“Buckingham Palace, 1947” reads the caption, and Episode 1 of The Crown takes us straight inside it — to discover the cancer-stricken King George VI leaning over a lavatory bowl, painfully coughing up his life’s blood. The King is dying, make ready for the Queen…Kneeling in the palace throne room is Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten RN, lean and threadbare in his wartime uniform, ready to be ennobled before his wedding to Princess Elizabeth the next day. The Lord Chancellor, the Earl Marshal and a row of stern establishment faces look on as the ailing monarch takes hold of the sword that will transform his future son-in-law from commoner to royal, their eyes darting with alarm as the King starts to stutter. Then George VI gamely clenches his jaw, twists his tongue around Philip’s trio of titles, and rounds off the list with the highest honour in his gift, the Order of the Garter, with which Edward III first knighted his fighting companions in 1348. “His Majesty has been pleased to authorise the use of the prefix ‘His Royal Highness’ by Lieut. Philip Mountbatten,” reported The Times next day, 20th November 1947, “and to approve that the dignity of a Dukedom of the United Kingdom be conferred upon him by the name, style and title of Baron Greenwich of Greenwich [a tribute to Philip’s naval background], Earl of Merioneth [a nod to Wales] and Duke of Edinburgh [a traditional royal dukedom and a compliment to Scotland]…The King touched Lieut. Mountbatten on each shoulder with a sword as he knelt before him in the ceremony of the accolade of knighthood, and invested him with the insignia of the Order of the Garter.”
The newly ennobled Philip Mountbatten sports his Order of the Garter sash (this page) following his dubbing in Buckingham Palace by King George VI on 19th November 1947, the eve of his wedding day. Meanwhile, (above) back in Whitehall, this 1947 photo shows young Lt. Mountbatten still working at his day job in the Admiralty. Credit 4
Which is all pretty much as we see things on the screen. The foreigner had been made familiar — with just one difference. As a prelude to the investiture scene we watch “His Royal Highness Prince Philip of Greece and Denmark” renounce his Greek nationality “and all foreign titles” to become a British citizen. The obscure and dubious foreign prince becomes a brave British war hero in front of our eyes.
In reality, however, Philip had already become a British citizen earlier that year via the routine, form-filling legal process, and certainly not inside Buckingham Palace. History records that Prince Philip of Greece renounced his Greek titles to receive his British citizenship on 18th March 1947 under the British Nationality and Status of Aliens Act — so he went by the name of plain Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten RN for a full eight months before his father-in-law ennobled him that November.
You are watching a historical drama, dear reader, not a history documentary. The Crown is a work of creative fiction that has been inspired by the wisdom and spirit of real events. To understand Philip, we need to witness his renunciation of his foreign royal status at the very moment we first meet him, the better to savour his full entry into the House of Windsor the next day. What you see on the screen is both truth and invention — in the age-old tradition of historical drama. Friedrich Schiller’s revered and much translated Maria Stuart, first staged in 1800, is often cited as the classic example of a history play, depicting the bitter clash of personalities when Mary Queen of Scots came face to face with Queen Elizabeth I — except that in history the two women never met.
The Viking Spirit…In 1935 Prince Philip of Greece (aged 14) played Donalbane in Shakespeare’s Macbeth as a pupil at Gordonstoun, the progressive academy in northern Scotland established by the Jewish educationalist Kurt Hahn, after he fled Nazi Germany. Credit 5
As this book will demonstrate, The Crown is based on meticulous factual research. But it is also a TV show, an artfully arranged assemblage of pixels whose purpose is to entertain, to explore great characters and themes in the life of a nation, and to winkle out the meaning of extraordinary events. The ultimate power of the ancient and modern British monarchy lies in its capacity to generate heartfelt emotion, sometimes angry and hostile, but more usually curious and admiring — and always sentimental to an extraordinary degree. “Of the various forms of government that have prevailed in the world,” wrote the historian Edward Gibbon, “an hereditary monarchy seems to present the fairest scope for ridicule.”
