6

GELIGNITE

The Princess and the pilot

Credit 88

The magic of Elizabeth II’s coronation was shattered with a speed that no one could have imagined — within minutes, in fact, of the new Queen being crowned. As the royal entourage moved out of Westminster Abbey at the end of the historic ceremony of 2nd June 1953, Princess Margaret reached out playfully to brush a piece of fluff from the uniform of the handsome Comptroller of her mother’s recently formed household, RAF Group Captain Peter Townsend, DSO, DFC. The Princess ran her white-gloved hand along the medals above the war hero’s breast pocket with a flirtatiousness that caught the eye of a watching journalist, and, with that gesture, the story of the new reign took a turn in a darker and more complicated direction. “It didn’t mean a thing to us at the time,” Peter Townsend was to tell the journalist Jean Rook many years later. “It must have been a bit of fur coat I picked up from some dowager in the abbey. I never thought a thing about it.” But the press thought about it hard, and they drew their own conclusions. “Picking fluff off a man’s jacket — that’s a gesture as intimate as a kiss,” remarks Bill Mattheson, the sardonic muck-raking reporter devised by series creator Peter Morgan to ignite the “Gelignite” of royal scandal in Episode 6 of The Crown. “[It’s] more intimate, since it suggests the kiss has already happened.”

In 1953, Princess Margaret’s romance with a divorced man provoked the same conflicts of religion, politics, and changing social attitudes that shook the monarchy during the abdication crisis of 1936. Credit 89

Princess Margaret first met Peter Townsend in February 1944 when she was 13 and wearing ankle socks, the very same age at which her elder sister had met and fallen in love with Philip. But whereas Lilibet’s love affair with Philip developed over the years into a marriage that would provide a solid underpinning to the Crown, Margaret’s romance with a divorced man led in record time to the same controversy and scandal that had produced the unforgettable crisis of 1936. “Historically, when this lot brush up against divorce,” says Bill Mattheson to his editor, “you end up with either Reformation or Abdication.”

In 1944, the two teenage Princesses had been lying in wait to catch a glimpse of an exciting new recruit to the royal household — and Palace lore relates the 18-year-old Elizabeth’s all-too-prophetic reaction: “Bad luck, he’s married!” Group Captain Townsend, 29 in February 1944, was arriving at the Palace as a new sort of equerry, a battle hero who would serve and stand beside the King. An equerry was the male equivalent of a lady-in-waiting, and it had been George VI’s idea, in time of war, to replace the conventionally upper-crust holder of the job with an “Equerry of Honour,” who had won the place by sheer valour — and who, frankly, deserved the cushiness of living for a spell in the company of the monarch.

1950. Peter Townsend in the cockpit of the plane sponsored by Princess Margaret for his air races. The Group Captain was awarded the Distinguished Service Order and the Distinguished Flying Cross and bar for his service in the Second World War. Credit 90

1946. Princess Margaret (aged 16), King George VI, Queen Elizabeth, Peter Townsend (aged 32)…and Princess Elizabeth (aged 20) attend a theatre performance in London’s West End. At the time, Townsend was the King’s equerry. Credit 91

Townsend was a Battle of Britain fighter ace. He had led crack squadrons of Hurricanes and Spitfires in a brave and sparkling career that included downing 11 enemy planes, being shot down twice and a brief period of mental strain and collapse — a “nervous breakdown” in the language of the time. He had the good looks of a film star, and could deploy his delicate, slightly nervous charm in super-abundance. “He was like Jean-Louis Barrault,” recalled the future Master of the Queen’s Pictures, Sir Oliver Millar, referring to the dashing French actor of the time. “You expected him at any moment to leap up lightly onto the nearest chandelier.”

Townsend came from an honourable, empire-building background. Haileybury, his public school, had been founded to educate the sons of employees of the East India Company. In the 1940s the school’s most famous alumnus was Clement Attlee, the Labour Party leader who had acquired his social conscience when working in the progressive Haileybury Mission that the school funded and ran in the East End of London.

