“Your uncle has let us all down,” King George VI tells his two young daughters in December 1936, referring to the recently abdicated Edward VIII at the opening of Episode 10. “He has put love before family. Now I want you to promise me one thing…that you will never put anyone or anything before one another. You are sisters above all else. And must never let one another down. Understood?” “Never,” replies the young Princess Margaret, six, nodding gravely. “Never,” echoes her elder sister Elizabeth, 10, with equal seriousness.
So, as in previous episodes, Peter Morgan opens the drama with an imagined flashback, then leaps forward to historical reality – to Princess Margaret’s twenty-fifth birthday on 21st August 1955. Twenty-five was the age when, as explained by private secretary Tommy Lascelles in Episode 6 (two years previously), Margaret could seek to marry the divorced Group Captain Peter Townsend without requiring the permission of her elder sister under the first part of the Royal Marriages Act of 1772 – thus sparing Elizabeth the embarrassments that went with her position as Head of the Church (see this page). But Lascelles had failed to mention the second provision of the Act – expressly designed by King George III to make life hell for his relatives if they chose to marry spouses of whom he did not approve. Over the age of 25, the Princess no longer needed her sister’s consent. But she would now have to give formal notice to the Privy Council of her wish to marry, then wait a full year to see if either House of Parliament chose to raise any objection of their own. Given the agitated nature of national opinion on divorce in 1955, it was hardly likely that some sort of objection would not arise, and with that went the guarantee of 12 months of newspaper coverage and fevered public debate. So, what progress had been achieved by the two-year delay, with all the pain of Townsend’s exile in Brussels and the attendant separation and suffering? The young lovers were the victims of a courtier’s carelessness – or callousness, more likely.
For an inhibited and traditional man, George VI, shown here at a West End pantomime with the little princesses in the year before his accession, was ahead of his times in encouraging his daughters to be independent. But Princess Margaret would take independence further than he might have wished…Credit 160
“Why did no one tell me this at the time?” asks Elizabeth II sharply – then realises that she and Margaret have been played for suckers by the Palace establishment, who had simply wanted to sweep the whole problem under the carpet. It will not be possible for the sisters to fulfil their childhood pledge of total mutual support and loyalty. Grown-up life and love is more complicated.
“The Queen Mother,” explains Lascelles to Michael Adeane, his successor as Private Secretary, at the start of the episode, “always believed that two years’ separation would be long enough for Princess Margaret to lose interest in the Group Captain…and the whole thing to go away. But she hasn’t. And it hasn’t.” So now, if anything, the dilemma for the Queen has become even greater. “Either she puts her foot down and forbids the marriage – that turns sister against sister,” the former private secretary continues, recapitulating the problem that he himself has made worse, “…Or she permits the marriage – setting a collision course with the Church of which she herself is the Head.”
Party girl. With her trademark cigarette holder, Princess Margaret enjoys a glamorous night out at a Parisian nightclub in November 1951. Credit 161
“How can I keep my word [to my sister], after I gave it knowing only half the facts?” Elizabeth asks her new prime minister Anthony Eden, the former foreign secretary who had succeeded Churchill in April 1955. “Let me take the temperature of the Cabinet,” responds Eden, himself a remarried divorcee. “We must not forget that times are changing. Morality is changing…”
Well, up to a point, Lord Copper. As Britain in a later decade identified with Diana, Princess of Wales, and her struggles for fulfilment, so Princess Margaret struck a chord in the 1950s with her own personal bid for happiness-against-the-rules. Her apparent willingness to throw over the traces represented the other side of the post-coronation 1950s – the self-obsession of novelist Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim (1954) and the “Angry Young Men” epitomised by John Osborne and his play Look Back in Anger (1956). Margaret might be a princess, but her battle with establishment values resonated with the culture of waywardness that was subverting the goody-goody, dutiful England embodied in her sister. As the Margaret–Townsend romance reached its once-supposed moment of decision – the Princess’s birthday on 21st August 1955 – the attitude of the press reflected the new licence. “Come on Margaret!” exclaimed the Daily Mirror. “Please make up your mind!”
