Philip: The Final Portrait

by Gyles Brandreth

  Mountbatten, a staunch ally of the King’s until the moment of Abdication,32 offered David’s reluctant successor an anecdote by way of consolation and encouragement. ‘This is a very curious coincidence,’ he said. ‘My father once told me that, when the Duke of Clarence died, your father came to him and said almost the same things that you have said to me now, and my father answered: “George, you’re wrong. There is no more fitting preparation for a king, than to have been trained in the Navy.”’

  George V, the second son of Edward VII, was forty-five when he became King in 1910, four years before the outbreak of the First World War. George VI, the second son of George V, was forty-one when he became King in 1936, three years before the outbreak of the Second World War. Wars that are won can do much to enhance the reputation of the reigning monarch. Bertie, as Duke of York, was unexceptional, unexciting, a good family man, a decent chap, not over-stretched, but conscientious when duty called. Bertie, as King, was stretched to the limit and not found wanting. René Massigli, the French Ambassador to London at the time of Bertie’s death just over fifteen years later, wrote in a report to the French Foreign Minister: ‘If the “greatness” of a king can be measured by the extent to which his qualities corresponded to the needs of a nation at a given moment in history, then George VI was a great king, and perhaps a very great king.’

  George VI – decent, dignified, determined – was the right man in the right place at the right time. He might lack his elder brother’s obvious glamour and panache, but you could see – and hear – from the way he wrestled with his speech impediment that he had courage. He might not be blessed with great imagination or any very obvious intellectual gifts, but he had palpable integrity. He looked to be what he was: a softly spoken, well-intentioned, quietly uncomplicated, honest English gentleman. And one blessed with a matchless Scottish wife.

  Famously, in his Abdication broadcast (which he scripted himself, though he showed the draft to Winston Churchill, who may have added the odd rhetorical flourish), David had said, ‘You must believe me when I tell you that I have found it impossible to carry the heavy burden of responsibility and to discharge my duties as King as I would wish to without the help and support of the woman I love.’ Might the same not have been true of Bertie? Could he have coped as King without Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon as Queen? Certainly, he could not have coped as well. And, equally certainly, he found the burden to be a cruelly heavy one. When, later, someone commented on how well the exiled Duke of Windsor was looking, Queen Elizabeth responded, ‘Yes. And who has got the lines now?’ Sir Alexander Hardinge, who served as assistant and then principal private secretary to George V, Edward VIII and George VI, said of Bertie, ‘As a result of the stress he was under the King used to stay up too late and smoked too many cigarettes – he literally died for England.’

  There was no love lost between Queen Elizabeth and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, but her niece, Mary Rhodes, who was also, later, her lady-in-waiting, and spent many hours with her, was anxious to tell me – and you – that ‘Not once in all the years I was with her – not once – did I ever hear say anything remotely unpleasant about the Windsors. I know she liked David and, I promise you, I never heard her say anything uncharitable about the Duchess. Becoming Queen was not what Queen Elizabeth wanted or expected, but, when it happened, she accepted it.’ And grew into the role and, I suspect, over time, rather relished it.

  Sensibly, Queen Elizabeth kept her feelings about Wallis Simpson – and much besides – to herself. The females of the family (Queen Mary, Queen Elizabeth, Queen Elizabeth II, Princess Anne) are good at that. Mrs Simpson was less circumspect. ‘Really David,’ she wrote to the Duke of Windsor, having seen photographs and newsreel of the new Queen going about her duties, ‘the pleased expression on the Duchess of York’s face is funny to see. How she is loving it all.’

  In March 1937, only three months into the new King’s reign, Harold Nicolson, diarist and recently elected Member of Parliament, found himself (in knee breeches and silk stockings – Court Dress – it was a different world) attending the grandest of dinners at Buckingham Palace: ‘The dining-table is one mass of gold candelabra and scarlet tulips.’ The meal was disappointing, but the wine ‘excellent and the port superb’. After dinner, in the drawing room, Nicolson observed the new Queen going the rounds: ‘She wears upon her face a faint smile indicative of how much she would have liked her dinner-party were it not for the fact that she was Queen of England. Nothing could exceed the charm or dignity which she displays, and I cannot help feeling what a mess poor Mrs Simpson would have made of such an occasion. It demonstrated to us more than anything else how wholly impossible that marriage would have been.’

