When George VI had come to the Throne in 1936, following the abdication of Edward VIII, the new King had great ambitions for a ‘durbar’, a spectacular Coronation-style gathering of all India’s princely rulers. His father had been crowned Emperor of India in this way in 1911, and George VI adored royal ritual. Rising Indian nationalism, followed in short order by the Second World War, soon quashed any lingering royal dreams of an assembly of bejewelled, elephant-borne maharajahs and princelings paying homage to their King Emperor. Like Queen Victoria, George VI regarded the Indian nobility as kindred spirits who could be relied upon in times of trouble, unlike some of India’s politicians. The King’s views would be reinforced as Britain fought for its very survival.
In 1942, with Japanese forces sweeping through Burma towards the Indian border, many Congress Party politicians were demanding instant British withdrawal from all of India – and were interned for their troubles. By contrast, the racing-mad Maharajah of Rajpipla, a friend of the Royal Family, commissioned three Spitfires and a Hurricane for the Royal Air Force. Come the end of the war, however, it was the politicians, not the princes, who represented the majority of the population and they wanted independence. A new Labour government in Britain, urged on by the United States, was committed to the idea. But the Indian nationalists were not prepared to settle for dominion status – like, say, Australia or Canada – whereby India would be entirely self-governing, yet retain the King as head of state. They wanted a fully independent republic. The King had grave fears about the speed and direction of travel. In December 1946, he met the two key players in the Indian power struggle, Jawaharlal Nehru, leader of the Hindu-dominated Congress Party, and Muhammad Ali Jinnah, leader of the Muslim League. With deadlock in India, they had come to London for a crisis meeting.
‘The leaders of the two parties, I feel, will never agree. We have gone too fast for them,’ the King wrote afterwards in his diary. ‘I could see no alternative to civil war between Hindus and Moslems [sic] for which we should be held responsible.’
George VI was, at least, reassured when the British Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, suggested a man who might come up with that alternative. Lord Mountbatten, the King’s cousin and close friend, was appointed Viceroy in early 1947 and soon insisted on clarity and speed if civil war was, indeed, to be averted. There had to be a clear date after which British imperial rule – the British Raj – would cease. He was also clear that the two rival factions were never going to create a viable, united nation. In just a matter of months, on 15th August 1947, the subcontinent was divided between a shrunken Hindu-dominated India and the new Islamic Pakistan, amid terrible bloodshed. As up to fifteen million people moved between either side, hundreds of thousands were killed in sectarian violence. Nehru would famously call the moment ‘a tryst with destiny’. The King was stoical and yet, undeniably, diminished. Having signed letters and documents with ‘GRI’ – George Rex Imperator – throughout his reign, he was now officially reduced to ‘GR’, under the terms of the Indian Independence Act. A trivial point perhaps, but not to a monarch who was so punctilious about such matters. After receiving a letter from the King three days later, Queen Mary scribbled her own forlorn postscript on it: ‘The first time Bertie wrote me a letter with the I for Emperor of India left out, very sad.’
Both India and Pakistan would start off as dominions while they sorted out their new constitutions. India was already preparing to adopt a republican system, at which point it would jettison the King. But that raised a further question, one of the greatest concern to the King: what about the Commonwealth?
Under the existing rules, any member of the Commonwealth had to recognise the King as its head of state. If not, it was out. On 4th January 1948, after a short and bitter independence struggle, Burma became the first British colony since the American war of independence to leave the British Empire. It had opted to become a republic and, thus, severed its link with the Crown. It was automatically expelled from the Commonwealth at the same time. Ireland would do the same the following year. Neither the King nor the British government wanted that to happen with India or Pakistan. Quite apart from personal and national pride, the King had a deep affection for the ‘brightest jewel’ in the imperial crown. He had warmed to Nehru greatly when the Indian Prime Minister had come to London in 1948. ‘I liked him very much,’ he told Lord Mountbatten. Like many others, the King was having trouble keeping up with all the comings and goings in his Commonwealth. Burma might just have gone, but newly independent Ceylon had just become a dominion. The Royal Archives contain a copy of the King’s speech at his dinner for them all in October 1948. ‘It gives me great pleasure to welcome here tonight my Prime Ministers or their representatives from the eight independent countries of the Commonwealth,’ it begins. Except that the King has crossed out ‘eight’ and scribbled ‘nine’. He was especially pleased, he said, to welcome India, Pakistan and Ceylon to the ‘councils of the Brotherhood of Nations’. At this stage, Pakistan and Ceylon were still happy to retain the King as head of state. The problem was India.
