convenient for the office: Philip had been given a desk job working for the Director of Operations at the Admiralty, and was able to walk there every morning along the Mall, despite the stares of passers-by.

It was an odd period for both of them: Elizabeth at first living a life which on the surface had altered remarkably little since before her engagement, Philip undergoing the profound change of outlook, circumstance and expectation that accompanied his choice of mate. Both worked, though neither of them very strenuously. They took a keen interest in the Clarence House renovations, often visiting the initially gloomy building. Sometimes they joined in – Elizabeth amusing herself by mixing the paints for the walls of the Adam-style dining-room, which was hung with Hanoverian portraits, and by furnishing the house with wedding presents. When eventually they moved in, the Princess and her husband had separate but communicating bedrooms, with the dressing-tables only a few feet from the joint door, so that they could talk through it when they were getting ready for dinner. According to the Duke’s valet, John Dean, when Bobo MacDonald was helping Elizabeth and he was helping Philip, the couple ‘would joke happily through the left-open door.’⁶

Getting settled into suitable accommodation took some time to sort out. Money was quicker – though by no means automatic. The Select Committee report on the Civil List was delivered promptly on December 11th, and discussed on the floor of the House six days later. The debate – as the Manchester Guardian put it – was of ‘peculiar interest’.⁷ Against the background of the Wedding on the one hand, and the split vote in the Committee on the other, it provided the first opportunity since the Abdication for a proper public exploration of the role and function of the Monarchy. It was also an exercise in temperature taking: for the vote was a free one, and the House, with its large Labour majority, was as far tilted away from automatic monarchism as at any time since 1918.

Conservatives and Liberals supported the report proposals. The difficulty was on the Government side. Sir Stafford Cripps, moving the acceptance of the report, spoke of the importance of the functions the Princess and Duke had to perform, and of the proof of that importance provided by ‘the intense interest and enthusiasm displayed by all sections of the population at the time of their marriage’. For the Conservatives, Anthony Eden reminded the House that the British ambassador in Washington spent £20,000 a year just on entertaining. Labour left-wingers responded with arguments that were to become staple fare on such occasions. There was talk of the excessive cost of the ‘servants and hangers-on of the Court,’ and of ‘spivs and drones and butterflies’ around the royal couple. A Scottish MP compared the Duke’s £10,000 (‘in addition to a cushy job at the Admiralty’) with the forty shillings a week paid to men blinded in the war. Others suggested that the ‘Scandinavian type’ of monarchy was cheaper and better.

In addition, there was a ‘moderate’ opposition to the Cripps Lascelles package – not republicanism, but a belief that (in the words of Maurice Webb, a Select Committee member) the country both wished to retain the Monarchy ‘and desired it to be simple, austere and democratic’. From the Palace’s point of view, such an argument was much more dangerous than that of the Monarchy denigrators, because it struck a genuine chord among the loyal but luxury-denied public; and because it sought, in reasonable tones, to reassert parliamentary control of royal expenditure. The decisive group, however, was the powerful body of Labour MPs who both believed in the Monarchy as a useful device, and felt – with Nye Bevan – that if it was to be done at all, it had to be done in style: in the words of Arthur Greenwood in the debate, ‘with proper dignity’.

It was to this group that the Prime Minister appealed when he spoke in support of a ‘ceremonial’ monarchy – whose value, he implied, derived both from its ability to meet a need for public theatre, and from the exemplary behaviour of the principal actors. In what amounted to a Labour theory of Monarchy, Attlee spoke of the need for ‘simple lives and approachable people’ at the heart of a democracy, and of royal ceremonials as an alternative to the sinister rituals of totalitarianism. The financial details before the House, he suggested, were intended to make such ceremonials and necessary symbolism possible, by giving ‘these young people the facilities for doing the kind of work the general public wanted them to do, of visiting and getting into contact with people in the United Kingdom’ and outside, especially in the Dominions.

Attlee’s advocacy worked, but it failed to supply the all-party support for the Select Committee recommendations which the Palace would have liked. Although no more than thirty-three MPs voted for a left-wing amendment to give no increase in the Civil List at all, an amendment proposed by Webb to limit the couple’s total to £40,000 was defeated only by 291 to 165 – indicating a large dissentient vote among Labour backbenchers, and a significant rate of abstention among ministers. A mere 122 Labour MPs opposed Webb’s amendment, while 106, including eleven ministers, were unaccounted for. In short, if Labour had voted on its own, the Webb reduction to the List payments would have been carried. As it was, the Princess and Duke got their increases in spite of, not because of, the votes of the governing party.⁸

‘There was much criticism of the sums proposed but none of the Monarchy as such,’ noted Colville who, with other courtiers, keenly watched the proceedings from the Distinguished Strangers’ Gallery. ‘There was, however, a large school on the Labour backbenches which said the country wanted a “Scandinavian monarchy” with less pageantry and pomp rather than a “ceremonial monarchy”. Cripps spoke admirably and was most effective in debate and Eden was also telling.’⁹ Chips Channon blamed the Palace for the tactical error, as he saw it, of failing to invite enough ordinary MPs to the Wedding, which had resulted in a lengthy and embarrassing debate. He concluded that ‘the Royal Family had, I think, a deserved jolt.’¹⁰

THE FIRST DUTY and ambition of an Heir to the Throne was swiftly accomplished: early in the New Year, Princess Elizabeth became pregnant. The announcement was not made until the summer. In the meantime, the publicity created by the Wedding, combined with the Princess’s new status, helped to increase her list of engagements.

