If 1948 was a year of turbulence and upheaval for the royal family – something the queen described to Churchill as ‘almost too vampire … [the experiences] have drained away something of the joy of living’1 – 1949 was one of betrayals. The first was relatively small in scale, if still quietly devastating. Crawfie left the family’s service after fifteen unblemished years of faithful and diligent endeavour, during which she had behaved almost like a second parent to both Elizabeth and Margaret, who were deeply fond of her.
When the queen wrote to her on 1 January, acknowledging her imminent departure, she called her a ‘true and trustworthy friend’. It was with genuine affection that she acknowledged everything that Crawfie had done for the family. ‘I can never tell you how grateful I am for all your devotion & love for Lilibet & Margaret. It was such a great relief to me during the war, to know that you were by their side, through sirens, guns, bombs & pantomimes – keeping everything cool and balanced & good humoured. Thank you with all my heart.’2
The queen hoped that Crawfie would find happiness with ‘the hub of your universe’, Major George Buthlay, whom she had married in September 1947. By Crawfie’s subsequent account, she had wished to leave the royal family’s service shortly after her marriage, but was prevailed upon to stay, if only by the queen’s injunction that ‘I do hope you won’t think of leaving us just yet … it is going to be such a busy time.’3 She remained in service for a further fifteen months, during which time she was granted Nottingham Cottage, a grace-and-favour Christopher Wren-designed residence at Kensington Palace,* as well as promised a full-salary pension for life upon retirement and a suitably well-recompensed job for Major Buthlay. At the start of 1949, it would have seemed to any observer that Crawfie was the very model of a former royal employee.
By the end of the year, she was disgraced and cast out of the circle of trust that the royal family had bundled her in, at times suffocatingly so. Her crime was to attempt to capitalise on her experiences and memories in an inoffensive, if ill-considered, fashion, and her punishment was a warning to any other courtier as to what they might expect if they transgressed in a similar fashion. Yet it was as nothing compared to another, potentially greater betrayal, which started as a result of the king’s illness. It took its form in shadowy intrigues and half-suggested machinations that would, if they had come to pass, have been nothing less than treacherous. And naturally, it was the man who had caused most harm to his family over the previous decades who was behind it.
Kenneth de Courcy did not hold back when he wrote to the Duchess of Windsor on 13 May, after a period of travelling in Europe. ‘There are some things which I want to talk over with you and which I think to be of great importance.’ Nor was she kept in suspense for long. ‘The issues involved are, to my mind, of first importance in view of the King’s illness.’ De Courcy stressed that he had previously advised against the duke returning to Britain, due to the ‘overwhelming natural advantages’ that Edward presented, showing up his brother as the poor royal timber that he was. (‘The consequences might have been very embarrassing to both of them.’) However, ‘an entirely different situation has arisen now’.
With a brutal lack of sentiment, de Courcy outlined the situation as he saw it. ‘The King is gravely ill and out of circulation and he will not be in circulation again. The Royal Family is grievously reduced in numbers and … I am of the opinion that the Dynasty – I prefer to say that rather than the Crown – is facing a time of great crisis, the outcome of which is unforeseeable, but it might be extremely serious.’ He suggested that he knew more about the king’s health than the monarch himself did, stating that the ‘grievous malady’ he suffered from was incurable, and that ‘barring accidents in other parts of the body the King faces the fearful tragedy of losing first one leg and then the other within two or three years’. Listing the various indignities and illnesses he could expect to face, he concluded that ‘in these circumstances therefore it is perfectly clear that the King will be able to do extremely little and moreover that those around him will gain greater and greater power’. Then he produced his most damning provocation. ‘I may tell you most confidentially that a Regency has already been discussed and it seems likely enough that presently one will be appointed.’
Although Princess Elizabeth, as de facto next in line to the throne, was already beginning to assume greater responsibilities in preparation for her eventual accession, de Courcy positioned himself as the man in the know. ‘I have no doubt from my information that the Mountbattens, thoroughly well informed of the situation, will do everything in their power to increase their influence, first with the public regency, secondly with the future monarch.’ He hinted that Prince Philip was likely to be in line for preferment thanks to his Mountbatten connections, but that ‘the King has already had occasion to be extremely angry with this young man and unfortunately there is an ever widening public beginning to hear about the consequences for this’. This, in de Courcy’s estimation, could lead to little less than the destruction of the monarchy as it stood. ‘If this particular person should in consequence of what is happening incline more and more to seek help and succour from Mountbatten, it is perfectly easy to imagine how things will work out.’