These are the paradoxes that Peter Morgan seeks to address in The Crown — whose drama revolves around two very real people, Elizabeth Windsor and Philip Mountbatten, and the extraordinary lifetime’s adventure on which they embark together. It’s the dramatisation of a seven-decade relationship — a love story that is both simple and highly complicated. So that is why Episode 1 of the series does not begin with the accession of Queen Elizabeth II in February 1952, nor with her solemn crowning in June the following year, grand constitutional landmarks though both events were. We first meet Elizabeth half a decade earlier — on the eve of her wedding to Philip. In reality, neither of the couple has ever been quite sure precisely where and when they first met. But they do recall exactly when they first took serious notice of each other. “We may have met before,” wrote Princess Elizabeth in 1947, trying to be helpful in response to a court correspondent’s request, “at the Coronation [of George VI in May 1937] or the Duchess of Kent’s wedding [in November 1934].” As direct descendants of Queen Victoria, Elizabeth and Philip were both children of the glamorous and fading miasma of 19th-century European royalty that still gathered for such events. But “the first time I remember meeting Philip,” wrote Elizabeth — heavily underlining the word “remember” — “was at the Royal Naval College, Dartmouth, in July 1939, just before the war.”
The meeting had been masterminded by George VI’s cousin, Lord Louis “Dickie” Mountbatten, who, like the King, had trained at Dartmouth as a naval cadet. The Mountbatten destiny had been intertwined with that of the House of Windsor since the reign of Queen Victoria. Dickie, like George VI, was one of her great-grandchildren, and his father Louis had been First Lord of the Admiralty at the outbreak of the First World War. But though this elder Louis had risen to First Lord on merit after 46 years of patriotic naval service, he was German by birth, and less than three months after hostilities started he had been hounded out of office during the popular witch-hunt against all things Teutonic, from German sausages to sausage dogs. The ties between Windsor and Mountbatten had been bound yet closer by this younger Louis who had been with the new George VI on the sad evening in December 1936 when the two men had stood and watched the recently abdicated Edward VIII pack his bags to go into exile. “Dickie, this is absolutely terrible,” Mountbatten recalled the new King saying, close to tears. “I’m only a naval officer. It’s the only thing I know about.”
(1895–1952)
PLAYED BY JARED HARRIS
The VC (Victoria Cross) is Britain’s supreme award for battlefield bravery. In September 1940, at the height of the Blitz, King George VI created the George Cross for civilian valour — and it became an apt metaphor for his life. With his infant legs strapped in to painful splints to prevent the public dishonour of knock knees, while enduring daily correction from his gruff father George V, it was small wonder that “Bertie” had developed a stammer by the age of eight. Between them, his wife, Elizabeth Bowes Lyon, and his Australian speech therapist, Lionel Logue, restored self-belief to his heart and tongue. “I broke down and sobbed like a child,” confessed the new King privately over the 1936 abdication of his brilliant, overshadowing elder brother. But in public, the stoicism with which George VI battled his evident shyness and speech handicap showed monarchy with a fallibly human face. Winston Churchill’s funeral tribute to the King was a wreath of white lilies and carnations in the distinctive shape of a George Cross.
“That is a very curious coincidence,” Lord Mountbatten replied, “for my father once told me that when the Duke of Clarence died [in 1892], your father [the future George V] 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.’ ” In 1939 at Dartmouth, the two cousins shared the pleasure of reliving their naval training, while two more distant and younger cousins, Elizabeth and Philip, got to know each other over a game of croquet.
Born on the island of Corfu in June 1921, Philip, Prince of Greece, ash-blond and angular like a Viking, had not a drop of Greek blood in his veins. He was a Dane, one of the exports to Greece of the most successful exporting dynasty of modern times, the Danish royal house, known to genealogists as the Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburgs. “You don’t look like a bloody Greek to me,” said Mike Parker, a young Australian who met Philip when they both served on naval convoy duty during the war, and would later become his close friend and private secretary. “I’m part-Danish, part-German and part-Russian,” explained Philip. “I can go to practically any country in Europe and there’s a relation there I can stay with.” He needed the hospitality. His father Prince Andrew was exiled from Greece in December 1922 in one of the frequent ups and downs of Greek politics, and the family fled Corfu in a British warship, carrying the 18-month-old Philip in an orange box. Philip’s mother was Alice, the beautiful, deaf daughter of Queen Victoria’s granddaughter, Victoria of Hesse, who had married Louis of Battenberg, the ill-treated sea lord and first of the Mountbattens. This mixture from the gene pool of European royalty lay at the root of Philip’s self-assurance, which he displayed at that first meeting in Dartmouth, to the evident liking of Princess Elizabeth. “She is shy and he is not,” explained one of their friends. “That is the fundamental dynamic of their relationship. He gives her ‘ginger.’ ”
26th October 1946. Philip and Elizabeth had just become secretly engaged when they attended the wedding of Uncle Dickie’s daughter Patricia Mountbatten to John Brabourne at Romsey Abbey, Hampshire, not far from the Mountbatten home at Broadlands. Credit 7
After that 1939 encounter and through his years of wartime naval service, Philip wrote letters to Elizabeth “from here and there” on what he later described as “kind of family relationship terms,” always downplaying suggestions of any romantic understanding with his younger cousin. “I thought not all that much about it…” he told his official biographer, Basil Boothroyd. “We used to correspond occasionally.” But Cousin Elizabeth saw things very differently. Nearly 20 years later Sir John Wheeler-Bennett published his official biography of her father George VI, a work commissioned and scrutinised word for word by Queen Elizabeth II, and although it might have been politic for such a biographer to play down any impression of infatuation on the part of the Queen at such an early age, Sir John’s royally approved verdict was emphatic on the subject of Prince Philip of Greece: “This was the man with whom Princess Elizabeth had been in love from their first meeting.”