With the marriage, as Ziegler has written, ‘the monarchy gained a new and incomparably brighter focus of attention. The King was in no sense forgotten . . . but in a curious way he was written off. Elizabeth was the future.’¹¹ The young Princess who signed no documents, made no decisions and uttered few words in public that were her own, continued to have a hypnotic effect wherever she went. As time passed, however, there was a shift in the tone and quality of the adulation. By chance, the marriage had coincided, not just with a crisis, but with the nadir of the nation’s peacetime fortunes. Thereafter, both the economy and living conditions began to improve. It was as if the Wedding had been a good omen; and the Princess – a healthy, composed, pretty, wifely symbol of post-war youth and possibility, with her exquisitely designed couture that made imaginative use of clothing coupons, and her picture-book war-hero husband – stood for a new alternative to drabness.

It was an enjoyable life, and less demanding than the frequency of her newsreel appearances made it appear. Yet it was also – as Colville perceived – a remarkably aimless one, devoid of any content apart from pleasing and being seen. The Princess’s private secretary, an ambitious and high-flying diplomat on secondment, had had a more exciting life than this, and he determined to inject some element of purpose, or at least of understanding, into the repetitive royal round. Once the Wedding was out of the way, he set himself the task of extending his employer’s political education.

He found the Princess easier to instruct than her husband. After going through some paperwork with both of them, he noted that Philip became impatient if his interest was not immediately aroused; and that Elizabeth concentrated better on details.¹² In order to advance the Princess’s knowledge, though possibly also to increase his own, he hit on the idea of getting her included in the distribution of Foreign Office telegrams. The less technical ones, he wrote to Lascelles, ‘would give HRH an idea of world affairs which she cannot possibly get from the newspapers.’¹³ The Foreign Office consented, as did the King, and the first box of telegrams arrived on January 16th. In addition, rather like Crawfie and Queen Mary before the war, Colville decided to take the Princess on educational trips. Shortly after the arrival of the first FO box, they sat and watched a Foreign Affairs debate in the House of Commons. As the Princess entered, ‘all eyes there turned in her direction,’ according to the press.¹⁴ The Princess sat demurely, while the Duke, who accompanied them, made lively comments.

Compensating for the deficiencies of a royal education was an uphill struggle. Though she appeared to read the telegrams, Colville was disappointed to find Princess Elizabeth at first uninterested in politics. However, his attempt to widen her experience continued. In February, he took her to a juvenile court for a day, in the not very optimistic hope of persuading her to improve her knowledge of the social services.¹⁵ In this, he achieved more success than he perhaps realized. At any rate, the Princess picked up enough to assist her in one of the most necessary of royal skills, that of talking brightly to distinguished guests about areas that concerned them. When Eleanor Roosevelt stayed at Windsor Castle the same spring during a visit to England for the unveiling of a statue of her husband, she was greatly flattered that the King’s daughter sought her out with a question about homes for young women offenders. She found the Heiress ‘very serious-minded’ and she was impressed ‘that this young Princess was so interested in social problems and how they were being handled’.¹⁶

There were also other horizon-expanding excursions in addition to the formal round. In May 1948, Tom Driberg complained to Lord Mountbatten that the Princess and Duke had made the wrong kind of visit to the Commons at the wrong time. Before the war, he pointed out, members of the Royal Family had dined informally in private rooms at the House with MPs of the then ruling party. He suggested taking the Princess to the House at Question Time. ‘To get the ethos, the feel, of Parliament’, he wrote, ‘she really ought to watch Bevan, Gaitskell, Harold Wilson, Morrison etc. parrying the everyday cuts, often pretty effectively and wittily.’¹⁷ If this particular suggestion reached Clarence House, it was ignored. However, Driberg’s belief that the Princess had no contact with leading Labour figures was not quite correct. In fact, a meeting with a couple of the Labour politicians on his list had occurred only the month before.

This took the form of a small dinner party held by the Prime Minister and his wife for the royal couple, to which a few of the younger members of the Government, including the President of the Board of Trade, Harold Wilson, and the Minister of Fuel and Power, Hugh Gaitskell, and their wives were invited. The gathering was indeed a strange one. The politicians could not decide whether it was appropriate to admit to the kind of feelings their constituents would have had at such an intimate meeting with royalty, or to put on a show of jacobin disdain. While they waited to greet the royal guests in the drawing room at No 10, they made nervous schoolboy jokes. ‘We had been talking about capital punishment,’ Gaitskell recorded. ‘Harold reminded us that it was still a capital offence to rape a Royal Princess!’ When the Princess and Duke arrived, the ministers and their wives were faced with the problem which often seems to beset prominent socialists in the presence of royalty: whether it was sillier to bow and curtsey, or not to. Dora Gaitskell could hardly bring herself to curtsey, but Mrs Attlee, entering into the spirit of things, ‘suddenly swung round and curtsied low to the Duke.’

