Power and Glory, page 7
Philip’s naturalisation as a British subject in the immediate postwar era was not a simple matter of a couple of documents being signed and a brand-new passport being handed over to a naval hero. Attlee and Bevin had to tell the king that if the prince – who was regarded as being Greek by dint of his father’s nationality, even if he had left the country as a baby and barely spoke the language – was to be granted British citizenship, it would be taken as a wider sign of favour towards the entire Greek royal family, and therefore of public support towards the country’s royalist movement. Given that, as Sir Alexander Maxwell, Permanent Under-Secretary of State, remarked to Lascelles on 26 October 1945, ‘the future prospects of the Greek monarchy are admitted to be dark’,39 it became politically expedient not to consider the matter until early 1946. In any case, Philip was engaged in a lengthy tour of Australia and the Far East, and was spending his time vigorously oat-sowing while he was out there. As his friend and subsequent equerry Mike Parker put it, ‘there were always armfuls of girls’.40
Nonetheless, Philip maintained his correspondence with Princess Elizabeth throughout this time. At some point, she had obtained a picture of him, which took a suitably prominent place on her mantelpiece. When Crawfie wondered aloud, ‘Is that altogether wise? People will begin all sorts of gossip about you’, Elizabeth laughed ‘rather ruefully’ and said, ‘Oh dear, I suppose they will.’ The next time the governess entered her charge’s room, the photograph had changed. It was still of Philip, but this time ‘completely ambushed behind the enormous fair beard he had managed to raise while he was at sea during the war’. Elizabeth said proudly, ‘I defy anyone to recognise who that is … he’s completely incognito in that one’. As it happened, she was incorrect – Crawfie observed that ‘those oddly piercing, intent blue eyes were much too individual’ – and before long, ‘one paper came right out into the open and announced it was Prince Philip of Greece whose photograph the Princess kept in her room’.41 For once, the well-informed media were correct.
Philip may not have been aware of the speculation that his photographic presence in the princess’s bedroom had excited in Britain – although it seems inconceivable that Mountbatten did not keep him abreast of such developments – but when he returned from his foreign travels at the beginning of 1946, it was no coincidence that Elizabeth, ‘her eyes very bright’, informed her governess ‘half shyly’, ‘Crawfie! Someone is coming tonight.’
Between Mountbatten and Crawfie, a degree of matchmaking took place that was almost comical in its intensity. Elizabeth not only took a greater degree of care about her appearance, but constantly played the song ‘People Will Say We’re in Love’ from the Rogers and Hammerstein musical Oklahoma! She was seen out in restaurants with Philip, although the two were discreet about their encounters; as Crawfie wrote, almost pruriently, ‘one can picture the glances they exchanged as they passed on the dance floor, each with another partner’.42
Philip, meanwhile, struggled to find his place in the world. His naval career had given way to tiresome drudgery, overseeing the decommissioning of HMS Whelp, and he wrote candidly to Queen Elizabeth that he was ‘still not accustomed to the idea of peace, rather fed up with everything and feeling that there was not much to look forward to and rather grudgingly accepting the idea of going on in the peacetime navy’.43 He may have been ‘hatless’ and ‘always in a hurry to see Lilibet’, as Crawfie breathlessly described it, dining as a matter of course en famille in the former nursery at Buckingham Palace with Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret. This would be followed by ‘high jinks’, although Crawfie often took care to remove the younger sister: ‘I felt that the constant presence of [Margaret], who was far from undemanding, and liked to have a good bit of attention herself, was not helping on the romance much.’44 When Margaret’s presence became too much, or too ‘comically regal and overgracious’, as Crawfie put it, Philip ‘would give her a good push that settled the question of precedence quite simply’.45
Yet when he wasn’t shoving teenage girls around, Philip was able to resume his naval career, mundane though it might have been. It was Elizabeth who found herself the subject of open, even insolent, speculation; she returned from one visit to a factory ‘rather excited’, and said, of the ‘horrible’ experience, that people shouted at her ‘Where’s Philip?’ Crawfie righteously described this as a ‘coarse piece of thoughtlessness’,46 but the reality was that Elizabeth found herself in an unprecedented situation. She was a nineteen-year-old girl who was in love with an older, considerably more experienced man, and whose previous love affairs and flirtations with sophisticated women were a matter of public record. Although it seemed clear to the detached likes of Channon that Philip both valued and welcomed Elizabeth’s affections, there were existential difficulties with the continuing relationship. Crawfie compared Philip to Prince Albert – ‘another Prince Consort, who had found that role no bed of roses’ – and suggested that ‘tactful subjugation had been no part of [Philip’s] training’, going so far as to say, ‘there must have been moments when he wondered whether he could possibly face it’.47
Regardless of Philip’s approach to subjugation, there were other issues as well. Crawfie referred to how ‘some of the King’s advisers did not think him good enough for [Elizabeth] … he was a prince without home or kingdom’, just as ‘some of the papers played long and loud tunes on the string of Philip’s foreign origins’.48 Although she acknowledged that ‘he was a forthright and completely natural young man … [with] nothing of the polished courtier about him’, his informal, energetic presence riled the likes of Lascelles, who, by Crawfie’s account, were given to say things like ‘If there is not to be an engagement, the boy ought not to be around so much. There is too much gossip and speculation already.’
