The Crown

by Robert Lacey

  As we shall see in the next chapter, the young Philip (26 years old in November 1947 when he married the 21-year-old Princess Elizabeth) might have encountered some racy ladies at the men-only Thursday Club whose luncheons he attended in Soho,9 but no solid evidence of marital infidelity has ever been produced. The furore of February 1957 contained a major dose of post-coronation hangover, with the newspapers seizing on the troubles in the marriage of the Duke’s private secretary, Mike Parker, whose separation from his wife Eileen became public on 3 February, while the royal yacht was in Portugal, leading Parker to resign 24 hours later.10

  Then there is the central question as to how much the Queen herself may have shared the general suspicions – did she hear or give any credence to the rumours? We follow Elizabeth in this episode as she goes to Covent Garden, and looks down meaningfully from the royal box at the dancing Ulanova, who stares back up at her as she takes her curtain call. But again, this swapping of glances is surmised. It is known that the Queen did attend Ulanova’s performance of Giselle at the Royal Opera House in October 1956 during her husband’s absence in the Pacific, but no personal exchange was recorded.11 The imagined sequence is intended to reflect the reality of what many people have wondered about the royal marriage, while leaving the truth in the drama as uncertain as it has always been in real life.

  1956 – Galina Ulanova dancing with the Bolshoi Ballet

  While The Crown depicts Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother as orchestrating Philip’s World Tour – remarking that Philip needed to ‘settle’ – it was, in fact, very much Elizabeth II’s own choice to accord her husband the honour of opening the Olympic Games in Melbourne. Then it was Philip who suggested that his Australasian adventure might be extended – with his wife heartily supporting this. Elizabeth loved the idea that her maritime husband should have the fun of taking the still newish Royal Yacht Britannia (in service 1954–97) on its first trip around the globe.

  Mike Parker – Lieutenant Commander Michael Parker VCO AM (1920–2001) – was an old friend of Philip’s, dating back to their naval service in the war, so the break-up of the Parkers’ marriage was exploited by the British press as a pretext for casting doubt on the state of the royal marriage.

  In October 1956, the central attention of Queen Elizabeth II – left alone at home, with her husband on the other side of the world – was focused on Egypt and Israel and on London’s attempts to maintain its ancient imperial control of the Suez Canal. ‘A squalid episode ends in a pitiable climb-down …’ complained the Daily Herald in those weeks, decrying Britain’s hapless misadventures in the Middle East that were to bring about the fall of a prime minister and produced something close to a national nervous breakdown. ‘Our moral authority in the world has been destroyed …’12

  One of the wonders of the pre-modern world, the Suez Canal was first opened in 1869, a visionary feat of engineering that linked the Mediterranean to the Red Sea, eliminating the long and hazardous voyage around the Cape of Good Hope, and shortening Britain’s links to its prized Indian possessions by nearly 4,000 miles. The inspiration and execution of the enterprise came from the French entrepreneur Ferdinand de Lesseps, but Britain soon got in on the act. In 1875 Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli bought up 44 per cent of the stock in the Suez Canal Company to make the British government the largest shareholder in the enterprise.

  In 1882 Suez effectively became part of the Empire, when British troops occupied Alexandria, making Egypt a British possession for the best part of 70 years. Then the 20th-century discovery of oil in the Middle East made Suez even more of a jewel in the crown. By the early 1950s more than half of Europe’s oil supplies travelled through the waterway with its surrounding Suez Canal Zone, a 120-mile strip garrisoned by some 40,000 British troops, many of them young men who were still serving their compulsory National Service.

  The pilots who shepherded the laden oil tankers and cargo ships up and down the Canal made up an elite cadre of French and British mariners, and there was little role for the local population. Not surprisingly, the Anglo-French mastery of Suez was a festering grievance to the Egyptian nationalist movement, headed from 1954 by the charismatic figure of General Gamal Abdel Nasser. The son of a postal clerk, Nasser had risen to the head of the Free Officers’ movement, which deposed the Egyptian King Farouk in 1952, and he became an eloquent inspiration to radicals across the Arab world – all of whom made British occupation of the Canal Zone a particular object of complaint.