1953: Peter Townsend aged 38. His tour of duty at the Palace was originally supposed to be for three months. But he stayed for nearly 10 years. Credit 92

Townsend’s grandfather was a general in the Indian Army and his father was Deputy High Commissioner of Burma. Brought up among tiger skins and brass gongs, young Peter grew up with a strong sense of social service, with a tweaking of Eastern musings and mysticism. His decision to join the socially undistinguished RAF in the 1930s was a form of rebellion. “At the time,” he remembered, “it was not at all the right place for a nice young man to go.”

Townsend’s tour of duty at the Palace was originally supposed to be for just three months, but he stayed for nearly 10 years. King George VI, who shared both a stammer and a love for the RAF with his calm and capable young assistant, found Townsend’s sensitivity a balm as he grew increasingly unwell. He treated “Peter,” as he soon became to all the family, as the son he never had, and the King’s wife also came to lean on the new equerry. “Peter had a rather ‘lost’ quality that was both vague and glamorous,” remembered Oliver Millar. “It somehow fitted well with the Indian summer character of those last years of George VI. He was not quite connected to reality — and when that was linked with his extreme good looks and genuine friendliness it turned out to make the situation, unintentionally, very dangerous indeed.”

The price of royal favour turned out to be the fighter ace’s romantically hasty wartime marriage. His wife, Rosemary, became rapidly disenchanted with being left alone with two small children while her husband played cards and went to the opera with his grand adoptive family. After Princess Elizabeth married, Townsend was effectively co-opted as the elder sibling’s replacement in the old Windsor family unit of “Us Four,” which now became Father, Mother, Margaret and Peter. “There was a sense in which the King and Queen rather encouraged the closeness,” remembered Philip’s friend Mike Parker.

To retain Townsend’s services and congenial company, George VI eventually promoted the group captain from equerry to Deputy Master of the Household, a uniquely demanding post. The job not only required supervision of the chauffeurs, valets, cooks and cleaners who started work in the Palace at dawn, but Townsend was also expected to travel as a full-time Mr. Fixit with the family, going everywhere, including Windsor, Sandringham and Balmoral, eating every meal at the royal table, and helping to organise the clan’s beloved al fresco picnics. One modern holder of the post has calculated that these so-called “holiday duties” alone kept him away from his wife for 90 days and nights a year — this particular Deputy Master resigned after five years.

In the old days, courtiers married women who took such separation for granted: royal service was seen as a type of military posting. But neither Peter nor Rosemary Townsend rose to the challenge. One courtier remembers a birthday party for one of Townsend’s sons at Adelaide Cottage, the Townsends’ grace and favour residence at Windsor, once the country retreat of Queen Adelaide, the wife of King William IV.

The telephone rang to ask if Peter would go riding with Princess Margaret, and, though he was not on duty, he jumped to the call. Rosemary, for her part, looked for solace outside the marriage. When the couple divorced, she took the legal role of the “guilty party,” not contesting her own adultery with John de Laszlo, son of Philip de Laszlo, the society portrait painter, whom she married in a matter of months (her second of three marriages). The divorce came through shortly after the death of George VI, leaving Townsend needy and available precisely at the moment when Princess Margaret was also in personal distress.

“After the king’s death, there was an awful sense of being in a black hole,” the normally polished Princess frankly confessed to the royal historian Ben Pimlott 40 years later.

Often snootier than her elder sister, Margaret could also be more openly vulnerable, and it was in shared loss and pain that the Princess and the war hero came together. The romance might have started as early as 1947, according to several sources, when Townsend and Margaret went riding together on the royal tour of South Africa, and it grew secretly from there. But it was not until the beginning of 1953, according to Townsend, a few months before the coronation, that matters came to a head, when the couple found themselves alone at Windsor Castle one day with the rest of the family up in London. “She listened, without uttering a word,” recalled Townsend in his memoir, Time and Chance, “as I told her, very quietly, of my feelings. Then she simply said: ‘That is exactly how I feel, too.’ ”

