7

SCIENTIA POTENTIA EST

Knowledge is power

Inkwells and exercise books — with the occasional croak from a bright-eyed pet raven. We join Episode 7 of The Crown in a dimly lit schoolmaster’s study, where a glossy black-plumaged bird hops among the piles of volumes scattered in cheerful chaos across the floor. The raven cocks her head knowingly from side to side, then flies up on to the shoulder of the venerable tutor to give his ear a friendly peck. No, we have not ventured into the fictitious world of Harry Potter. We have stumbled upon the historic den of Henry Marten, the eccentric and raven-owning Vice-Provost of Eton College, Windsor, as re-created for The Crown from the memories of his students in the 1940s — one of whom was the future Queen Elizabeth II. “There are two elements of the Constitution…” we hear Henry Marten explaining to the young Elizabeth as Episode 7 begins, “the ‘efficient’ and the ‘dignified.’ Which is the monarch?” His pupil appears distracted by the raven, which has now perched on the back of the Vice-Provost’s chair. “Your Royal Highness?” he prompts her. “The dignified,” comes her belated response. “Very good,” says Marten approvingly. “The ‘efficient’ has the power to make and execute policy and is answerable to the electorate. ‘What touches all should be approved by all.’ ” With Elizabeth remaining transfixed by the antics of the raven, the vice-provost moves towards the climax of his exposition: “The two institutions — Crown and government — the dignified and the efficient — only work when they support each other. When they trust each other. You can underline that.” And the young Elizabeth duly underlines the word “trust” in her exercise book. “Trust” becomes a highly significant word in the episode that follows…

Royal apprenticeship. In April 1942, 10 days before her sixteenth birthday, George VI prepares his daughter Elizabeth for one of her future duties as Queen – to peruse the government documents sent for her daily inspection in their red leather-bound dispatch cases – “The Boxes.” Credit 128

Princess Elizabeth was just 13 when Henry Marten was assigned the task of teaching her the complexities of the British Constitution — in the summer of 1939, with Germany poised to invade Poland, the trigger for the Second World War. The 66-year-old tutor came cycling up from Eton to Windsor Castle, sometimes forgetting to remove his bicycle clips as he embarked on his lessons. The Princess rather enjoyed his forgetfulness, along with the way in which the vice-provost started each session with the salutation he used to his Eton pupils, “Gen’lemen!” The lessons turned into a correspondence course when the family went away — for both holidays and reasons of safety — to Balmoral and Sandringham. But as Elizabeth grew older, with the royal family firmly based in Windsor, she would make the journey to Marten on foot and accompanied by only her governess, Marion Crawford — as we see on screen at the start of Episode 7. Out of the Henry VIII Gateway and down the hill the young Princess would walk, across the bridge over the Thames and along Eton High Street through the medieval, pillared gates of the college past the tail-coated students — their black gowns flapping on a windy day rather like ravens themselves — to end up in the wizard’s den.

On 12th March 1945, after nearly six years of lessons, George VI came down to Eton to bestow a knighthood on the much-loved tutor in recognition of his work with Princess Elizabeth. The dubbing ceremony took place on the steps of the college chapel in front of the Queen, the two princesses and several hundred cheering pupils, and the new Sir Henry served out the rest of his life as Provost of the College, bequeathing his library to Eton when he died, including the volumes from which he had instructed the young Princess.

From the outside, they look like any other set of dry and faded old schoolbooks that you might find at a jumble sale — Sir William Anson’s The Law and Custom of the Constitution in three volumes. But they are kept under lock and key in the Marten Library, for when you open volume I (Parliament, fifth edition) you discover a rare signature inside — “Elizabeth, 1944” — followed by neat, pencilled comments in a round and still childlike hand: the notes of the 18-year-old Princess on how to be a queen.

In choosing Henry Marten, Elizabeth’s parents had done their best to ensure that a dry subject should be taught in a stimulating fashion. The vice-provost was an outsized and whimsical character with a gift for storytelling — “a dramatic, racy, enthusiastic teacher,” according to Old Etonian Sir Alec Douglas-Home, Elizabeth’s fourth prime minister — well known for sucking on his handkerchief, almost as a comforter, when explaining some especially complicated passage from history. “Books cascaded from the shelves, surging over tables and chairs in apparent disorder,” recalled one of his pupils. Elizabeth’s hours in this wizard’s cave, where the piles of books on the floor grew “like stalagmites” according to Crawfie, was the closest that the future Queen ever came to “going to school,” and some years later her Merlin made a revealing disclosure.

Whenever Sir Henry had posed a question to the 13-year-old, he noticed that she did not reply directly. In the early years of her lessons, at least, the Princess was so unused to being quizzed that her first instinct was to turn away from her teacher and “look for confidence and support to her beloved governess, Miss Crawford.” The answer when she did make it was “almost invariably correct,” and it was not as if Princess Elizabeth lacked social confidence in a public forum. By the age of 13 she was already starting to make short speeches — as when the President of France came to London on a state visit in the spring of 1939. The teenage Princess, who was so shy that she could not give a direct answer to the kindly Dr. Marten, was able to welcome President Lebrun with a fluent speech in well-rehearsed French. Her social skills might not measure up to those of an “ordinary,” run-around-the-playground child of her age — but they were exactly what she would need for her future job. Not blurting out a quick, personal response, but turning to others for advice — the cautious, sideways style of the figurehead monarch.