Despite the warmth of the relationship, it was generally believed impossible at the beginning of 1946 that Philip and Princess Elizabeth could marry. Tales of his sisters’ marriages to leading figures in the Nazi Party did him no credit; as one courtier described it, ‘the kind of people who didn’t like Prince Philip were the kind of people who didn’t like Mountbatten. It was all bound up in a single word: “German”.’49 This impoverished, often scruffy figure, who would write in grand houses’ visitors’ books that he was of ‘no fixed abode’ and whose wardrobe was ‘scantier than that of many a bank clerk’,50 might even have been accused of being an arriviste, an Arthur Townsend* whose primary designs on the future queen involved securing a financial and social stability he might well otherwise never have enjoyed.
But post-war Britain was a peculiar place. And things could change at remarkable speed, as the royal family were about to discover once again.
Chapter Four
‘This Poor Battered World’
Relations between the Duke of Windsor and the rest of the royal family at the beginning of 1946 resembled the experiences of participants in a gruelling war. There were periods of inertia, occasional inconclusive scuffles and long-distance incidents of sniping, and then short, intense rounds of combat, from which both sides would emerge exhausted and demoralised. Victory for either party seemed impossible. Yet dealings between them had not always been so dismal, and one courtier was testament to this. In 1920, when Lascelles was only thirty-three, he was offered the job of assistant private secretary to the then Prince of Wales, on a salary of £600 a year. In this more starry-eyed incarnation, Lascelles wrote that ‘I have got a very deep admiration for the Prince’, whom he praised as ‘the most attractive man I’ve ever met’,1 and began working for him in December that year.
The relationship between the two lasted until January 1929, when a disillusioned Lascelles resigned, believing that his master’s self-absorption, lack of any sense of duty, and general moral vacancy – to say nothing of an absence of Christian faith – made him wholly unsuited to be king. It was a significant turnaround from the beginning of the decade, but when Lascelles had stated that ‘I am convinced that the future of England is as much in [Edward’s] hands as in those of any individual’2, he was more accurate than he could have imagined. While, two and a half decades later, the duke was no longer the figure he once was, he still held enormous symbolic importance throughout the world. It might have been easier to have ostracised and ignored him, but such things were not realistic. Even as he and his wife became ever more irksome and demanding, they still had to be afforded the treatment that a former monarch merited.
‘I am afraid you are wrong about England’, Wallis wrote to her aunt on 3 January 1946. She complained that her husband’s home country had been deliberately inhospitable towards him, but also stated that ‘the game is how attractive will they make it under those conditions – plus the fact that they really do not want him to have any official recognition anywhere.’ Both she and the duke were weary of the situation, and it was an additional frustration that Churchill could not help them (‘he has little power now and when he did took the same line as the King and Govt’).
Nonetheless, she reported, in her usual stoical fashion, that ‘the Duke goes to London tomorrow for another crack at the Court and the powers that be3.’ It was a sign of the changing times that, after a prolonged (and enforced) six-year absence from his former country, that the duke could now visit Britain twice in a matter of few months without the attendant controversy that once greeted him. Yet the tolerance that he now received was also marked by weariness. He could not be forbidden to come to the country that he had once ruled, but he was shown – repeatedly, if needs be – how little interest anyone now had in him. The star attraction had long since been demoted to supporting turn status, and now was in danger of being excised from the show altogether.
There were, in any case, more important issues at hand for his brother to consider. Shortly after President Truman had met him on board the Renown, the king was shocked to discover, on 21 August 1945, that the president had signed a document – almost without thinking – that ended the Lend-Lease agreement that Roosevelt had been responsible for in 1941, which had offered Britain a vast amount of food, oil and equipment in order to maintain the war effort. It is possible that Truman’s actions were dictated by a newfound disdain for a country that would eject a prime minister who America knew and liked from office, apparently without any gratitude for his services during the war, but it is more likely that it was simple indifference displayed towards their former allies. After all, the Second World War was over. Wasn’t it time for the United States to look back to their own borders, and to their own interests?
Although Attlee visited Congress in November 1945, and established a working relationship with both Truman and the Democratic Party, the king was aware that the situation for Britain was dismal, and showing no signs of improvement. While he had come to respect his premier, not least over their shared attitudes towards the duke, he did not share the prime minister’s politics. He believed that, rather than dealing with the legal restraints on trade unions or increasing nationalisation of the country’s means of production, the crucial actions that had to be taken were to build houses, to replace both the countless homes that had been destroyed in the war and those that should have been constructed long before that.
