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One royal adviser recorded that, during a meeting with the Princess’s grandmother, Princess Elizabeth’s coming engagement had been discussed and that Queen Mary evidently had grave doubts about it.
Perhaps there was a last minute rearguard action by opponents of the match. If so, it swiftly collapsed. Prince Philip’s small sports car began to reappear at the side entrance to Buckingham Palace,
and on July 8th, the Palace declared its hand. ‘It had long been rumoured,’ noted Colville.
A few weeks after the official announcement, the Princess’s private secretary wrote of the lobbying that had taken place against the Prince by his critics. Whether they had been unable to block the engagement, he wrote, ‘because, as they think, the Queen’s usually good judgement has failed her, or because Princess Elizabeth was so much in love as to overcome her parents’ antipathy to the match, I do not know’.
* This is the Queen’s own spelling. Others have ‘Porchie’.
Chapter 7
UNCLE DICKIE had prepared the ground well. The press reaction to the betrothal, at a time when the Princess’s popularity had never been greater, was one of unqualified enthusiasm. Newspapers vied with each other to point out, not only that ‘this was clearly a marriage of choice not arrangement,’ but also that it was an extremely suitable match, made all the more so by Philip’s British bearing and attachments.
‘An effort had obviously been made,’ as Colville drily observed, ‘to build him up as the nephew of Lord Louis Mountbatten rather than a Greek Prince.’
The effort came primarily from Dickie, and it worked. Glucksburg antecedents took a backseat. Profiles focused on Philip’s British relatives, education and service record, which made a neat package. As one account put it, the Prince was ‘thoroughly English by upbringing, has that intense love of England and the British way of life, that deep devotion to the ideals of peace and liberty for which Britain stands, that are characteristic of so many naval men’.
Others tactfully suggested that, although technically a member of the Greek Orthodox Church into which he had been born, Princess Elizabeth’s fiancé had ‘regarded himself’ as a member of the Church of England since entering Dartmouth;
that he did not look Greek; and that his royal rank was a bonus – even though the naturalization had set aside any significance it ever had. Meanwhile, in Athens, the continuing Greek royal family – which had leaked the news of the engagement the day before its official release – had no doubt about its own reaction. Philip had hit the jackpot.
Philip himself acquired a valet and a detective, who accompanied him wherever he went. He also received a degree of public attention which he had never been subjected to before, and which he would now have to put up with for the rest of his life. His face, shown on all the newsreels, became recognizable everywhere. So did his car – suddenly everybody in Britain seemed to know that he drove a black, green-upholstered sports car with the registration HDK 99, and they looked out for it. For the time being, however, he continued to live on a lieutenant’s pay. According to his valet, his wardrobe was ‘scantier than that of many a bank clerk,’ and often didn’t include a clean shirt.
His naval wardrobe wasn’t much better. Appraising the King’s future son-in-law at a royal garden party a few days after the announcement, Lady Airlie noted, not entirely disapprovingly, that his uniform was shabby, with ‘the usual after-the-war look’.
For a short time, the image of the Prince as a genteelly poor, male Cinderella became a newspaper staple. Crawfie – who had been won over by the Prince from the beginning – took secret delight in the raffish style he introduced into the Palace, and in the pursed lips of servants and courtiers when he arrived hatless, with flannel trousers, and in an open-necked shirt with rolled-up sleeves.
In August, after the King and Privy Council, including the Prime Minister, Archbishop of Canterbury and Leader of the Opposition, had formally approved the match (as they were required to do under the 1772 Royal Marriages Act), Lieutenant Mountbatten joined the Royal Family at Balmoral. Here the Court was able to assess, soberly, the new recruit. According to one below-stairs tale, Philip annoyed the King when they were in Scotland by bobbing a mock curtsey at him while wearing a kilt.
Whether or not the story is true, it fits in with a picture of the Prince’s uneasy first summer in possession of the prize, regarded with caution by the King’s aristocratic friends, and potentially as dynamite by his courtiers. Jock Colville – in mellow mood, after his own first Balmoral working holiday – recorded his impressions of the royal life north of the border. He was struck by the contrasts with austerity London, even as experienced in Buckingham Palace. ‘There was luxury, sunshine and gaiety,’ he wrote, with ‘picnics on the moors every day; pleasant siestas in a garden ablaze with roses, stocks and antirrhinums; songs and games; and a most agreeable company with which to disport oneself.’ The company included Lord and Lady Eldon, the Salisburys, the Duke of Kent, David Bowes-Lyon, and Lady Violet Bonham Carter’s son Mark – several of them avowed disapprovers of the Prince.