From the carefully marked volumes of Anson’s The Law and Custom of the Constitution we can reconstruct the principles that Henry Marten stressed to his pupil, for here was a job description of monarchy that went far beyond unveiling plaques and waving graciously to the crowds. Anson picturesquely introduced the British Constitution as “a somewhat rambling structure…like a house which many successive owners have altered.”

This was a clue to its essential characteristic, explained a passage that attracted one of the Princess’s first pencil markings, carefully underlined where appropriate: “the more complex a constitution, the more guarantees of liberty it offered.” The Chinese Empire was held up to the student as an example of crude autocracy, while the US Constitution with all its amendments over the years was presented as an example of the complications that liberty requires to flourish. Alongside his British constitutional tutoring of Elizabeth, Henry Marten threw in an extra course on American history.

There were relatively few notes in the margin on the prerogatives of the Crown, and some passing glances at constitutional development. The Anglo-Saxon monarchy was described as “a consultative” and “tentative absolutism” — here the Princess underlined the words “consultative” and “tentative” — with the Witenagemot, the “meeting of wise men,” the royal council of great landowners and bishops known as the Witan for short, being portrayed as an early form of Parliament. “If the King had a strong will,” wrote Anson, “and a good capacity for business, he ruled the witan; if not, the witan was the prevailing power in the State.” (Princess Elizabeth’s emphasis again.)

To teach the Princess about the powers that she would wield as Queen, Marten supplemented Anson with the thoughts of Walter Bagehot, the Victorian founder of the National Review and editor-in-chief of The Economist, who first articulated the distinction between the “dignified” and “efficient” functions of government in his book The English Constitution, published in 1867. Whereas Anson, a cerebral classicist, lawyer and Member of Parliament with an interest in education, would solemnly set out the historical and legal precedents for the nation’s evolving methods of government, Bagehot revelled in the philosophical and even irrational aspects of the Crown, rather savouring its emotional appeal. “The mystic reverence, the religious allegiance, which are essential to a true monarchy,” he wrote, “are imaginative sentiments that no legislature can manufacture in any people. You might as well adopt a father as make a monarchy.” Kings emerged favourably from the pages of both Anson and Bagehot, depicted as generally benign and protective figures, with an instinct for the common weal. But the principal focus of the 13-year-old’s pencilled attention was on the power of Parliament — the voice and instrument of the people. This was where she set to annotating seriously. She marked the basic principle that “what touches all should be approved by all,” noting that Parliament had the power to effect any change it wished, to such an extent that no Parliament could bind its successors irrevocably. Reflecting different circumstances and the will of the people, a new Parliament could always undo the work of those who went before.

Pupil and teacher clearly worked hard at mastering the abstruse technicalities of legislation, leading up to the royal assent at the end of the parliamentary process, which formally turned bills into law. The Princess’s notes traced the procedures for the passing of finance or money bills, and the observation that, when it came to practical transactions, “every change of recent times has tended to enhance the power of the Cabinet.” The longest passage of all, a full page of pencilled notes where Sir Henry had evidently abandoned Anson’s text to deliver one of his famous “great tales” from British history, related the day-by-day events of James II’s ignominious flight from his throne in 1688. It was a well-told story, culminating in the King throwing the Great Seal of the Realm, the ultimate expression of his royal authority, into the River Thames — the 17th-century parallel to the 20th-century abdication.

The message of Anson, Bagehot and Henry Marten was clear: the monarch of the day might wear the crown, but in the age of mass democracy the true king was Parliament, and no modern sovereign should forget it. The era when monarchs called or dissolved Parliaments without the advice of elected ministers was dismissed as “the days before responsible government,” with Elizabeth noting the differences between dissolving, proroguing and adjourning Parliament.

Her notes traced the procedural minutiae that might fill the head of the ultimate civil servant and, in one sense, that is what this little girl was to become — the most civil of national servants.

In these painstaking preparations for her future life and work, we can find the roots of the modern Elizabeth II, diligent mistress of the red boxes full of government documents sent to her every day of her reign — even, on occasion, at Christmas. No sovereign in history would read and mark more sheets of paper more dutifully. “Do you teach this to your other pupils?” asks the young Elizabeth in the dialogue imagined by series creator Peter Morgan. “No,” Marten replies, “just you” — reaching for a sheaf of algebra, trigonometry and English comprehension papers for her to leaf through. “This is what I teach them.” “Shouldn’t I know all of this too?” Elizabeth asks wide-eyed as she reviews the range and detail of the different subjects. “No, Ma’am,” answers Marten, his reply punctuated by the raven’s squawk. “All very undignified…”

