Lord Aylestone, and Barbara Castle, to Roy Jenkins, Jim Callaghan, Reginald Maudling and ‘Alec Home for Foreign Office’. ‘The people trust him, perhaps alone of the politicians.’746
There was history here about Mountbatten’s political ambitions. In June 1946, whilst receiving his honorary degree at Oxford, Mountbatten had talked long into the night with Zuckerman about the war, the enormous problems that it had left behind, and about what his future was to be. He wanted to return to the Navy, but other ideas had been mooted, such as his becoming Governor-General of Australia.
Zuckerman later wrote in his memoirs, ‘The one job that he felt that he could have done was that of Prime Minister, but that office had been closed down to him because of his royal connections. He and Edwina would have known how to handle the settling of ex-serviceman, and so on and so on. He talked as though there was nothing that he could not do.’747
In December 1947, Orme Sargent, Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office, had confided his fears in Dickie’s dictatorial ambitions to the journalist Robert Bruce Lockhart.748 In 1951, Zuckerman and Mountbatten had met again at a cocktail party given at Admiralty House. ‘He drew me aside, and we had a long talk about many things, but particularly about the sorry state of the country,’ Zuckerman later wrote. ‘Dickie was immensely worried, and I was not surprised when he again said that with all his political experience, he might have made a better job of leading the country than had Attlee.’749
The 1968 coup was only part of an ongoing battle, which continued throughout the seventies between politicians and, in particular, Harold Wilson and the ‘Secret State’, largely represented by MI5.750 In July 1977, Zuckerman had run into Harold Wilson, who had unexpectedly resigned the previous year, at the Queen’s Jubilee Party at Buckingham Palace. Zuckerman was being interviewed the following day by Barrie Penrose and Roger Courtiour, who were writing a book about the plotting against Wilson.
Zuckerman ‘immediately asked what it was all about: were they trying to “frame” Mountbatten?’ No, it’s not Mountbatten they are after, was the reply, but I knew that there was one section of MI5 which wanted to get at him, Harold Wilson, and Lady Falkender, and one or two others.’751
Courtiour and Penrose claimed to have a senior MI5 officer as a source who, with others, ‘had told them that there was something much more substantial behind the story of a possible military takeover than people assumed. They then referred to Cudlipp’s account of the meeting with Mountbatten and explained that their MI5 informant had told them that the danger of a military takeover had been real. As they saw it, Cudlipp had indicated this in his account of the meeting with Mountbatten.’752
Amongst those who had been approached was David Stirling, the founder of the SAS, who in the mid-seventies had created an organisation called ‘Great Britain 75’, recruiting members from the aristocratic clubs in Mayfair; mainly ex-military men (often former SAS members). The plan was simple. Should civil unrest result in the breakdown of normal Government operations, they would take over its running.753
According to the writer Charles Higham, ‘One who took the plot seriously, perhaps too seriously was Marcia Williams, Harold Wilson’s secretary, who apparently spoke to the press at a later stage, talking of Mountbatten as “a prime mover in the plan”. She added, “Mountbatten had a map on the wall of his office showing how it could be done. Harold and I used to stand in the State Room at Number Ten and work out where they would put the guns.”’754
There’s no doubt that Mountbatten believed in strong leadership and that a national government might be required, was vain and flattered to have been approached and did not immediately reject the overtures, but the evidence that his own role went any further than a few conversations remains hidden.755 Private Eye was later to claim that Zuckerman had talked Mountbatten out of it.756 But Alex von Tunzelmann, drawing on private information from Buckingham Palace, has suggested the advice came from elsewhere. ‘It was not Solly Zuckerman who talked Mountbatten out of staging a coup and making himself President of Britain. It was the Queen herself.’757
Mountbatten’s relationship with the Queen was a complex one. She had known him since she was a child, he had become a father figure to her after the death of her own father, when she was in her twenties, and she regularly went to stay at Broadlands. She was fond of her husband’s uncle, but she had no illusions about him and how he used her to further his own ends.