Old Queen Mary, Elizabeth’s grandmother, was taking a close interest. The couple had been “in love for the last eighteen months, in fact longer I think,” she confided in 1944 to her lady-in-waiting, the Countess of Airlie. The old Queen had a soft spot for Philip, remembering him as “a nice little boy with very blue eyes” who had come to tea when she lived in Buckingham Palace. From the start of the war she had honoured him with a place on her knitting list, one of the favoured relatives for whom she crocheted woollen scarves.
The Princess’s mother, Queen Elizabeth, was not so sure. She would have welcomed more evidence of reticence to balance Philip’s bumptiousness, and she didn’t like his politics, which veered “too far to port” (leftwards), in her opinion, in the subversive tradition of his Uncle Dickie. War’s isolation had left her daughter unqualified to make such a major commitment at an early age, she felt, and she took to inviting well-born young Guards officers to Windsor for the weekends — the future Dukes of Grafton and Buccleuch, and Henry Herbert, Lord Porchester, the future Earl of Carnarvon. These handsome heirs to ancient estates had the style the Queen thought suitable for her daughter, and the Princess enjoyed their company. Several of them did indeed become staples of her social circle in later years — particularly Henry Herbert, “Porchey,” with whom the Princess had already established a friendship based on their shared love of horses. But none of the Queen’s “First XI,” as intimates slyly called them, had the bounce and excitement of Philip.
“Everyone was starting to say that he could be the one,” remembered Edward Ford, later one of Elizabeth’s assistant private secretaries. “But he wasn’t deferential or ingratiating. He behaved with all the self-confidence of a naval officer who’d had a good war…He wasn’t in the least afraid to tell Lord Salisbury [the senior Conservative politician] what his own opinions were.” “The Salisburys and the hunting and shooting aristocrats around the King and Queen did not like him at all,” remembered Mike Parker. “And the same went for [Tommy] Lascelles and the old-time courtiers. They were absolutely bloody to him.” But the groundswell only made Elizabeth the more determined. In the summer of 1946 Philip took a few weeks’ leave from his teaching duties to join the royal family’s annual Scottish holiday and there, according to legend, in a picturesque spot in the hills overlooking Balmoral, he formally proposed and was accepted. Elizabeth would be 21 on her next birthday, and she had waited, as her parents had requested. But she knew whom she loved and whom she wanted.
LORD LOUIS “DICKIE” MOUNTBATTEN
First Earl Mountbatten of Burma
(1900–79)
PLAYED BY GREG WISE
The leanly handsome, charming and shamelessly pushy Louis Mountbatten could take some credit for his nephew Philip’s jackpot marriage — and he frequently did. Born royal, but not very royal, “Uncle Dickie” got even closer to the inner circle in his later years as mentor and “honorary grandfather” to Prince Charles. In fact, he had no Richard among his names, having been christened Louis Francis Albert Victor Nicholas — the family explanation was that “Dickie” had been an alteration of the last of these to distinguish him from his Uncle Nicky, Tsar Nicholas II. His wartime naval career won him distinction in Burma (modern Myanmar), but his greater achievement came in 1947–48 as the last Viceroy of India, where his energies reduced at least some of the killing in the bloodthirsty partition of India and Pakistan. The IRA thought they’d scored a famous victory when they blew up Uncle Dickie on a family fishing expedition off County Sligo in August 1979, but the bombers actually handed him the hero’s farewell, of which he could only have dreamed. The most grudging critics of Mountbatten’s ego had to admit it was his due.
“I suppose one thing led to another,” Philip later explained to his biographer, determinedly downplaying the romance, “…It was sort of fixed up.” Practicalities ruled when it came to making the news public. Buckingham Palace had two priorities in the aftermath of victory — to thank the countries of the Empire for their support in the war and to restore the overtaxed health of the King — and the two objectives were neatly combined in a family tour to South Africa scheduled for the spring of 1947. George VI had set his heart on this sunny foreign foray by the family unit he liked to call “us four,” and there was no room in this picture for a son-in-law.