The apocalyptic situation thus outlined, de Courcy could make only one suggestion: send for the Duke of Windsor, albeit in an ‘unofficial and most discreet’ capacity, and allow him to function as regent. ‘If the Duke were prepared to be advised and to devote his great abilities and his utmost energies to the task, his influence could be decisive at a most critical time in English history, thus making that of the Mountbattens of relatively little importance … I am not suggesting that the Duke’s influence should be with the Royal Family but with the people.’ This was not so very far from the suggestion, made around the time of the abdication crisis, that the then king should be head of an unelected, unaccountable political organisation known as ‘the King’s Party’, with Churchill as prime minister and Lord Beaverbrook as the shadowy éminence grise behind the monarch.
In both cases, a failing of Edward’s – a willingness to ignore all norms of acceptable behaviour – could now be regarded as a virtue. As de Courcy, channelling Machiavelli, put it, ‘in the times of great kingship Princes who were determined to bend the wills of men and nations to their policies and leadership did not care in the slightest degree for little things like rank and protocol; what they cared for was the winning of power and the service of the nation, and all the ceremonial things followed naturally’. He suggested that rather than attempting to regain the throne by conventional means, the duke might devote himself to something even more important, namely ‘in laying entirely fresh foundation stones in the place of those which are now endangered, upon which the Monarchy of the latter part of the 20th and the whole of the 21st century might be built’. Maintaining that Edward should concentrate on avoiding publicity – ‘a rigid refusal to be seen anywhere which might in the faintest degree give enemies the chance of putting out a play-boy propaganda’ – de Courcy concluded his heartfelt, if treacherous, counsel by suggesting, ‘I venture to say that if this advice were followed the results would be remarkable.’4
No reply exists from either the duchess or the duke to de Courcy’s extraordinary letter. Under normal circumstances, discretion or simple common sense would have entailed a rebuttal of the measures suggested, but if a response was written, it has vanished. Certainly, the relationship between de Courcy and the couple was in no sense tarnished by his suggestion that Edward should effectively all but seize the throne and capitalise on his brother’s indisposition by taking on the office of regent. Not only was de Courcy writing to the duke on 2 June to criticise Churchill (‘his interventions in home politics are uniformly disastrous … if he would only stop making speeches we might possibly win the next election’), but the continuing friendship between them was shown by his subsequent letter cheerily suggesting potential dates to meet for dinner at the Ritz in Paris later in the year. If the duke wished to back away from such a scheme, he did not try very hard.
Nor, in fairness, did he attempt to return to Britain permanently. The beginning of 1949 saw him sequestered in France, with the reluctant company of Murphy, in the ongoing attempt to write his memoir. Unsurprisingly, the relationship between subject and ghostwriter had deteriorated sufficiently by this point for a miserable Murphy to write candidly to Monckton on 23 April that ‘my own spirits stand sorely in need of replenishment’. Pithily, he explained the current difficulties he faced. He had been summoned back to New York and to Life magazine, who were worried at the absence of progress; as he put it, ‘Operation Belvedere is at a point of special crisis.’ There had been some talk about abandoning the project, but he now wrote to the lawyer that ‘We have decided to make one more try … if this last try is to succeed, I shall greatly need your help … It is now all too clear, painfully clear, that our famous friend must continue to count upon you.’5
Murphy’s central problem was that in the absence of the duke being able to remember certain salient details, he was having to piece together the events of his past with help from former courtiers, politicians and the haut ton. Some of these people were less than thrilled by the prospect. Godfrey Thomas wrote to Monckton on 19 June to say, plaintively, that ‘Of course I’ll do what I can to help about the earlier part of HRH’s life … as it happens, I’m going over to Paris to see him this next week-end … He rang me up this morning & sounded full of life and good spirits.’ With an Eeyorish touch of pessimism, he grumbled, ‘[he is] likely, I should say, to see “us both” out’.*6
Before long, it was clear that there were intrinsic difficulties in the creation of the book. Although at this point the royal family were cooperating tacitly – Lascelles received Murphy on a visit to Britain in the early summer of 1949 – it was also clear that there was the potential for great embarrassment in the duke’s treatment of the abdication crisis. Monckton wrote to Lascelles on 8 July, fearing the worst. ‘I am particularly anxious to do all I can in the general interest but could do with some wise and helpful advice … I shall not have an easy time for what I have written to the proposed author will undoubtedly cause offence.’7 A letter to Murphy written on the same day suggested the various difficulties the account could lead to: ‘errors of fact which other people with Notes and Memoirs will rush to correct if they feel hostile in any case … breaking the rules of constitutional propriety … libel, particularly if the facts are not correct’.8 He concluded to Lascelles, with the put-upon attitude that he had displayed ever since the abdication crisis, ‘If I go too far, I shall lose what chance I have of exercising the pruning fork, which becomes more and more necessary at every stage.’9