At least they said, “Please.” Up in Balmoral, more than 300 journalists and photographers appeared for the first recorded instance of what would come to be known as royal “door-stepping,” and when Peter Townsend arrived in London in September, ostensibly on his way to attend the Farnborough Air Show, he was pursued by packs of avid newshounds. Journalists besieged the succession of friends’ houses to which the group captain retreated, while Margaret remained up in Balmoral for the time being with the rest of the royal family.
Newspapers stirring up mayhem in the capital, while the royal family kept their heads down at Balmoral, set a fateful precedent, and Elizabeth II did not thank her sister for it. Her feelings had moved far beyond the open-hearted, and somewhat naïve, optimism that had inspired the welcoming diner à quatre in the spring of 1953. Now the Queen had grown tired of the fuss. She had not enjoyed having to put this family complication on the agenda with her new prime minister, and she had come to feel that both Margaret and Townsend had imposed on her goodwill and patience. “She’s so instinctively dutiful herself,” says a friend, “that she can’t understand why other people – and particularly her own family – do not just do the right thing.”
By the autumn of 1955 Elizabeth II had no doubt. The obvious and correct course was for Margaret to give up Townsend, but she shrank from imposing that on her sister. As the deadline approached for Margaret to go up to London to be reunited with the group captain at the beginning of October 1955, both sisters avoided the issue. After the final picnic on the Princess’s last day in the Highlands, the Queen took her dogs out for a very long walk, carefully arriving back at the castle with time to say no more than a simple goodbye. Her mother was equally evasive.
She was “ostriching,” to employ an expression from the royal repertory of animal catchphrases. The Queen Mother had come to feel quite certain that Margaret should not marry Townsend. It stirred memories of the abdication. She was furious with her younger daughter for provoking such vulgar publicity at the beginning of Lilibet’s reign, and she also shared the family’s aversion to thrashing things out face-to-face. Meals at Clarence House, where the two women were confined together, were marked, Princess Margaret later remembered, by long and frosty silences “for weeks on end.” The Queen Mother, however, now 55, did share her feelings with her old friend “Bobbety” Cecil, fifth Marquess of Salisbury, who was never scared of a scrap, as he had demonstrated in his attempts to elbow out the ailing Winston Churchill. An annual guest at Balmoral, where he had not held back from crossing swords with the young Prince Philip, “Bobbety” was a pious churchman, as well as a senior and powerful voice in the government of Anthony Eden – and in the middle of October 1955 he made a decisive cabinet intervention.
Prime Minister Anthony Eden was a divorced and re-married man. But he was not prepared to fight to give Princess Margaret and Peter Townsend the freedom from which he had benefitted. Credit 162
If Princess Margaret persisted with her plans to marry a divorcee, Salisbury told his colleagues, he would resign from the government rather than acquiesce in a subversion of the Church’s teaching. Not wishing to deny the couple personal happiness, he would be agreeable to marriage, but that would have to be subject to a special Bill of Renunciation that would strike the Princess and her heirs from the Civil List – the schedule of royal expenses and allowances – and from the succession. It would be too much to suggest that “Bobbety” was doing the Queen Mother’s dirty work. He felt very strongly about the decay of old-fashioned standards. A few years later he would again threaten to resign in protest against Britain’s negotiations with Archbishop Makarios, the terrorist-supported Cypriot leader, stalking out of the cabinet when he did not get his way. But as he made his stand in 1955, the principled marquess knew that one very senior figure in the royal family would sigh regretfully and remind both her daughters that it was not possible to cross the will of an elected government.
Anthony Eden had tried to keep himself out of the argument. The prime minister was himself a divorced man who had remarried. But Salisbury had forced the issue on a generally uncensorious cabinet. Though Princess Margaret was by now 25, with the possibility of escaping from the scope of the Royal Marriages Act, she was in receipt of £6,000 a year from the Civil List which would rise to £15,000 when she married. The Civil List was paid from government funds. Even if Eden were willing to accept a cabinet split, he was faced with having to stand up in Parliament and justify, as a matter of government policy, taxpayers’ money going to support the divorced Group Captain and the new Mrs. Townsend – along with her prospective stepchildren, Townsend’s two sons, whose inconvenient existence was seldom brought into the matter. In political terms, the battle was simply not worth fighting, and Eden regretfully informed the Queen that the price of Margaret’s marriage would be the Bill of Renunciation as proposed by Salisbury. If the royal family wished to endorse divorce, it would have to do so at its own expense.