The new spirit alive in Britain made the king feel marginalised and without an obvious outlet for his views. While Churchill and Chamberlain had both allowed him to believe that he had an active influence in politics, Attlee politely made it clear that the role of the constitutional monarch – especially with a Labour government – was to listen and agree, rather than to attempt to impose his own perspective on matters. Mountbatten’s hopes that the king might be able to exert a more interventionist stance were not met. There were numerous instances of minor humiliations. It was made clear by the formerly unquestioning royal servants that they believed they deserved a pay rise, and that in this new egalitarian age, they would have no other option than to join a union if their demands were not met. And although both Churchill and the king had agreed that Sir Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris should receive a peerage, as well as a promotion to Marshal of the RAF, the peerage was vetoed by Labour, on the grounds that the destruction Harris’s raids had caused was ultimately disproportionate, not least in the case of Dresden, which was turned into rubble by the concentrated bombing it received.*
The king may have suggested to Lascelles, in a letter sent from Sandringham over Christmas 1945, that ‘I am not downhearted or pessimistic as to the future’.4 Save the possibility of his eldest daughter’s romantic happiness, there was, however, little concrete evidence that things would improve on either a personal or national basis. He and the queen did what they could, once again inviting people to ‘dine and sleep’ at Windsor Castle – a tradition that had passed into abeyance for decades – but the prospect of the Duke of Windsor dining and sleeping at Windsor, or anywhere else for that matter, was an unhappy and vexing one.
* * *
When Edward arrived in Britain on 7 January 1946, having flown from Paris, he found himself received with reluctance by the king and various government ministers. He stayed at his mother’s residence of Marlborough House, this time without her present. Lascelles summarised the former monarch’s embassy with his usual pithiness. ‘[Bevin] intended to tell the Duke plainly that he couldn’t recommend any form of attachment to the Embassy in Washington.’5 Although the following day saw the king and duke on sufficiently amicable terms for the former to show the latter into Lascelles’ office for a meeting before a state banquet to mark the inauguration of the United Nations organisation, nothing could be achieved. As Lascelles noted, ‘[the duke] thought that he had made some progress in converting [Bevin] to his Washington plan’, but given the Foreign Secretary’s comments about the impossibility of such a scheme, the duke’s hopes remained, in Lascelles’ summation, nothing more than ‘wishful thinking’.6
The duke’s visit was a waste of time and effort. The king noted, pithily, on 8 January, ‘David came to see me. He is here for a few days. He is still adamant about wanting to be attached to the Embassy and has left an aide memoire both with Attlee & Bevin.’*7
Edward was informed by the politicians that he would not be able to accept an invitation from his friend John Marriott, officer in charge of the Guards division in Germany, to visit the army stationed there. Memories of his previous trip to Germany, less than a decade before, and his meeting with Hitler – to say nothing of further embarrassing associations with that country’s citizens and sympathisers during the war – meant that there was no way that even a private visit could be made. Attlee and Bevin also knew that the duke would never maintain a low profile. Press conferences, interviews and further scandal would all undoubtedly have followed.
Edward returned to France, dejected, jobless and demoralised, and Wallis summed up the situation in a letter to her aunt on 25 January. ‘The English are determined not to give the Duke a big or important job for the reason they think it would take from the King – this in high circles is frankly said. The belief is that 2 Kings can’t operate therefore the Duke having made his decision should eliminate himself. In the meantime they search for some camouflage type of position. We have definitely refused any colonial governmentship [sic]. What is the use to bury ourselves away for nothing?’ She decided that, if ‘camouflage’ could not be found, their options were either to lead a private life, ‘taking taxes into consideration’, or, as the atomic bomb alternative, ‘go to England for six months privately naturally and see what the effect would be’.8 She did not mention that such a return would almost certainly be vetoed by an appalled government, and their wanderings would recommence immediately.
Yet as the duke’s ambitions of an ambassadorial post appeared frustrated, there seemed to be a sudden shift in his fortunes. The flamboyant and unconventional Archibald Clark Kerr assumed the post of ambassador to the United States from Lord Halifax, and seemed to be a man who would understand the duke’s position, given his own eccentricities. Rather than the usual standard-issue Etonian, Clark Kerr was a left-leaning iconoclast. He took delight in boasting that he was tougher than even Ernest Hemingway, and his constant companion was a young Russian named Eugene Yost, who served as his personal masseur and valet; he quipped that Yost was ‘a Russian slave given to me by Stalin’. Perhaps surprisingly, given this association, he had once been a suitor of Queen Elizabeth’s, and had an equally unlikely wife, a Chilean aristocrat named Doña María Teresa Díaz y Salas. All in all, Clark Kerr – newly created Baron Inverchapel – was the friend the duke needed at this particular juncture.
Emboldened, Edward wrote to Lascelles optimistically on 28 January to say that ‘it would be my judgement that Archie would personally place no obstacles in the way’, and that although the two had not met in several years, ‘I have known him on and off all my life … of course, people change, but I would be surprised if he and I could not make a success of the experiment’.9 He also informed his brother on 2 February that ‘in my opinion unless Archie had changed since 1932, he and I could work together very well in America along the lines of my two Aide Memoirs’.10
The knowledge that he and Wallis would be giving up their Parisian residence on the Boulevard Suchet at the end of April had galvanised his wish for something to be done, and British attempts to frustrate his hopes of a quasi-ambassadorial post of this nature had not been helped by Bevin’s suggestion that the decision lay, to an extent, in the gift of the new ambassador. There seemed, at last, a chance that the duke’s schemes might come to fruition.