After dinner, each minister was summoned to the sofa, to spend a quarter of an hour in conversation with the twenty-two-year-old guest of honour, who must have found the experience as taxing as they did. Gaitskell formed the same opinion as Colville. ‘She had a very pretty voice and quite an easy manner but is not, I think, very interested in politics or affairs generally’, he concluded. She tried hard, but evidently found it more difficult to think of things to say about the fuel economy than about homes for bad girls. Gamely, she remarked that her grandmother’s house was the coldest she knew. Why? inquired the minister. The Princess replied that ‘it was because of her national duty’.¹⁸

Colville’s ambitions to extend his employer’s range (and also to extend his own) did not cease. In February, he proposed that the Princess and the Duke should visit Paris to help strengthen ties with an ally that was beginning to recover its economy and self-confidence after the war. The proposal was accepted by the Foreign Secretary and the King, but at first it encountered difficulties with the royal couple. Elizabeth was enthusiastic about the prospect of a trip that would take her to a city and country she had never visited, and which would be a good deal more exciting than speaking to women’s organizations in the provinces, or sitting on sofas with middle-aged politicians. Philip, on the other hand, who had spent most of his childhood in or around Paris, was less thrilled. He also resented the way Colville did things that affected him without getting his opinion first. There was a row, but eventually he agreed.

The notional purpose of the visit was the opening of the Exhibition of Eight Centuries of British Life at the Musée Galliera in Paris, in a ceremony to take place in the presence of President Auriol on May 14th. The real aim, however, was to give the Anglophile section of the French public a chance to show its sympathies, after a decade of confusion. It was the first official visit by British royalty since the King and Queen had been sent on a similar mission of bridge-building in 1939. The precedent was not entirely propitious: though British royalty had been welcomed on that occasion, the visit had failed in its purpose of helping to create an unbreakable bond between the two peoples. Since 1940, French attitudes towards Britain had contained a complex mixture of emotions, including those of comradeship and suspicion in equal measure.

So it was a gamble – but it worked. The French government did everything in its power to build up the diplomatic importance of the visit, and the French public – mystified and fascinated by the royal wedding – seemed delighted at the opportunity to see and cheer a newly married Princess. The royal party was escorted to Versailles and given lunch at the Grand Trianon, where the tablecloths and napkins had been embroidered with ‘E’s and ‘P’s in their honour. A triumphal progress down the Seine was followed by a dinner and reception at the British embassy, where the Princess glistened with the Nizam of Hyderabad’s jewels; and there were visits, through thick crowds, to Fontainebleau, Barbizon, Vaux-le-Vicomte. It was, said the papers, the Norman Conquest in reverse: Elizabeth had conquered Paris. It helped that the Vicomtesse de Bellaigue had done her work well, and that the Princess spoke almost faultless French. Even the Communist press abandoned its normal silence on such occasions, and paid the Princess the indirect compliment of complaining that the police arrangements for her security made it impossible for ordinary Parisians to get a close enough look.¹⁹

The British Foreign Office privately expressed its satisfaction. ‘The latent enthusiasm of the French people for the pomp and pageantry of monarchy was clearly revealed,’ the British ambassador, Sir Oliver Harvey, wrote to Ernest Bevin. ‘It was an unusual experience to see the townsfolk of Paris cheer an English Princess from the Place de la Bastille.’ Yet the visit caused offence to some. General de Gaulle – opposed both to the current French government and to the Fourth Republic Constitution – was left off the Embassy invitation list, for fear of offending the President, and they had to do make do with the General’s brother, who was President of the Municipal Council of Paris, instead.²⁰ At home, some Scottish church organizations criticized the couple for visiting a racecourse and a Paris nightclub on a Sunday, and hence setting a most regrettable example to the Empire’s youth, ‘who look to their Royal Highnesses for guidance and inspiration’.²¹ The Princess used the trip as an opportunity to stock up with goods not available in Britain. When she got the HM Customs bill, she startled her private secretary by asking him crossly why he had made a full declaration.²²

The appeal of the Princess to the French lay partly in her international celebrity following the Wedding; partly in her appearance, especially what Colville, a keen connoisseur, described as her ‘beautiful blue eyes and superb natural complexion’;²³ and partly in a feeling that she stood for those who had grown up in the war, and could look hopefully ahead. In Britain too, the vision of the Princess as the ambassador, not just of her country, but of her generation, seemed to justify hopes for a freer, more fulfilling future for the war’s young inheritors. Invitations to speak to, and on behalf of, younger people proliferated. At the end of May, she attended a parade of youth organizations in Coventry; later she delighted dons and undergraduates in Oxford with a speech in the Sheldonian in which she declared that the universities were ‘a powerful fortress against the tide of sloth, ignorance and materialism.’²⁴

Meanwhile, the idea of the Princess as standing for the future was enhanced on June 4th, Derby Day, by the announcement of her pregnancy. The Princess broke precedent by appearing the same afternoon, ‘smiling and unabashed,’ at the Epsom Downs racecourse.²⁵ No child in utero arouses more interest than a royal one in the direct line. As Crawfie later pointed out, the only truly private period in the existence of a member of the Royal Family is between conception and the moment when the coming event is publicly known.²⁶ For Prince Charles, that period was now over. The world’s most famous foetus became the hapless recipient of baby clothes from all over the world, together with matinée coats, bootees and pictures of storks.

