Royal Sisters

by Anne Edwards

  Philip was invited to Balmoral for the first time the following year, in August 1946. Some Royal historians have considered this the turning point in his relationship with Lilibet. Since she had already made up her mind, there was no need to further win her affections. Protocol, however, ruled that she be the one who proposed and even then they could not marry without the approval of the King, who, at this time, was not inclined to grant it. But he saw no reason, when his daughter requested that they invite Philip to Balmoral, to deny her youthful companionship, a decision he must have shared with the Queen. It has been said that the King consulted Townsend on this matter, which Townsend vehemently denies. “The King,” he explained, “would never discuss such a private family matter with an equerry.”

  To this day, Townsend cannot understand why people believed Philip was antagonistic toward him or that they had a private vendetta. In fact, he felt that Philip quite liked him and he “always found Philip good company.” Another member of the King’s close coterie had observed “a degree of rivalry when the two men were in a room together. Philip seemed to feel threatened by Townsend’s friendship with the Royal Family. And he also was a touch dismissive, in a way one might—but shouldn’t be—to staff; and Townsend was really not ‘a fellow guest’ in the sense that Philip was. He was a paid employee. Philip could be great fun, but he could also be incredibly arrogant. It was part of his charm as well as a detraction. I don’t believe Philip cared about what people thought about him—except in the case of the Royal Family. He most desperately wanted their approval. And his character was such that he could never believe that a common chap like Townsend could have an influence on them and he might very well consider that it was nothing less than cheek if he didn’t keep his place.”

  Philip had never before been in an environment quite like Balmoral. He was more of a daredevil than a true sportsman at the time, and his tastes ran to boats and fast cars. But he knew he had to learn to shoot to please both Lilibet and the King. His first day with the guns was rather dismal. He trudged miles and miles into the hills behind a determined ghillie without finding one deer, but he went out again and again, “fighting off the swarming flies and mosquitoes ... borrow[ing] Elizabeth’s rifle to bag his first deer.” To his relief, he did not have to haul his kill back, slung from a pole. A pony carried it to the road and “there he found a chauffeur waiting and saluting, and he sank exhausted into the plush luxury of the limousine, to be driven home.”

  This was Townsend’s second full season at Balmoral and he, too, entered into the sport of deer stalking, despite Margaret’s dislike of the activity. He never was able to shoot a flying creature since they so strongly reminded him of his own former plight as a fighter pilot. Deer stalking, however, unearthed a basic instinct in him. “It is a hard sport,” he explained, “demanding keen eyes, strong legs and lungs, and a stubborn resistance to the elements, which in the Highlands can be savage.... I liked the stalkers, hard men who wasted neither words nor feelings, who spoke a language among themselves which was barely understandable.” In a short time, he became a crack shot, and was invited to go out with the King, considered quite an honor since His Majesty was an expert hunter.

  At the end of the day, shooters and other guests gathered in the drawing room, which had a sweeping vista of the distant mountains through the wide bay windows. Queen Victoria’s hand remained so firm on the decoration that “you almost felt that you were in her august presence,” one guest recalled, adding that this “did not dispel the pleasure of downing a well-earned drink.

  “Then, everyone would hurry to their room, hurriedly change, and hurry back, just in time for dinner—to learn that the Queen had returned only a few moments earlier from fishing and would not be down for half an hour.”

  Dress for dinner was kilt, jacket and jabot for the Scottish gentlemen (and always worn by the King) and dinner jackets for the others, with the women in long gowns. “Grouse, slightly high, but delicious, was on the menu each night during the six weeks stay,” and every evening a dozen of the King’s pipers marched round the dining table to the “moving and deafening wail” of Scottish airs.

  “Dinner over,” Townsend reported, “the ladies retired and the King passed the port to the gentlemen.” The two groups rejoined a respectable time later and the “reunion led to crazy games [charades, etc.], or canasta, or most enchanting of all, Princess Margaret singing and playing at the piano. Her repertoire was varied; she was brilliant as she swung, in her rich, supple voice, into the American musical bits ... droll when, in a very false falsetto, she bounced between the stool and the keyboard ‘I’m looking over a four-leaf clover, which I’d overlooked before ...’, and lovable when she lisped some lilting old ballad.”

  Certainly Townsend was stirred. Perhaps he did not realize that he was falling in love with Margaret. Everything in his nature would have rebelled against such an idea. At this time she was only sixteen years old and he was thirty-two, twice her age, married and the father of two small sons. Additionally, she was a Princess and he was a commoner and a member of the Household staff. Granted, his position was not that of a servant, but, nonetheless, the concept was unacceptable to a man of his conservative upbringing.

  “Rosemary couldn’t take the contrast of our lives,” he said, with sharp insight into his marital difficulties. Here was Townsend moving from castle to palace, from palace to castle, meeting the great, the famous, the powerful; being in on events before they happened, and accepted by the very man, the King, whom he would have gladly died to protect. His day was filled with new experiences and glamorous surroundings, while Rosemary was caring for infant children in a small country cottage that possessed two radiators and was “an icebox in winter.” And when Townsend was at Balmoral, Rosemary was alone for a stretch of six weeks.