A compromise was reached. The King consented to his daughter’s engagement, but it must remain a secret until after the tour. That October Elizabeth and Philip attended the wedding of Lord Mountbatten’s daughter Patricia in the parish church of Romsey in Hampshire, and they played the game of keeping a public distance from each other. “When I come back,” said Elizabeth to her grandmother’s old friend Lady Airlie, thanking her for an early twenty-first-birthday present, “we will have a celebration — maybe two celebrations.” The South African tour was a triumph for Elizabeth, culminating in her coming-of-age dedication, broadcast on the evening of 1st April 1947: “I declare before you all,” she enunciated in her clear, young voice, “that my whole life, whether it be long or short, shall be devoted to your service and the service of our great Imperial Commonwealth to which we all belong. But I shall not have the strength to carry out this resolution unless you join in it with me, as I now invite you to do; I know that your support will be unfailingly given.”
The broadcast had been drafted by Tommy Lascelles, George VI’s severe and traditional Private Secretary, whose own summing up of the tour gave pride of place to Elizabeth: “She has come on in the most surprising way, and all in the right direction…” he noted in his diary. “When necessary, she can take on the old bores with much of her mother’s skill, and never spares herself in that exhausting part of royal duty. For a child of her years, she has got an astonishing solicitude for other people’s comfort.” This consideration for the convenience of others, noted the private secretary, who had served George V, Edward VIII and George VI, not to mention Queen Mary and the apparently charming Queen Elizabeth, “is not a normal characteristic of that family.” Princess Elizabeth had come of age. She was ready — and she needed to be. When George VI returned from his 1947 tour of South Africa, he was looking and feeling dreadful. In his twelve weeks away he had lost 17lb in weight. He suffered from painful cramps in his legs and his secretaries would find him in his study kicking his feet against the desk to try to restore circulation — signs of the arteriosclerosis that came from his smoking and the restriction of blood flow to his lower limbs. The King’s immediate symptom was a peppery temper that was fiercer than ever — and an obstinate refusal to accept that the time had finally come for his daughter to marry Philip.
19th November 1947. The stag party for the recently ennobled HRH Baron Greenwich of Greenwich, Earl of Merioneth and Duke of Edinburgh, Knight of the Garter, aka Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten (centre), was conducted in the finest naval tradition by his uncle Lord Louis “Dickie” Mountbatten (second from right with cigar). Credit 9
Elizabeth and Philip, for their parts, were more in love and more determined than ever. Early in June 1947 Philip wrote assuagingly to his prospective mother-in-law to concede that delaying their plans until after the South African tour had been correct. But now he and the Princess wanted to start their new life together. Elizabeth’s personal conviction was the decisive factor. Whatever her parents’ doubts, she herself had none, and she was now 21 — an adult who declined to accept further delay. The dutiful daughter finally put her foot down and, faced with her resolve, her parents bowed to the inevitable. “She has known him ever since she was 12,” wrote the still worried Queen on 7th July 1947 to her sister May, “very secretly” (underlined in both black and red). “I think she is really fond of him, and I do pray that she will be very happy.” Three days later, the secret was revealed. “It is with the greatest pleasure,” read a statement from Buckingham Palace, “that the King and Queen announce the betrothal of their dearly beloved daughter the Princess Elizabeth to Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten RN…to which union the King has gladly given his consent.” “They both came to see me after luncheon looking radiant,” wrote a delighted Queen Mary, who gave her granddaughter some family jewellery. Mabell Airlie was impressed by how Philip’s worn uniform reflected the country’s current austerity — “the usual ‘after the war’ look…I liked him for not having got a new one for the occasion, as many men would have done, to make an impression.”