PRECEDENT was about to be broken in another way: the custom that had got ‘Jix’ Joynson-Hicks out of bed in the middle of the night in 1926 was discontinued. Royal propaganda presented the decision as an independent initiative by the King and Queen, and further evidence of their modernity. In fact, it only came about after a fight, and the forces of reaction nearly won the day.

Lascelles later claimed to have been the instigator of change. ‘I had long thought that the practice of summoning the Home Secretary to attend, like a sort of supernumerary midwife, at the birth of a royal baby was out-of-date and ridiculous’, he wrote in 1969, after his retirement. ‘The Home Office made exhaustive researches and assured me that it had no constitutional significance whatever, and was merely a survival of the practice of ministers and courtiers, who would flock to the sick-bed, whenever any member of the Royal Family was ill.’²⁷ The Home Office assurance was indeed categorical. ‘The custom is only a custom,’ Chuter Ede, the Home Secretary, wrote in June. ‘It has no statutory authority behind it and there is no legal requirement for its continuance.’²⁸

It was an opportunity to do away with a time-wasting and embarrassing distraction. The matter was one for the King, but the King demurred. According to Lascelles’s later account, when he put the proposition to him in the autumn of 1948, George VI agreed at once, ‘but the Queen thought differently, seeing in this innovation a threat to the dignity of the Throne. So I was told to hold my hand.’²⁹ However, Lascelles’s memory of what happened was not exact. Contemporary records suggest that a period of indecision preceded the royal negative. Correspondence in the Royal Archives includes a letter from Lascelles himself to the Home Secretary, written at the end of July, putting off an answer. In it he explained that the King had been particularly busy lately, ‘but hopes to give his full consideration to the question of your attendance at Princess Elizabeth’s accouchement when he gets to Balmoral next week.’ It was another month before the period of full consideration was complete, and the verdict communicated. ‘It is His Majesty’s wish’, wrote Lascelles on August 21st, ‘that you, as Home Secretary, should be in attendance when Princess Elizabeth’s baby is born.’³⁰ There the matter rested until November when, a few weeks before the birth, the King changed his mind. The clinching factor was not a sudden progressive impulse, or a newly acquired desire to dispense with a meaningless ritual – but a shocked discovery of the constitutional implications of hanging on to it.

What turned the tables was a visit to the Palace, on other business, by the Canadian High Commissioner. In the course of the conversation with the King’s private secretary, the envoy happened to speak of the Princess’s condition. Since the Dominion governments had as much stake in the birth of a future heir as the British one, he remarked, he supposed that when the baby arrived, he and the representatives of the other Dominions would be asked to attend, along with the British Home Secretary. It was a eureka moment. The point had never occurred to Lascelles, to the Home Office, to the Dominion Governments or – apparently – to anybody at all in 1926, at the time of the Princess’s birth. However, constitutionally it was indisputable – and, at a time of Commonwealth transition, politically it was unavoidable.

When Lascelles spoke to the King later that day, he was able, quite casually, to mention that ‘as he had no doubt realized, if the old ritual was observed, there would be no less than seven Ministers sitting in the passage.’³¹ The perpetuation of a custom popularly believed to involve the Home Secretary attending ‘as a sort of super-inspector to guarantee that the Royal baby is not a supposititious child!’ could scarcely be seen as an act of homage³² – least of all, if there were seven super-inspectors. According to Lascelles, the King was horrified at such a prospect, and his resistance immediately crumbled.³³ On November 5th, Buckingham Palace announced the ending of ‘an archaic custom’.³⁴

Perhaps a more personal factor also affected the Monarch’s judgement. The King had been unwell for some time, and in the autumn of 1948 his health took a sharp turn for the worse. On October 30th, a medical examination showed that he was seriously ill. Thirteen days later, his doctors firmly diagnosed early arteriosclerosis – with such a severe danger of gangrene to his right leg that they considered amputating it.

How much did the Princess know? The full significance of the diagnosis may have been kept from her, as it was from the King. However, the physical discomfort of her father, and the acute anxiety of her mother, must have communicated themselves to her during the last few days before her first confinement.³⁵

The burdens of being a monarch were not easily shed. Despite his illness, and the concern for his survival, the King was required to perform a constitutional function which the courtiers regarded as urgent. ‘As things stand at present,’ Lascelles wrote to the King on November 9th, while the doctors were considering their provisional diagnosis, ‘Princess Elizabeth’s son would be “Earl of Merioneth”, her daughter “Lady X Mountbatten”.’ To ensure that the child would be known, instead, as HRH Prince X or Princess Y, Letters Patent had to be prepared ‘before the baby is born,’ Lascelles stressed, ‘so that the official announcements may refer to him, or her, as a Prince or Princess.’³⁶ The King did as he was advised, and Letters Patent were rushed through and issued the same day. The move had an incidental consequence: it finally resolved, for the benefit of constitutional purists, an issue first raised after the birth of Princess Margaret, when it had been argued that the two princesses might have equal claims to the succession. By placing Princess Elizabeth in the same position as if she were the King’s son and heir, any theoretical doubt on this point was finally eliminated.³⁷