Margaret told her sister almost immediately, and the new Queen’s response was faintly encouraging — and certainly sisterly. “A few days later,” remembered Townsend in his memoir, “at Buckingham Palace, Her Majesty invited us both to spend the evening with her and Prince Philip.” There was a friendly equality about the two young couples, each sister with her dashing and handsome military partner, and Townsend later recalled an atmosphere of informal supportiveness. No one was minimising the problems that lay ahead, with Philip making it his job to bring them up with the pointed banter that was becoming his trademark. Elizabeth herself was more opaque, and Townsend was impressed by her “movingly simple and sympathetic acceptance of the disturbing fact of her sister’s love for me.” But as he sat with his feet under the royal table, “the thought occurred to me that the Queen, behind all her warm goodwill, must have harboured not a little anxiety.”

In “Gelignite,” Peter Morgan imagines the conversation that the Queen and her husband might have had that night as they prepared for bed — Elizabeth trying hard to support her sister, with Philip pointing out the difficulties, starting with the parallels to Edward VIII: “Has everyone forgotten the catastrophe that was your uncle already?” “The situation’s different,” replies Elizabeth defensively. “One party divorced?” retorts Philip. “The other royal? Sounds pretty similar to me” — while he also brushes aside Elizabeth’s protest that Peter had been the “blameless” party in the divorce: “There is no such thing as a blameless party in a divorce” is his riposte. Elizabeth’s final argument tries to boost Townsend’s comparative maturity, arguing that the elder man is “a good influence” on Margaret. “Is he?” replies Philip grimly. “If he were really a good influence, he’d patch things up with his wife and leave Margaret well alone.”

In real life, Tommy Lascelles dished out the same grim medicine — to Peter Townsend’s face. “You must be either mad or bad,” declared the private secretary darkly, making no attempt to feign sympathy when Townsend went to the veteran courtier for help. The group captain should be removed at once, Lascelles advised the Queen — and as far away as possible to some remote overseas posting.

But, as Margaret’s only sister and her closest confidante, Elizabeth declined to be so hardhearted. She agreed it was impossible for Townsend to stay in Clarence House, yet ignoring several back-room offices to which she could have dispatched him, she chose the post that brought him most visibly and frequently into contact with her. She made Townsend one of her own equerries. It was a sisterly and supportive gesture to Margaret — though with the coronation, at this point, just a few months away, it did not seem unreasonable for Elizabeth to ask the couple to keep everything private for the time being, and to wait to see how things might be worked out.

Margaret’s careless gesture on Coronation Day was a poor repayment for her elder sister’s understanding, for it disastrously sabotaged the key element of the agreement — that the romance should, for the moment, remain a secret. There was a lot of fixing to accomplish behind the scenes, particularly with Downing Street, before there could be any prospect of the marriage Margaret longed for, and publicity would hurt people on all sides. Subconsciously or otherwise, Margaret’s public act of possessiveness was the ultimate upstaging by the younger sister, who, as Elizabeth once complained to Crawfie, “always wants what I have.” Elizabeth II had got her crown on 2nd June 1953, but Princess Margaret had got her man, and as she left the scene of her sister’s great triumph she could not resist showing off her own talisman.

A curious interlude ensued. American newspapers reported what came to be known as the “tender hand” incident next day, in line with the speculation they had been printing about the couple for some months. Following the pattern of the abdication crisis, the British press kept silent.

But the self-restraint lasted less than two weeks, and when the dam broke on 14th June it was with typical Fleet Street self-righteousness, with newspapers repeating the foreign rumours of Margaret’s love for a divorced man — “It is high time for the British public to be made aware etc. etc.” — while suggesting that the rumours could not possibly be true. “It is quite unthinkable,” pronounced the People, “that a Royal Princess, third in line to the throne, should even contemplate a marriage with a man who has been through the divorce courts. Group Captain Townsend was the innocent party…But his innocence cannot alter the fact that a marriage between Princess Margaret and himself would fly in the face of Royal and Christian tradition.”