The developing theme of the episode is how Elizabeth came to feel dissatisfied with the limited focus of her education, denying her the power (potentia) that comes with knowledge (scientia). But when it came to the first major constitutional crisis of her reign, it turned out that Anson, Bagehot and Henry Marten had really served her quite solidly. The crisis stemmed from her 79-year-old prime minister Winston Churchill and his failing health. There had already been the scare of February 1952, diagnosed by his doctor, Charles Moran, as an arterial “spasm,” when Churchill had temporarily lost his powers of speech (see this page). Now, on the evening of 24th June 1953, only three weeks after the coronation, the prime minister had just finished a sparkling after-dinner speech in Downing Street in honour of his visiting Italian counterpart — Churchill’s remarks had centred humorously on how much the ancient Britons had benefited from the Roman conquest — when he slumped backwards in his chair, the lower left corner of his mouth drooping slackly.

He managed to say goodbye to his guests without rising, but his son-in-law Christopher Soames and Jock Colville, his private secretary, had to help him to his bedroom. Next day, Moran diagnosed another “spasm” in a small artery of the brain, and said the prime minister could not possibly attend the forthcoming cabinet meeting. Churchill ignored his doctor’s advice. At cabinet on 25th June, R. A. Butler, the chancellor of the exchequer, noticed how the prime minister seemed unchara­cteris­tically reluctant to speak, reticently delegating different parts of the agenda to the appropriate ministers with a wave of his hand. But no one suspected anything was wrong, and that afternoon Churchill was driven down to Chartwell. Next morning, Friday 26th June 1953, Colville was working in the library at Chartwell when Dr. Moran came in. The prime minister, he said, might well not live through the next four days and seemed destined for long-term incapacity at the best. His paralysis was getting worse, so that one whole side was now out of action. “I think it is quite likely,” said the doctor, “that he will die during the weekend.”

The news was even worse than it seemed. The prospect of Churchill’s death was bad enough, but that very day Anthony Eden, Churchill’s heir apparent since the early 1940s, was in America at the Lahey Clinic in Boston, undergoing a bile duct operation from which he would take several months to recover. The 56-year-old foreign secretary was not in good health, often in pain from a duodenal ulcer and turning increasingly to the black tin box of pain relief drugs that travelled with him everywhere. The drugs ranged from aspirin to full-scale morphine injections which, from 1951 onwards, had started to serve as his solace.

We do not know if Anthony Eden was caught snoring in the presence of US President Eisenhower, as depicted in this episode, but he had certainly become dependent on regular opiate injections. If Churchill had died over the weekend of 27th/28th June 1953, or had remained as seriously incapacitated as his doctor had predicted, Elizabeth II would have been faced with an unprecedented constitutional dilemma, since Anthony Eden could not possibly have accepted her commission to form a government. “Do you mean to tell me,” asks the horrified Clementine Churchill as she discovers the full extent of the crisis in Episode 7, “that, at the moment, this country is without a fit leader or a deputy leader?” “Sshh…sshh,” responds her husband tetchily. “Not so loud.” In their textbooks, both Anson and Bagehot made clear that, when a constitutional monarch was required to choose a prime minister, it was their job to pick out the political figure who could command a working majority in Parliament. The support of the House of Commons was the guiding principle, and Eden was undoubtedly the man whom the Conservatives, as the majority party, wanted as Churchill’s successor. But if Eden was sick and out of the country, there was no constitutional process whereby a caretaker prime minister could be appointed — and how would that work, in any case? What red-blooded politician would consent to step up and run the country for three or four months, then step aside meekly when Anthony Eden’s convalescence allowed him to return from America?

“The only thing the Queen could do,” Colville remembers reasoning at the time, “would be to send for somebody she knew very well and could trust implicitly to resign immediately [when] Eden was well.” Robert “Bobbety” Salisbury, the long-standing ally of Eden who had been fighting for nearly 10 years to secure the succession for his friend Anthony (see this page), was the obvious candidate for this role. As Colville conferred urgently with Churchill, via Soames, they fixed on Bobbety, with his heritage of family service and his strong religious principles, as the best bet for doing the decent thing — and so it proved. When the “caretaker” proposal was put to him, the fifth marquess duly agreed to play that role, if necessary. So, the plan was hatched over that weekend of 27th/28th June, involving Colville, Salisbury, Dr. Moran and Churchill, working through Christopher Soames, who, as well as being the PM’s trusted son-in-law, was also his parliamentary private secretary. Other senior Conservatives were consulted, notably R. A. Butler, the effective number three in the Tory power structure whose consent was crucial. Once Butler said yes (rather nobly, since he might plausibly have tried for the top job himself), Churchill felt able, via Lascelles over the telephone, to recommend the “caretaker” arrangement to the Queen in the event of illness enforcing his resignation. But, crucially, the prime minister did not make clear just how ill he was. “My dear Prime Minister,” Elizabeth had written sympathetically at the first news of Churchill’s “temporary inconvenience,” “I am sorry to hear from Tommy Lascelles that you have not been feeling too well these last few days. I do hope it is not serious…”