With Clarence House not ready and Windlesham Moor unsuitable, arrangements were made for the Princess’s confinement to take place at Buckingham Palace, just below her second floor bedroom, looking out towards the Mall. The American press reported ‘medical reasons’ for expecting the baby to be a girl³⁸ and a Ceylonese astrologer sent a horoscope – which Lascelles passed to the King for his amusement – promising a boy.³⁹ The astrologer was right. The Princess went into labour early in the evening of November 14th, and – attended by four doctors – gave birth to a baby boy shortly after 9 o’clock. Her husband, who played a game of squash during her contractions, was summoned from the Palace court immediately after the delivery to hear the news.⁴⁰ According to the official statement, the Duke ‘went into the Princess’s room to see her’ and then ‘went to see his son, who had been taken to the nursery.’⁴¹ Meanwhile, the crowd outside the Palace, far greater than the little gathering in Bruton Street twenty-three years before, became so large that the police had to cordon off the road. Despite appeals for quiet, the cheering continued until after midnight. ‘The bells rang, and a man going down the street outside our flat called “It’s a boy,”’ recorded Hugh Dalton. Pondering the future for such a child, and the future of the British Monarchy, he added: ‘If this boy ever comes to the throne . . . it will be a very different country and Commonwealth he’ll rule over’.⁴²

Few others looked so far ahead. Most newspaper commentary combined anodyne leading articles about the value and virtues of royalty with sentimental descriptions of the baby’s appearance. Crawfie thought he looked like George V,⁴³ John Dean described him as ‘a tiny red-faced bundle, either hairless or so fair as to appear so’.⁴⁴ A few days after the birth, Cecil Beaton was called to the Palace to take the first official pictures of mother and baby. ‘Prince Charles, as he is to be named, is an obedient sitter,’ he noted. ‘He interrupted a long, contented sleep to do my bidding and open his blue eyes to stare long and wonderingly into the camera lens, the beginning of a lifetime in the glare of publicity.’⁴⁵ As a royal gesture, the Princess instructed that food parcels made up from gifts received at the Palace should be distributed to mothers of all children born on November 14th.⁴⁶

The baby Prince was placed in a gilt crib, with lace frills around it, and the entire Palace staff was invited to visit the nursery to take a peek. A royal pram was brought out of storage, along with a royal rattle once used by the Princess.⁴⁷ According to Crawfie, in order ‘to give him as good a foundation as possible,’ for the first few months the Princess breastfed him.⁴⁸ Before the Prince had reached the age of two months, however, there was an unfortunate hiatus. In January, it was announced from the Palace that Princess Elizabeth had contracted measles. There were no complications. Nevertheless, it was feared that the baby might catch the infection. It was therefore decided that mother and baby should be separated, until the disease had run its course.⁴⁹

IF THE PERIOD following the Wedding was a happy one for the Princess, the immediate aftermath of her first confinement was tense and anxious, as the full gravity of her father’s illness – with its terrible implications, not just for him, but for her as well – was brought home to her. Two days after the birth, the King yielded to the advice of his doctors that a long-projected tour of Australia and New Zealand, similar to the one he and the Queen had undertaken as Duke and Duchess of York in 1927, should be postponed. The decision was a bitter disappointment, but he had no choice – he had been told that such a journey might delay his recovery, and even endanger his leg.⁵⁰

The moment was a turning point. From this time on, the Heiress Presumptive and her young, healthy family became the present, as well as the future – her energy and composure linked in the public mind to the visible fatigue of the ailing King. Though still in his early fifties, the King looked and behaved like a man much older, and had become increasingly difficult for his family and advisers to handle. He remained a loving and deeply devoted father, who enjoyed nothing so much as a private family occasion. In matters of state, he was punctilious, honest, and stoical to a fault. But his ability to deal with complicated matters, never great, diminished still further under the impact of his illness. Although, ultimately always willing to take advice, he became increasingly obstinate.

There was also an intensifying of some long-established traits: and in particular his bad temper. ‘He had his explosions,’ says one of his former advisers. ‘He would explode if he read something in the paper that the Prime Minister hadn’t told him about. We used to call them his “gnashes”. When they occurred Princess Margaret was very good at defusing them.’⁵¹ One friend of the princesses, who used to stay at Sandringham and Balmoral, recalls the King’s ‘prep-school sense of humour,’ and rollicking enjoyment of practical jokes. He also remembers his ‘Hanoverian bark’ if something annoyed him. The subject of his displeasure was often politics. However, everyday incidents could also provoke an outburst. Once, when they were shooting at Sandringham, a man walked past and the King said, ‘He didn’t take his bloody hat off.’⁵² According to another ex-courtier, the Monarch ‘used to lose his temper with anyone around.’⁵³

Some people wondered whether he had a touch of the petit mal. Others put it down to the frustration caused by his own intellectual limitations, and the need to cover up. Alec Vidler, a canon at Windsor who often dined with the Royal Family, found him ‘really very simple,’ and also ‘difficult to get on with because he talked in an excitable manner’.⁵⁴ Another aide, meeting the King for the first time in 1947, was taken aback by his irascibility and apparent inferiority complex. It was as if, he recorded, the Monarch’s displays of wrath and emphatic manner were devices to hide his ignorance and weakness.⁵⁵