A standing joke in royal and army circles was how quickly he would make reference to ‘my niece, the Queen’ – often using her as an excuse for being late. According to her private secretary, Lord Charteris, ‘The Queen’s attitude was that he was her Uncle Dickie and she was very, very fond of him, but sometimes she wished he’d shut up. Once she said, “I always say yes, yes, yes to Dickie, but I don’t listen to him.”’758
During the seventies, Mountbatten had resurrected his old friendship with the Duke of Windsor. In February he had dined with him in Paris. ‘We seem to have caught the old spirit really even more than in the 1930s,’ he wrote in his diary, returning again the next month.759 There was a purpose behind this newfound friendship, amidst concerns about the Duke’s health and what would happen to his papers and possessions after his death.760
In May 1972 the Duke had died, and Mountbatten was asked to greet the Duchess at the airport when she accompanied the body back to Britain for burial. She was nervous about meeting the Royal Family, especially the Queen Mother, but the visit passed smoothly. Mountbatten noted in his diary after he took her to see her husband lying in state in St George’s Chapel:
At the end she stood again looking at the coffin, and said in the saddest imaginable voice: ‘He was my entire life. I can’t begin to think what I am going to do without him, he gave up so much for me, and now he has gone.’761
Broadcasting a tribute, Mountbatten, with customary hyperbole, spoke of how the Duke had not just been his best man, but ‘my best friend all my life’.762
Mountbatten now turned his attentions to ensuring the Duke’s estate came back to the Royal Family, suggesting to the Duchess that she left everything in her will to the Royal Family, or to a charitable foundation in the Duke’s name, which he and Prince Charles would administer. He was concerned that she had dismissed her English solicitor and that her French lawyer, Maȋtre Suzanne Blum, was exerting her influence. Mountbatten offered to act as an executor of her will and to find another lawyer connected to the Royal Family.
There were claims by Blum that ‘two individuals, authorised either by Lord Mountbatten or “some other person”, acting upon what she alleged to be royal authority, had somehow obtained the keys to the Duke’s boxes and confidential filing cabinet and burgled the contents . . . The contents included the Duke’s private correspondence, the documents of divorce from Win Spencer and Ernest Simpson . . . and a certain amount of the Duchess’s personal correspondence.’763 There were also rumours that Mountbatten had arranged for correspondence between the Duke of Windsor and German, Italian and British fascists to be placed in the Royal Archives.
A friend of the Duchess, Linda Mortimer, visiting her shortly afterwards found her ‘very angry. She said she had been thinking of leaving most of her things to Prince Charles, and some younger members of the Royal Family’, but Mountbatten had been ‘picking up boxes and swords and trinkets’, saying, “This belongs to the Royal Collection.”’ Wallis told Mortimer that she had changed her mind and Mortimer tried to persuade her ‘that’s just the way Mountbatten is. He’s never been known for his tact.’764
Tactful or not, Mountbatten did save the papers from being sold on the open market or given away and a large amount of material was indeed returned to the Royal Archives in three batches – 15 June 1972, 13 December 1972 and 22 July 1977 – all of it approved by the Duchess and her advisers.765 Kenneth Rose, close confidant of the Royal Family, noted in his diary: ‘I hear that the Duchess of Windsor has promised to leave Queen Alexandra’s jewels back to the Queen �
� on condition that the Prince of Wales attends her funeral. Mountbatten arranged the deal.’766
Mountbatten enjoyed being the elder statesman of the Royal Family and had no hesitation offering advice to the Queen and to Philip – advice they sometimes took. It was Mountbatten who had suggested Prince Charles attend Trinity College, Cambridge, Dartmouth and then spend some time in the Royal Navy.767 He was close to the whole family, but had become even closer to Prince Charles in the early seventies, when the Prince of Wales was posted to Portsmouth and would frequently come to stay at Broadlands, where a room was left permanently made up for him.