  The evening over, Nicolson went home with friends and sat, over beer, late into the night, discussing ‘the legend of monarchy’. At dinner, George VI had sat with Stanley Baldwin and David Lloyd George discussing affairs of state. In truth, he would have little impact upon them. The King was still head of state, the figurehead, the font of honour, but he was no longer a force to reckon with. Queen Victoria had been (in Prince Philip’s phrase) ‘an executive monarch’ who could ‘do things’. As a diplomat, as an operator on the European stage, Edward VII had been able to make a difference. Even George V had had opinions – and taken action – that, to an extent, affected the course of history. But by the time Edward VIII’s reign had ended, exactly a century after Queen Victoria’s had begun, the power of the monarch had all but disappeared. Edward VIII was forced to abdicate because the government and parliament of the day – in the Dominions as much as in Britain – would not let him do as he pleased. George VI was the first of a new kind of monarch: a symbol, not a player.

  ‘Until the King became King,’ Margaret Rhodes said to me, ‘he was always “Uncle Bertie”. Then, overnight, he became “Sir”.’ The simple fact of being King gave the hesitant Duke of York a new authority. The machinery of the monarchy – well oiled and with its own momentum – swept him, relatively effortlessly, through the first few months of his reign. Privately, he felt the strain, but, so far as the public was concerned, it was a matter of ‘business as usual’. Bertie and Elizabeth might, silently, be brooding about David and Wallis across the water,33 but, at home, the court, the press, and the people were ready to move on. ‘Least said, soonest mended’ was the unstated national policy. ‘The King is dead! (Well, moved to France, which comes to the same thing …) Long live the King!’ The Coronation, on 12 May 1937, was not Edward VIII’s Coronation manqué: it was wholly George VI’s, and the day when the new King – according to several observers – seemed, for the first time, wholly to accept his destiny.

  Lilibet, now eleven and Heiress Presumptive, seems always to have accepted hers. Her life was to be different from here on in and there was nothing she could do about it. In public, even her closest friend, Sonia, now had to curtsy to her and could no longer call her Lilibet. When the family moved to Buckingham Palace, Sonia told me, ‘Princess Elizabeth’s parents, who, previously, had simply been “downstairs”, were now “miles away” and very much busier. Everything was different.’

  ‘Was the young Princess different?’

  ‘She had always been quite serious, calm and organised. She was still fun to be with, but I think we were all suddenly aware that one day she might be Queen.’

  According to Margaret Rhodes, ‘I believe, briefly, she hoped that she might have a brother and be let off the hook, but I think she knew that wasn’t very likely. She knew she would be Queen one day, but she thought it would be a long way off. She didn’t talk about it much. In fact, I don’t think she talked about it at all.’

  What she did talk about, and take the keenest interest in, according to Crawfie, was her father’s Coronation. Crawfie read to her Queen Victoria’s account of her own Coronation in 1837. In 1937, as a present for her parents, in a neat hand, written in light pencil on lined paper, the little Princess produced her own record of their great day:

  To Mummy a
nd Papa

  In Memory of Their Coronation

  From Lilibet

  By Herself

  An Account of the Coronation

  It’s vivid stuff. The day begins with Lilibet, wrapped in an eiderdown by her faithful nursemaid Bobo, gazing out of her nursery window ‘onto a cold misty morning’. Once they were breakfasted and dressed, the young Princesses showed off their Coronation outfits ‘to the visitors and housemaids’:

  ‘I shall try and give you a description of our dresses. They were white silk with old cream lace and had little gold bows all the way down the middle. They had puffed sleeves with one little bow in the centre. Then there were the robes of purple velvet with gold on the edge.

  ‘We went along to Mummy’s bedroom and we found her putting on her dress. Papa was dressed in a white shirt, breeches and stockings, and over this he wore a crimson satin coat. Then a page came and said it was time to go down, so we kissed Mummy, and wished her good luck and went down.’