  Britain’s post-war generation of politicians shrugged their shoulders. ‘Tell them,’ growled Winston Churchill to his Foreign Minister, Anthony Eden, in 1954, ‘[that] if we have any more of their cheek, we will set the Jews on them and drive them into the gutter from which they never should have emerged.’13

  Churchill was referring to the recently formed State of Israel, which had carved out its existence eight years earlier from the former British Mandate of Palestine in a bloody war that confronted the massed Arab forces dispatched from across the Middle East, fighting them to a standstill in 1947. Britain saw Israel as a natural ally against Nasser and the forces of Arab nationalism that dared to threaten British hegemony in the Middle East, and Israel became one cornerstone of Anthony Eden’s policy when he moved into 10 Downing Street as successor to Churchill in the spring of 1955.

  In dramatic terms, The Crown inhabits Britain’s two principal spheres of power and prestige – Buckingham Palace and No. 10 Downing Street. The series’ title and its continuous running narrative focus obviously on the Queen, but each season of episodes is structured to portray a new set of political figures. Monarchy provides continuity, while democracy generates change – well, that’s the theory, anyway. So, while Season 1 covered the Winston Churchill years of the early 1950s, Season 2 brings the story forward to Churchill’s successors, starting with Sir Anthony Eden, whose misfortune it was to be especially burdened by his association with the great man.

  As one of Britain’s youngest ever foreign secretaries – he was just 38 when he first got the job in 1935 – Eden had been Churchill’s helpmate through the difficult days of appeasement in the late 1930s, when he showed himself willing to sacrifice his political career by resigning over his opposition to Neville Chamberlain’s accommodation with Mussolini in 1938, a prelude to the notorious Munich Agreement later that year. Eden was subsequently rewarded by becoming Churchill’s Secretary of State for War, then Foreign Secretary and Leader of the House of Commons during the years of the Second World War, sharing Churchill’s glory and acting as his heir apparent as the old man plodded through his late seventies – finally, and reluctantly resigning in April 1955 at the age of 80.

  No prime minister in modern times has entered Downing Street with a more impressive résumé than Anthony Eden. Promptly calling a general election, which handsomely increased the Conservative majority by 60 seats, and enjoying 70+ per cent ratings in the new Gallup opinion polls that were just taking hold in Britain, Eden seemed set fair for glory. Still relatively young at 57, he retained the aura of the young crusader-against-appeasement, his matinée idol looks now enhanced with a greying moustache and brilliantined hair.

  But those who knew the private Eden were not so sure. ‘I don’t believe Anthony can do it,’ confided Churchill to just about anyone who asked his opinion.14 Highly strung and lacking close friends, the new Prime Minister was ‘an exceptionally tense, lonely and shy man’, in the words of his official biographer, David Thorpe.15 R. A. Butler, Eden’s feline colleague and Chancellor of the Exchequer, who had been Eden’s only possible rival for Downing Street, put it less kindly, describing his new boss as ‘part mad baronet, part beautiful woman’.16

  Eden’s solitary and nervous disposition had been sabotaged in April 1953 by medical misfortune, when a surgeon’s knife working to remove gallstones had slipped and cut into his bile duct. The accident nearly killed him, leaving Eden susceptible to migraines, liver failure, jaundice and a succession of abdominal infections requiring further surge
ry. To keep their patient going over these medical hurdles, Eden’s doctors prescribed him Benzedrine, the wonder drug of the moment. But this only increased the PM’s restlessness, as well as his sleepless nights. According to the photographer Cecil Beaton, Eden complained, rather strangely, about the noise made by the fashionable, small-wheeled Italian motor scooters that were just appearing on London’s streets – he said they kept him awake in Downing Street.17

  Restlessness, insomnia and mood swings – we now know these are the dangerous and routine consequences of taking Benzedrine. But in the 1950s amphetamines were casually dispensed by doctors as harmless stimulants, and their side effects were plaguing Britain’s Prime Minister harshly in the summer of 1956 when Egypt’s General Nasser dispatched Egyptian troops to occupy the Suez Canal Zone.