In March 1949, the King underwent major spinal surgery to restore circulation to his leg, carried out in a surgical theatre constructed at Buckingham Palace. He was well enough by June to be driven in an open carriage to watch the Ceremony of Trooping the Colour, while his elder daughter rode confidently at the head of the parade. Pictures of him, however, show a drawn, tired old man. He was now a semi-invalid, and the rest of his life was to be a series of alarms, remissions and new alarms, with alternating episodes of relief and anxiety, against the background of an unspoken foreboding. His wife and two daughters admired, adored, and felt protective towards him – as they always had. But as his health deteriorated and his ability to cope diminished, his dogmatism grew, and so did the pressure on those around him. It was heightened by a desperate resistance to the truth. ‘The Queen never allowed you to contemplate the fact of the King’s illness,’ recalls a former aide.⁵⁶

The result was a collective self-deceit at Court, which made a realistic look into the future impossible to discuss. The King’s ill-health also had the effect of increasing his elder daughter’s sense of independent responsibility, as she assumed more and more of his functions. Outwardly, the Princess showed no sign of strain. Indeed, she and the Duke – with a male heir promptly provided, and efficiently nurtured by a retinue of helpers – embarked on a brief episode of social gaiety. As pre-war Society began to re-emerge from hibernation, the royal couple were to be seen at the houses and events frequented by others of their kind, or in the company of show business personalities, for whom both princesses had a particular penchant. Ordinary citizens bought photos of their favourite film stars. The King’s daughters invited them to dinner, or to stay. When Princess Elizabeth celebrated her twenty-third birthday in April 1949 at the Café de Paris, a fashionable restaurant in Coventry Street, following a visit to The School for Scandal at the New Theatre, the royal party was joined by Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh, the leading actor and actress of the show. Together, the royal and theatrical party ‘tangoed and sambaed, waltzed and quick-stepped’ the night away, before going on to a nightclub for more of the same.⁵⁷

For a time, both princesses took up with Danny Kaye, then at the height of his fame. John Dean recalled seeing the American comedian ‘capering round Princess Elizabeth’ on the lawn at Windlesham Moor.⁵⁸ At grand social occasions, the Princess and the Duke were inevitably the main attraction, and they learned to play their parts. In June 1949, Chips Channon recorded his impression of the couple at a ball at Windsor Castle, mainly attended by the clever, artistic, smart members of the emerging ‘Princess Margaret set’. Elizabeth was wearing a very high tiara and the Garter, and Philip, also with the Garter, was in his naval uniform. ‘They looked like characters out of a fairy tale’, wrote Channon, ‘and quite eclipsed Princess Margaret, who was simply dressed.’⁵⁹ This was one kind of fancy dress. There was also another. At a ball given by the American ambassador in July – in a curiously snobbish piece of royal whimsy – the Duke appeared as a waiter, wearing a white apron, and his wife as a maid.⁶⁰

That summer they moved into Clarence House, away from the direct surveillance of the King and Queen. For a few months, they were able to lead the semblance of a normal family life – husband, wife and infant son, a single, separate unit under the same roof. The arrangement, however, was soon upset by the resumption of Philip’s active naval career. In October 1949 – following a period at the Royal Naval Staff College at Greenwich – he was appointed First Lieutenant and second-in-command of HMS Chequers, leader of the First Destroyer Flotilla of the Mediterranean Fleet, based in Malta. During the next two years, the Princess’s existence became, in one respect, the most ‘normal’ of her entire life. Crawfie wrote later that when Elizabeth was in Malta with her husband, she ‘saw and experienced for the first time the life of an ordinary girl.’⁶¹ Mike Parker, who had become a private secretary to the Princess and the Duke jointly, agrees. ‘This was a fabulous period,’ he says, ‘when it was thought a good idea for her to become a naval officer’s wife. It seemed it was the King’s wish that she should do so.’⁶² The negative side of such normality, however, was that she saw her husband only on those occasions that his location and leaves made possible.

Philip flew out to Malta on October 16th. The Princess was due to join him a few weeks later. Meanwhile, her emblematic role as young mother continued to develop. It was an age of exhortation, and the Princess’s demeanour and speaking style equipped her well for the task of delivering homilies to others – especially women – whose experience seemed to relate to her own. A couple of days after her husband left, she returned to the theme of ‘materialism’ – already denounced in her Oxford University speech – when she addressed a Mothers’ Union rally of young wives at Central Hall, Westminster. ‘Materialism’ in 1949 meant wasteful and unnecessary consumption – and therefore was subject to Government as well as moral disapproval. At the same time, she was required to lend her own moral authority – as a royal newly-wed and home-maker – to the Mothers’ Union condemnation of divorce.

In her speech, she spoke scathingly of the ‘current age of growing self-indulgence, of hardening materialism, of falling moral standards’. She also praised her audience’s emphasis on the sanctity of marriage.⁶³ The young wives applauded warmly when she declared that broken homes caused havoc among children, and that ‘we can have no doubt that divorce and separation are responsible for some of the darkest evils in our society today’. Children, she said, learnt by example, and would not be expected to do what parents were too lazy to do themselves. ‘I believe there is a great fear in our generation of being labelled priggish’, she added – indicating that the fear should not prevent responsible people from doing or saying what they believed to be right.⁶⁴

The speech plunged her into unexpected controversy. Advocates of changing the divorce laws reacted strongly. The Mothers’ Union, they claimed, was notorious for its conservatism on the subject, and they complained that royal sanction should not have been given for a standpoint that was increasingly contested. ‘The harm to children can be greater in a home where both parents are at loggerheads than if divorce ensues’, protested the chairman of the Marriage Law Reform Committee. Of course, the Princess had not written the words she had spoken, but – having allowed her personal image and reputation to be used in order to bolster a contentious point of view – she could not entirely escape responsibility for the sentiment. However, according to one member of the Royal Household, writing a few years later, there was no reason for the Princess to distance herself from her script. ‘King George and Queen Elizabeth were completely satisfied that their daughter had been right, for their views on marriage and family life were the same.’⁶⁵

Princess Elizabeth flew to Malta to join her husband on November 20th, accompanied by a party that included a lady-in-waiting, Lady Alice Egerton, Mike Parker, her maid Bobo, and Philip’s valet John Dean.⁶⁶ Prince Charles was left in the charge of nursery staff, much as Princess Elizabeth herself had been left in 1927, when her own parents, as Duke and Duchess of York, had embarked on their antipodean tour.