Temporary inconvenience? In Episode 7, the polite yet clearly unalarmed tenor of the Queen’s letter alerts Clementine Churchill to her husband’s lack of candour: “How much does she know exactly?” she asks suspiciously. “Because from the tone of this…” “She thinks it’s a cold,” her husband confesses sheepishly. “If she knew the truth, she would bid me step down.” The historical record shows clearly that Churchill had decided to “pig it” — his favoured expression in a crisis for resorting to any tactic, however grubby, to get his way. The prime minister made sure that talk of the word “stroke” did not go further than the walls of Chartwell that June; the phrase “disturbance of the cerebral circulation” was cut from the official medical bulletin; and he swore Soames and Colville to secrecy in their dealings with the Palace. “He told the Queen,” according to Dr. Moran, “that he was not without hope that he might soon be about and able to discharge his duties.”

This is the act of wilful deception on which Peter Morgan fixes to bring Episode 7 of The Crown to a dramatic conclusion. As events unfolded in late June and July 1953, Churchill managed quite a remarkable recovery from his stroke and he lasted another 20 months in Downing Street. By the time Elizabeth II discovered the truth about his seizure, her prime minister was back in action, conferring with US President Eisenhower on the threat posed by Soviet Russia’s detonation of the H-bomb, speaking in the House of Commons, and even rallying the Conservative Party conference at Margate in October with a fighting speech. It was not in the nature of Elizabeth II, nor would it have been productive, for her to revisit the events of that post-coronation summer. So, we conclude Episode 7 with an enjoyable exercise in what might have been.

“It is not my job to govern,” Elizabeth tells the contrite Marquess of Salisbury, whom she has summoned to the Palace. “But it is my job to ensure proper governance…How can I do that if my ministers lie and plot and hide the truth from me? You have prevented me from doing my duty. You have hampered and bamboozled the proper functioning of the Crown!”

To Churchill, Morgan imagines the sovereign being even more severe. “I am just a young woman, starting out in public service,” says Elizabeth, “and I would never presume to give a man, so much my senior, and who has given this country so much, a lecture. However, you were at my coronation. And you therefore heard for yourself as I took the solemn oath to govern the people of my realms according to their respective laws and customs. Now, one of those customs is that their elected prime minister should be of reasonably sound body and mind…Not an outrageous expectation, one would’ve thought.”

“No,” agrees the downcast prime minister, hanging his head while his sovereign continues: “But it seems to me that you have not been of sound body and mind these past weeks. And that you chose to withhold that information from me…a decision which feels like a betrayal, not just of the covenant of trust between us and the institutions that we both represent, but of our personal relationship.”

At this point in the action, Elizabeth walks over to a drawer to retrieve her ancient, much-scribbled-in exercise book and opens it to reveal her childish handwriting. “In 1867,” she reads to her contrite prime minister, “Walter Bagehot wrote: ‘There are two elements of the Constitution: the efficient and the dignified.’ The monarch is the dignified and the government is the efficient. These two institutions only work when they support each other — when they trust one another…Your breaking of that trust was irresponsible, and it might have had serious ramifications for the security of this country.” The Queen pauses to let the message sink in, then asks her prime minister to assure her that he is now “better…Sufficiently better? Fit for office better?” — forcing Churchill to concede “that the time is fast approaching for me to step down.” This is where dramatic invention falls back in step with history, since one positive outcome of the June 1953 crisis was Churchill’s eventual willingness to acknowledge that his faculties were waning and that he must surrender his hold on Downing Street.

At the beginning of August 1953, the prime minister travelled to Windsor, according to Colville’s memoirs, to inform the Queen that he would step down if he was not able to face Parliament or the party conference that autumn. While he teased Eden cruelly about his intentions, he told his sovereign the truth. Later he managed to utter the dreaded “stroke” word, first to President Eisenhower and later to Parliament, when describing the nature of his summer indisposition. Most practically, he agreed to secret arrangements with the Palace to transfer power to Anthony Eden in the event of his illness or death during the six months of the Queen’s post-coronation tour of the Commonwealth, which was due to commence that November.

In the event, these precautions proved unnecessary. Winston Churchill soldiered on in office with no more untoward health scares, finally retiring in April 1955 at the age of 80. But the unthinkable had been thought, the worst had been discussed — and, more important, trust had been restored between the dignified and the efficient branches of government. Did anyone hear the approving croak of a raven?

Educating Elizabeth

“This is a surprise!” exclaims the Queen Mother warmly, as her eldest daughter pays her an unexpected late-night visit at Clarence House towards the end of June 1953. “To what do I owe the pleasure?” “I came,” replies Elizabeth, whom we have just seen embroiled in the problems caused by her ailing prime minister, “because I wanted to ask you a question about my education.” “What about it?” responds her 52-year-old mother, whose attention is distracted by a cheesy variety show on the television. “The fact that I didn’t receive one!” asks Elizabeth sharply. “You did,” retorts the elder Queen – to which Elizabeth responds angrily: “Sewing, needlework and saying poems with Crawfie? That is not an education!”

