The Queen: Elizabeth II and the Monarchy

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.

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.

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.’

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.

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’.

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.’

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’.

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.

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.

Bobo MacDonald responded to the tension by whipping herself up into a frenzy of work.

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.

There may have been an element of misunderstanding. After the book was written, the Queen was approached for permission, and even saw proofs.

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’.

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.’

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’.

Kenneth Rose suggests that the Royal Family was angry because ‘their privacy had been purloined and sold for gain’.

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.

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’.

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.

Chapter 9

PHILIP RETURNED FROM MALTA in the summer of 1951 and bowed to the inevitable: that it was impossible to combine an active naval career with the role of active partner to the Heiress Presumptive – especially one who, because of the King’s illness, was expected to take on an increasing share of royal duties. It was a major sacrifice. He was barely thirty and, but for his marriage, his prospects of promotion to a high rank within the Navy of his adopted country were reckoned to be good. But he could not simultaneously accompany his wife, and command ships; his wife could not adapt her royal functions to suit his career; and he could not repeatedly take sabbaticals. When he left Malta, it was announced that he would not take up any further active naval appointments until after the return of the King and Queen from a Commonwealth tour now scheduled for the autumn. In fact, the break was a permanent one.

The result was a painful period of transition, which expressed itself in bursts of undirected energy and dismissive intolerance. According to his manservant, ‘he loved the sea and adored the Navy, and some of my gayest times with him were when he was serving’. After his return from the sea, he was ‘inclined to be moody and impatient’, and it was some time before he settled down to public engagements.

One of the butts of his impatience was the royal establishment, which he regarded as stuffy and old-fashioned. ‘Prince Philip was very hostile to Buckingham Palace – he didn’t like it, and he wanted his own show’, recalls a former courtier. ‘The gap between the Palace and Clarence House was very big.’

It was some compensation that, by 1951, the much smaller households of the Princess and Duke at Clarence House did constitute a quite distinct show – and one that worked with a degree of efficiency and harmony that would have been impossible if they had stayed longer in the same building as the King and the Queen. It may have helped that at the beginning of 1950 the suavely intelligent Jock Colville returned to the Foreign Office. In some ways, Colville had been a progressive influence, with an ambition to make the Heiress and her husband more socially aware. On one occasion he even made the suggestion to the Duke that he should work as a coal miner for a month – a proposal which was rejected on the grounds that ‘it would be playing to the gallery’.

Colville’s frequently possessive devotion to the Princess, however, had not made him the easiest of advisers for her husband to work with, and the atmosphere at Clarence House was more relaxed without him. His place was taken by Major Martin (later Lord) Charteris, a professional soldier who had spent much of the war in the Middle East, eventually running Military Intelligence in Palestine. Charteris worked for Elizabeth at Clarence House and then at Buckingham Palace for the next twenty-seven years. With the exception of her later Deputy Master of the Household, Lord Plunket, he came to know her as well as any courtier. His particular blend of wisdom, dry humour, friendliness, conservatism and selfless loyalty fitted her needs well.

Those who worked at Clarence House in the short period of its occupancy by the royal couple recall a happy, close-knit group of helpers, over which the influence of the busy and contented Princess, enjoying her duties and her pleasures, shone benignly. ‘Martin and I both loved to bask in her light’, says Mike Parker. ‘She was very good at making you feel part of her team and family.’

The mornings would be filled with letters and other business, the afternoons with visits. She and her husband would often lunch with the staff in the dining-room, in conditions that were less formal and much more intimate than anything possible at the Palace.

‘When we were planning daytime journeys, she was very good at making suggestions’, Parker recalls. ‘She showed an early maturity in discussing things and making decisions.’

Her responsibilities were widening. As yet, however, she had little knowledge of the conduct of Government business. Jock Colville had made his own contribution, by persuading the Foreign Secretary to let her see Foreign Office telegrams. In the summer of 1950, Charteris took a leaf out of Colville’s book, and raised with the Cabinet Secretary, Sir Norman Brook, the possibility of letting her see Cabinet papers as well. Brook consulted the Prime Minister, suggesting that the Princess should see minutes as well as memoranda, apart from any Confidential Annexes, as ‘a temporary experiment forming part of the general plan for giving Her Royal Highness a wider experience of public affairs’.

Attlee spoke to the King. Then he scribbled a note to Brook: ‘I think it should be permanent’, and it became so.

The Princess’s experience of public affairs extended in other, more traditional ways over the next eighteen months. In 1951 – year of the Festival of Britain – the Royal Family was in exceptional demand for ceremonial duties, and Elizabeth had to deputize for her father, because of his illness, on many occasions. In June, she hosted a dinner for her uncle, King Haakon of Norway. This time her father was too ill to attend the King’s Birthday Parade of the Brigade of Guards, with the ceremony of Trooping the Colour, on Horse Guards Parade. It was a vivid début. The tiny, compact figure, riding side-saddle in the scarlet tunic of Colonel of the Grenadiers – ‘a woman alone’, as The Times put it, at the centre of an all-male military event – was a telling reminder of her significance, not just as under-study, but as successor to the sick Monarch.

In the summer, the medical suspicion that George VI had cancer became stronger. In September, exploratory surgery confirmed it, and the King underwent the removal of his left lung. Once the severity of the illness was established, a variety of arrangements had to be made. To ensure that the constitutional functions of the Monarchy should continue without interruption, Lascelles took the necessary steps to have the Queen, the two princesses, the Duke of Gloucester and the Princess Royal designated Counsellors of State. Princess Elizabeth wrote to her father’s private secretary agreeing that this was the best thing to do, ‘for it will relieve the King of so much of the ordinary routine things’.

One routine thing was the general election. Before the operation, the King had asked the Prime Minister to make a decision about a poll before the start of his Commonwealth tour, planned for January. After it, Lascelles wrote to Attlee explaining that when this request had been made, the King had had no inkling that the trip would have to be put off.

The decision was now taken to hold an election on October 15th. On October 4th, Princess Elizabeth presided over the Privy Council preceding the Dissolution. Meanwhile she had been making her own preparations. ‘In view of the unfortunate turn in the King’s health,’ she wrote to her young dress designer Hardy Amies on September 24th, and ‘in the strictest confidence . . . I have strong reason to believe that he will be unable to undertake the tour of Australia and New Zealand. I would very much like you to prepare some sketches for me to see . . . as a precaution against any sudden decision for us to go in the King’s place.’

On October 9th, the King’s already postponed South Sea tour was cancelled.

It was to be a busy winter – the busiest, indeed, of the Princess’s life so far. Despite anxiety about the King, she and her husband decided to go ahead with a long-projected tour of Canada. This particular venture had first been mooted three years earlier. Elizabeth had been keen, but – as over the French trip – Philip had initially been opposed, saying that he wanted to settle down and start a family.

Their family was now well started and they had, at Clarence House, a settled home. With the other obstacle – Philip’s naval duties – also removed, the trip was scheduled for October 1951. Meanwhile, the proposed tour had expanded in ambition. The visit had at first been envisaged as a purely Commonwealth undertaking. However, in July, Lord Halifax – a former ambassador in Washington – had suggested that it would be impolite for the royal couple not to include in their itinerary a brief detour south of the border. So what Lascelles called a ‘pop-over’ holiday visit to the United States was tacked on, as an extra.