Colville and Philip overlapped for a week, long enough for the Princess’s private secretary to form a provisionally favourable opinion, though also a cautious one. He liked the young naval officer, appreciated his difficulty in fitting into ‘the very English atmosphere that surrounds the Royal Family,’ especially when people like the Eldons and the Salisburys were around, and felt that he was intelligent and progressive, especially on the Commonwealth. But he was puzzled by the Philip–Elizabeth relationship. He recorded that the Princess was certainly in love with her fiancé. But he wondered about the apparently ‘dutiful’ appearance of the Prince.
Perhaps Philip did not show his deeper feelings, perhaps Colville’s attitude was tinged with a little jealousy: he, after all, was the person who saw more of the Heiress than almost anybody – including, probably, her fiancé. Other impressions varied. One royal adviser remembers games of ‘murder’ at Balmoral, and bumping into the couple in the dark. ‘Somehow’, he recalls, ‘they always seemed to find each other when the lights went out.’
Another, however, confirms Colville’s impression of a mysterious imbalance. ‘She was in love with him, you know’, he says. ‘Whether he was with her, I couldn’t say’.
The marriage was fixed for November 20th. In the meantime, Princess Elizabeth took over from the Duke of Gloucester the function of the King’s ceremonial understudy. In October, she accompanied her father at the State Opening of Parliament for the first time, riding to the ceremony in the glass coach, with a lady-in-waiting. Royal Wedding fever – which was to reach epidemic proportions a few weeks later – had already gripped the capital: people began to line the procession route from Buckingham Palace to Westminster in the early hours of the morning, in the hope of catching a glimpse of the Princess as she passed.
However, the idea that the marriage of the Heiress Presumptive should be treated as a major national and imperial event was a novel one – in Eric Hobsbawm’s terminology, an invented tradition. Walter Bagehot had written a famous passage in The English Constitution, in which he declared that the women of Britain cared more about the marriage of a Prince of Wales than a ministry. Yet nineteenth and early twentieth century royal weddings had been comparatively modest occasions, and the marriages of the children of recent monarchs were essentially family events. Although the wedding of George VI as Duke of York had taken place in the Abbey, this was a departure from earlier practice. Edward VII, as Prince of Wales, had married in St. George’s Chapel, Windsor and George V, as Duke of York, had married in the Chapel Royal at St. James’s Palace. The wedding of Victoria, which took place after she had become Queen, was also at St. James’s Palace.
The choice of Westminster Abbey as the venue – made in consultation with the Prime Minister and Cabinet – was a decision to turn the day into a popular celebration of a kind, and on a scale, that had not taken place since before the war. It was to be a jamboree fit for a people’s princess, which would show that the Labour Government knew how to give everybody a good time, even in the depths of economic adversity. There were also – as at the time of George VI’s Coronation – diplomatic points to be made. In place of the restrained show of imperial might of 1937, the wedding of a decade later would be a peace-loving Empire parade, reminding people – as the South African tour had also sought to do – of the continuing strength of Commonwealth and imperial ties in the wake of Indian independence. Finally, Princess Elizabeth’s wedding to an undivorced, unforeign, relative provided both Monarchy and public with the Heir-to-the-Throne marriage of which they had been deprived in the 1930s, and which – it was fervently hoped – would blot out the memory of an unsuitable match with a suitable one, while perpetuating the new Windsor line.
Yet the arguments did not wash with everybody. Hugh Dalton, the Labour Chancellor of the Exchequer, described 1947 – in a phrase echoed by Elizabeth in a different context many years later – as his own, and the nation’s, ‘annus horrendus’. Not only was it an exceptionally uncomfortable year because of the protracted freeze-up in the first part of it. It was also economically a catastrophic one, with a fuel crisis which stopped factories, put millions out of work, and helped to precipitate a financial collapse that stalled the Government’s reform programme. In August – a few days after the Abbey announcement – the large North American dollar loan which had helped to pay for early post-war reconstruction ran out, and the free exchange of dollars and sterling was abruptly ended. In a restructuring of the Government in September, Sir Stafford Cripps, the President of the Board of Trade, was given the powerful new post of Minister of Economic Affairs, in order to strengthen the export drive. An Emergency Budget was scheduled for November, and Dalton was expected to announce the most restrictive package of measures since Labour came to office.
Against such a background there was some feeling, especially on the left, that a major state occasion was out of keeping with the rigour of the times. The Communist MP, William Gallagher, attacked the marriage both on the grounds of Philip’s ancestry (‘I am quite certain that he has not forsaken the family politics,’ he told the Commons), at a time of Greek repression, and because of the ‘lavish expenditure’ involved.
A group of Labour MPs added their own voice, sending a letter to the Chief Whip in protest at the likely cost.