So here is the question posed by Episode 7 – should Britain’s longest-serving Queen have received better schooling? Peter Morgan’s Latin title for the episode, “Scientia Potentia Est” – “Knowledge is power” – is inspired by the apologetic comments that Queen Elizabeth II has let drop from time to time about her lack of formal education: “You and I would never have got into university,” she once said to her sister Margaret in the presence of the Labour politician Barbara Castle, prompting Mrs. Castle to reassure the sisters that university “wasn’t as formidable as it seemed.” The Queen’s self-deprecating remarks are a device she has regularly deployed to put nervous guests at their ease. But their theme clearly represents some sort of personal concern – is “grievance” too strong a word? – and in Episode 7 the Queen Mother presents the case for the defence. She points out robustly to her recently crowned daughter, 27 years old at this stage of the action, that she has spent no less than six years with the Vice-Provost of Eton studying the intricacies of the Constitution – and this on top of “an entirely appropriate education” for a woman of her background. “We taught you to be a lady…” says the elder Queen Elizabeth. “No one wants a bluestocking or college lecturer as sovereign. They want a Queen.”

The older Queen Elizabeth could have made a stronger case. It was certainly true that her daughter had no experience of the communal classroom. In 1936, a tentative plan for the 10-year-old Elizabeth to be sent away to boarding school was said to have been vetoed by her uncle, the new King Edward VIII, on the grounds it would break with the traditions laid down by George V. But there was a further argument to be made, that dispatching royal children to a posh country house with a pack of other privileged, upper-class brats did not, in fact, prepare them so well for royal or even regular life as the strategy of the future George VI and his wife did – to hand over their children to the care of working-class servants inside the Palace. “[The Queen] was brought up by strict nannies,” recalled a friend, describing to the biographer Sally Bedell Smith how the young Elizabeth once came to tea and put her elbows on the table cloth. “Take them off!” snapped the Princess’s first nursery nanny, Mrs. Clara Knight, without ceremony, and the elbows came shooting off the table. Life tutors could teach better lessons than school tutors.

Clara Knight was a solidly built Hertfordshire farmer’s daughter who had raised several members of the Queen Mother’s prolific Scottish family, including the Queen Mother herself and her favourite brother, David Bowes Lyon. The nanny’s young charges often had difficulty getting their tongues around “Clara,” so she was usually referred to as “Alla.” With her square jaw, ample bosom and her round black hat pulled down to her ears, Alla Knight resembled no one so much, to the modern eye, as Mrs. Doubtfire, the movie governess creation of the comedian Robin Williams. Alla was a spinster, but, following the nursery etiquette of the day, she was accorded the courtesy title of “Mrs.”

Old-fashioned and firm, Alla ran her nursery floor as a “state within a state” over which she presided as a benign dictator, installing discipline and regularity into her charges in everything from mealtimes to bowel movements. In later years, Princess Elizabeth was reported to be a remarkably neat and tidy child, going to great trouble to line up both her shoes and her array of toy horses with military precision. “I don’t think any child could be more sensibly brought up,” noted her grandmother Queen Mary with approval, “…and she’s always punished when she’s naughty.” The old Queen had the chance to monitor Alla’s nursery regime at close quarters at the beginning of 1927 when Elizabeth’s parents were dispatched on a visit to Australia and New Zealand for nearly six months, leaving their newborn baby behind, in line with upper-class parental practice at the time, to be cared for by her nannies under the supervision of her two sets of grandparents, Bowes Lyon and Windsor, between whose homes she was shuttled.

Between the ages of nine months and her first birthday, the little Princess was a lodger on the upper floors of Buckingham Palace, where she was spruced up by Alla and her staff every afternoon to be brought downstairs for tea in the presence of the King and Queen. Contemporary accounts make much of the informality of the gathering. “Here comes the Bambino!” the normally staid Queen Mary was said to have exclaimed with delight at her granddaughter’s arrival – though a modern mind might wonder at the impact on the 11-month-old child of the daily cleansing, changing, hair-brushing and ritualistic dressing-up, then to be borne reverentially down long corridors into the holy of holies by servants who were tingling with awe and homage.

When her parents eventually returned from the other end of the earth at the close of June 1927, they were strangers who can scarcely have recognised the smell and texture of the child they had left any more than she recognised them. Revealing more than she realised, the Duchess of York’s authorised biographer, Lady Cynthia Asquith, reported that the little girl was “almost as pleased” to see her mother as if the duchess had been “quite a large crowd” – to whom she held out her arms with a smile, copying the gesture she had learned to make when onlookers gathered round her pram during her excursions with Alla in Hyde Park. “She is a character,” reported Winston Churchill when he met the two-and-a-half-year-old Princess the following year at Balmoral. “She had an air of authority and reflectiveness astonishing in an infant.” With the birth of Princess Margaret in 1930, Alla’s nursery priorities switched to the care of the new arrival, with supervision of the four-year-old Elizabeth being transferred to the nanny’s senior assistant, Margaret “Bobo” MacDonald, the daughter of a Highland railway signalman, who had grown up in a tied cottage beside the Aberdeen to Inverness line. This forthright, red-haired young Scotswoman would sleep in the Princess’s bedroom through most of her childhood and would, in adult life, become her most intimate female companion and confidante – looking after the royal wardrobe as her dresser and being generally credited as the source of her mistress’s famous frugality. The railwayman’s daughter trained the Princess to open each of her Christmas and birthday presents carefully, then smooth out and save the wrapping paper and ribbon, preserving them in a special drawer for future use, a practice the Queen is said to have continued throughout her life.