  Actually, at Balmoral Townsend’s duties were not enviable. He “acted unobtrusively, as a kind of general handy-man, with eyes and ears alert, ... [to the Royal hosts and their guests]—a shy girl arriving, late and blushing, for dinner; a young blood with a drop too much inside him; a cabinet minister ... ill-at-ease in this highland lair ... and finally, their Majesties’ old and intimate friends who knew the form better than the equerry himself—and consequently needed the most delicate attention.”

  Whatever comforts were available at Balmoral (fires in the hearths, clean and pressed clothes and a generous table) were supplied with the help of the many hundreds of servants and staff who tended the Castle and its occupants: the Royal Family, usually six to eight shooting guests and their wives, the King’s Private Secretary, Sir Alan Lascelles, members of the Royal Family’s Household; and Bobo, Ruby and Alah. (Crawfie continued to take this time to visit with her family and her longtime fiancé in Scotland.) This meant that between thirty-five and forty people, not including the vast domestic staff, inhabited the Castle at all times, and in the evenings local guests joined them for dinner.

  Philip’s apartment was “a block away down the corridor from the bathroom, and the toilet, startlingly Victorian, enormous with mahogany armrests and basketwork lid, with a handle you had to pull upward till with volcanic gurgles everything went ‘whoosh’—was even further down the hall and shared by numerous other guests.”

  He quickly discovered that he was to have very little time alone with Lilibet. Days and evenings were carefully planned and, almost always, group oriented. But Philip was not to be deterred. He took the opportunity to speak to the King in his study. He asked permission to convey to Lilibet his wish to marry her, and if she was so inclined that they might become engaged. Technically, this amounted to a proposal, but Lilibet had already made her feelings evident to Philip. The King advised Philip to wait. Lilibet was only twenty and he still had serious matters to straighten out. Had the latter not been the case, it seems sure that the King, possessive as he was of his elder daughter whose company he adored, would have still told her suitor to wait.

  Philip has said that it “just more or less happened” after t
hat. He and Lilibet did speak about the future (whether it was Lilibet or Philip who initiated this discussion is unclear), and he returned again to the King’s study. The King could not have been pleased that Philip had ignored his wishes. Alexandra has said that the King reiterated that “there were still too many difficulties.” But in the end, “the idea of an engagement was tacitly accepted,” with the condition that the couple must wait “at least six months, and maybe more, before it could be made public.”

  There was a small private celebration that evening before dinner in the Queen’s sitting room. Only the closest members of the Royal entourage were included. The next day Philip departed Balmoral. The King now pressed forward on what he considered a wise plan: that both his daughters would accompany him and the Queen on a three-and-a-half-month Royal tour of South Africa which was scheduled for early in 1947. The engagement would not be announced until their return in mid-May, actually nine months away, not six.

  Lilibet and Philip were forced to agree to this plan, and the King began to clear the way for Philip’s naturalization, which would have to be accomplished before that date. A short time later he decided that Townsend would accompany the family as King’s Equerry on the South African tour. The lovers were to be separated, which the King believed would be all to the good. (Later, he was to write Lilibet anxiously that he hoped she had not thought him “hard-hearted” in the matter.) But Townsend and Margaret would have a rare opportunity to get to know one another better—and in extremely private circumstances.

  Footnote

  *Queen Alexandra of Yugoslavia was a cousin, not a niece, of King George and Queen Elizabeth, but she was in the habit of referring to them as her uncle and aunt.

  11

  No sooner had Philip departed from Balmoral than the Greek newspaper Hellenicon Aema printed a story about an “impending announcement of his betrothal to Princess Elizabeth.” Sir Alan Lascelles, once more caught in the middle of a Royal romance, believed that Alexandra had inadvertently yet indiscreetly written the news to her uncle, King George of Greece, now tentatively returned to his homeland, who either “willingly or coerced by his government, was endeavouring to use the British Royal Family to ward off approaching disaster [the dissolution of the Greek Monarchy].” A denial of an engagement was instantly forthcoming from the palace, but the British press could not be hoodwinked.

  When Mountbatten's daughter, Lady Patricia, married Captain, Lord Brabourne of the Coldstream Guards on October 26, 1946, both Lilibet and Margaret were bridesmaids and escorted to the ceremony by Philip. Press photographs of Philip, attentively helping Lilibet remove her mink coat, appeared in almost every major newspaper. Refutations continued to be issued by the Palace Press Office.

  Lilibet was being torn by her great sense of duty and her burgeoning passions. No one could doubt her strong attraction to Philip. Yet her inexperience and naiveté could well have caused her to misinterpret her feelings. Philip had been the only love object in her life. Unlike other young women of twenty-one, she had not even been “rushed” by another man, and the Queen, who had not tried to convince the King to give the couple his blessings at this point, was just as wary of the relationship as was the King.