On October 28th, Dalton responded to the attacks by declaring that only the decorations in Whitehall and outside the Palace would be funded by the taxpayer – everything else would be financed by the King’s Civil List.
On the eve of the Wedding, Chips Channon reckoned that Labour had got the worst of both worlds, laying itself open to criticism for spending too much, while actually appearing mean. Somebody in the Government he noted, ‘apparently advised simplicity, misjudging the English people’s love of pageantry and a show’.
There was certainly fierce pressure on the Palace not only to limit expenditure but, above all – at a time of foreign-exchange shortage – to buy British. Indeed, such were the jitters of the Government on the subject, that it became the cause for behind-the-scenes friction. In October, Lascelles responded with extreme testiness to a request for information from the Prime Minister, who was facing a hostile question, about a suggestion that ‘Lyons silk’ was being used for the bride’s dress. ‘The wedding dress contains silk from Chinese silk worms but woven in Scotland and Kent’, replied the courtier. ‘The wedding train contains silk produced by Kentish silk worms and woven in London. The going-away dress contains 4 or 5 yards of Lyons silk which was not specially imported but was part of the stock held by the dress maker (Hartnell) under permit.’ (Norman Hartnell had his own say. Faced with the accusation that, in troubled times, the silk might be ideologically suspect, he made a firm answer: ‘Our worms are Chinese worms’, he coldly informed his accusers, ‘– from Nationalist China, of course!’
) As for the suggestion that the Palace was insufficiently careful on such matters, Lascelles tartly reminded the Prime Minister that, only recently, the Privy Purse had found it necessary to tick off the Board of Trade for recommending an Austrian ornament-maker for the wedding dress’s trimmings, a recommendation which had threatened the Palace ‘with an appreciable amount of embarrassing publicity’.
A bigger problem, however, than the cost of the Wedding was the cost of the Princess. The marriage of an Heir to the Throne automatically involved a review of the Heir’s Civil List – and the month in which this was taking place could scarcely have been less propitious. Buckingham Palace asked for a total of £50,000 per annum for the couple – a net increase of £35,000. The Government – conscious of left-wing backbenchers whose working-class constituents had been told to tighten their belts – replied that this was politically impossible. It did not ease discussions on such a delicate matter that the Chancellor, responsible both for the Budget and for finding the cash for the King’s daughter, happened to be the son of a former tutor to George V, and – for complex domestic reasons – was heartily disliked by the Royal Family, which regarded him as a turncoat. Dalton, antiroyal since his youth, was not particularly good at concealing the wry pleasure he derived from the twist of fate that had made him royal paymaster.
The Cabinet had a single objective: to avoid a parliamentary row at a difficult time on what they regarded as a minor matter. On October 22nd, less than a month before the Wedding, Attlee and Dalton saw Lascelles and Sir Ulick Alexander, Keeper of the Privy Purse, in order, as Dalton recorded, to discuss ‘a new Civil List Bill and much more money for Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip’.
It was a sticky meeting. In reply to the courtiers’ request on behalf of the royal couple, the premier and Chancellor threatened a full-scale Select Committee, which might open a pandora’s box, and bring every item of royal expenditure under review. In particular, Attlee pointed out, ‘it might even be impossible to prevent questions being asked as to the extent of any private fortunes belonging to the King and to other members of the Royal Family’.
Dalton added that if the annuities were too high, ‘It would raise discord, and many awkward questions, and would impair the popularity of the Royal Family.’
Why, asked the Chancellor, should the King not solve the problem himself, by increasing the Princess’s present allowance out of the Household Balances which were in credit, and were likely to continue so? When Alexander insisted that the surplus was only temporary, Dalton drew attention to £200,000 which had been lent by the King, out of these balances, to the Government – and which might be used to pay for Elizabeth and Philip. At this point Lascelles suggested that Dalton should have a personal audience with the King, to discuss the matter
– and laid the ground for such a meeting by proposing to the Prime Minister a compromise. Parliament, he suggested, should make provision for the Princess – thereby avoiding the setting of a dangerous precedent by not doing so – but on the understanding that, while the difficult times lasted, the money would not be spent.
Dalton’s audience took place on October 27th. It appeared to go well. Lascelles wrote afterwards that the Chancellor was ‘greatly pleased by his talk with HM,’
and Dalton told the Prime Minister that he found the King ‘in a very happy mood’. The meeting seemed to resolve one of the royal difficulties – how to preserve the principle of provision by Parliament, without a Select Committee – by agreeing a formula that established a Select Committee in name, but not in reality. A royal message would announce that no burden should be placed on public funds while economic difficulties lasted. Then the Chancellor would propose the setting up of a Select Committee that would merely note that it was normal for provision to be made for an Heir on marriage, but that this would be delayed for the time being.