We know the details of this thriftiness thanks to the Princess’s governess Marion Crawford, another feisty young Scottish woman, who joined the York household just before Elizabeth’s sixth birthday and later published an internationally bestselling book, The Little Princesses, about her life behind Palace doors. “Crawfie” came to Windsor in the spring of 1932 for a month’s trial as governess, was dubbed with an affectionate nickname to match those of Alla and Bobo, and stayed for 17 years. Prepared with the help of a ghostwriter, The Little Princesses reads today as a kindly and wholly positive account of the future Queen’s upbringing; everyone emerges from the pages with great credit. But no such intimate, day-to-day revelations had appeared on such a scale before, and the royal family – who tried to stop the governess publishing – came to regard the book, first published in November 1950, as a gross act of betrayal. “Crawfie snaked,” Princess Margaret used to hiss with disdain.

Until she embarked on her career of royal revelation, however, Miss Crawford was cherished as an inspiring and creative teacher – singled out by The Times, no less, on Elizabeth’s 18th birthday in April 1942, for having “upheld through the years of tutelage the standards of simple living and honest thinking that Scotland peculiarly respects.” Of lower-middle-class Presbyterian stock, Crawfie had come to the attention of the Duke and Duchess of York in the early 1930s as tutor to a number of their aristocratic friends who lived in the hills around Dunfermline, between whose homes the governess would hike several dozen miles a week, in all weathers. Prince Bertie admired the young woman’s energy, and both parents felt that her carefree, spirited style, very much in the mould of child-centred, progressive nursery teaching at that time, was exactly what their daughters needed. So, in September 1932 the governess took over full-time responsibility for the daytime activities of Princess Elizabeth, and she found she was given a surprisingly free hand.

“No one ever had employers who interfered so little [she later wrote]. I had often the feeling that the Duke and Duchess, most happy in their own married life, were not over-concerned with the higher education of their daughters. They wanted most for them a really happy childhood, with lots of pleasant memories stored up against the days that might come and, later, happy marriages.” Their grandfather King George V wanted a little more. “For goodness’ sake,” he boomed at Miss Crawford when he met her, “teach Margaret and Lilibet to write a decent hand, that’s all I ask of you. None of my children could write properly. They all do it exactly the same way. I like a hand with some character in it.”

Miss Crawford discovered that Princess Elizabeth could read already. She had been taught by her mother. The Duchess of York told Lady Cynthia Asquith that she had read Bible stories aloud to Elizabeth on Sunday mornings from an early age, and had selected some of the most cherished books from her own childhood to read in this manner on winter evenings.

The family would sing songs round the piano after tea, reported the duchess, then start digging into “fairy stories, Alice, Black Beauty, At the Back of the North Wind, Peter Pan, anything we can find about horses and dogs, and gay poetry like ‘Come Unto These Yellow Sands.’ ” Over the years Miss Crawford would extend this list to include Robert Louis Stevenson, Jane Austen, Rudyard Kipling, the Brontës, Sir Walter Scott, Charles Dickens and Anthony Trollope – all consumed in periods of “silent reading,” which stood the future monarch “in good stead,” as Her Majesty would later explain to J. K. Rowling, when the author of the Harry Potter series came to the Palace for an investiture. “I read quite quickly now,” the Queen explained. “I have to read a lot.”

The silent reading sessions were part of a carefully tabulated, six-day-per-week curriculum drawn up by Miss Crawford, the mornings filled with half-hour lessons, the afternoons devoted to less academic accomplishments – singing, drawing, music or dancing. The governess sent a draft version of the timetable to Queen Mary and was told the Queen considered too little time had been allocated to history, geography and Bible readings: “Her Majesty felt that genealogies, historical and dynastic, were very interesting to children and, for these children, really important.” Detailed knowledge of the physical geography of the Dominions and India would also be valuable, thought their grandmother, along with regular learning of poetry by heart – “wonderful memory training.”

Working with the governess, the old Queen helped organise regular Monday excursions to historic venues such as Hampton Court or the Tower of London, with private tours of the capital’s finest libraries and museums. Thus, the young Elizabeth got to touch the blood-stained shirt worn by her predecessor Charles I on the day he was beheaded, and the lead shot extracted from the body of Admiral Nelson at Trafalgar – “instructive amusements,” in the opinion of her grandmother. “It would have been impossible for anyone so devoted to the monarchy as Queen Mary,” wrote her friend Lady Airlie, “to lose sight of the future Queen in this favourite grandchild.” In this spirit, Crawfie conferred with the curators of the incomparable Royal Collection to select a “painting of the week” – a Vermeer or Canaletto, or even a Rubens or a Titian – to sit in the Palace schoolroom on an easel.