Down at Chartwell, his Kent country home, Winston Churchill’s initial reaction was surprisingly favourable. The course of true love “must always be allowed to run smooth,” declaimed the Prime Minister benevolently when Tommy Lascelles arrived for a council of war. Why shouldn’t the beautiful young Princess marry her handsome war hero? It took Clementine Churchill to remind her sentimental husband that he had made the very same mistake back in 1936, when his support for Edward VIII and Mrs. Simpson had proved so unpopular and politically damaging — and abdication parallels lay at the heart of the matter. For what purpose had the Duke of Windsor been made to suffer, if his niece was now allowed to marry a divorced man?

As in 1936, exile was the solution — though this time on a temporary basis. It was decided that Townsend would be dispatched as air attaché to the British Embassy in Brussels to work as a mixture of spy and salesman, reporting back to London on Belgian aviation developments and sniffing out commercial opportunities for the British aircraft industry. Margaret, for her part, would have to delay her marriage decision until after August 1955, when she would become 25. She would then be outside the scope of the Royal Marriages Act of 1772, which required the assent of the Queen — in other words, of the Prime Minister and cabinet, since this matter of public interest and debate was ultimately a political matter.

Public opinion, at least as measured in the newspapers, seemed wholeheartedly in favour of the couple being allowed to marry. On 13th July 1953, the Daily Mirror cheekily printed a “Princess Poll” voting form on its front page that put the question in these terms: “Group-Captain Peter Townsend, 38 years old Battle of Britain pilot, was the innocent party in a divorce. He was given custody of his two children, and his former wife has recently remarried. If Princess Margaret, now 22, so desires, should she be allowed to marry him?” No fewer than 70,000 readers took the trouble to fill in the form and post a reply (at the expense of a penny-halfpenny per letter) — a world record for a newspaper poll, according to the Mirror — with 67,907 voting in favour and only 2,235 against. The Press Council, the recently founded and voluntary body set up to organise the self-regulation of British journalism, promptly reprimanded the newspaper for its impertinence.

There is some reason to doubt whether the self-selected 67,907 “yes” voters of the Daily Mirror were representative of a country that, in 1953, was still socially conservative and quite heavily influenced by traditional religious values. A newspaper poll that had enquired two years earlier whether young people should have sex before they married came up with a 52 per cent vote for chastity for men, and 63 per cent for women. The reasons against pre-marital sex ranged from “Marriage should be a new experience” to “People wouldn’t marry if they could get it without doing so.” Church attendances were falling, but people still expected public figures, and especially the royal family, to “set a good example.” “Life, especially for those in high places, is not for self-satisfaction,” wrote S. M. M. of Clapham Common to the Daily Mirror on 20th July 1953. “Renunciation by Princess Margaret would be a wonderful example and proof of the faith she professes in the Church of England.” “The laws of the Church of England on divorce are quite definite,” agreed P. F. Hall of Gerrards Cross in the same correspondence column. “To suggest that a Christian should be allowed to break those laws to achieve her heart’s desire is tantamount to suggesting that one may steal something just because one wants it.”

Winston Churchill knew how many of his Tory MPs would nod sagely at such opinions and decided, on reflection, there was no chance he could persuade his cabinet to give approval to a Margaret–Townsend marriage in 1953, even though there were divorcees among his ministers, starting with his number two Anthony Eden, who had recently remarried (this time to Churchill’s own niece, Clarissa). Margaret would have to delay her gratification for another two years — and that posed something of a challenge to a young woman who was accustomed to getting her own way.

“I am unique,” Princess Margaret was given to pronouncing over dinner, à propos of nothing in particular. “I am the daughter of a King and the sister of a Queen.” The derivative nature of this conversation stopper summed up the unhappiness of the Queen’s younger sister, who spent her life struggling to establish a satisfying identity of her own. A birthright of incredible privilege that could have been a platform for constructive endeavour was never quite fulfilled, leaving the Princess with the perpetual grievance of the also-ran — to which a succession of backstairs anecdotes bore witness.