  Lilibet and Margaret Rose in their Coronation finery travelled in procession to Westminster Abbey in a glass coach: ‘At first it was very jolty but we soon got used to it.’ She watched the three-hour-long ceremony sitting alongside her grandmother, Queen Mary, in a specially created royal box:

  ‘I thought it all very, very wonderful and I expect the Abbey did, too. The arches and beams at the top were covered with a sort of haze of wonder as Papa was crowned, at least I thought so.

  ‘When Mummy was crowned and all the peeresses put on their coronets it looked wonderful to see arms and coronets hovering in the air and then the arms disappear as if by magic. Also the music was lovely and the band, the orchestra and the new organ all played beautifully.

  ‘What struck me as rather odd was that Grannie did not remember much of her own Coronation. I should have thought that it would have stayed in her mind for ever.

  ‘At the end the service got rather boring as it was all prayers. Grannie and I were looking to see how many more pages to the end, and we turned one more and then I pointed to the word at the bottom of the page and it said “Finis”. We both smiled at each other and turned back to the service.’

  The service over, the Princesses were escorted to ‘our dressing room’ and offered ‘sandwiches, stuffed rolls, orangeade and lemonade’ before taking the ‘long drive’ home.

  ‘Then we all went on to the Balcony, where millions of people were waiting below. After that we all went to be photographed in front of those awful lights.

  ‘When we sat down to tea it was nearly six o’clock! When I got into bed my legs ached terribly!’

  The unique souvenir she presented to her parents (carefully tied together with pink ribbon) tells us much about the essential Lilibet. She is observant. She has a nice sense of humour. She lives in a world of nursemaids and housemaids and pages and accepts it completely. She goes out on to the balcony and ‘millions of people’ are waiting below. The only thing she doesn’t enjoy is being photographed. At the end of a long day her legs ache terribly. It’s all a taste of things to come – and there’s a telling sentence there, too, that, in many ways, sums up the phlegmatic approach to life that will stay with her – and sustain her – through the years: ‘At first it was very jolty but we soon got used to it.’

  Lilibet’s composition – well structured, with sound punctuation and impeccable spelling – tells us something about Crawfie, too. She was a good teacher. In February 1937 Crawfie, along with Alah and Bobo and their young charges, moved from 145 Piccadilly across Green Park to Buckingham Palace. 145 had been a home, albeit a grand one staffed by eighteen servants. Buckingham Palace was the headquarters of an empire, with a staff in excess of four hundred. ‘I still recall with a shudder that first night spent in the Palace,’ said Crawfie. ‘The wind moaned in the chimneys like a thousand ghosts.’ Crawfie was disconcerted by the sheer scale of the place and not impressed by the (in every sense) Victorian quality of much of the accommodation. The rooms were dark and musty. The light switch for Crawfie’s bedroom was outside the door, two yards down the corridor. To reach the bathroom and lavatory you had to cross the passageway in your slippers and dressing gown, and risk bumping into the Palace postman on his early morning round. Crawfie did not like it. She was homesick.

  Lilibet was less troubled. To her, it was a home – this was where her grandparents had lived – and the corridors, while endless (‘People here need bicycles,’ she said), were more fun than forbidding. ‘There was very little restraint placed on the children,’ Crawfie reported. ‘The Prime Minister, coming to see the King on affairs of State … might easily find himself tangled up with two excited little girls racing down the corridors. Or one stoutish little girl panting, “Wait for me, Lilibet. Wait for me!” Perhaps Dookie, the Queen’s devoted Corgi, might take a nip at a passing leg. Dookie adored the taste of strange trousers.’34

  Gradually, the governess came to terms with her new surroundings. Improvements were made, walls were repapered, facilities were enhanced. The new Queen added her special touch. ‘Elizabeth can make a home wherever she is,’ said Bertie, proudly. ‘Mice continued to be a menace,’ said Crawfie, tartly. However, even she had to acknowledge that the gardens at the back of the Palace were a bonus, and there were still the weekends, ‘now the best part of all our lives’, when ‘we escaped from the Palace’ and went down to Royal Lodge, Windsor. ‘At Royal Lodge, court etiquette was forgotten, and ceremony left behind. We were just a family again.’ In fact, nothing was to be quite the same again.