Life was tough in post-war Britain. Wartime rationing restrictions still applied. Clothing, like food, could only be purchased with coupons from a government-issued ration book, and the officially encouraged atmosphere of make do and mend raised tricky questions about the proper scale of the forthcoming royal wedding. For Princess Elizabeth, sharing her joy with the nation meant sharing its grumbling as well. The cost and style of royal celebrations would provide a theme of national fractiousness throughout her reign, though it was Aneurin Bevan, the beating heart of Labour’s left wing, who put the controversy in context. “As long as we have a monarchy,” he declared, “the monarchy’s work has got to be done well.” That proved to be the national consensus by the time the wedding day rolled around on 20th November 1947. The list of over 1,500 wedding gifts displayed extraordinary generosity from ordinary members of the public, with many women saving up their ration coupons to send the Princess the most coveted feminine asset of the times: “351 — Mrs David Mudd: a pair of nylon stockings. 352 — Miss Ethel Newcombe: a piece of old lace. 353 — Mrs E. Klarood: a pair of nylon stockings.” People who had been running for their lives into bomb shelters a few years earlier could now celebrate and laugh in the streets. It was, in the words of the historian Ben Pimlott, “a kind of victory parade for liberty” — and for the constitutional monarchy as well. “Affection for a King’s person and family,” wrote G. M. Trevelyan in the official programme to the wedding, “adds warmth and drama to every man’s rational awareness of his country’s political unity and historic tradition. It is a kind of popular poetry in these prosaic times.”
The wedding helped the family reconcile their differences. “I was so proud of you and thrilled at having you so close to me on our long walk in Westminster Abbey,” wrote the King to his daughter after the ceremony. “But when I handed your hand to the Archbishop, I felt that I had lost something very precious…I am so glad you wrote & told Mummy that you think the long wait before your engagement & the long time before the wedding was for the best…I can see that you are sublimely happy with Philip, which is right, but ‘don’t forget us’ is the wish of Your ever loving and devoted PAPA.” All was forgiven as far as Elizabeth was concerned. “Darling Mummy,” she wrote on the second day of the couple’s honeymoon at Broadlands, the Mountbatten estate in Hampshire, “I don’t know where to begin this letter, or what to say, but I know I must write it somehow because I feel so much about it…I think I’ve got the best mother and father in the world, and I only hope that I can bring up my children in the happy atmosphere of love and fairness which Margaret and I have grown up in.” The arrival of a healthy son and heir within less than a year completed the family and the national joy. Prince Charles was born on 14th November 1948, and Princess Anne less than two years later — “heavenly little creatures” according to their doting grandmother: “I can’t tell you what a difference it makes having [them] in the house — everybody loves them so, and they cheer us up more than I can say. Thank you very very much for letting them come.”
The reason why the baby prince and princess were staying with their grandparents at Royal Lodge in Windsor Great Park at the start of 1951 was because their mother was abroad enjoying an interlude unlike any other in her life, the closest she would ever come to everyday existence. Philip’s naval career, which both he and the Palace felt he should continue to pursue, had taken him to the Mediterranean island of Malta on active service, and Elizabeth went along too. For three spells that added up to nearly a year, she could do relatively ordinary things, such as sunbathe and swim off a beach, drive her own car and visit Tony’s hairdressing salon in Shema every ten days for a six-shilling shampoo and set. On Saturday nights, the Princess and the Duke would join other naval couples for dinner dances in the ballroom of the Hotel Phoenicia, where Philip enjoyed Duke Ellington (“Take the ‘A’ Train”) while Elizabeth shook a lively leg in the samba. Not surprisingly after all their Balmoral evenings, the couple both excelled at the Eightsome Reel. “They were so relaxed and free, coming and going as they pleased…” recalled John Dean, Philip’s valet, of these Malta adventures. “I think it was their happiest time.”
Philip, meanwhile, had achieved his long-standing ambition to captain a ship of his own. After a few months as first lieutenant on HMS Chequers, a C-class destroyer, he was given command of HMS Magpie, a frigate in Britain’s still considerable Mediterranean fleet. “Dukey,” as he was known behind his back, soon impressed his crew with his seamanship skills, negotiating difficult shallows or turning the ship with precision. Philip made clear to his men that royal titles were never to be used, and he impressed still more when he stripped to the waist to row stroke in one of the frigate’s whalers, leading his crew to victory in the fleet’s annual regatta in which Magpie won six of the ten boat events. In February 1951, Dukey and his wife, a frequent visitor to the ship, were said to be investigating married quarters ashore with a nursery, so they could bring their two children out to live with them.
But back in London George VI’s health was worsening. When he opened the Festival of Britain exhibition on the south bank of the Thames in May 1951, the 55-year-old King looked worn beyond his years and had to retire to bed soon afterwards, suffering from what appeared to be an attack of flu. X-rays revealed a shadow on his left lung which his doctors told him was “pneumonitis,” a less severe form of pneumonia which could be treated with penicillin injections. The King was a good patient, taking careful notes of his symptoms to help his conversations with his doctors. He was a particular believer in the homeopathic prescriptions of his beloved Dr. Weir, and had even named one of his racehorses, Hypericum, after a homeopathic remedy that Weir had prescribed him.