Anthony Eden went to convey the unpalatable news to the Queen as part of his weekly royal audience on the evening of Tuesday 18th October. Neither Eden nor his colleagues said it or implied it, but one conclusion was becoming inescapable. If Princess Margaret did marry Peter Townsend, she would have little choice but to leave the country for several years, if not permanently – thus creating two sets of exiled Windsor victims of Anglican divorce dogma.
On Friday 21st October came another reminder of the past when the royal family, the Buckingham Palace household, the prime minister and cabinet, along with the leaders of the opposition and representatives of the Church and Commonwealth, gathered on the steps of Carlton Gardens halfway down the Mall for a poignant ceremony to unveil William McMillan’s fine-featured bronze statue of King George VI (a scene depicted by Peter Morgan at the opening of Episode 8). “Much was asked of my father in personal sacrifice and endeavour,” declared Elizabeth II in her moving speech at the unveiling, highlighting “personal sacrifice” in a way that some felt carried an extra meaning. “He shirked no task, however difficult, and to the end he never faltered in his duty to his peoples.”
By now, recalled Townsend – who had, pointedly, not been invited to the ceremony commemorating the monarch whom he had served with such devotion – “We were both exhausted, mentally, emotionally, physically. We felt mute and numbed at the centre of this maelstrom.” The couple separated for the weekend – Margaret to stay with her sister and husband at Windsor, Townsend to remain at 19 Lowndes Square, the Knightsbridge apartment of Margaret’s friends the Marquess and Marchioness of Abergavenny. “That Sunday night,” he recalled in his memoir Time and Chance, “I had hardly slept. My mind had turned incessantly on the sadness of the Princess. In just over a week the smile had vanished from her face, her happiness and confidence had evaporated. Events had put us to a rude test and the clamour, louder than ever, still continued about us…”
On the morning of the following Wednesday, 26th October 1955, The Times broke silence in a monumental editorial. The paper made no personal criticism of Peter Townsend, describing him as “a gallant officer with nothing to his disadvantage except that his divorced wife is still living.” Nor did it criticise public interest in the love of the Princess for the group captain. “The enormous popular emotion that has been generated by the recent happenings is in itself perfectly healthy…It proceeds from genuine affection for the Royal Family which they have inherited and continue to deserve and which is a principal guarantee of the stability of Kingdom and Commonwealth.”
Interestingly, it dismissed Elizabeth II’s position as Governor of the Church as being of real concern only to “that southern part of the United Kingdom in which the Church of England is established.” This meant little, said The Times, to the vast majority of people in the Commonwealth. But (and here was the rub) the vast majority of the rest of the Commonwealth clearly cared about whether or not Princess Margaret married Peter Townsend, and this was for the highest reasons. Whether she liked it or not, Princess Margaret was the sister of the Queen, “in whom her people see their better selves reflected, and since part of their ideal is of family life, the Queen’s family has its own part in the reflection. If the marriage which is now being discussed comes to pass, it is inevitable that this reflection becomes distorted. The Princess will be entering into a union which vast numbers of her sister’s people, all sincerely anxious for her lifelong happiness, cannot in conscience regard as a marriage.
Once the decision was made, Peter Townsend could eventually escape back to Belgium to live in relative anonymity. But for Princess Margaret there was no escape. She had to stay in the spotlight in Britain. Credit 163
“There is no escape from the logic of the situation,” continued the paper. “If the Princess finally decides, with all the anxious deliberation that clearly she has given to her problem, that she is unable to make the sacrifice involved…then she has a right to lay down a burden that is too heavy for her.” But, said The Times, this would be “a blow at all that the royal family had traditionally stood for.” And the parting thrust was sharper still. Whatever decision Margaret’s conscience might settle on, “Her fellow subjects will wish her every possible happiness – not forgetting that happiness in the full sense is a spiritual state and that its most precious element may be the sense of duty done.”