  The Yorks were now King and Queen; Lilibet and Margaret Rose were first and second in line to the throne. Queen Mary, who, since her own Coronation, twenty-six years before, had always been the personification of majesty, and had long shown an interest in her granddaughters’ upbringing, now insisted that touches of regality be introduced to the children’s routine. Meals on the nursery floor were served by liveried footmen. The food was English, but the menus were in French. Crawfie continued to be in charge of the Princesses’ education, but her staple fare – Bible, History, Grammar, Arithmetic, Geography, Literature, Poetry, Writing and Composition, with Music, Drawing, or Dancing after lunch – was now supplemented by lessons in constitutional history (for Lilibet) and, later, for both girls, by special classes in French, provided by a Mrs Montaudon-Smith (soon known as Monty), and, later still, French literature and European history, provided by a Belgian aristocrat, the Vicomtesse de Bellaigue (known as ‘Toinon’: her Christian name was Antoinette).

  Lilibet’s personal tutor in constitutional history was Henry Marten, co-author of a much-respected standard History of England and Vice-Provost of Eton College, the celebrated boys’ school conveniently situated not far from Royal Lodge. Marten described his royal pupil as ‘a somewhat shy girl of thirteen who when asked a question would look for confidence and support to her beloved governess, Miss Crawford’. The teacher, a bachelor now in his sixties who had been a master at Eton since 1896, does not seem to have been wholly at ease himself, never managing to look his first-ever female student directly in the eye, frequently addressing her as ‘Gentlemen’, and alternately biting his handkerchief and nervously crunching lumps of sugar produced at regular intervals from his jacket pocket.

  Marten’s syllabus covered more than a thousand years of royal heritage, starting with the reign of King Egbert, the king of the West Saxons (802–39), ‘the first to unite all Anglo-Saxons’, and culminating with the two most significant events of modern times: the advent of broadcasting and the 1931 Statute of Westminster. According to Marten, the Statute, which recognised the independence of the Dominions within the Commonwealth, gave a new significance to the Crown as the one remaining link between the United Kingdom and the Dominions, and the arrival of broadcasting enabled the wearer of the crown to sustain that link, in a personal way, by speaking directly to people around the world.

  Gradually, Princess Elizabeth was being groomed for her destiny. Crawfie, meanwhile, was determined to keep the royal fee
t firmly on the ground: ‘I suggested one day that it would be a very good idea for the children to start a Girl Guide Company at the Palace. Besides keeping them in touch with what children of their own ages were doing, I knew it would bring them into contact with others of their own ages and of all kinds and conditions.’ So, in 1937, the Buckingham Palace Guide Company was formed, divided into three patrols, with a small Brownie pack tacked on for the benefit of Princess Margaret, who was still only seven. The girls – about three dozen in all – included royal cousins, royal friends, the children of courtiers and, according to Crawfie, ‘those of Palace employees’. The Company met on Wednesday afternoons: in summer, in the Palace gardens; in winter, in one of the Palace’s many echoing reception rooms. ‘Just at first,’ noted Crawfie, ‘some of the children who joined started coming in party frocks, with white gloves, accompanied by fleets of nannies and governesses. We soon put a stop to all that.’

  Princess Elizabeth was in the Kingfisher patrol and second-in-command to Patricia Mountbatten, Louis Mountbatten’s elder daughter, who was two years her cousin’s senior. ‘Princess Elizabeth was a first-class Guide,’ Countess Mountbatten told me, ‘really efficient and completely level-headed. You could really rely on her. She’d never let you down. She quickly became a leader in her own right.’

  The girls enjoyed their Guiding. ‘The Company was formed so that Elizabeth and Margaret Rose could meet and mix with ordinary children,’ Countess Mountbatten told me, with a charming little chuckle. ‘Well, there’s ordinary and ordinary, of course. I think the children were quite carefully vetted. I think they had to be “suitable”. But we did do ordinary Guiding things. The long corridors at Buckingham Palace were ideal for practising signals and we went on wonderful expeditions in the Windsor forest, trekking and bird-watching and cooking sausages over the camp fire. The King’s Piper came and played for us and we did Highland dancing. That was fun.’