But as the weeks went by, the monarch remained reluctantly bedridden, unable to “chuck out the bug” as he put it, and Elizabeth returned from Malta to help with the traditional royal duties of the summer. Early in June, she read the speech of welcome at the banquet to honour the visiting King Haakon of Norway, then took her father’s place at his official birthday celebration, Trooping the Colour on Horse Guards Parade, riding Winston, a 16-hand chestnut gelding that George VI had ridden in previous years. “It must have been an ordeal for her,” wrote Queen Mary to the King, “but she was so calm & collected all through the Ceremony, it was really a pleasure to watch her.” Towards the end of July, Philip returned to Clarence House, the London family and office headquarters that he and Elizabeth had renovated for themselves on the Mall. “It will be a long time before I want those again,” he said regretfully as he watched his valet unpack and hang up his white naval uniforms. The couple were due to tour Canada in the autumn, and it already looked likely that they would have to take the place of the King and Queen on the long royal tour to Kenya, Ceylon, Australia and New Zealand that was scheduled for the following year. The hope had been that some winter months in the sun would fortify the King’s health, but he still was not able to shake off his cough. Further tests in September confirmed the doctors’ worst fears, and an operation was recommended. “If it’s going to help me to get well again, I don’t mind,” said the King, “but the very idea of the surgeon’s knife…” Going into hospital would only intensify the royal hyper-anxiety, so his surgeons decided to create an exact replica of Westminster Hospital’s principal operating theatre inside the Palace, moving an adjustable operating table, gas and oxygen cylinders, high-intensity lighting and sterilising equipment into the high-ceilinged Buhl Guest Suite on the first floor looking out onto the Mall. To ensure peace and quiet for their patient, they asked for the daily changing of the guard ceremony in the front courtyard outside to be moved down to St James’s Palace, both during the operation and for the several weeks of bed rest that followed. The King was told that “structural changes” had necessitated the removal of his entire left lung and he did not enquire what those changes might be.
Princess Elizabeth and the Duke of Edinburgh posing in Buckingham Palace on 20th November 1947 with their wedding guests, including their best man, Philip’s cousin, the Marquess of Milford Haven (front row, next to the bride and to the left of Princess Margaret holding flowers); Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother (front row with sash, fourth from right); Queen Mary (behind and between the bride and groom); and the delighted mastermind of the whole event, Lord Louis “Dickie” Mountbatten (back row, third from left). The guest list did not include any of Philip’s sisters from Germany, because of post-war sensitivities in Britain. The husbands of three of his sisters had been prominent Nazis. Credit 11
But Winston Churchill, getting ready to fight a general election the following month, asked his own doctor, Charles Moran, why the specialists had spoken in such vague terms. “Because,” replied Moran, “they were anxious to avoid talking about cancer.” The C-word was never mentioned to the King or the Queen, nor to anyone else in the royal family, though the process of removing the left lung on 23th September made clear to the surgeons that the right lung was now infected as well. On the brightest prognosis, George VI had only a few months left to live. On the evening of the operation — during which a crowd of more than 5,000 people had stood in silent vigil outside Buckingham Palace — the diarist Harold Nicolson received a phone call from Wilson Harris, the editor of the Spectator, asking him to write an obituary of the King on the basis of Charles Moran’s suspicions. Moran would later tell Wilson that “even if the King recovers, he can scarcely live more than a year.”
“The King [is] pretty bad,” noted Nicolson the following day. “Nobody can talk about anything else — and the Election is forgotten. What a strange thing is Monarchy!” Early in October the King was still not strong enough to get out of bed to attend the Privy Council meeting that was necessary to approve the formalities proroguing Parliament prior to the election. So, on 5th October, a small delegation of Privy Councillors gathered round his bedroom door while the Lord President read out the order of business. Speaking with difficulty, George VI muttered the word “Approved,” while Lascelles took the necessary documents to his bedside for a shaky royal signature.
As events turned out, the narrow election victory on 25th October of his old friend and wartime companion, Winston Churchill, seemed to re-galvanise the monarch. When Churchill submitted his list of proposed ministerial appointments in his new cabinet, George VI’s sharp eye spotted that Anthony Eden’s title of Foreign Secretary was followed by the words “Deputy Prime Minister” — Churchill’s sop to pacify his ambitious no. 2. The King struck out the words of this title imperiously, since they infringed, in his opinion, on his royal prerogative to choose a successor in the event of the Prime Minister dying in office or resigning, and as the weeks went by, his own recovery continued. On 14th November, he was fit enough to attend Prince Charles’s third birthday party, being photographed on a sofa sitting happily beside his grandson. A pre-ordained political succession might be taboo, but the royal succession flourished.
