by Robert Lacey
THE
CROWN
THE
CROWN
Political Scandal, Personal Struggle and the Years that Defined Elizabeth II
ROBERT LACEY
Published by Blink Publishing
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Text copyright © Robert Lacey, 2019
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CONTENTS
Foreword by Peter Morgan
Preface
Chapter One – ‘MISADVENTURE’
Chapter Two – ‘A COMPANY OF MEN’
Chapter Three – ‘LISBON’
Chapter Four – ‘BERYL’
Chapter Five – ‘MARIONETTES’
Chapter Six – ‘VERGANGENHEIT’
Chapter Seven – ‘MATRIMONIUM’
Chapter Eight – ‘DEAR MRS KENNEDY’
Chapter Nine – ‘PATERFAMILIAS’
Chapter Ten – ‘MYSTERY MAN’
Chapter Eleven – ‘OLDING’
Chapter Twelve – ‘MARGARETOLOGY’
Chapter Thirteen – ‘ABERFAN’
Chapter Fourteen – ‘BUBBIKINS’
Chapter Fifteen – ‘COUP’
Chapter Sixteen – ‘TYWYSOG CYMRU’
Chapter Seventeen – ‘MOONDUST’
Chapter Eighteen – ‘DANGLING MAN’
Chapter Nineteen – ‘IMBROGLIO’
Chapter Twenty – ‘CRI DE COEUR’
Endnotes
Bibliography
Pictures
Acknowledgements
Index
Picture Credits
FOREWORD BY
PETER MORGAN
THE CROWN IS A HISTORICAL DRAMA ABOUT AN ORDINARY WOMAN born into extraordinary circumstances. It is not a documentary or a docudrama. Everything from the scripts that I write to the costumes, production design and locations that add such richness on screen, as well as to the performances by our two stellar casts – headed initially by Claire Foy and now, in Season 3, by Olivia Colman – is underpinned by a vast and exhaustive amount of research, analysis, thought, care and consideration.
The relationship between history and narrative, fact and fiction, is much more fluid and unreliable, but also more interesting, than anyone might imagine. That is what makes The Crown so enjoyable to write – and, I hope, to watch.
I am delighted once again to invite the royal historian Robert Lacey to provide a deep-dive into some of the remarkable history upon which our drama is built. I hope that Robert’s expert analysis into some of the events, people and wider cultural context will enrich viewers’ appreciation of The Crown by providing fresh and often surprising insights.
So, let me hand you over to Robert to take you back to 1956, on the eve of the traumatic Suez Crisis, when there are grave problems brewing in Britain – and problems too inside the royal marriage…
PREFACE
SUEZ, SCANDAL, SOCIALISM – AND TRAGEDY AT ABERFAN
THE CROWN MOVES ON … IN THE FIRST VOLUME OF OUR Inside History we followed Queen Elizabeth II from her childhood through to love and marriage, savouring the hidden history of her coronation and her early years of apprenticeship with Winston Churchill – as based on the first ten episodes (101–110) of The Crown Season 1.
Now, in Seasons 2 and 3, the Queen must work with prime ministers who are shadows of the great man – the devious Anthony Eden and Harold ‘Supermac’ Macmillan, as well as with Alec Douglas-Home, whose mistakes paved the way for Harold Wilson, the most successful Labour Prime Minister of Elizabeth’s reign. Twenty Netflix episodes (201–210 and 301–310) and 20 matching chapters (One to Twenty) of this book will transport us from the Suez Crisis of 1956 to the Silver Jubilee celebrations of 1977, a saga of intrigue, tragedy, more royal babies – and, this being the Cold War, a surprising amount of trouble with spies.
This book, volume 2, tracks the history of the still-maturing Elizabeth II through the second phase of her reign as she feels her way towards more confident regality, while her country stumbles quite dramatically, losing hold of the self-assurance – the smugness, indeed – that characterised the British Establishment after the victory of the Second World War. In 1956 the Suez adventure put paid to London’s pretensions that it ruled the world, while the Profumo Scandal of 1963 discredited the elite who liked to think that they ruled London. But from these misadventures emerged a more populist identity under the Labour governments of Harold Wilson – for whom Elizabeth II developed something of a soft spot – with the Swinging Sixties, divorce and homosexual law reform, the Beatles, miniskirts, England winning The World Cup …
In one sense, the monarchy rode serenely – and not a little superciliously – above all these social and political changes. Elizabeth II, her critics complained, occupied a completely different universe from the ‘Women’s Lib’ movement that developed in the 1960s and 1970s – and so she did. On the other hand, the antiquated British system of hereditary monarchy delivered supreme national prestige and authority to a woman throughout these tumultuous years, with an open-mindedness and, yes, a modernity, that the contemporary United States still cannot bring itself to embrace. Every episode of The Crown (201–310) – and every chapter of our book (One to Twenty) – plays with this delicious paradox: the sight of powerful men having to bow and kneel to an unremarkable mother of two (of four by the end of Season 2).
This second volume follows the first in attempting to separate history from invention. How much of the drama that viewers so enjoy in The Crown is historically ‘true’? And how much has series creator Peter Morgan invented? On several occasions we will follow Elizabeth II as she meets characters whom we are 99 per cent certain she cannot possibly have encountered in this way – the rebel peer Lord Altrincham, for example, visiting Buckingham Palace after his dramatic criticisms of the monarchy, or Eileen Parker, the wife of Philip’s friend Mike Parker, whom Elizabeth seeks out to discuss her marriage problems. No, dear viewer and reader, these encounters did not happen. But, yes, these dramatic inventions have been devised to embody the central themes and messages of the plot. Drama, remember, is not the same as documentary.