  Nasser chose 26 July 1956, the anniversary of his ending of the Egyptian monarchy, to make his move, which he announced in code in a speech that opened with some apparently random reflections on history: ‘I went back in my memory to what I used to read about the year 1854,’ he declaimed to the crowds massed in Cairo. ‘In that year, Ferdinand de Lesseps arrived in Egypt.’18

  De Lesseps was the code word – the signal to Nasser’s generals who were listening to the broadcast to order their troops into action – and the Egyptian leader repeated the Frenchman’s name 14 more times in the course of his speech, just in case his officers missed the alert. They didn’t. Taken by surprise, British troops surrendered the Canal Zone into Egyptian hands.

  ‘Hitler of the Nile’19 and ‘Fuehrer Nasser’20 were samples of the headlines in the newspapers the next day, and Anthony Eden naturally made the same connection. ‘Military action!’ we see him declaring emphatically to his cabinet in Episode 201 making his own attempt at Churchillian resolution. ‘There is only one proven way to deal with fascists!’21

  Eden had encountered Nasser in his days as Foreign Secretary and had sniffed at the Egyptian with a disdain that Nasser detected and fully reciprocated. The Prime Minister looked back to his own glory days in the late 1930s: ‘I was right about Mussolini. I was right about Hitler. And I am right about this fella …’22 But the problem with Britain, or Britain and France, directly retaliating against Egypt, was that the United Nations had moved quickly to play its own role in the Suez situation. A fair number of nations – not least the Soviet Union, which had sent Russian pilots to help keep Canal traffic moving – were sympathetic to Nasser’s anti-colonialist stance.

  ‘There can be no military action,’ argues Anthony Nutting, the young Minister of State whom Peter Morgan depicts as the voice of scepticism in Eden’s cabinet, ‘without support from the UN – support we do not have. We cannot go to war alone.’23

  Eden had, in fact, already taken account of this – and his solution to the dilemma was one of the most barefaced deceptions in modern British history. On 22 October 1956 British and French representatives met secretly with David Ben-Gurion, the Israeli Prime Minister, his Defence Minister Shimon Perez and Chief of Staff Moshe Dayan, at a villa in Sèvres on the outskirts of Paris. Eden had adopted Churchill’s advice to recruit ‘the Jews’, though not in an obvious or acknowledged fashion. In the following 48 hours the three nations cooked up a plot whereby Israeli forces would invade Egypt to take control of the Suez Canal, thus allowing Britain and France, both ostensibly taken by surprise, to pose as the honest brokers and peacemakers – ‘Shock! Horror!’ – and intervene to separate the combatants.

  ‘In the early hours of this morning’, we hear Anthony Eden explaining in apparently surprised and alarmed terms to Elizabeth II at the end of October, ‘the Israeli army launched an attack into Egyptian territory … The Egyptian army has mobilised a retaliatory force, and … Her Majesty’s Government has now issued a deadline to both Israel and Egypt to halt all acts of war and to allow Anglo-French forces into the country.’24 Six days later, on 5 November 1956, Britain and France landed paratroopers along the length of the Suez Canal, taking back possession of the waterway – but to little effect, since the Egyptians sank most of the shipping in the Canal before they withdrew, rendering the route impassable to navigation for the next six months.

  It was nearly 20 years before the details of the secret Anglo-French-Israeli collusion at Sèvres were publicly revealed by Lord Mountbatten in an interview in the 1970s.25 But Mountbatten himself, Chief of Naval Staff in 1956, said that he suspected the plot at the time. There was no way that massive British paratroop landings could have taken place without advance preparations that were widely known in military and intelligence circles. All through August tanks and armoured cars had been getting trucked down to Southampton and put on ships bound for the Middle East. So The Crown uses this military foreknowledge to create a fascinating confrontation between the Queen and Anthony Eden.

  ‘When you mentioned that the Israelis had launched an attack,’ says the Queen, looking quizzically at her Prime Minister in their audience of early November 1956, and speaking with a sharpness which makes Eden sit up with a jolt, ‘you didn’t seem surprised.’26

  This may be another ‘Stag Scene’ – we do not know the details. Apart from the Queen and Prime Minister themselves – along with their private secretaries who have prepared the briefs for their encounter – no one has the slightest idea what goes on in the weekly audiences between Britain’s theoretically ceremonial Head of State and her hands-on, elected Head of Government. The meetings usually take place in Buckingham Palace on a weekday evening when Parliament is in session – pushed back from 6 to 6.30pm at the start of the reign so that Elizabeth could enjoy the bath-time of her children, Charles and Anne.