That December, George VI was able to write and pre-record his annual Christmas broadcast before heading out to Sandringham for the traditional Christmas festivities with his family. The sportsman sovereign seemed back to his old self as he enjoyed several energetic weeks of the midwinter shooting that he loved so well. But when his daughter and her husband set off for Kenya on the last day of January 1952, ready to start on the long southern odyssey that the King and his wife had been due to carry out, Princess Elizabeth’s private secretary, Martin Charteris, carried sealed envelopes containing a draft Accession Declaration in his briefcase, together with a message to both Houses of Parliament.
Homeopathic Doctor
(1879–1971)
PLAYED BY JAMES LAURENSON
The bedside manner of Sir John Weir, physician to George VI and Queen Mary, relied on a pocket notebook of “pawky jokes” and “wee stories” that he would relate to his patients in his Scottish accent. But their faith in him rested primarily on a shared belief in homeopathy, the alternative medicine that seeks to use the body’s own abilities to heal itself. Homeopathy, Weir liked to argue, “is no religion, no sect, no fad, no humbug.” Its small doses of often herbal remedies “merely stimulate the vital reactions of the patient, and this causes him to cure himself.” Courtiers like Dermot Morrah, the royal historian, dismissed Weir as an “old menace” whose “quack” remedies did his royal patients more harm than good. But Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother and Princess Alice, Duchess of Gloucester, were two of Weir’s patients who lived comfortably beyond their hundredth birthdays — with Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Charles also faring quite healthily as later recruits to the cause of homeopathy.
The Order of the Boot
WINSTON CHURCHILL IN OPPOSITION
1945–51
Winston Churchill made his entrance to Westminster Abbey with exquisite timing at the royal wedding of 20th November 1947. The former prime minister was late (a sheer accident, according to his friends; deliberate calculation, in the view of his critics) — and the entire congregation rose to its feet in salute. “Everyone stood up,” reported the diarist Sir Henry “Chips” Channon, “all the Kings and Queens.” It was difficult to believe this was the man whom the British electorate had flung out of power little more than two years earlier. “Has Winston no shame?” asks “Bobbety,” Marquess of Salisbury, in Episode 1 of The Crown, as Peter Morgan imagines how Churchill’s principal Conservative critic might have expressed his disdain. “He’s outrageous,” responds Anthony Eden, Churchill’s not-so-loyal lieutenant and nominal deputy. “But you have to admire him…Poor old Attlee…No one got up for him.”
The Winston Churchill whom we first meet at the beginning of The Crown is theoretically a beaten man, no longer prime minister but the Leader of His Majesty’s Opposition. As the Second World War had drawn to a close in the spring and summer of 1945, the cross-party coalition government which Churchill had so successfully headed since the dark days of 1940 had started to fracture. The European war had been triumphantly won, and, though Japan fought on, the coalition’s deputy leader, Clement Attlee, felt the time had come for the Labour Party to strike out on its own again.
In the general election that followed, the British electorate resoundingly agreed. They wanted a fresh start, handing Labour a massive 146-seat majority to implement its programme to build a bright new cradle-to-grave “Welfare State,” featuring a free National Health Service along with a massive programme of nationalisation. King George VI offered his departing prime minister the knighthood of the Garter, but Churchill declined. “How can I accept the Order of the Garter,” he said a few months later, “when the people of England have just given me the Order of the Boot?”
By October 1951, however, after six years of Socialist government, Britain had come to view Churchill and Conservatism more kindly. Clement Attlee’s great reforming administration seemed exhausted by its efforts, and life remained drab for many people, with many items of daily existence, from sweets to tobacco, still rationed. Labour’s promised brave new world had not dawned.
As a general election loomed, the Conservatives seemed to offer fresh energy and practical competence, with a commitment to build 300,000 new homes per year — and inside the party some influential voices argued for finding a new young leader to match. Since 1945 “Bobbety” Cecil (he became Marquess of Salisbury in 1947) had led a cabal of disaffected younger Tories plotting how to persuade their revered but ageing leader to resign, or at least delegate day-to-day control of the party to Anthony Eden, the well-respected foreign secretary whom Churchill himself acknowledged to be his designated successor.
But the old man would have none of it. He angrily repulsed at least two approaches from his colleagues, while Eden declined to be party to any coup — so it was Winston Churchill who took up residence again in Downing Street on 26th October 1951 after the electorate narrowly handed victory to the Tories.