‘It’s lovely having him here,’ Mountbatten wrote in his diary at the beginning of 1972. ‘We’ve had so many cosy talks. What a really charming young man he is.’768 In November, Mountbatten had written to him, ‘I miss you a lot for there is no one whose company I enjoy more, as I expect you realise.’769
The relationship was reciprocated. ‘As you know only too well, to me it has become a second home in so many ways,’ wrote Charles after leaving Broadlands for a six-month cruise, ‘and no one could ever have had such a splendid honorary grandpapa in the history of avuncular relationship.’770 Mountbatten responded, ‘I’ve been thinking of you – far more than I had ever expected to think of a young man – but then I’ve got to know you so well, I really miss you very much.’771
Not close to his parents, ‘in his Uncle Dickie he found someone to whom he could open up, confess his mistakes and misgivings, and turn for advice,’ felt John Barratt. ‘Lord Mountbatten was never short of a few words of advice for anyone, and he particularly enjoyed having the boy who would one day be king turning to him for counsel.’772 The royal biographer Sarah Bradford thought Mountbatten ‘uniquely placed to instruct the Prince with authority and intimacy about the governance of Britain and to help him interpret the duties and opportunities which faced him. By the time Charles was twenty-three, Mountbatten had become his closest confidant and the greatest single influence of his life.’773
Just as he had allowed Philip, before he married, to use Broadlands to meet young women, so Dickie encouraged Charles to discreetly bring girlfriends, such as Georgina Russell (now Lady Boothby) to the house. One visitor that spring of 1972 was Lady Jane Wellesley, daughter of the Duke of Wellington, who was to be his girlfriend for the next year.774
According to the gossip columnist, Nigel Dempster:
Mountbatten set up a slush fund, administered by a British lawyer through a private bank in Nassau in the Bahamas . . . to ensure that potentially troublesome conquests could be swiftly and handsomely paid for their silence. Certainly two, and possibly three, six-figure dollar contracts were signed between December 1974 and July 1979.775
Mountbatten’s advice to his great-nephew was clear:
I believe, in a case like yours, the man should sow his wild oats and have as many affairs as he can before settling down, but for a wife he should choose a suitable, attractive and sweet-charactered girl before she met anyone else she might fall for. After all, (your) Mummy never seriously thought of anyone else after the Dartmouth encounter when she was 13! I think it is disturbing for women to have experiences if they have to remain on a pedestal after marriage.776
Mountbatten was not above pushing his own candidates including, in 1974, his 17-year-old granddaughter, Amanda Knatchbull, whom he told Charles was keen on. He drafted ‘how to woo letters to Charles and even going to the lengths of enlisting his favourite goddaughter, the chic Sacha Abercorn, to take Amanda to Paris on a clothes-hunting trip to smarten her up.’777
Amanda and Charles saw much of each other over the next five years in London, at Broadlands and in the Bahamas. Sibilla O’Donnell hosted them twice at her home in Nassau. ‘I was given strict instructions by Dickie to leave them alone as much as possible which I did, and then they went to Eleuthera . . . Dickie tried very hard to get them together.’778
Jonathan Dimbleby revealed in his authorised life of Prince Charles that:
Amanda had grown fond of Prince Charles, warming to his energy and enthusiasm, his sense of the ridiculous, and his kindness. She admired his immense seriousness, his understanding of the natural world, the fact that he had read Small is Beautiful, the seminal work on the environment by Fritz Schumacher, and that he could quote from Laurens van der Post. She was also touched by his love for her family, and especially for her grandfather.779
In 1978, when Prince Charles was due to visit India, Mountbatten engineered a visit for himself and tried to include Amanda in the trip – but both her father and Prince Philip objected, worried that Mountbatten’s presence might distract from Charles’ visit and put Amanda unfairly in the media spotlight. In spite of that, Charles did propose to her, but she gently refused. ‘They liked each other, but they couldn’t fall in love,’ according to Sibilla. ‘There was no chemistry. They had known each other too long, since they were children.’780
Mountbatten needed to be wanted and loved to feel he could act as an intermediary in other people’s love affairs. Another relation he tried to matchmake for was his nephew Carl Gustaf, King of Sweden, first with Lady Jane Wellesley and then Lady Leonora Grosvenor, and when Prince Michael of Kent confided in him, alone of the Royal Family, that he had fallen in love with a Catholic divorcée, Marie Christine von Reibnitz, it was Mountbatten who encouraged the match and suggested they marry in Vienna.