It was an overwhelming onslaught, and even if the Daily Mirror retorted two days later that The Times spoke “for a dusty world and a forgotten age,” and suspected that its editor would have preferred the Princess to marry “one of the witless wonders with whom she has been hobnobbing these past years,” the editorial of 26th October 1955 made clear that something serious was going on. Punch had been running cartoons of counting peas on a plate – “Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Group Captain” – and a comedian had mimicked the news bulletins on the BBC: “They had tea together again today.” But until The Times spoke many people had remained convinced that the crisis was the concoction of the popular media.
Even if Peter Townsend was seeing Princess Margaret – and The Times itself had chronicled starkly such visits as he had made to Clarence House – it seemed to many people to be a totally private matter, for she could not seriously be contemplating a marriage which would flout the teaching of the Church and the traditional royal attitude towards marriage vows. It now became clear, however, that she was.
The Chairman of the Methodist Conference, Dr. Leslie Weatherhead, felt the time had come to pronounce on his church’s behalf. “Princess Margaret and Group Captain Townsend are popular young people in love with one another,” he declared. But, even if the Princess were to renounce her income and rights to the throne, to many “her example does not make it easier to uphold the ideal of Christian marriage in a land in which divorce is already too lightly regarded, homes too readily broken up, and children too thoughtlessly deprived of the mental security of having two united parents, a security which is surely part of God’s plan.”
Peter Townsend had, in fact, already decided. During the morning of the day The Times editorial appeared, he later recalled, “I had sat mechanically dictating thanks to the scores of letters pouring into No. 19 Lowndes Square. With rare exceptions, they were simple, touching expressions of sympathy; whether ‘for’ or ‘against,’ I felt they all deserved acknowledgements.” Ever the perfect equerry, the group captain politely answered every letter.
“I felt so played out,” he wrote, “that I tried to snatch a few winks of sleep before leaving to see the Princess at 4 p.m. But sleep evaded me. I was obsessed by the thought that the Princess must tell the world there would be no marriage. Words, broken phrases turned in my head. Of a sudden, I rolled off the bed, grabbed a piece of paper and a pencil. The words now came to me with clarity and fluency and I began to write: ‘I have decided not to marry Group Captain Townsend…It may have been possible to contract a civil marriage. But mindful of the Church’s teaching…’ ”
Less than an hour later, Townsend was with the Princess inside Clarence House. “She looked very tired,” he recalled, “but was as composed and affectionate as ever. I told her quietly, ‘I have been thinking so much about us in the last two days, and I’ve written down my thoughts, for you to say if you wish to.’ I gave her the rough piece of paper and she read. Then she looked at me, and very quietly, too, she said, ‘That’s exactly how I feel.’ Our love story had started with those words. Now, with the same sweet phrase, we wrote finis to it.”
Margaret told her sister and mother at once, then went to see the Archbishop of Canterbury next day in a scene engraved in the popular imagination by Winston Churchill’s son, Randolph. “The Archbishop,” wrote Churchill, “supposing that she was coming to consult him, had all his books of reference spread around him carefully marked and cross-referenced. When Princess Margaret entered, she said, and the words are worthy of Queen Elizabeth I, ‘Archbishop, you may put your books away; I have made up my mind already.’ ” Dr. Fisher was indeed surprised that the Princess’s decision had already been reached so unambiguously, and was delighted by the path of duty she had chosen. But he was still more surprised when he read this account of the crucial meeting since, as he later told his biographer, William Purcell, “I had no books of any sort spread around. The Princess came and I received her, as I would anybody else, in the quarters of my own study. She never said, ‘Put away those books,’ because there were not any books to put away.” The following Monday, the BBC broke into its evening radio programming to broadcast the statement. “This is a great act of self-sacrifice,” wrote Harold Nicolson in his diary, “and the country will admire and love her for it. I feel rather moved.” Most of the editorials of 1st November 1955 bore him out. “All the peoples of the Commonwealth will feel gratitude to her for taking the selfless, royal way which, in their hearts, they expected of her,” declared The Times with ill-concealed satisfaction.