The affair, ‘so delicate from so many different points of view,’ Dalton wrote to Attlee, ‘has moved forward with an unexpected smoothness.’
But had it? One thing it had not disposed of was the problem of how much the Princess and Prince would get, and how they would be paid. ‘The essential point,’ Dalton reminded the King, ‘was to prevent the development of an embarrassing debate.’ That, however, was more the Government’s problem than George VI’s. The royal concern, the King told the Chancellor, was ‘that he could not go on indefinitely making the additional provision from his own resources . . .’
The gap between these two positions remained a wide one, and in the fortnight before the Budget it became the cause of a heated argument, which turned on the status of the royal wartime loan. The Government saw this as a fund of public money to be tapped; the Palace, on the other hand, regarded it as the product of royal frugality, and an essential part of the King’s accounts. It did not help Government-Palace relations that at the end of October it was decided, for technical constitutional reasons, that a proper Select Committee would be necessary after all.
On November 7th, Dalton returned to the attack, sending the Palace a detailed proposal: the King should surrender the £200,000 saved during the War, and out of this sum a £10,000 annuity should be paid to Elizabeth (over and above the £15,000 Civil List income she was already getting), and £5,000 to Philip, making a joint total of £30,000, part of which should be taxable. If he imagined that this would do the trick, he was mistaken. The Palace was incensed at an amount which it considered derisory, and a poor return on its £200,000 wartime saving. Lascelles recorded the next day that the King considered the offer to be unacceptable.
The prospect of a negotiated peace having thus faded, both sides now dug trenches. As Dalton approached the day on which he would have to give the most difficult Budget speech of his career, his attitude became even less tractable, and more infuriating to the Court. On November 10th, he returned to the Palace for another discussion with Lascelles and Alexander, and explained that his earlier offer had just been a bargaining position. The admission confirmed everything the Palace believed about him already. ‘He began by saying that he was not at all surprised that the King had rejected the offer,’ noted an exasperated Lascelles, who added that this was particularly remarkable in view of the fact that he had been told that Dalton had Cabinet backing.
There, for the next few days, the matter rested. In his Budget speech on November 12th, Dalton – as expected – announced a series of tax increases and other deflationary measures. Next day, in Cabinet, his sole recorded contribution to the morning’s discussion concerned the forthcoming marriage of HRH Princess Elizabeth for which, he said, Parliament should be asked to make further financial provisions.
A Draft Message from the King, in which His Majesty expressed willingness to ‘place at the disposal of the faithful Commons a sum derived from savings on the Civil List made during the war years’ was passed without a dissentient voice. Even the left seemed happy. The Minister of Health, Aneurin Bevin – who might have been expected to make a critical or at least quizzical comment – merely remarked that so long as Britain had one, ‘we ought never to lower the standards of the Monarchy’, and that he hoped the Select Committee would do its work quickly, and settle the whole matter while the Wedding was fresh in people’s minds. No figures were mentioned. ‘That is quite satisfactory’, Lascelles wrote to the King cautiously, ‘as far as it goes.’
The same night, however, an unexpected development altered the picture in a fundamental way. Released from Budget concerns, Dalton might now have turned his attention fully to the Civil List problem. Instead, the discovery that he was the inadvertent source of a Budget leak, which appeared in an evening paper while he was still giving his speech, forced him to offer his resignation as Chancellor of the Exchequer. It was accepted. His friends were shocked, while the Opposition congratulated itself on an unexpected scalp.
Buckingham Palace could be forgiven if it secretly rejoiced as well. At any rate, it is unlikely that the King remonstrated with Attlee about the departure. Indeed, he now had a double reason for gratitude towards his Prime Minister on the subject of Mr Dalton. In 1945, Attlee had obliged by not appointing the renegade Etonian as Foreign Secretary; two and a half years later, he obliged once again by accepting Dalton’s resignation as Chancellor, at a moment of maximum convenience to the Palace.
In the negotiations, Dalton had appeared both resistant and devious, even – most maddeningly of all – gleeful. His successor, Sir Stafford Cripps, was none of these things. Despite his reputation for austerity (perhaps partly because of it), he was not only straightforward in his dealing with the Palace on the Civil List issue, he was also accommodating. As a result, a much more generous provision than Dalton had ever envisaged went through without a hitch.
In December, the new Chancellor recommended to his colleagues a total provision of £50,000 – including a £25,000 increase for Elizabeth, with £10,000 for Philip – £20,000 more than Dalton’s offer. He also suggested that the King should make available only £100,000 of accumulated savings, for a period of four years.