According to Dean, the Princess’s life in Malta was not markedly different from that of anybody else similarly placed. However, normality and ordinariness were only relative. Most service wives did not have a retinue of devoted helpers. There was also something else that singled her out: the presence and hospitality of Uncle Dickie. It added greatly to the convenience and comfort of the Princess that the ever-solicitous Lord Mountbatten happened to be based at Malta in his current role in command of the 1st Cruiser Squadron of the Mediterranean Fleet, and that he was more than happy to make his house, Villa Guardamangia, available to the royal couple.

The Princess’s party stayed till the end of December, when Chequers was sent with six other warships to patrol the Red Sea, following disorders in Eritrea. Dean recalled later that Princess Elizabeth had been very excited about her first Malta trip, ‘although she was probably a little sad at leaving Prince Charles behind’.⁶⁷ She did not, however, display any obvious consternation or – as some mothers might, after five weeks’ separation – find it necessary to rush back to him as soon as she returned to England. Instead, she spent four days at Clarence House attending to engagements and dealing (according to the press) with ‘a backlog of correspondence,’ before attending Hurst Park races, where she saw Monaveen, a horse she owned jointly with her mother, win at 10–1. Only then was she reunited with her son, who had been staying with her parents at Sandringham.

Yet the Princess could be forgiven for enjoying the novelty of her visits to Malta – a haven of comparative privacy, and freedom from official duties. ‘They were so relaxed and free, coming and going as they pleased . . .’ recalled Dean. ‘I think it was their happiest time.’⁶⁸ Philip was delighted to have returned to the life he knew and loved, and which depended on his abilities, not on his marriage. What for him, however, was a restoration of the status quo ante was a revelation for her. Though she lived in greater luxury than others, she did many of the same things as them, and in a similar way. Parker recalls that she would go down to the ship at the bottom of the road which led from the villa and ‘generally mucked in with the other wives’. There was a lot of social visiting, having tea and dining with other couples. ‘She spent only ten per cent of the time being a Princess,’ he says. The ten per cent was mainly accounted for by Uncle Dickie who ‘tried to get her into the admirals’ strata’.⁶⁹

There were some necessary courtesy calls. She was required to visit Archbishop Bonzi, and admire the views from his hilltop residence. Otherwise, to a degree that was barely imaginable in Britain, she was left alone. When Philip was busy, she drove her own Daimler, either solo or with a female companion, around the island. When he was free, she accompanied him on swimming expeditions with the Mountbattens, who would take a launch to the creeks and bays around Malta and Gozo, and they would sometimes sleep on board. She would watch her husband at some sporting event, or dine and dance with him at the local hotel – protected by the management and unharassed by the press. If she missed Charles, helping with a party given by Lady Mountbatten for a hundred children on board ship may have provided some consolation.⁷⁰

In April, Princess Elizabeth’s second pregnancy was announced. She spent her twenty-fourth birthday on Malta, watching her husband and uncle playing polo. Then she returned to England. The baby was due to be born in August, this time at Clarence House. As her time approached, thousands of people gathered outside, many of them hoping for a glimpse of the heavily pregnant Princess.⁷¹ Bobo MacDonald responded to the tension by whipping herself up into a frenzy of work.⁷² On August 15th, her mistress gave birth to a baby girl. Afterwards, Prince Charles, aged twenty-one months, was held up to the window to wave back at the onlookers.

The Princess took some time fully to recover. She had been expected to resume her public duties in October, but – on doctor’s orders – had to postpone or cancel all engagements for another month. There were further cancellations in November because of a ‘severe cold’. Later the same month – shortly after Charles’s second birthday – she flew to Malta to spend Christmas with her husband, while the children were taken to Sandringham to stay with their grandparents. Meanwhile, Philip had been promoted to Lieutenant-Commander, and at the beginning of September 1950 he was given command of the frigate HMS Magpie. The Magpie had been ordered to provide an escort for the Commander-in-Chief’s despatch vessel, HMS Surprise, for a visit to Philip’s relatives King Paul and Queen Frederika of Greece, in Athens. Princess Elizabeth accompanied her husband on the trip – and together they were warmly welcomed in the Greek capital.

Not everybody shared the devotion of a Bobo MacDonald. In January, the whole Royal Family’s education was dramatically advanced by the unexpected treachery – as they saw it – of Crawfie, now Mrs Buthlay, who had decided to cash in on her royal experiences. A letter from Princess Margaret to her former governess in March 1949 indicated concern at the Palace at the preparation of a revelatory book.⁷³ There may have been an element of misunderstanding. After the book was written, the Queen was approached for permission, and even saw proofs.⁷⁴ However, there was no doubt about the royal displeasure when the book was serialized, against the Royal Family’s express wishes, in the American Ladies’ Home Journal.