His desire to involve himself in his family’s life was not always welcome. In December 1977, after handing over responsibility for World Atlantic Colleges to Prince Charles, the latter wrote to him:
I agreed to take over as President from you on the understanding (as I saw it) that you wished to cut down on your commitments, etc. From the way you have been tackling things recently, it looks as though you are still going to do too much as Patron. I hate having to say this, but I believe in being absolutely honest with you, and when I take over as President I may easily want to do things in my own particular way, and in a way which could conflict with your ideas. So please don’t be surprised if, like the other evening at Broadlands, I disagree with your approach or appear to be awkward and argumentative. I am only taking a leaf out of your book after all.781
In April 1979, tensions flared up again after Mountbatten criticised Charles for breaking short his holiday with the Brabournes on Eleuthera, which had caused inconvenience for others:
I thought you were beginning on the downward slope which wrecked your Uncle David’s life and led to his disgraceful Abdication and his futile life ever after. Of course you were legally right – the US Coastguards could recall a crew from Easter weekend leave if you really wanted them. An officer was on duty and had no claim for the extra 3 days with his fiancée. But how unkind and thoughtless – so typical of how your Uncle David started. When I pointed this out you flared up – so I knew you had seen the point. I spent the night worrying whether you would continue on your Uncle David’s sad course or take a pull.782
Charles was shortly – as he now seriously contemplated marriage – to keenly feel the loss of the wise advice of his honorary grandpapa.
CHAPTER 27
Ireland
Classiebawn, the Mountbatten home in Sligo, had continued to be a haven though, given the costs of running it, attempts were made in 1975 to gift it to the Irish nation ‘for use by the President, members of the Government or Official visitors to Ireland’ on the understanding Mountbatten could use it in August, but the offer was declined on the grounds ‘of the limited use the State would be able to make of the castle.’783 The following year, Hugh Tunney, a local businessman, agreed to buy the castle subject to letting the family use it every August.
Mountbatten was a popular figure in Mullaghmore. A few years earlier, he had sold most of the property in Sligo town belonging to the Ashley estate. Accompanied by his Sligo solicitor Charlie Browne, Declan Foley recounts, ‘Mountbatten personally called on each householder in John Street, Sligo. After he had introduced himself, he inquired how many yea
rs the family had been renting the house. Depending on the number of years, he quoted a price. One woman told me when she asked how much, he replied, “Would fifty pounds be okay?” Browne the solicitor interrupted, “But Lord Mountbatten . . .” That was as far as he got, when Mountbatten reminded him, “Mr Browne, you are my solicitor, I will advise you! Now please draw up the sale of this property and have it ready by the end of the week!”’784
Family had always been important to Mountbatten, and his grandchildren would join him every Christmas at Broadlands, each Easter at the Brabourne or Hicks holiday homes in the Bahamas, and every summer at Classiebawn – quite apart from annual trips to Trooping the Colour or the Royal Tournament, where his granddaughter India Hicks remembered how he would invariably fall asleep and have to be pinched in time to take the salute. She fondly remembers the Mickey Mouse pen on his desk, how his shooting socks were used as Christmas stockings, and the tradition of fudge making:
He was the centre of stage, he always dictated the agenda, not least because we always met in his homes with his staff . . . He always liked us to be busy and would say, ‘Don’t walk around like an envelope waiting to be posted’ . . . He had a gift of making each of us feel special and unique.785
At Christmas, each grandchild would receive a stocking made up of various presents he had collected on his travels that year – elephant droppings from Africa, shark’s teeth from New Zealand, Eskimo carvings from Canada, pieces of coral, or special menus from a grand function – all individually wrapped. This attention could be claustrophobic, because everything had to be on his own terms. ‘He was a man who took over everyone and everything – very bossy, even down to deciding what everyone was going to have for breakfast,’ recollects his granddaughter Edwina.786
He wanted to know about their friends and love lives, but his gift, according to her, was ‘the ability to talk to you about anything under the sun: love, sex, school, nothing was taboo and he never talked down.’787
The Mountbattens Page 29