Unsurprisingly, the effort and anguish involved with these efforts caused Monckton to become ill, and he had to have an eye operation in August. The Duke of Windsor expressed rote commiserations in a letter of 13 August, in which he asked for Monckton’s continued fact-checking assistance, on the grounds that ‘I know from my own experience how stale one’s memory gets after a lapse of thirteen years, but where I may have forgotten you will remember, and vice versa.’ The kinds of questions he had in mind would have baffled even the most sage counsellor – ‘When did I actually decide to abdicate?’10 – and Monckton replied with his usual patience, while convalescing at the stately home of Madresfield. ‘You were always determined to abdicate if that was the only way in which you could marry the Duchess … I was always desperate lest you should fall between two stools, i.e. abdicate and then find that the Duchess was not free.’11
He knew that the book’s very creation was riddled with difficulty. A despairing letter from Murphy of 4 August had noted that ‘the written record is scanty in the extreme, and our friend’s memory, much as he prides himself on it, is weak and scattered’. He even hinted that the memoir might not come to pass. ‘You will be interested to hear that for the moment the book has been completely put aside. We are now concentrating on the articles and toward that end I have now begun to cut the abdication chapters … With the narrowed focus the margin of error will tend to diminish.’12 The implication was clear: if everyone cooperates in the appropriate fashion, the chances of a scandalous and embarrassing memoir ever making it into the public domain were drastically reduced. Murphy no longer hid his irritation with his collaborator, observing on 1 September that ‘I have delayed writing until the Duke of Windsor’s plans become clearer – a not always successful process’, and bemoaning the ‘agonising slow rate’ at which work was being done, as well as sneering of the duke, ‘it is his habit not to commit himself’.13
At last, in October 1949, some chapters were ready, and were sent to Monckton for his professional opinion. After he passed them over to Allen, the solicitor did not hide his horror at both their content and their style. Revealing his unfamiliarity with the ghostwriting process, he gasped, ‘I do not think that HRH himself could possibly be the author of these chapters … I feel that they are so bad that I am impelled to suggest to you that it may be our duty to advise against publication, because if they appear in their present form, they will be condemned and must do him untold injury in every quarter.’ Allen’s approach to journalistic and publishing matters was commendably right-minded, if somewhat naïve in its view of the duke’s inclinations. ‘I should have thought the wiser course would be to rewrite the articles on a basis of truth and generous fairness to everybody, in a manner which would stir world sentiment in his favour, and place him on a new pedestal for all time.’ He concluded, ‘I believe that the task would be by no means impossible in the right hands.’*14
Allen, ever the punctilious lawyer, sent Monckton a series of notes about the chapters. He was especially exercised about what he felt amounted to an ad hominem attack on the former prime minister, Stanley Baldwin† (‘legally, the criticism of S. B. might be said to go beyond fair comment and to constitute … an attack upon him personally, imputing to him base and sinister motives’), and stated that ‘the propriety of a member of the Royal Family, and former King, entering upon political controversy and speculation might be criticised’.15
Monckton, when he read the material the duke and Murphy had produced, was no more impressed. In his own comments, he wrote, ‘there is much to eliminate that is not worthy of him … all this will seem very negative criticism but I am so sure that the pruning fork will be needed and will leave a better result in what is left … that I must make these suggestions’. He wondered out loud whether Murphy might be replaced by ‘a sympathetic, experienced and brilliant friend and writer’16 such as Duff Cooper, and wrote despairingly about some of the basic errors of comprehension, which included describing Attlee, then the Labour prime minister, as a member of the Liberal Party. On 4 October, he washed his hands of involvement with the project. ‘I can take no responsibility for the book, for its presentation of the Duke’s case, or for the accuracy of its statements of fact … It is of vital importance that this should be made plain, because others who played principal parts at the time are likely to rush into print and also to write to me for confirmation of their memory, and I want to be able to decline to enter into any controversy at all.’17
Monckton had done what he could. In a subsidiary note, he listed what he had achieved in his edits. ‘I have succeeded in securing the deletion of the attack on Hardinge* and practically all criticism of the Archbishop.† There is and could be nothing critical of the Royal Family or any member of it. Any minor observations in relation to any of them to which objection might be taken I have already been able to delete or hope to do so.’ Yet for all his skill, tact and diplomacy, he was unable to stand against the duke’s increasingly obstinate desire to see the project come to fruition. Edward may not have decided to take de Courcy’s advice, and prepare himself for a potential regency, not least because another matter of a deeply personal nature continued to occupy him. But if he wanted to take his revenge on those who had wronged him, the best thing he could do would be to publish and be damned.