Yet the smiles on many Conservative faces were forced. Labour had easily won the popular vote (by 48.8 to 44.3 per cent), and it was only the first-past-the-post constituency system that had given a shaky 17-seat majority to Churchill. Bobbety Salisbury and a growing number of his Conservative colleagues had no doubt that the party’s first order of business in victory would be to map out a retirement schedule for their 76-year-old leader now that Churchill had managed to win what he described as “the last prize I seek.”
Ousted from Downing Street in 1945 by Clement Attlee’s Labour Party, Winston Churchill reinforced his reputation as a “war monger” with his 1946 speech at Fulton, Missouri, where he coined the phrase “Iron Curtain”; “From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.” This article described how the Tory Leader of the Opposition was trying to soften his image and win back power — as he did in October 1951. Credit 14
KING GEORGE VI, COUNTRY GENTLEMAN
Whenever the royal train rolled across East Anglia’s windswept fens towards his family’s Norfolk estate at Sandringham, King George VI would talk of “going home.” He had been born at Sandringham in December 1895, and 57 years later he would die there, having spent some of his happiest hours striding the Norfolk countryside in his tweed cap and plus fours, a gun in the crook of his arm, scanning the high skies for partridge, coot or mallard. Born Prince Albert of York and known to his family as “Bertie,” the stuttering King played diverse roles in his life — knock-kneed naval cadet, the last Emperor of India, father of Queen Elizabeth II, steady prop to the post-abdication monarchy, and dogged wartime leader. His secret to managing all these parts was that he remained consistently in style and at heart a Norfolk country gentleman.
Wolferton Splash was his special pride. On 19th January 1915, the Sandringham estate was surprised by one of the first German airship raids on Britain. The Zeppelins had also bombed the nearby towns of King’s Lynn and Great Yarmouth, and there can be little doubt that the German objective at Sandringham was a direct hit on the British royal family. The raiders had previously targeted (and failed to hit) the Belgian royal family at Antwerp. But the bombs only succeeded in cratering the sandy salt marshes along the Wash, and one such crater near the village of Wolferton, the site until the 1960s of the Sandringham railway station, filled up with water and became an attraction for visiting wild duck. That meant that the pond also became an attraction for keen-eyed duck hunters, so when George VI took charge of the estate in 1937 he had Wolferton Splash enlarged, and it became a favourite destination for his winter expeditions.
Aged 27 in 1922, the future King George VI remained at heart a Norfolk country gentleman. Credit 15
To the end of his life, the sporting monarch loved ranging the hedgerows with his gun dogs. Credit 16
The young Prince Albert of York had started his shooting career near Wolferton at the age of 12, noting the details on the opening page of his brand-new game book: “December 23rd, 1907. Sandringham Wolferton Warren. Papa, David and myself. 1 pheasant, 47 rabbits. My first day’s shooting…” Papa was his father, George V, who inculcated him with his passion for field sports; David was his elder brother, the future Edward VIII, who soon came to find shooting a bore. “I used a single barrel muzzle loader with which Grandpa [King Edward VII], Uncle Eddy [Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence] and Papa all started shooting. I shot 3 rabbits.”
In the years that followed, the royal game book came to document a tally which, to the non-sporting outsider, can only look like the most indiscriminate slaughter. But shooting is the preserve of the countryman, and as such George VI became noted for moving the Sandringham agenda away from the formal battues of slow-moving, overfed pheasants that passed for sport in Edwardian times, followed by a marquee lunch served by footmen. He loved rough forays with the estate workers, ranging the countryside to hunt up the hedgerows, pausing only for a quick sandwich and swig from a whisky flask behind a handy haystack — and he was no fair-weather sportsman. “Snow and very cold east wind,” he noted in his gamebook one January. “I spent four hours in a hide in a kale field.” Modest and generous to his guests, George VI also abandoned his father’s and grandfather’s tradition whereby the King took the best place at every stand throughout the day.
In August 1943, the Royal Family walked the fields of Sandringham which had been turned over to agricultural production in aid of the war effort. Princess Elizabeth, 17, and Princess Margaret, just 13, carried the dog leads. Credit 17
His last ever day of shooting on 5th February 1952 took the form of his beloved end-of-season rough forays, and the details were not recorded in the game book. But his Norfolk neighbour and fellow sportsman Aubrey Buxton described the scene — “the wide arc of blue sky, sunshine and long shadows, a crispness underfoot and the call of mating partridges ringing clearly across the broad fields. They were all there, the King’s men — his staff, some friends, the keepers, the estate workers, some local policemen and visiting gamekeepers.” And so they set off to hunt the hedgerows…