But the Daily Mirror declined to join “in the suffocating chant of ‘good show!,’ ” while the Manchester Guardian prophesied that Margaret’s decision “will be regarded by great masses of people as unnecessary and perhaps a great waste. In the long run, it will not redound to the credit or influence of those who have been most persistent in denying the Princess the same liberty that is enjoyed by the rest of her fellow citizens…That odd piece of inconsistency may be typically English, but it has more than a smack of English hypocrisy about it.”
Hypocrisy was the theme that Noël Coward picked up in his diary three days later, hoping that Margaret would not now “become a frustrated maiden Princess [and] that they had the sense to hop into bed a couple of times” – though he privately doubted this. “It would have been an unsuitable marriage anyway…” mused The Master. “She cannot know, poor girl, being young and in love, that love dies soon and that a future with two strapping stepsons and a man eighteen years older than herself would not really be very rosy.” As Margaret’s occasional confidant Kenneth Rose would knowingly put it, the Princess could not have long survived the bottom-line reality of “life in a cottage on a Group Captain’s salary.” Elizabeth’s younger sister had not been raised to be anything other than a princess, and marriage to Townsend would have meant surrendering her lifestyle, her status and, in many ways, her very identity. “Let me tell you from bitter experience,” remarked the former Princess Patricia of Connaught, Queen Victoria’s granddaughter, who nobly surrendered her HRH status on her marriage to the naval officer Captain Alexander Ramsay in 1919, and was to spend 55 happy but obscure years as Lady Patricia Ramsay, “It’s not a good idea to give up being a princess.”
“We are half people…” declaims the Duke of Windsor philosophically in a telephone call that Peter Morgan imagines Elizabeth making to her Uncle David at the height of Margaret–Townsend crisis. “I understand the agony you feel and I am here to tell you, it will never leave you.”
The irony of the Princess Margaret–Peter Townsend crisis of October 1955 was that it was the supposedly wayward Margaret, the younger sister, and not the dutiful Elizabeth II, who took action to protect the Crown with her act of personal sacrifice – and that, sadly, that sacrifice did not count for very much in the long run. Within 40 years, the marriages of three of the Queen’s four children would end in divorce, not to mention Princess Margaret’s own marriage to Lord Snowdon; and, looking to the next reign, the future King Charles III, due to be solemnly crowned and consecrated one day with holy oil, is a divorced man who is married to a divorced woman. What price now the Church’s teaching?
Peter Townsend quietly made his escape back to Belgium, to live the rest of his life safely removed from the twin perils of the British press and the British royal family, while Princess Margaret continued to ruminate on exactly what – and who – had denied her happiness. Her greatest, and most understandable, complaint was that the obstacles of the Royal Marriages Act that were placed in her way in 1955 had all existed back in 1953 when she first committed herself to Townsend. She and Peter had wasted two painful years planning life and love on false pretences, and she focused her particular resentment on Tommy Lascelles, since it was Lascelles who had kept the truth from both herself and from her sister, taking the excuse to exile Peter to Brussels, while attributing spurious hope to her twenty-fifth birthday. Everyone had taken their cue from the private secretary.
In later years, Margaret came to be a neighbour of Lascelles in his grace and favour retirement apartment in Kensington Palace, and she described the moment one morning when she saw his grey and stooping frame trudging across the pebbles in front of her car. The Princess who had made such sacrifice for the sake of her Christian faith happily confessed to a most un-Christian impulse – to command her chauffeur to step on the accelerator and crunch the former private secretary into the gravel.
Princess Betts
TRAINEE MECHANIC
“She’s a bit throaty, I’m afraid,” says Queen Elizabeth II as she leads Anthony Eden towards an old green Land Rover during his autumn visit to Balmoral in 1955. “We’ve been having trouble with the fuel pump.” The prime minister wants to discuss the Suez Canal and his problems with the fiery Egyptian leader, Gamal Abdel Nasser. But the Queen is happier talking about fuel pumps and cylinder heads – fond memories of her most sustained spell in the outside world, when she studied as a trainee mechanic on an army vehicle maintenance course as a member of the women’s Auxiliary Territorial Service, the ATS, at the end of the Second World War: “No. 230873, Second Subaltern Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor. Age: 18. Eyes: blue. Hair: brown. Height: 5 ft. 3 ins.”