He was, however, taking a risk. The provision required Parliamentary approval which, in view of the need for a Select Committee, could not be taken for granted. Moreover, if they did not accept it, serious damage would be done to the prestige of the Monarchy, as well as to relations between Palace and Parliament.
The Committee began hearing evidence on December 3rd. A key witness was the King’s private secretary, who impressed MPs with a dire warning that the Civil List ‘may have to face a crisis of insolvency,’ if it did not receive adequate provision. Should this happen, three major economies would become necessary: the abolition of horse-drawn carriages, the disbandment of the Gentleman at Arms and Yeoman of the Guard, and the closing of Windsor Castle as a royal residence. ‘I don’t think any member of this Committee,’ he declared – repeating Bevan’s remark in Cabinet – ‘will disagree with me when I say that, so long as we have a Monarchy, the Monarchy’s work has got to be done well’.
It was a close-run thing. Under only slightly different circumstances – with a less persuasive Chancellor, or one who commanded less authority among MPs – the decision might have gone the other way. As it was, five out of the twelve Labour MPs on the Committee, including the Chairman of the Parliamentary Party, were in favour of substantially lower annuities for the royal couple, backing figures of £35,000 for Elizabeth and £5,000 for Philip. In the final vote, Labour MPs, split evenly, and the higher figures proposed by the Chancellor required Tory and Liberal support to carry them.
THE DEBATE over annuities for the Heiress and her husband had many echoes over the next half century, as inflation bit into the Civil List, while rising asset values simultaneously added to royal wealth. The question of what Parliament should provide, and what it was fair to ask the Monarch to pay out of private or accumulated resources, remained one of the central issues surrounding the institution.
In 1947, however, few matters were of smaller interest to the public. Despite the Government’s misgivings, ‘Royal Wedding Week’ in mid-November provided the national carnival of the decade: a spectacular display of conspicuous consumption, for royalty and subjects alike, which revealed – to those who cared to note it – the public longing for a relaxation of controls after eight years of tight regulation. If there was popular criticism or resentment, little of it ever became public. Mass Observation discovered discontent, here and there, about the extravagance. People questioned about the 300 clothing coupons and £1,200 spent on the wedding dress split evenly on whether it was reasonable or not. The journalist Jill Craigie described the decision to design a calf-length trousseau for the Princess as ‘a major victory for the vested interests of the fashion houses.’
However, opinion polls showed a mellowing of opinion as the day approached, with a rise between July and November from 40 to 60 per cent of people actively approving of the arrangements.
During the autumn, pre-nuptial excitement focused fetishistically on the physical details of the preparations, including the wedding presents which arrived by the crate-load from all over the world. A souvenir book was published listing all 2,428 of them, and the gifts themselves were put on show, tickets a shilling each, at St James’s Palace. ‘After the scarcity, the make-do of the war years,’ wrote Crawfie, who beat Princess Elizabeth to the altar by getting married, more modestly, in September, ‘this sudden lavishness was unnerving.’
Presents ranged from a gold tiara from the Emperor of Ethiopia to a large number of nylon stockings, home-knitted jumpers and hand-made tea cosies.
There were political gifts, like a 175-piece porcelain dinner service from Chiang Kai-Shek and his wife; well-chosen ones, like a chestnut filly (Astrakhan) from the Aga Khan; and puzzling ones, like the item given by the Mahatma Gandhi, which the catalogue described as a ‘fringed lacework cloth made out of yarn spun by the donor on his own spinning wheel.’
Queen Mary thought it was the Indian leader’s famous loincloth, and took a dim view. ‘Such an indelicate gift,’ she told Lady Airlie.
Not included in the exhibition were hundreds of tons of tinned food from British communities abroad, which were distributed to needy widows and pensioners, with a message from the bride.
All exhibited gifts were carefully and democratically itemised in the catalogue, regardless of splendour. The pot pourri of the exhibition, appropriate for the times, was reflected in a preview party for donors, attended by rich and poor, ‘peers and factory workers, statesmen and schoolgirls, old age pensioners and housewives, visitors from the provinces, the Continent and the United States.’
Such social mixing, however, was not to everybody’s taste; nor were many of the gifts. Chips Channon, caught in the crush, noted with admiration a wreath of diamond roses given by the Nizam of Hyderabad, but ‘was struck by how ghastly some of the presents were, though the crowd made it difficult to see.’
He owed his own invitation to gift No. 797, listed as a ‘silver cigarette case, sunray pattern set with a cabochon sapphire in a gold thumb piece.’