  The primeministerial audience is supposed to cover the government’s policy and priorities of the moment, at home and abroad, along with details of cabinet personnel changes – who’s in and who’s out of favour. According to a few indiscreet prime ministers, the Queen greatly enjoys hearing Westminster gossip and takes a particular interest in matters where she feels personally responsible – the welfare of the Armed Forces, for example.

  But all these leaks have come from the political side of the fence. If Elizabeth II has ever discussed her audience conversations with her private secretaries, they have kept that information confidential. So this leaves a free hand for a writer to imagine what monarch and minister might have said to each other in this meeting – and addressing the height of the 1956 Suez Crisis, series creator Peter Morgan goes for the heart of the matter:

  ‘Have we colluded with Israel? In any way?’ Elizabeth asks Eden.

  And so the story comes out. Eden confesses to his monarch the details of the Sèvres conspiracy and the subsequent British invasion of Egypt, while the background music plays a theme, ‘Colluding with Israel’ …

  ‘Six days ago,’ admits Eden shamefacedly, ‘this Government met with representatives of the French and Israeli Governments in a small village on the outskirts of Paris, where a document was signed – the Sèvres Protocol …’27

  This opening episode of The Crown Season 2 suggests that Britain’s shrewd and still youthful constitutional monarch – aged just 30 that previous 21 April – saw through the prevarications of her duplicitous prime minister to make him confess the truth about his Suez deception. Half a century later, we still lack the evidence to be certain either way. We know that Elizabeth II had access in August, September and October 1956 to the intelligence documents which set out Britain’s advance plans for paratroop landings in the Suez Canal Zone in alliance with the French – the joint invasion that did indeed occur.

  So this does provide some historical basis for the Queen’s confrontation with Eden in this episode, which must, for the moment be judged to be a blending of both invention and the truth. And we should never forget that even invention – shrewd imagination applied to a close reading of the facts – can always constitute a valid reflection of the truth.

  CHAPTER TWO

  ‘A COMPANY OF MEN’

  NOVEMBER–DECEMBER 1956

&nb
sp; ON THURSDAY 17 JANUARY 2019, BRITAIN’S EDITORS cleared their front pages to cover an everyday car accident on a rural road in Norfolk.28 No one was killed, nor catastrophically injured. But the incident was reported on the scale of a national emergency, only to turn into a convulsive national debate when the 97-year-old driver of the upturned Land Rover took delivery of a replacement vehicle the next day and defiantly headed out onto the public roads again – without wearing a seatbelt.29

  It was Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, of course, up to his old tricks – the eternal curmudgeon and enduring enigma at the heart of the British royal family. How can a man who is blessed with the love of Britain’s gracious Queen behave with such a bristling lack of graciousness? Does he really respect the institution she embodies? And what forces are at play when an apparently trivial issue like one old man’s car crash can so disturb the composure of a nation?

  The fascinating roots of Prince Philip’s contrarian spirit will be examined in a few chapters’ time, in Chapter Nine (Episode 209 on the screen) where we address the troubled childhood of the Queen’s husband and the family traumas that shaped his psyche. But here we learn how these disturbing questions first tumbled into the forefront of public consciousness in the late 1950s – the focus of Episode 202 of The Crown by Peter Morgan, ‘A Company of Men’.

  The Duke of Edinburgh’s world tour through the winter of 1956–7 was originally planned for a number of totally serious reasons – to give the Royal Yacht Britannia and its crew their first lengthy proving voyage; to allow Philip to open the Olympic Games in Melbourne on his wife’s behalf; and, at Philip’s particular suggestion, to visit a number of remote British island dependencies that were, in those days, only accessible by sea, so had never before been visited by any British royals. By the end of his great southern odyssey, Philip had set foot on more of the then-British Empire than any other member of the royal family – a record that stands to this day.30