The Princess had enrolled for wartime youth service as soon as she was eligible, on her sixteenth birthday in April 1942, but her parents had been reluctant to let her “out into the world” at such a young age. George VI felt his elder daughter should concentrate on her formal studies with Henry Marten, her constitutional tutor, as well as with her governess Marion Crawford. But both the governess and the Princess herself felt that the King was being overprotective. “I ought to do as other girls of my age do,” complained Elizabeth, and she had to fight a long-running campaign to get her father to change his mind.
“After exercising all her persuasion,” in the diplomatic words of Dermot Morrah, Elizabeth finally won permission to join the ATS while she was still just 18. She was fitted for her hard-won khaki uniform, and for six weeks in the spring of 1945 she was driven over daily from Windsor to Aldershot, the traditional home of the British Army in Surrey, to pursue the ATS course on vehicle maintenance – working on, in and underneath motor cars and lorries. She learned how to read a map, how to drive in convoy and how to strip and service an engine. It was the first time in history, her 11 fellow students were told, that a female member of the royal family had ever attended a course with “other people.” They were under strict instructions not to reveal her identity and were bursting with curiosity to see what she looked like. Noted Corporal Eileen Heron in her diary, “Quite striking. Short, pretty, brown, crisp, curly hair. Lovely grey-blue eyes, and an extremely charming smile, and she uses lipstick!” The Princess was equally eager to get to know her course mates, but that proved difficult. While they slept in huts at Aldershot in the all-female base, Elizabeth was chauffeured the 22 miles back home to Windsor, where her earnest discourses on pistons and cylinder heads over dinner became something of a family joke. When the course broke for lunch, the Princess was “whisked away” by the officers to eat in their mess, and at lectures she was placed in the middle of the front row, with a protective sergeant on either side. But she did her best in the circumstances. “When anyone is asked a question,” noted Eileen Heron, “she turns round to have a good look at the person concerned. It is her only opportunity to attach names to the right people.” And by the end of her course, Elizabeth had managed to escape from her overprotective mentors and take tea with the other girls. According to one report, her more familiar companions referred to her as “Betts.”
During her six-week training course at Aldershot in 1945, “ Princess Betts” learned how to change a tyre, how to strip and service an engine, how to drive in convoy and how to read a map. Credit 164
Royal recruit to the Auxiliary Territorial Service: No. 230873, Second Subaltern Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor. Age: 18. Eyes: blue. Hair: brown. Height: 5 ft. 3 ins. Credit 165
When the King and Queen visited the depot to observe “Betts” taking her final test, they found their daughter in greasy overalls with black hands and a smudged face peering out from under a car “looking very grave and determined to get good marks and do the right thing.” As a measure of her proficiency at the end of the course, the Princess drove her company commander up from Aldershot through the thick of London afternoon traffic into the courtyard of Buckingham Palace – “though whether the fact that she found it necessary to drive twice around Piccadilly Circus on the way was due to high spirits or to a less than absolute mastery of the round-about system,” wrote Dermot Morrah, “has not been determined by competent authority.”
The experience ended all too quickly for Elizabeth. “[She] says she will feel quite lost next week,” noted Corporal Heron, “especially as she does not know yet what is going to happen to her as a result of the course.” The Princess told Eileen that she was hoping to join ATS headquarters later that summer as a junior officer, where she would have worked in an office with the other young women on transport organisation. But it was not to be. Less than a month later, on 8th May 1945, came VE (Victory in Europe) Day. There was ATS work aplenty in the months of demobilisation that followed, but George VI wanted his daughter back home on more prominent public duties. On the evening of VE Day itself, after the family had appeared for the umpteenth time on the balcony of Buckingham Palace to the cheers of the enormous crowds, the King detailed a group of young officers to take his daughters quietly out of the Palace to mingle with the throngs of merrymakers revelling in the almost forgotten experience of brightly lit streets and buildings. The Princesses were swept along in the mass rejoicing. “Poor darlings,” wrote George VI in his diary, “they have never had any fun yet.” The King had already forgotten his elder daughter’s vehicle maintenance course at Aldershot. But Elizabeth never did.