In March – spurred by the excitement caused in the United States – Woman’s Own ran it in Britain, advertising extracts as ‘The Loving, Human, Authentic Story of The Little Princesses’. The Palace tried to throw doubt on the accuracy of the account at every opportunity. ‘The Princess is not a bad sailor’ insisted the Comptroller of the Household in reply to a well-wisher who, on reading that the Heiress suffered from sea-sickness, had helpfully donated a patent remedy, ‘and to show how facts can be distorted, the voyage to the Channel Islands – on which occasion Miss Crawford reports that Her Royal Highness was prostrate – was in fact so calm that it was impossible to tell one was at sea, except for the subdued hum of the engines’.⁷⁵ Undeterred, Mrs Buthlay wrote a stream of additional books and articles over the next few years, drawing on the same store of knowledge, though ever thinner and more repetitive as the store ran out.

Eventually, to the great satisfaction of Buckingham Palace, she over-reached herself by writing in imaginative detail about a royal event as if she had witnessed it, before it had taken place, and then finding herself unable to prevent publication of the article after the event had been cancelled. Her literary career ended forthwith. Mrs Buthlay died in 1986, unmourned at Buckingham Palace. According to a royal aide who went to the Palace a few years after the rumpus, ‘the only thing I was told was that letters signed Bongo or Biffo should not be put in the bin because they were probably from cousins. Letters from Marion Crawford should be handled with a very long pair of forceps.’⁷⁶ Her name is still taboo: mention Crawfie to older royalty, and they stiffen. Yet there remains a little tragedy about the lack of a reconciliation. For the princesses, and especially Princess Elizabeth, were closer to Crawfie than almost anybody during their most formative years, and the bonds of understanding and affection had been strong.

Today it is difficult to appreciate an age of innocence in which Crawfie’s recollections caused such a sense of outrage. As A. N. Wilson puts it in his introduction to the 1993 reprint of Marion Crawford’s The Little Princesses, ‘though few books were written so mawkishly, few can have been written with such obvious love’.⁷⁷ Kenneth Rose suggests that the Royal Family was angry because ‘their privacy had been purloined and sold for gain’.⁷⁸ Yet there had been earlier accounts of the princesses’ childhood, almost as mawkish, and also for gain. Perhaps it was the disobedience that caused most fury, rather than either the content or the motive.

The Little Princesses marked a watershed. For the former governess had stumbled on a discovery that was to blight the Royal Family for the rest of the century: the market in intimate details of royal lives was a rising one. The financial value of revelations was already known, and had been remarked upon within the Palace before the war. What had changed, and would henceforth grow with increasing rapidity, was the voracity of the public appetite, and the profits-led crumbling of inhibitions about feeding it.

There was an irony: Crawfie’s writings caused a frisson because of the tightness with which royal privacy had been guarded, and the refusal to treat even the most modest press request for personal information as legitimate. The instrument of this policy was the King’s press secretary, Commander Richard Colville – an unbending ex-naval officer with no knowledge of the press, which he treated with a combination of distrust and lordly contempt. There was also a grundyish aspect: former colleagues fondly recall his countenance when, confronted by the latest newspaper lèse-majesté, the corners of his mouth would turn down in horror.⁷⁹ Journalists called him ‘the Abominable No Man’, fellow courtiers dubbed him ‘Sunshine’. At the time of Crawfie’s offence, he had been in post for three years. The affair seemed to have a traumatic effect on him. So far from encouraging him to liberalize, it produced secrecy, greater hauteur, and greater prudery.

Commander Colville stayed at the Palace until 1968, a source of continuing aggravation to those on the press side who had to deal with him. His legacy – a belief that any titbit of above or below-stairs royal gossip was inherently interesting, because of the irritation its publication would cause to the Palace – still has its baleful effect. The Commander, however, was not alone in his attitude to the media. While George VI lived, his views received active support from Sir Alan Lascelles, who to some extent shared – even helped to inspire – the view that the Palace owed the press nothing, and that it would be better if the newspapers confined themselves to publishing official handouts.

Though author of the Princess’s Cape Town BBC speech, Lascelles regarded the technology of radio with a special wariness. Over-exposure, he believed, through such a direct medium as broadcasting, was one of the biggest potential dangers to the Royal Family – and a temptation to be resisted strongly.

At the height of the Crawfie furore, it was proposed that Princess Elizabeth should accept an invitation to broadcast to the Youth of the Empire on Empire Day. She herself was keen. Lascelles’s reaction, however, was unhesitatingly negative. ‘The world, as a whole,’ the courtier wrote in an internal Palace minute, ‘is pretty surfeited with broadcasts, and the last thing we want is for the world to feel that way about royal broadcasts.’ Christmas broadcasts, together with the occasional VE-Day or Silver Wedding, were quite enough. He therefore strongly advised against the Princess undertaking ‘an “out of the blue” broadcast this summer – or indeed at any time’.⁸⁰ No Empire Day broadcast took place; and Princess Elizabeth remained – Crawfie outpourings apart – tantalizingly visible yet inaccessible, until many years after her accession as Queen.