The King’s personal feelings were one thing. Of far greater concern were the Cold War implications of an Indian exit from the post-colonial fold. As Clement Attlee wrote to the King in early 1949: ‘If India against her will is obliged to leave the Commonwealth, it would encourage Russia in her efforts to disrupt South East Asia.’
The fact was that Nehru did not want to lead India out of the Commonwealth anyway. An internationalist at heart, he argued that the Commonwealth would ‘enable us to contribute to the peace of the world’. Many within his Congress Party thought otherwise. They wanted to sever all post-colonial ties with Britain. As the former Commonwealth Secretary-General Kamalesh Sharma points out, they feared lingering imperial interference. ‘At home, there wasn’t much support,’ he says, pointing to people like the future Indian Prime Minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, who was ‘vehemently’ opposed to having anything to with ‘the old dominions’. So how to resolve the contradiction of being a republic, yet somehow owing allegiance to the Crown?
A meeting of all the dominions, old and new, was finally convened in London in April 1949. Some of the ‘old Commonwealth’, like Australia and New Zealand, were deeply hostile to any changes that appeared to dilute their loyalty to the Crown. South Africa’s new nationalist Prime Minister, Daniel ‘DF’ Malan, who had beaten Smuts in the 1948 election, took a different line. An Afrikaans-speaking former church minister and no royalist, he was wary of giving the King any enhanced role. After much heated debate, an ingenious solution was finally agreed. To be a member of the Commonwealth, countries did not have to recognise the King as head of state. Instead they had to acknowledge that he was ‘the symbol of the free association of its independent member nations and as such the Head of the Commonwealth’. Those two little words – ‘as such’ – were inserted to reassure India and South Africa that the King had no constitutional authority at all. In just four paragraphs of text, the 1949 London Declaration also quietly removed the word ‘British’ from what would now be the ‘Commonwealth of Nations’.
‘British Empire to British Commonwealth to Commonwealth of Nations,’ wrote the Canadian Prime Minister, Lester Pearson. ‘Emperor to King to Head. This was one of the most important landmarks in the history of the Commonwealth.’ Sir Peter Marshall, former Deputy Secretary-General of the Commonwealth, believes it was one of the shortest, cleverest political compositions of modern times: ‘It emphasised that nothing had changed. In fact just about everything changed.’
Nehru had a deal, but he still had to sell it to his anti-British hotheads. He returned home and assured the Indian Constituent Assembly that ‘it was made perfectly clear that the King has no functions at all’ (even if the King’s daughter would make a mockery of that claim in years to come). In what would become one of his most famous speeches, he spoke of the Commonwealth as ‘this new type of association with a touch of healing’. Of all the attempts to capture the essence of the Commonwe
alth over the years – and there have been some good, bad and incomprehensible ones – none quite captures the spirit of those early days as well as Nehru’s ‘touch of healing’.
In the end, says Kamalesh Sharma, it was Nehru’s greatness and force of personality that propelled India into this new Commonwealth, rather than the arguments. If a man who had served nine British prison sentences and nearly nine years in jail was championing the idea, could it really be such a bad one? Another former Secretary-General, Sir Sonny Ramphal, says that George VI should take a share of the credit. ‘The emotion and the argument was all about the King and it was managed with great skill.’
The most ardent royalists could go home happy, too. To this day, veteran diplomats and civil servants marvel at the way that a serious post-war crisis had been averted by a few carefully drafted words.