To reduce the dangers of elitism that went with such privileges, the governess tried to ensure that her charges’ Monday excursions should not be by chauffeur-driven car but by public transport on the London Underground – the “Tube.” Queen Mary thoroughly approved. On one famous occasion the old Queen had noticed her granddaughter wriggling impatiently during a concert and asked if she would not prefer to go home. “Oh no, Granny,” came the reply, “we can’t leave before the end. Think of all the people who’ll be waiting to see us outside!” – whereupon Granny immediately had the little girl escorted out of the back way by a lady-in-waiting and taken home in a taxi.

To keep in touch with the outside world in another fashion, Miss Crawford started a subscription for Princess Elizabeth to the Children’s Newspaper, a tabloid weekly that presented current affairs and samples of adult literature adapted for young readers, with all references to alcohol changed to soft beverages – orange squash for wine, and fizzy pop for beer – reflecting the temperance principles of its editor, Arthur Mee, a crusader for self-education. Subtitled The Story of the World Today for the Men and Women of Tomorrow, the paper reflected the editor’s Baptist faith and loyalty to the British Empire, with the aim of keeping young people up to date with the latest in world news and science. “What would happen, we wonder,” Mee asked his young readers at the time of the Munich crisis of 1938, “if every human being who longs for peace knelt down to pray for it as if it were the deepest longing in his heart? What would happen if we all thought of ourselves as broadcasting stations, broadcasting the thought of peace into the world?”

Elizabeth became an avid reader of the Children’s Newspaper, discussing its articles with her father, who pitched in with cartoons and humorous articles from his own favourite magazine, Punch – the Private Eye of the day. The King would also draw his daughter’s attention to grown-up newspaper articles he thought she should read – usually in the royal edition of The Times, then specially printed on rag paper for Buckingham Palace, the British Museum and the Copyright libraries.

Working with Elizabeth’s parents and grandmother, the governess whom Ben Pimlott would later compare to Muriel Spark’s inspirational Miss Jean Brodie, seems to have delivered rather more to her young charges than just sewing, needlework and poetry. It was Miss Crawford who pushed for the creation of special Girl Guide and Brownie “packs” inside the Palace so the Princesses could have contact with girls from the outside world. Keen on sport and physical exercise – Elizabeth had had weekend riding lessons at Windsor from an early age – Crawfie organised swimming and life-saving lessons at the Bath Club in Mayfair, and also in the Buckingham Palace pool. Then there were the French literature and language lessons with Toni de Bellaigue, a Belgian tutor who insisted that the sisters spoke nothing but French with her at mealtimes. In 1972, President Pompidou was so impressed with the Queen’s command of French on her state visit to Paris that he stopped the car as they left the airport and told his translator to find his own way back to the office. He had no further need of his services.

Elizabeth II’s unhappiness about her education is embodied in Episode 7 by Professor Hodge, a fictitious character who comes into the Palace, at her invitation, to help the Queen plug the gaps in her learning – only to conclude there are no significant gaps to plug. The professor discovers that Her Majesty is a walking encyclopaedia on her specialist subjects, horse breeding and horse racing, and as for disciplining devious politicians: “Ma’am, you say you don’t have what it takes to do battle with these people. You do. You were drilled for years in the finer points of our Constitution; you know it better than me. Better than all of us. You have the only education that matters…Summon them and give them a good dressing down like children…They’re English, male and upper class. A good dressing down from Nanny is what they want most in life.”

Learning the finer points of knot-tying at a Girl Guides meeting in Frogmore, Windsor, gave the sixteen-year-old Princess Elizabeth a rare chance to mix and mingle with girls of her own age. Credit 133

And so it proves. “Something’s different,” muses Philip when he encounters his wife at the end of the episode, after she has finished chastising Winston Churchill and Lord Salisbury with a verbal spanking. “You seem…taller, somehow. Or is it just that I’ve shrunk?” In her notorious book, Crawfie relates a tale with a similar moral about a Girl Guide and Brownie game that the nanny-educated Princesses used to play with school-educated girls from outside the Palace. It involved everyone taking off their shoes, throwing them into a pile, then finding them again, putting them back on and racing back to the starting line. “This never went very well,” Crawfie wrote, “as quite half the children did not know their own shoes! Lilibet and Margaret told me this with scorn. There was never any nonsense of that kind in their nursery.”

The tragedy of Marion Crawford

Early in 1949, Bruce and Beatrice Gould, the ambitious publishers of Ladies’ Home Journal, America’s leading women’s magazine, approached Buckingham Palace with a project to instruct and entertain their 4.7 million readers — a series of articles on the education of the future Queen and her sister. The Palace eventually agreed, on the condition that the articles would be written by Dermot Morrah, a pro-monarchist who was trusted by the family, and whom they connected with the obvious source, the Princesses’ beloved governess Marion Crawford. With Elizabeth married and Margaret having passed her eighteenth birthday, Crawfie had recently retired, at the age of 38, to marry her long-term sweetheart George Buthlay, an employee of Drummonds Bank.