The Princess herself spent much of her time before the Wedding thanking the more important corporate donors in person. For such occasions, she had a set speech, which was like a cutdown version of her Cape Town broadcast and a wedding rehearsal combined. ‘As long as we live’, she recited in her thank-you to the City of London, ‘it will be the constant purpose of Lieutenant Mountbatten and myself to serve a people who are so dear to me and to show ourselves deserving of their esteem’.
Of almost as great interest as ‘the presents’ was ‘the cake’ – a topic of special fascination because younger members of the population, reared on sugar rationing, found it difficult even to imagine a culinary creation of such opulence. The problem of having the wedding cake made was solved by a neat and characteristic royal exploitation of professional snobbery, vanity and loyalty. Royal-connected cake manufacturers were graciously permitted to present an example of their work, in return for an invitation to the viewing party in the mirror-lined State dining-room, in the presence of the King and Queen, who wandered around, asking polite questions about the ingredients. The winners had the satisfaction of knowing that their cakes had been consumed by royal guests.
There were twelve cakes in all, the biggest of which stood four feet high, and took four months to make.
Finally, there was ‘The Dress’. Of all the totemic artefacts associated with the royal wedding none drove the press and public to greater frenzy than this garment – partly, again, because of the shortages, which had made fine materials hard or impossible even for well-off people to obtain. Accounts of the wedding dress were caressing: according to Norman Hartnell’s own description, it was made of ‘clinging ivory silk’, trailed with jasmine, smilax, seringa and rose-like blossoms, and included a large number of small pearls. Others were even more lyrical. James Laver, fashion expert at the Victoria and Albert, spoke of Hartnell’s creation of Botticelli curves, and of the raised pearls arranged as York roses, entwined with ears of corn. By the device of reversed embroidery, the design had ‘alternated star flowers and orange blossom, now tulle on satin, and now satin on tulle, the whole encrusted with pearls and crystals.’
A mythology surrounded the production. Hartnell himself liked to recount that his manager, returning from America after a component-hunting expedition, had replied to the question at the customs about whether he had anything to declare, ‘Yes, ten thousand pearls, for the wedding dress of Princess Elizabeth.’
Like the presents, the dress was put on display, and at times the queue of people waiting to see it stretched the length of the Mall.
After the build-up, the Wedding became, in the words of an American monarchophile, ‘a movie premiere, an election, a World Series and Guy Fawkes Night all rolled into one’.
It was also, at its core, a gathering of the remnants of European royalty – a vast, rivalrous, beleaguered, mutually suspicious and mutually loyal, and frequently impoverished, extended family. In this respect, the Wedding was different from a Coronation, which was a state more than a personal event. Because of the background of the groom, special attention was directed at the least significant members of this inter-related, uniformed, bemedalled and be-jewelled galère, who included the flotsam of two world wars and many revolutions – and for whom Lieutenant Mountbatten was both an object of envy, and a morale-boosting proof that they still had a place in the world.
Since 1918 – if not before – the British Royal Family had been the premier dynasty; and now, with fewer surviving monarchies than ever, its pre-eminence was even more apparent. ‘You are the big potato,’ Smuts was overheard saying to the King’s mother at the wedding-eve party; ‘all the other queens are small potatoes.’
Nobody doubted it or that this was an occasion for big potatoes to show cousinly solicitude to small ones, whatever their circumstances. Lady Airlie cast her mind back to 1939 or even 1914. Old friends were reunited, she wrote, old jealousies swept away.
‘It was a tremendous meeting place,’ recalls Princess Margaret. ‘People who had been starving in little garrets all over Europe, suddenly reappeared.’
Queen Alexandra of Yugoslavia likened the atmosphere to that of a boarding school, in which all the royal families belonged to the same house: the Wedding reminded her of a reunion of school friends, all ‘shedding their grown-up facade, and romping together in an abandon of gossip, leg-pulling and long-remembered family jokes’. Many of the visiting royals – especially the mendicant ones, who had their travel expenses discreetly paid by the Windsors – crowded round a communal table in the dining room at Claridges, where they were put up, adding to the illusion of an unruly and cacophonous academy.
However, simple accounts of happy high jinks, and of bygones being bygones, did not give the whole picture. Delicate decisions had to be made. Though Philip’s mother was invited, his three surviving, German-married sisters were not. Nor was the Duke of Windsor, who spent the day morosely in New York in his Waldorf Towers suite. A few who came might have done better to have stayed away. ‘When I am back behind the Iron Curtain,’ Queen Helen of Romania remarked during her brief stay, ‘I shall wonder whether this is all a dream.’
Her words acquired a special poignancy because the Government in Bucharest used the opportunity afforded by King Michael’s absence to declare a republic.