26th May 1945. The “Princess Mechanic” poses for a different sort of glamour shot on the cover of Illustrated magazine. Credit 166
Annigoni and Beaton Royal Portraits
In the spring of 1955 the Florentine artist Pietro Annigoni was preparing to display his huge and unashamedly “chocolate box” portrait of Queen Elizabeth II at the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition. More than five feet tall, the painting was the painstaking product of no fewer than 14 sittings, and its strikingly representational, almost photographic image boldly upheld the painter’s defiance of “modern art.” No Graham Sutherland, Annigoni had joined with six other Italian artists in 1947 to proclaim a manifesto of “Modern Realist Painters” in defiance of abstract art, protesting against the various non-figurative movements that were gaining favour in Italy in the post-war years.
In fact, the artist’s towering, three-quarter-length study of the Queen was not totally traditional. While meticulously detailed in the early Renaissance style to which Annigoni adhered, its symbolism had a Surrealist feel, with Elizabeth dressed in her dark blue Garter robes, floating in a cloudless sky above a bleak landscape of windswept trees, with a mysterious lake in the distance.
The portrait caused a sensation when it was unveiled at the Academy’s summer show. It appealed to both the eye and to the heart. Crowds queued for hours and they clustered around the painting up to 10 deep. One critic compared the precision of the imagery to Hans Holbein’s portrait of Jane Seymour, Henry VIII’s favourite wife, and Annigoni took pride in the comparison. In documentary terms, his painting displayed a monarch who had come of age – self-assured and in command, a royal portrait and no mistake.
The most plausible explanation of its enigma was offered by the artist himself, an endearingly diminutive and chatty Italian no more than five feet tall, who had cajoled the Queen into talking about her experiences as a child – in French, since his English was faulty and her Italian non-existent. Elizabeth told him how, as a little girl, she had spent hours looking out of the Palace windows, wondering about the cars and the passers-by and the reality of the lives they led, trying to put herself in their place and imagine where they were going and what they were thinking. In the eyes of Annigoni, Elizabeth II was both remote from her people and very engaged – and that was the paradox his painting sought to convey.
“Chocolate box” was the reaction of the fiercer critics, but that did not discourage Cecil Beaton, about whose photographs the very same has been said. Invited to photograph the Queen in the autumn of 1955, he decided to do an Annigoni of his own, photographing her in her Garter robes against another of his painted backdrops – this time of Windsor Castle from the Thames. He painted in the backdrop of the sky himself in situ at the Palace on the morning of the sitting, to make quite sure it had the tone he was aiming at.
In later years, royal photographers would bring along teams of make-up artists as if for a fashion shoot, but this afternoon in the Blue Drawing Room Beaton had to make do with the powder and lipstick that Elizabeth had applied herself – with no mascara. The lighting did not work for him to start with; it seemed too harsh. But he persevered through several poses, and he played on his familiarity with his subject and their shared memory of the epic session with the maids of honour after the coronation, two summers earlier.
“Luckily, it seems that the Royal Family have only to get a glimpse of me for them to be convulsed in giggles,” he wrote in his diary. “Long may that amusement continue, for it helps tremendously to keep the activities alive. Throughout the afternoon I found it was very easy to reduce the Queen to a condition of almost ineradicable fou rire and this prevented many of the pictures being sullen and morose.” Beaton tried the monarch standing and the monarch seated, and by the time he got to the Garter photographs he felt he had finally got his subject relaxed. “Now I knew how to arrange the lights,” he wrote, “and to get the Queen three-quarter face with the head turned sufficiently back for the cheek bone to be clear and flattering. I was excited…”
At the end of Episode 10, Peter Morgan rides on that excitement to round off the episode. “All hail, sage Lady, whom a grateful Isle hath blessed!” exults Beaton as he shoots the final frame, reverting to archaic, Faerie Queene language to match the style of his Windsor fantasy. “Not moving! Not Breathing! Our very own Goddess!” So, Season 1 of The Crown ends on a photographic crescendo, with Elizabeth starring as Gloriana – on canvas, at least, as well as on the silver nitrate plate.
Queen Elizabeth II in her Garter robes, photographed against a backdrop of Windsor Castle by Cecil Beaton in the autumn of 1955. Credit 168