  To everyone's surprise, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor turned up in England in early October of 1946 to stay at Ednam Lodge, the country house near London lent to them by the Duke’s old friend Eric Ward, Earl of Dudley. Five days later the Windsors were the victims of a “spectacular theft of the Duchess’s jewels (many of them inscribed love tokens from the Duke).” The main objective of the trip was to convince Bertie to grant the Duke some foreign diplomatic post of stature, possibly as British Ambassador to the United States. The brothers met privately, but this failed. Twice the Duke dined alone with his mother at Marlborough House. She staunchly refused his pleas to meet Wallis. To his further humiliation, the Queen did not invite either him or the Duchess to the Palace to see his nieces. Less than a month after they had arrived in England, the Windsors departed for New York. For Lilibet her Uncle David’s unsatisfactory visit was bound to have a significantly poignant effect.

  Philip was a guest at Sandringham over Christmas. The King, guilty at imposing such a long separation between Lilibet and her young man while “us four” were on the South African tour, had been unable to deny her a happy holiday beforehand. But he remained unwilling to publicly acknowledge their engagement.

  The family was scheduled to depart for South Africa on February 1, 1947. Two days before they were to set off, the Mountbattens, preparing themselves to leave shortly for India and his new post as Viceroy, gave a private dinner at their London home for the King, Queen, David Milford Haven, the newly wedded Lord and Lady Brabourne (the former Lady Patricia Mountbatten), Lilibet and Philip. Margaret was indisposed and unable to come. Mountbatten’s valet, John Dean, wrote that “beside the King’s place I set a tiny decanter of Scotch. Most of the guests were taking champagne, but Lord Louis [Mountbatten] warned me that the King always drank whiskey.” The following day Lilibet went to see Queen Mary at Marlborough House.

  Her grandmother’S home was “like going into another world ... traffic noises were already muted as” one waited for the small side door to be opened and when it closed behind you “there was silence filtered only by the slow ticking of [dozens] of clocks ... wall clocks, chiming clocks, grandfathers, all telling exactly the same time, precise even to their second hands.” She was greeted by the handsome gray-haired Lady Airlie, who led her “along a high-ceilinged corridor whose walls were crowded with oil paintings massively framed, towards an old-fashioned lift. Throughout, the walls were papered and the floors carpeted in a dull soft red, patterned with a tapestry design.

  “The lift was small and quite unusually slow [and smelled of polished wood]. It rose to the second floor in such gradual stages that it scarcely seemed as though [it] was moving.”

  Lilibet and Lady Airlie then went along “another corridor into a light, sunny room overlooking wide gardens.” Queen Mary, her white hair piled in high curls above her forehead, rose to greet her grand-daughter. Age had not diminished her awesome presence. She stood “erect and unbending ... [and] wore a dark red woollen dress, the skirt of which reached nearly to her ankles; a triple row of large pearls were around her throat, and jewels sparkled from a large [diamond] brooch and the several [diamond] rings she wore on her fingers.”

  Lilibet curtsied and kissed her hand. Queen Mary’s face “softened wonderfully and her voice too.” Lady Airlie left them alone to talk. Lilibet remained about thirty minutes, during which time her grandmother handed her a small box, a gift in anticipation of Lilibet’s impending twenty-first birthday. It contained a pair of pearl and diamond earrings. Lady Airlie came to collect her and when they were back in the front reception, surrounded by the ticking clocks, presented her with a small package as well. Lilibet kissed her fondly on the cheek and confided: “When I come back we will have a celebration—perhaps two celebrations.”

  Alexandra recalled the day she and King Peter brought their infant son to see Queen Mary at Marlborough House. Queen Mary held the small boy on her lap and admonished his parents to beware of nannies who did not believe in parents being with their children. “A child can be seen by its parents any time.... Why do you suppose nature provided parents if this were not so!” Gravely, she added: “Don’t you lose touch with this baby. If you do, the time will come when you will never forgive yourselves.”

  After tea, brewed herself “with meticulous care using bubbling water from a silver kettle which was kept at boiling point over a small spirit lamp,” she led them into another room, more ornate and richly furnished. “Here, beautifully arranged in illumined glass cabinets was her Fabergé collection [Alexandra wrote] ... and never had I seen anything quite as exquisite as this collection of the minute boxes, tiny jewelled caskets and chests and diminutive objects, all carved in marvelously scaled proportions, jewelled and ... inlaid with enamel.”

  King Peter di
scussed with her his distressing position of exile. “One cannot tell how things will go with you and with your country,” she observed quietly. “You were born to a life of duty, and where that duty will take you it is difficult to see.” Her china-blue eyes fixed on King Peter’s face. “You’re very young,” she said, “it may not be easy, but you must never forget that you are a King.”

  One could not help but make the association with the son who had such a lapse, or to envision clearly what Queen Mary had said when alone with the granddaughter she knew would one day be Queen.

  All of the Royal Household assembled in the red and gold Bow Room at Buck House the morning of the Royal Family’s departure for South Africa. “The King and Queen came in wearing their travelling clothes,” Crawfie reported. “The King was in uniform and looked, I thought then, desperately tired. The Queen looked very sweet and pretty in her favourite blue. Lilibet was sad and we all thought she did not want very much to go. Margaret very grown up in her pink coat and gay hat with its little feather.” Townsend escorted them to their car. Snow was falling and the weather was cold; but as the Royal Party began their journey toward the sun, no one could have known that this was to be one of England’s most severe and crippling winters.