In 1937, for example, while trying on their robes for their father’s coronation, the six-year-old Margaret was said to have thrown a fit when she discovered that the purple velvet train edged with ermine behind her ceremonial outfit was cut slightly shorter than that of her elder sister. It wasn’t fair, she complained, and she flung herself to the floor in a tantrum. Only when it was explained to her that the two sisters’ trains had been designed in direct proportion to their height — and that Lilibet was nearly four inches taller — was the Princess placated, and then only grudgingly so. “What a good thing,” courtiers would murmur, “that Margaret is the younger one.”

In adult life, according to Lord Snowdon’s biographer Anne de Courcy, Margaret’s inferiority complex showed itself in her lack of consideration towards the staff that she shared with her mother in Clarence House. If there was a Christmas party “down the road” at Buckingham Palace to which the staff of Clarence House were invited, the Queen Mother would arrange to dine out that evening, or eat something light so that her servants could get to the party — while Princess Margaret, to the contrary, would make a point of arranging a full-scale dinner party for that very night. Such perversity, suggested de Courcy, “could perhaps be explained by the fact that, unlike the Queen Mother and the Queen, who had successively been the first lady in the land, Princess Margaret, always number two, was determined to insist on her royal status.” Kenneth Rose, the royal confidant and biographer of King George V, used to attempt a brave defence of the Princess’s sometimes contrary behaviour. “We show no lack of sympathy,” he once declared, “for those who are denied an inspiring education for social reasons like poverty or colour. But there are shortcomings at both ends of the social scale.

“The two princesses Elizabeth and Margaret Rose were not educated in a rigorous or testing fashion. They never experienced the challenge of going to school — and that certainly left an unsatisfied appetite in the younger of the two sisters.” From private conversations with the Princess, Rose learned how bitterly she resented not being allowed to accompany her elder sister, or even to follow her at a later age, when Elizabeth was sent for constitutional history lessons at Eton College with the vice-provost Henry Marten in the early 1940s. At that stage in their lives, after all, Margaret was next in the line of succession.

Her grandmother Queen Mary also worried about the deficiencies of both girls’ home-schooling. “Queen Mary tried to beef up the princess’s lessons,” recalled Rose, “but Queen Elizabeth didn’t think education [for women] necessary.” Rose related how the former Princess May of Teck, herself extremely cultured and well versed in the fine arts, took up the matter with her daughter-in-law Queen Elizabeth — only for her plea to fall on stony ground. “I don’t know what she’s complaining about,” the home-schooled Queen Elizabeth later said to her friends. “My sisters and I were all educated at home by a governess and we all married very well. In fact, you might say that one of us married very well indeed!”

To Margaret’s credit, she did make valiant efforts to educate herself, particularly in the artistic subjects that fired her imagination — history, art, architecture, dance, music and theatre. She seems to have been the origin of the famous wartime Windsor pantomimes that grew out of a modest nativity play that the Princesses performed with child evacuees during the second Christmas of the war, in December 1940. Margaret sang “Gentle Jesus, meek and mild” so affectingly in the nativity play that her father was moved to tears. “I wept through most of it,” wrote the King in his diary, and when Marion Crawford suggested that the girls might attempt something more ambitious the following year, the younger Margaret leapt at the idea. “From that moment,” the governess later wrote, “I had no peace. Margaret was after me incessantly. ‘Crawfie, you did say…’ she would begin a dozen times a week.”

The 10-year-old was so keen she started designing costumes and sets, pushing her father until he gave permission for the ambitious series of pantomime productions that became the highlight of Windsor Christmases during the war. She also worked seriously at her own mastery of music, and of the piano in particular. Princess Margaret Rose (she dropped the “Rose” soon after she became a teenager) made a point of growing up more rapidly than her elder sister, delightedly abandoning the velvet-collared coats (and ankle socks) of childhood. She was not yet 14 when she made her first public speech in July 1944, visiting the Princess Margaret Royal Free School in Windsor, named in her honour. Accompanied by her mother, she felt “dreadfully sick” with nerves and did not enjoy the experience. But she fared better two years later, on her first solo engagement, when she opened the Hopscotch Inn, a children’s play centre in Camden, north London. “One has to remember that she was only fifteen at the time,” recalled Audrey Russell, sent by the BBC to cover the event in March 1946, “but I was first struck by her marvellous poise. I think she was trying very hard to follow her mother’s example, talking to everybody and asking questions all the time, which she did very professionally.”