In the process, the King would stop talking about his ‘kingdoms’ and ‘dominions’ and would use the more understated word ‘realms’ instead. And then the finest minds in the Civil Service, including the Cabinet Secretary himself, started tackling the really pressing issue of the day: how should the ‘Head of the Commonwealth’ be translated into Latin, for ceremonial use? Professor Philip Murphy chronicles the gloriously esoteric academic process that toured the common rooms of Oxbridge, taking far longer than the actual Commonwealth conference itself. Though the Latin for ‘head’ was caput, for example, it was deemed an insufficiently ‘honorific’ term for the King. There was, of course, no possibility of using rex, the Latin word for ‘king’ since the whole point of the exercise was to include nations which did not want a rex. In the end, they opted for princeps, a multi-purpose word for both a ‘leader’ and a ‘prince’. The King would be ‘Consortionis Populorum Princeps’.
Whatever his title, George VI had succeeded in creating something unique, enduring and forward-looking in a turbulent, war-weary world. Seven decades later, the current Secretary-General of the Commonwealth, Baroness Scotland, says that his legacy remains ‘a thing of wonder’. The King, though, would never live to see his handiwork. Soon after postponing plans for another grand tour of his realms, the new ‘Head of the Commonwealth’ died in his sleep at Sandringham on 6th February 1952.
SUCCESSION
Having famously climbed that giant Kenyan fig tree as a Princess, Elizabeth came down it as Queen on the morning of 6th February 1952. She had succeeded to the Throne while spending a night watching wild animals. Having pledged her life to her peoples while touring the Commonwealth five years earlier, she had now become their Queen in the heart of Africa, too. ‘I have very special reasons for feeling a special affection for Africa,’ she told Commonwealth leaders at their 1999 meeting in Durban. ‘My life was transformed by those events.’
Before she had even returned to London, to be greeted by her first British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, the well-oiled machinery of royal succession was under way. Elizabeth II would automatically become Head of the Armed Forces, Supreme Governor of the Church of England, Duke of Lancaster, and much else. But there was a problem. What about the Commonwealth?
In all the careful negotiations and political pirouettes that had produced this new creation, no one had clarified what happened after a change of reign. Was the title of Head of the Commonwealth hereditary or finite? To this day, some constitutional experts like to argue that it is hereditary, on the basis that the London Declaration refers to ‘The King’ in generic terms and not specifically to George VI. Yet the accepted position today, reinforced at the 2018 summit, is the same as it was in 1952 – namely, that being Head is not automatic. The new Queen would, therefore, need to be endorsed by all the nations of the Commonwealth, and by one in particular. What if India argued that the London Declaration only applied to the late King? This potential diplomatic nightmare was averted on 8th February, when Nehru sent a formal message of condolence to the new monarch. ‘May I welcome your Majesty as the new head of the Commonwealth and earnestly trust that this great fellowship will continue to work for the cause of human understanding and peace,’ he wrote, solving the problem in a single sentence. If Nehru was happy, no one else was going to step out of line. At the Coronation the following year, the Queen was the first monarch to be crowned with the style and title of ‘Head of the Commonwealth’, while her gown was embroidered with the floral emblems of every Commonwealth nation. The Queen’s designer, Norman Hartnell, had included the lotus flower of India and wheat, cotton and jute to represent Pakistan. Still some years away from becoming a republic, Pakistan had even despatched a contingent of troops to take part in Changing the Guard on the day itself.
The Coronation gown was the most prized item in the eight tons of luggage loaded aboard the cargo-liner, the SS Gothic, for the great Coronation tour of 1953–4. The dress would appear at the opening of parliament in New Zealand, Australia and finally Ceylon, where the glass beads got so hot that the Queen said it was ‘like being in a radiator’. From there, she crossed the Indian Ocean to Africa, before her triumphal homecoming voyage in the new Royal Yacht.