On the eve of the main event there was a dinner for foreign royalty, and a grand party at the Palace, attended by crowned heads, presidents and premiers. Much was made of the down-at-heel condition of royal adornments, of tiaras taken out of storage and dusted down: as though the ostentation was easier to justify if it was seen as a fancy dress parade, rather than the display of real luxury. Crown jewels were worn as if they were paste, almost apologetically – leading some of the kings and queens who still had thrones to feel superior. ‘Queen Juliana of the Netherlands was frightfully scathing about everybody’s jewellery,’ recalls Pamela Hicks, a bridesmaid. ‘“It’s so dirty,” she kept saying.’
Lady Airlie wrote that ‘anyone fortunate enough to have a new dress drew all eyes’. However, all the famous diamonds were visible, ‘even though most of them had not been cleaned since 1939’.
ONE TICKLISH question, which exercised the finest and most antiquarian minds at Buckingham Palace almost until the Wedding itself, was what Philip Mountbatten should be called and how he should be styled. Since he was no longer Greek, his royal title was meaningless, and anyway he had abandoned it; yet it was taken for granted that the Heiress’s consort could not remain a commoner. The problem was finding a suitable English title, and an appropriate rank. In choosing one, future children – including the future Heir or Heiress – had to be taken into account. Would they be named after their father or their mother? Consulted on this point, the Lord Chancellor, Lord Jowett, replied that the 1917 Proclamation which changed the Royal Family’s name to Windsor, did not include under the general rubric George V’s married female descendants. Elizabeth, and her issue, were excluded, and would take their names from her husband.
At the end of July, Dermot Morrah – who had covered the tour of South Africa for The Times and felt a passionate concern about the minutiae of royal etiquette – sent a memorandum to his editor, who passed it on to the Palace, listing some twenty alternative labels for Lieutenant Mountbatten, with comments on each. He gave ‘Edinburgh’ a high ranking. Though it had the drawback of lacking antiquity, ‘having been first conferred only in 1726,’ the adoption of it, he suggested, would be seen as a compliment to Scotland. Lascelles added his own notes, and passed on the list to the King.
In view of Philip’s naval background, either the Earl or Duke of Greenwich was considered a possibility.
Finally, Baron Greenwich, Earl of Merioneth, Duke of Edinburgh was agreed. However, the question of a ‘Royal’ Dukedom – whether Philip should be called ‘His Royal Highness’, following his marriage – still had to be sorted out. The King became greatly exercised on this issue. ‘Can you find out how Prince Henry of Battenberg who was Serene Highness was created Royal Highness by Q. Victoria on his marriage to Princess Beatrice?’, the King pencilled to Lascelles in August. ‘This will give me a Precedent in this case.’ In September, after consultations with the Home Secretary, it was decided to bestow the ‘HRH’ title which Philip had turned down before the engagement, but which his marriage to the Princess would justify. The King’s attention now turned to the complex question of his future son-in-law’s coat-of-arms. Rough sketches were commissioned, and the Monarch spent many productive hours poring over them, noting down his comments.
At the end of September, Philip’s transmogrification into an Englishman was completed with his formal reception into the Anglican Church by the Archbishop of Canterbury in the chapel at Lambeth Palace – at roughly the same time as his mother, Princess Alice, was making arrangements for the founding of her own Greek Orthodox order of working nuns. There was one more detail: in November, the King bestowed the Garter on both the Princess and Philip – though too late for the wedding service sheets, which described him as ‘Philip Mountbatten, RN’. Popularly, however, he had always been known as ‘Prince Philip’ – a title to which his wife, as Queen, finally gave regal sanction ten years later.
Courtiers continued to weigh him up. In late October, Philip accompanied Elizabeth on her last pre-marriage engagement, to launch the Cunard liner the Caronia from the Clydebank shipyard of John Brown and Co. On the way back, the royal train was delayed in a siding, and Jock Colville walked down the line with his employer’s fiancé, climbing with him into the signal box. ‘I watched P. narrowly,’ he recorded. ‘He is a strong believer in the hail-fellow-well-met as opposed to the semi-divine interpretation of Monarchy.’ However, during a conversation with some of the railwaymen, there was one ‘appalling gaffe’. When the signalman said jokingly that he was waiting for promotion until somebody died, noted Colville, ‘Philip replied, “Like me!” No doubt he meant in the Navy, but another interpretation was obvious.’ Colville wrote that he expected the future consort to be popular with the crowd, but that he could also be vulgar, and that his manner towards Princess Elizabeth at times was quite off-hand.