By the time she was 16, Princess Margaret had that poise in abundance, stylishly dressing in tailored suits, designer hats, silk stockings and high-heels, with long dresses of silk, satin or chiffon for evenings. Her father had organised her own coat of arms, to be followed by a specially created cipher for her personal use — a classically styled “M” beneath a coronet embossed in red on her private stationery. “Let us pray…for Princess Margaret,” pronounced the chaplain at Crathie Church, Balmoral, when she celebrated her eighteenth birthday in August 1948, “that God may bless and prosper her in such purposes as she has in her heart.” With Elizabeth’s love and marriage an old story, the press now turned their attentions towards the sophisticated younger sister, her complexion “smooth as a peach,” her curvaceous figure and 18-inch waist, with her vivid blue eyes — “the only thing about me worth looking at,” she once said. Reporters suggestively described her lips as both “generous” and “sensitive,” for while it was not done to say as much in so many words, sex appeal was the fresh ingredient that Princess Margaret brought to the royal package. She was talked of as “one of the beauties of her generation.” She did prefer her friends to curtsey and to call her “Ma’am,” but after a few gin and tonics she was the life and soul of every party.

Noël Coward was impressed when he encountered her in November 1949 at a private dinner party at the American Embassy. “Princess Margaret obliged with songs at the piano,” noted “The Master” in his diary. “Surprisingly good. She has an impeccable ear, her piano playing is simple but has perfect rhythm, and her method of singing is really very funny.” Invited to entertain a Scottish cleric who came to tea with her parents, Margaret launched into a spirited rendering of “I’m Just a Girl Who Can’t Say No” from the Rodgers and Hammerstein hit musical Oklahoma! — to the horror of her mother and the delight of her father, whose roar of regal laughter made it clear to the minister that he was expected to laugh as well. “Espiègle” — “roguish” — was Queen Mary’s word for her granddaughter’s sense of mischief, a corruption of the French name for Till Eulenspiegel, the peasant prankster of German folklore. “She is so outrageously amusing,” remarked the Queen, “that one can’t help encouraging her.” “Elizabeth is my pride,” said George VI on one telling occasion, “and Margaret is my joy.” The King had egged on his irreverent younger daughter, a natural mimic, to indulge her cheekiness from an early age, and in this glow of parental approval Margaret had developed a more extrovert personality than Elizabeth: less solemn, less conscientious — and altogether less well mannered.

This was the nub of the problem: Princess Margaret was, quite simply, spoilt. Her elders indulged her because she was amusing, but also because they felt she was owed something — some correction or compensation for her junior role in the royal set-up, with Princess Elizabeth feeling most guilty of all. A cook from the Yorks’ home at 145 Piccadilly in the mid-1930s recalled how the elder sister would go out of her way to spare Margaret the more arduous duties of the girls’ compulsory housework by taking them on herself.

Conscious of her own seniority and advantages, the elder sibling seems to have bent over backwards to “be nice to Margaret” in the family tradition — when it might actually have benefited Margaret to have a nasty elder sister who put her in her place from time to time. “We are only young once, Crawfie,” her mother told Marion Crawford when the governess, still on the family payroll in the late 1940s, expressed her concerns that Margaret was “all over the place” after a succession of late nights out. “We want her to have a good time. With Lilibet gone, it is lonely for her here.”