This was, separately, the same conclusion that Marion Crawford also came to. Yet her rationale was rather different to the duke’s. Crawfie had no desire for revenge on a family who had been good to her and had treated her as a trusted intimate for many years. She had observed the happy marriage of the king and queen, their devotion to their daughters, and the impressive development of Princess Elizabeth into a young woman who dealt with unlooked-for responsibility with grace and charm. (The more wilful and wayward Princess Margaret was another matter.) With her own union with Major Buthlay, she might have hoped for a similar degree of personal contentment, and the ability to enjoy a long, comfortable and fruitful period of retirement, with no financial imperative to work and the chance to dedicate herself to good causes, if she so wished. She would have joined the ranks of many of the ladies-in-waiting and other trusted household servants who performed their duties cheerfully, discreetly and without ever seeking to betray the omertà they had embraced by being a member of the royal family.
Unfortunately, Major Buthlay was not one of life’s gentlemen. He was instead a semi-disgraced military man who would have probably been played by Terry-Thomas had a film been made of his life. A divorcé fifteen years Crawfie’s senior, he had been involved during the war with a company known as UNNRA (United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration), which might have had noble intentions but was stymied by some of its senior members involving themselves in an Albanian smuggling ring. When Buthlay’s attachment there came to an end, he secured himself a minor position with the Bank of Scotland, courtesy of Ulick Alexander, the Keeper of the Privy Purse and, far from coincidentally, a director of the Scottish Union Insurance Company. This gave him a facade of respectability, but none of the financial security he desired. Therefore, his intentions went the same way as many weak men through the ages: exploiting his wife’s good nature to further himself.
Buthlay saw Crawfie’s attachment to ‘the Firm’ as a means of parlaying himself into positions of power and influence. Once she had left their employment, he proceeded to nitpick at the honours and gifts she had received, criticising everything from the size of their grace-and-favour home to the CVO (Commander of the Royal Victorian Order) she was given upon retirement for ‘personal services’; he persuaded her that she should have been given a damehood instead, and that she had been cheated out of her rightful reward. Like a serpent dripping poison into her ear, he gradually convinced her that she had been hard done by, and that her long years of service had been barely noticed, let alone rewarded. Therefore, he argued, it was almost her responsibility to herself to write down her story about her involvement with the royal family. It wouldn’t hurt anyone; it would just be a fair way of putting her story across, and would have the happy by-product of providing for them financially as well.
Crawfie moved swiftly. By April 1949, she had obtained a literary agent, and had asked Queen Elizabeth for permission to write a magazine story about her time with the princesses. The queen, however, was unhappy about the idea, and wrote to her on 4 April to politely dissuade her from continuing with the project. She stated, ‘I do feel, most definitely, that you should not write and sign articles about the children, as people in positions of confidence with us must be utterly oyster, and if you, the moment you finished teaching Margaret, started writing about her and Lilibet, well, we should never feel confidence in anyone again.’ The letter combined the usual regal flattery (‘you have been so wonderfully discreet all the years you were with us’) with straightforward threat: ‘You would lose all your friends, because such a thing has never been done or even contemplated among the people who serve us so loyally.’