Morrah and the Goulds found Crawfie strangely uncooperative, however, and quickly identified the root of the problem. The pushy Buthlay had already tried to persuade the royal family, through his wife, to switch their accounts from Coutts to Drummonds — without success. Now it became clear he felt that his wife’s 17 years of devoted service deserved more than her royal pension of £300 a year (about £10,000 in 2017 values), with the lifetime use of the grace and favour Nottingham Cottage in the grounds of Kensington Palace, and the letters CVO (Commander of the Victorian Order) after her name. Sensing Crawfie’s reluctance to hand her story to another writer for nothing, the Americans promptly flew to London and offered her a deal. “Her awe of the royal family almost paralysed her,” recalled Bruce Gould. “Even in her own sanctuary, close as it was to Kensington Palace, she would hardly speak…above a whisper.” The governess took the Goulds’ proposal to her former employer, and received a firmly negative response. “I do feel most definitely,” wrote Queen Elizabeth on 4th April 1949, “that you should not write and sign articles about the children, as people in positions of confidence with us must be utterly oyster.”

This appealing use of a family catchphrase was part of a long and carefully phrased letter that deployed charm and threats in equal measure. “You would lose all your friends,” warned the Queen, “because such a thing has never been done or even contemplated amongst the people who serve us so loyally…I do feel most strongly that you must resist the allure of American money & persistent editors, & say No No No to offers of dollars about something as private & as precious as our family.”

The weakness in the Queen’s argument was that she herself had helped create this profitable genre that was so attractive to persistent editors. As Duchess of York in the 1920s and 1930s, the young Princesses’ mother had given her blessing to numerous sugary magazine articles and several “authorised” books about her daughters in a style that was scarcely different from what the Goulds were now proposing. The sticking point was the maintaining of royal control of the disclosure process, along with opening the floodgates to other employees. As the Queen put it to Crawfie, “we should never feel confidence in anyone again.”

The Queen finished her letter by inviting the governess “to come & see me again about a job…I feel sure that you could do some teaching, which after all is your ‘forte,’ and I would be so glad to help in any way I can.” Her Majesty even said she was happy for Crawfie to help Dermot Morrah with his articles (which the Palace, of course, would be able to control) “and get paid from America…as long as your name did not come into it.”

But nothing could match the tempting offer of the Goulds for Crawfie’s unrestricted personal story: a lump sum of $80,000 ($801,000 or £614,000 in 2017 values) — and for this fortune Crawfie did not even have to do any writing. She surrendered to the now-familiar newspaper process of being confined to a hotel room for days on end with a journalist, who “pumped” her mercilessly to extract her story. To satisfy the ex-governess’s continuing fear of the Palace, the Goulds flew over an American shorthand typist “recommended for discretion in recording wartime secret conferences,” and they moved into the Dorchester themselves to oversee the process. When the first of eight instalments ran in January 1950, Ladies’ Home Journal sold out.

Thousands took out subscriptions to make sure they would not miss the next instalment, and in Britain, Woman’s Own, which bought British rights in the series, increased its normal print run by 500,000. Similar serialisations in Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa made the fortunes of the magazines which ran them — and then came the book. The Little Princesses went hardcover in lavishly illustrated editions that were bestsellers around the world.

Crawfie shared in this bonanza for a time, putting her name to further ghostwritten books and to a weekly syndicated column in Woman’s Own purporting to describe royal events from the inside. “Ascot this season had an excitement about it never seen there before,” reported “Crawfie’s Column” of 16th June 1955, going on to praise “the bearing and dignity of the Queen” at the annual Trooping the Colour ceremony as causing great “admiration among the spectators.” Unfortunately for Crawfie, both Ascot and the Colour ceremony were cancelled that year because of a rail strike, so her column created a sensation she did not intend. She concluded her career as a writer more rapidly than as a governess. Nor did her private life prove much happier. George Buthlay — the inspiration for her betrayal in the opinion of those who knew him — proved a bullying and controlling husband. When he predeceased her in 1977, his will went to the trouble of excluding his widow from the ceremony of disposing of his ashes. The couple had chosen to retire to a mansion in Aberdeen, just 200 yards from the road taken by royal car cavalcades on their way to and from Balmoral — on the forlorn fantasy, it would seem, that a cavalcade might one day choose to stop. “I can’t bear those I love to pass me by on the road,” wrote the mournful governess in a note that accompanied a failed suicide attempt in the 1980s. There were no royal wreaths or flowers at Crawfie’s funeral in February 1988. But her name does live on inside Buckingham Palace, since there have been a few others — very few, it must be said — who have followed the governess’s path of unauthorised disclosure. Their treachery is always described in the same terms: “doing a Crawfie.”