So Margaret took to lolling in bed of a morning — 10 or 10:30 came to be her routine breakfast time for the rest of her life — after long nights out with a group of young people that the newspapers took to calling “the Princess Margaret Set,” all of them high-spirited and of independent means, with none of them needing to start their day early: Old Etonian Billy Wallace; Colin Tennant, the future Lord Glenconner; “Sonny” Blandford, the future Duke of Marlborough; and American Sharman Douglas, the ebullient daughter of Lewis Douglas, Harry Truman’s ambassador to The Court of St. James. “Princess Margaret High Kicks It!” ran the headline over one description of a ball at the American Embassy where the Princess and Jennifer Bevan, her first lady-in-waiting, danced a well-rehearsed can-can with Sharman Douglas and three other girlfriends, all dressed in authentic frilly petticoats, black fishnet stockings and feathered bonnets. “Princess Margaret is great news value…” wrote Cecil Beaton in his diary when he took the photographs for her twenty-first birthday in 1951. “She is grown-up — an independent character showing more signs of interest in unconventional life than any member of the royal family since Edward Prince of Wales.” A few years earlier, Duff Cooper, the former British Ambassador to Paris, had put it even more directly after a Buckingham Palace luncheon party at which Margaret had shone in 1948 — “lovely skin, lovely eyes, lovely mouth, very sure of herself and full of humour…She might get into trouble before she’s finished.”

Neither Beaton nor Cooper knew about Peter Townsend when they made their prophetic diary entries, but by at least one account Princess Margaret had made up her mind about him the previous year, during the February–April 1947 royal tour of South Africa. “We rode together every morning in that wonderful country, in marvellous weather,” the Princess told a confidante. “That’s when I really fell in love with him.” It was also, presumably, when she fell out of love with being royal, since renunciation was the only possible price of the man she had come to desire. Did Princess Margaret really want to be a princess? Once the gallant group captain went off to Brussels in July 1953, she had just over two years to make up her mind.

Defender of the Faith

Every modern British coin carries the face of Queen Elizabeth II. Along with all the trillions of bank notes and postage stamps bearing her effigy that have been issued since 1952, it makes the Queen’s face the most multiplied and duplicated set of features in human history. The letters around the rim of the coins also indicate the religious nature of her authority — “D G,” standing for Dei Gratia (“By the Grace of God”), alongside “F D” or sometimes “FID DEF,” both abbreviations for the Queen’s Latin title Fidei Defensor, “Defender of the Faith.”

This historic and religious title, first won and proudly borne by her Tudor predecessor King Henry VIII, indicates that Elizabeth II is not merely an earthly monarch. “Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God,” runs her full official designation, “of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of Her Other Realms and Territories Queen, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith.” So, the Queen’s special role in the protection and governance of the Churches of both England and Scotland gives her links to the divine — or to divine law, at least. That was why Elizabeth II encountered such trouble in 1953 when her sister wanted to marry a man who was divorced.

Fidei Defensor is a curious title in several respects. Henry VIII did not earn it personally — it was the reward from a grateful Pope Leo X in 1521 for a ghost-written pamphlet composed for Henry by his future Lord Chancellor Thomas More (executed by Henry in 1535). Even more curious, the pamphlet was a stoutly anti-Protestant broadside, the Defence of the Seven [Catholic] Sacraments, aimed against Martin Luther, the inspirer of the European Reformation — and the Pope indignantly revoked the title after Henry reversed himself and followed Luther’s example to break away from Rome.

It was Henry VIII’s urgent and increasingly angry desire to divorce Catherine of Aragon, and the Pope’s refusal to grant him his wish, that led to the English Reformation and the creation of the Anglican Church in 1534. But that did not prevent the now-Protestant English Parliament from reviving the popish title and bestowing it upon Henry in 1544 — and FID DEF has been sported proudly by British monarchs and coins ever since. When a two-shilling piece (or “florin”) was inadvertently issued in 1849 bearing Queen Victoria’s head without the magic letters, there was national outrage and the “godless florin” was withdrawn from circulation. Henry VIII’s other religious title was “Head of the Church of England,” also bestowed on him by Parliament through the Act of Supremacy of 1534. Renouncing Rome and declaring the King to be “the only supreme head in earth of the Church of England,” the act effectively gave Henry the eminence of an English pope — or more precisely, perhaps, the quasi-spiritual authority of the Holy Roman emperors who had claimed lordship over Europe since the days of the Emperor Charlemagne.