She ended with an observation about the temptations Crawfie would be faced with, and how to deal with them. ‘Having been with us in our family life for so long, you must be prepared to be attacked by journalists to give away private and confidential things, and I know that your good sense and loyal affection will guide you well. I do feel most strongly that you must resist the allure of American money & persistent editors and say No No No to offers of dollars for articles about something as private and precious as our family.’18 It was reasonably meant and sensible counsel and Crawfie would have been well advised to take it. After all, whatever she earned from her indiscretion would have to be set against the shame of becoming a pariah.
It was unfortunate, then, that Bruce and Beatrice Blackmar Gould, the co-editors of Ladies’ Home Journal, were so fixated on Crawfie’s revelations. They visited London in May and assiduously pursued her, eventually coercing her into signing a contract on 25 May that agreed she would produce a manuscript of around forty thousand words. Royal permission to publish letters from the queen, the princesses and others was desirable but not essential, and she was promised the aid of a ghostwriter, Dorothy Black, who the Goulds suggested would be ‘immensely helpful in making your story a story that will enlist the sympathy of the Queen as well as our readers’ – which, they noted, was ‘not an easy thing to accomplish’. A more cautious woman might have read over her letter from the queen, with its injunction that she should be ‘utterly oyster’, but Crawfie, leant on by the Goulds and her husband – who dismissed her literary agent, on the grounds that he could do the job better – got to work.
She was pleased with what she and Black produced, believing that it trod a fine line between discretion and retaining the interest of the reader, desperate for titbits of royal gossip. She wrote* to Bruce Gould on 19 September that ‘my story will bring America & Britain closer together in real friendship & understanding. I feel that our Foreign Office will welcome the chance. Like you, we pray all will go well & that the Queen will not only agree but also write a preface in her own handwriting.’19
Her hopes were, inevitably, dashed. The queen read the manuscript in October and wrote to her friend Lady Astor to say, ‘we have worried greatly over this matter, and can only think that our late & completely trusted governess has gone off her head, because she promised in writing that she would not publish any story about our daughters, and this development has made us very sad’. Repeating the royal family’s commitment to secrecy – ‘we have to trust our people completely, and such a thing has never happened before & is a bad example to others’ – she expressed a hope that the Goulds might remove ‘some of the inaccurate or dangerous bits, which would indeed be a great relief’.20
The tactical error the royal family then made was to ask for thirteen points of fact to be addressed in the text: these were mainly the removal of trivial details, such as Queen Mary being asked to assist with the education of the princesses, and the king, queen and Princess Elizabeth watching an air raid from the Brunswick Tower in Windsor Castle and having to be asked to stop doing so. Unfortunately, both the Goulds and Crawfie took the removal of these anecdotes to mean that the queen and others were offering consent to publication, which they certainly were not. As Dermot Murrah wrote to Bruce Gould, ‘the Queen has dug her toes in firmly and is not going to budge on the principle that all former royal servants are forbidden to write under their own names about the royal family’, which, inevitably, meant that, as Murrah put it, ‘Mrs Buthlay has blotted her copybook for good and all.’21
Up to this point, Crawfie had believed, apparently sincerely, that she was acting with at least tacit approval from the queen. When she realised that she was likely to be ostracised by her former friends, and that her grace-and-favour house and pension might be withdrawn, her previously amicable disposition shaded over into anger. She, or rather Buthlay, announced her intention to Gould on 25 November of monetising her treachery, saying, ‘I would be wise to make as much as I can while the going is good as a) I shall certainly require every penny I can earn if the Queen’s displeasure is brought to bear against me, and b) if events cause Her Majesty to smile upon me, whatever I do to make The Little Princesses more popular, will only add to my favour in the Queen’s eyes.’22 In the latter point, at least, she was either naïve or delusional. Her husband’s fear that publication was going to lead to a cessation of expected income led him to write – and Crawfie to sign – a letter on 26 December stating, ‘I have no fear of what might be called “consequences” because I have adhered to the terms of my understanding with the Queen, and if she decides to be unfriendly, or worse, she will be the loser. If any action on Her Majesty’s part is brought to bear on me to my detriment, I shall not hesitate to expose it in the Press if necessary, and if an attempt should be made to eject me from this house and/or deprive me of my pension, I shall fight in Court and have the facts made public if I am driven to do so.’