However, even the Princess’s acidic private secretary was not immune from the rising tide of sentiment towards the young couple, and the sense of a storybook romance. Close contact with both of them also caused him to revise his opinions. ‘As the day drew nearer’, Colville acknowledged immediately after the Wedding, ‘I began to think, as I now sincerely do, that the Princess and Philip really are in love.’
He also wrote that Elizabeth ‘bore the pre-wedding strain with great good nature and cheerfulness’.
Sometimes, it must have been hard. To the worries of any young bride were added an uncertainty about what to expect as the first married Heiress to the Throne of modern times, and the almost suffocating attentions of the world. Crawfie, seeing her former pupil’s nervousness, tried to help – by offering some advice. This took the form of a homily on the condition of matrimony, which reveals much about British attitudes (or at any rate Scottish lower-middle-class ones) in the 1940s. It was unwise, the governess explained, even in a royal union, to be too jealous or possessive a wife. ‘When you marry, you must not expect the honeymoon to last for ever,’ she told the young woman she had helped to bring up. ‘Sooner or later you will meet the stresses and strains of everyday life. You must not expect your husband to be constantly at your side or always to receive from him the extravagant affection of the first few months. A man has his own men friends, hobbies and interests in which you cannot and will not want to share.’
Princess Elizabeth started her wedding day much as she had begun the morning of her father’s Coronation ten years before – looking out of the window of Buckingham Palace in her dressing-gown.
Despite the cold November weather, crowds had gathered in the Mall the night before, in preparation for an all-night vigil. ‘There was a tremendous crowd reaction’, says Pamela Hicks. ‘Suddenly to see the state coach was marvellous, with Princess Elizabeth with her wonderful complexion and Prince Philip so devastatingly handsome – they were a dream couple.’
The theme was popular monarchy. The day’s events, including the service, were broadcast to forty-two countries. The address by the Archbishop of York, Cyril Garbett, stressed the universality of the occasion. Never, he said, had a wedding been followed with such interest by so many people, yet the ceremony was ‘in all essentials exactly the same as it would have been for any cottager who might be married this afternoon in some small country church in a remote village in the Dales’.
One of the essentials – despite a few protests from ‘extreme advocates for sexual equality’ – was the promise by the Heiress Presumptive ‘to love, cherish and obey’ her husband.
Non-essentials included the attendants, the list of whom made no concessions to social equality. All were either royal or aristocratic. Philip’s cousin, the Marquess of Milford Haven, was best man.
The congregation of two thousand included, as Wheeler-Bennett put it, ‘one of the largest gatherings of royalty, regnant and exiled, of the century’.
There were so many kings and queens and their off-spring, together with foreign heads of state, that other categories were squeezed – British MPs, for instance, had to ballot for places, much to their irritation. Many of the guests were unknown to either the bride or the groom. Others were known to the entire Abbey. When the Leader of the Opposition, Winston Churchill, arrived a little late, ‘everyone stood up’, as Channon observed, ‘all the Kings and Queens’.
There were also eccentrics. Lady Munnings, wife of Sir Alfred, President of the Royal Academy, sat through the whole service with her Pekinese dog, Black Knight, concealed in her muff.
To be invited was bliss: to be left off the list, when you thought you should be on it, was torture. ‘Miserable royal wedding day’, wrote Lord Reith, former Director-General of the BBC, in his diary. ‘Didn’t get up till 10.30. Completely out of phase with everything and everybody through not being asked to the Abbey.’
The lucky ones felt the kind of excitement people feel when they attend events everybody else wishes they were at: they found beauty and wonder everywhere, in the building, the words, the music, the congregation, the Royal Family, the royal couple and especially the bride. There were many accounts from people eager to display their privileged access, and inside knowledge. Faces were studied for expressions, clothes critically examined for the minutest detail. Mrs Fisher, wife of the Archbishop of Canterbury, thought the Princess looked ‘very calm, absolutely lovely’ coming up the aisle. The effect of her outfit, she wrote, ‘was a diaphanous one with her lovely train of silk tulle and her veil’.
Channon ‘thought Princess Elizabeth looked well, shy and attractive, and Prince Philip as if he was thoroughly enjoying himself’.
Others were impressed by the theatricality of the event. ‘The King looked unbelievably beautiful’, Sir Michael Duff wrote to Cecil Beaton, ‘like an early French King and HRH the Bride a dream.’
After the signing of the register in the Chapel of St Edward the Confessor, the couple returned, the Prince bowing to the King and Queen, the Princess dropping a low curtsey, her train billowing out behind her. Then they returned together in the Glass Coach to Buckingham Palace, for an ‘austerity’ wedding breakfast for 150 guests. At the end of it, the King made no speech. He simply raised his glass to ‘the bride’.