Henry’s Catholic daughter Mary renounced the headship during her brief reign from 1553 to 1558, but her sister Queen Elizabeth I restored the dignity to herself in modified form as “Supreme Governor” — on the grounds that only God could rule as the head of a Church.

Queen Elizabeth II shown on the face of a 1953 sixpence, with her Latin title: “ELIZABETH II DEI GRATIA REGINA” — “Elizabeth II, by the Grace of God, Queen.” Credit 102

In 1563, the thirty-seventh of the Church of England’s 39 Articles set out the powers of the Supreme Governor as they have lasted to the present day: “The King’s Majesty hath the chief power in this realm of England, and other his Dominions, unto whom the chief Government of all Estates of this Realm, whether they be Ecclesiastical or Civil, in all causes doth appertain.”

Meeting at Canterbury in 1563, the convocation of Anglican archbishops, bishops, deans, archdeacons and proctors made very clear that “we give not to our Princes the ministering of God’s Word, or of the sacraments.” It was not for the Supreme Governor, in other words, to preach sermons or to lay down theology — so, jumping to 1953, the question of divorce was not a matter on which Elizabeth II was supposed to have any doctrinal opinion or personal authority. But as the Church’s earthly protector and manager, it was her job to defend the reputation and authority of the Church’s canons or doctrinal laws, “which we see,” continued Article 37, “to have been given always to all godly Princes in Holy Scriptures by God himself.” At her coronation in June 1953 — even as she was pondering over the quandary that her sister and Peter Townsend had just laid in front of her — Elizabeth solemnly swore to “maintain and preserve inviolably the settlement of the Church of England, and the doctrine, worship, discipline, and government thereof, as by law established in England.” So, since the Church had its face set against divorce, Elizabeth had no choice but to follow that direction. The Crown’s Church responsibilities doubled in 1603, when the death of Queen Elizabeth I brought King James VI and I (James VI of Scotland and James I of England) down to London from Edinburgh. The Church of Scotland recognised only Jesus Christ as “King and Head of the Church,” so there was no question of any title of Supreme Governor north of the border. But from 1603 it became the duty of the Kings of England, in their capacity as Kings of Scotland, to swear to “preserve the settlement of the true Protestant religion as established by the laws made in Scotland” — and this was formalised in the 1707 Act of Union between England and Scotland.

To this day, new British monarchs make no mention of the Church of England when they accede to the throne — that is dealt with later when they swear their oaths at their coronation. But the first item of business at their Accession Council, usually held on the day following the death of their predecessor, is to swear to defend and uphold the Scottish Presbyterian Church. Elizabeth II made such a pledge at the first Privy Council meeting of her reign, following her return from Africa in February 1952.

“I was just wondering,” says Elizabeth on the telephone to her sister Margaret in Episode 6 of The Crown, “if you and Peter [had] considered Scotland…Marriage isn’t regarded as a sacrament in the Church of Scotland. It’s not as binding in the same way as here.” Margaret jumps at this idea in the dialogue imagined by Peter Morgan. “Meaning,” she asks, “we could even get married in a church?” “I’d have to check,” replies Elizabeth. “But I think so…It would make my life a lot easier, too.” In the event, the Scottish option did not provide an easy way for Elizabeth and Margaret to sidestep their dilemma. Divorce and the taboos attached to it in 1953 were no minor matter. Ongoing convocations of the Church of England — effectively the parliament of the Church — had consistently pronounced against the remarriage of divorced persons, and Elizabeth had no choice but to comply with what those convocations said. That was the reason, after all, why she was now occupying the throne. The historical irony, of course, was that the Church of England had been created, and Elizabeth was bound by its rulings, because Henry VIII had himself wanted a divorce.