The aggression and bravado could only barely conceal the fear both Buthlay and Crawfie now felt, and their concession that ‘the Queen will merely feel she should show a certain amount of disapproval’23 indicated their hope that the publication of The Little Princesses would be greeted with temporary froideur and then business as usual would resume. They were well recompensed for the book, to the tune of $80,000,and unsurprisingly, it was a bestseller in both Britain and the United States, with millions of copies of the Ladies’ Home Journal, which had excerpted The Little Princesses, sold; the book itself was the highest-selling title in the United States in 1950.
Not all the public were delighted by its existence. On 30 December, a Vera M. Brunt wrote to Lascelles to say, ‘Can nothing be done to suppress Miss Marion Crawford, the Evening Standard and The Ladies Home Journal of Philadelphia? That anyone who has been trusted as a Royal Governess for 17 years can so demean herself, and cheapen all that she should protect, has been a great shock to one of His Majesty’s most loyal servants.’24 Lascelles, who was privately as horrified and disgusted as his employers by what became known as ‘doing a Crawfie’,* responded with a sigh. ‘The Private secretary regrets that it is not possible to take any steps such as Miss Brunt proposes, and can only suggest that Miss Brunt, if she wishes to pursue the matter, should address herself to the authoress of the book in question.’25
Crawfie’s exclusion from the royal family’s wider circle was not immediate. She received a Christmas card from Princess Elizabeth at the end of 1949, was provided with central heating for her home by the royal household, and was invited to the royal garden party in the summer of 1950. Although she never heard from Queen Elizabeth directly again, it was not until the autumn of the following year that she appreciated the extent to which she and her husband ‘were shunned by colleagues from top to bottom’.26 Realising that she was never going to be welcomed back into the fold, she devoted herself to more of the same bland and often factually inaccurate writing, which led to a libel suit from the Duke of Windsor, offended by the description of his wife in the serialised version of The Little Princesses; he especially disliked Crawfie’s description of how Wallis ‘appeared to be entirely at her ease, but rather too much so … she had a distinctly proprietary way of speaking to the new King’.* The offending passages were subsequently withdrawn, but it was yet another black mark against her previously sinless name.
The end of her public career came swiftly and embarrassingly. She had become a regular journalist for Woman’s Own and was commissioned to write a piece on Trooping the Colour and Royal Ascot for the magazine in June 1955. She produced the usual anodyne gush – ‘the flashing of the swords in the sunlight’ and suchlike – but was undone by the fact that she wrote her copy long in advance, which was then exposed by the events being cancelled because of a rail strike. There had been widespread suspicion that much of The Little Princesses was exaggerated or fictionalised – an accurate assumption, given that the Goulds had rewritten it to make it more interesting, accuracy be damned – and this seemed to confirm it.
Crawfie was finished as a writer, and faced public mockery, a state of affairs the royal family did nothing to ameliorate. When the queen had remarked that the inevitable consequence of her publishing her book would be that ‘You would lose all your friends’, she was not exaggerating. Facing life as an unpopular outcast, Crawfie removed herself from London society, and she and Buthlay retired to Aberdeen, leaving their grace-and-favour home behind.
They remained an unlikely couple, unable to shake off the taint of notoriety; her doctor described the pair as ‘very, very presbyterian, [she] sitting with a blank face as her husband cracked barrackroom jokes’.27 Buthlay died in 1977, and Crawfie had a miserable widowhood, apparently beset by guilt over her actions. Before her eventual death in 1988, she had made at least one unsuccessful suicide attempt; the emergency services who saved her life found a note that said, ‘The world has passed me by and I cannot bear those I love to pass me by on the road.’ Although Balmoral was less than fifty miles away, she would never be visited by any of its residents again.
Both Crawfie and the duke had betrayed the royal family. The difference between the two of them was that as an employee – even, whisper it, a servant – she was ultimately dispensable, for all the queen’s talk of affection and loyalty. The duke, despite his far greater provocations, could not be cast out into outer darkness, much as his family might have wished for it. But as his brother’s health continued to hang in abeyance, he decided to return to a long-fought battle, and hoped that this time his wishes would finally prevail.