The newsreels and picture books present this as a joyous, stately progress through an old empire happily adjusting to life in the new Commonwealth. Yet the cracks were already there, for those who cared to look. Even on the night she acceded to the Throne in Kenya’s Aberdare National Park, Princess Elizabeth was a terrorist target. She and the Duke of Edinburgh were under the protection of a big-game hunter whose primary concern was not the threat from wild animals. Jim Corbett, famous for bagging two of the deadliest man-eating tigers in Indian history, was more alert to the dangers of the Mau Mau guerrilla movement, which was already operating in the area. The royal presence was neither overlooked nor forgotten. In 1954, in the very same month that her Coronation tour brought the Queen back to Africa for the first time since her accession, Mau Mau insurgents returned to Treetops. They torched the giant fig tree to the ground and then led away the five domestic staff who had looked after the royal couple during their stay. Four were never seen again. Only Nahashon Mureithi, a handyman and porter, managed to escape into the undergrowth, albeit with a bullet wound to his arm. This was the unreported postscript to the enchanting story of the Princess who went up a tree and came down a Queen. From the outset, there was a dark side to the fairytale.
‘A HOLIDAY FEEL’
During the early years of her reign, with the jet engine in its infancy, most royal travel was still by sea. The emphasis was still firmly on visiting those parts of the world where the Queen was Queen, plus near-neighbours in Europe. The rest of the world would have to wait, especially when it was learned, in 1959, that the Queen was expecting her third child. All that would change, however, in 1961, as a result of two events. One was the arrival of Prince Andrew in 1960. The other was the British government’s enthusiasm for joining the new European Economic Community. The UK’s increasingly energetic flirtation with the EEC had gone down badly with the Commonwealth. Britain needed to show that it still cared, especially if ex-colonies were not to be wooed by predatory rogues like the USSR. The easiest way of doing that was to despatch the Queen. As a result, she would spend more than a quarter of 1961 visiting eleven nations on three continents.
Nothing, though, would match the drama and colour awaiting her in the former lodestar of British imperialism. India was the reason the modern Commonwealth had come into existence. Now the Queen was going to visit the man who had effectively anointed her as its head. ‘I have a holiday feeling,’ Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru declared as he waited for his guest to land in Delhi in January 1961. Nehru and his government wanted to show the Queen – and the world – how far post-imperial India had progressed. Though that might be the Indian government’s ambition, how would the people of India be feeling, little more than a decade after the blood and pain of Partition? Would they still bear a grudge?
The answer to that was clear enough as more than two million people lined the road into Delhi from the airfield where the Queen’s BOAC Britannia landed
on 21st January 1961. All along the 12-mile route there were vivid scenes of welcome, not least a ‘durbar’ of 800 carts with their oxen and camels draped in Union flags. Mounted police had to hold back the crowds at Connaught Place. ‘I have never seen so many people in my life. I became quite worried. I thought they would fall off the trees and roofs,’ the Queen told Nehru, over tea. He gleefully revealed to her that she had actually drawn a larger crowd than the recent visit of America’s President Dwight Eisenhower. Those who have travelled with the Queen often say that she has a photographer’s eye for detail in a crowd. While this was one of the most tumultuous welcomes of her entire life, what had made a deep impression on her, she told Nehru, was not the crowd, but the deadpan faces of the water buffalo.
Her first major engagement of a forty-four-day, 20,000-mile tour – which would include Pakistan and Nepal – was to lay a wreath of 500 white roses at the tomb of the founding father of Indian independence, Mahatma Gandhi. It was an act that epitomised Nehru’s famous dictum about the Commonwealth’s capacity to administer ‘a touch of healing’.
Though a giant in the pantheon of Commonwealth leaders – and a man whom the Queen’s father had held in the highest esteem – Nehru was not her host. Protocol dictated that this was the role of the head of state, India’s non-executive President, Rajendra Prasad. At his state banquet on the first evening, Prasad set an upbeat tone that came as a relief both to the Queen and the British government. ‘We welcome you not only as head of the oldest democracy in the world but also as head of the great Commonwealth,’ he told her, adding that it was ‘perhaps the most suitable and effective organisational expression of the world’s independence’.
Queen of the World: Elizabeth II: Sovereign and Stateswoman Page 16