Peter Morgan does not write a word of The Crown until he has worked out a documented historical template for each episode with the series’ research team. Solid factual data – letters, documents, newsreels and first-hand interviews with surviving participants and witnesses – form the backbone and skeleton of every story. Then the writer and his fellow writers add dramatic flesh to the bones, cr
eating a drama on screen that is a unique blend of real history and imagined truths – as exemplified by the famous ‘Stag Scene’ in The Queen, Peter Morgan’s Oscar-winning movie of 2006.
Towards the climax of The Queen, which depicts the events following the death of Diana, Princess of Wales in August 1997, we see Elizabeth II, played by Helen Mirren, lost in the Highlands of Scotland in the course of a deer hunt. Suddenly she catches sight of the deer, a magnificent Imperial stag, standing proudly on the river bank in front of her – an embattled and harassed monarch just like her, pursued as she is at that moment by the media of the world who are condemning her for her apparent indifference to Diana’s death. Elizabeth starts talking to the stag. She senses their common plight, and it pierces her to the quick. Stricken with anxiety as she hears the hunters approach, she then waves her arms and shoos the imperilled beast to run away to safety – which he does. One minute he is there – the next minute he is gone.
The ‘Peter Morgan Stag Scene’ is taught in film schools around the world as an illustration of how sheer invention, plucked out of the air, is essential to make history performable. No one imagines that Queen Elizabeth II has ever spoken to a wild stag in her life. But it is the scene that people remember as summing up the essential truth of The Queen and conveying the totally accurate and historical message of the movie – that if Diana was destroyed by the monarchy, her mother-in-law was another type of casualty.
Every episode of The Crown TV series has been imaginatively built in a similar fashion around a major historical event of the period – from the Anglo-French-Israeli conspiracy behind the invasion of Suez in 1956 to the tragic deaths of 116 children and 28 adults in the Welsh mining village of Aberfan in 1966. The corresponding chapter in this book will seek to explain the different layers of that episode, analysing how research and interpretation have worked together to create the final dramatic mix.
In 1956, for example, only a few inner, top-level government conspirators knew the details of the plot that Britain and France hatched with Israel to create an excuse for invading the Suez Canal Zone. Similarly, in 1966 it took months to lay bare the shameful culpability of the National Coal Board in failing to monitor the waste tip that fatally smothered Aberfan’s Pantglas Junior School.
So should the dramatist depict such episodes by working solely with the surface, contemporary knowledge and ignorance of the participants at the time? Or is the writer permitted to ‘enrich’ the narrative with the benefit of hindsight? That debate provides a running tug-of-war through every chapter of this book – enhanced by two illustrated colour picture sections that display The Crown’s production stills – reflecting the key scenes from Seasons 2 and 3. Has the screen version improved on history, or corrupted it? The question is there for the reader to decide.
Hilary Mantel, the historical novelist, has offered a profound and illuminating description of the difference between history and the past – two very different horses, in her view, who are each of a contrasting colour. As she explained in her BBC Reith Lectures of 2017, the past is what really existed – all the lives and loves and hopes and dreams of the billions and trillions of people who have lived and died on earth since time began. Then along comes the historian – rather like a gardener, suggests Ms Mantel, who is holding out a sieve to try and capture any fragments of the past that might get caught in the mesh: the books and surviving documents, the monuments and artefacts that remain, along with the shards unearthed by the archaeologists.
These fragments make up ‘history’ – the comparatively few and often banal relics that survive in the sieve. But most of humanity’s past, all those glorious personal dreams and loves, all the beautiful and creative emotions fizzing away inside people’s heads and hearts for countless millennia – all that precious reality has escaped history’s mesh.
Poor historians! You can sense Ms Mantel’s pity for the paper-shufflers who have missed out on the real life of the past through sticking to their stolid, fact-based approach. What a glorious opportunity for the historical novelist and screen writer to pounce upon all those treasures that have passed through the sieve, deploying their imaginations to recreate a drama that is both fictitious and true.
‘You got it all wrong and you got it all right,’ declared one of the Queen’s private secretaries a year or so back when Peter Morgan invited him to pass judgement on the early seasons of The Crown – and that is the theme examined in the pages that follow. History requires the magic of the dramatist’s imagination in order to become performable – which means, in the most basic sense, that the drama you see on screen is ‘all wrong’.
But when you take account of the human truths about the Queen and her family that have been confected and conveyed to you by The Crown, then the dazzling creation on the screen in front of you can certainly be judged to be ‘all right’. That is the paradox which this book now invites you to explore.
Robert Lacey
September 2019
CHAPTER ONE
‘MISADVENTURE’
JULY–NOVEMBER 1956
‘ITHINK WE BOTH AGREE,’ SPITS OUT AN ANGRY AND WOUNDED Queen Elizabeth II, looking icily at her husband … ‘It cannot go on like this.’1
Season 2 of The Crown opens on a stormy night aboard the Royal Yacht Britannia, anchored in the choppy waters of the North Atlantic off Setúbal, the Portuguese port and fishing harbour to the south-east of Lisbon. It is February 1957, and a crowd of British reporters and press photographers is gathering on the quay, their intrusive new telephoto lenses aiming out at the ship across the water.
The media’s sniping targets are the 30-year-old Queen Elizabeth II, freshly landed from London, and her husband Philip, 35, who has just arrived in Portugal after a four-month tour of the British Commonwealth, largely in the southern hemisphere, where, among many other duties, he has opened the Olympic Games in Melbourne on his wife’s behalf. Philip’s plan after that was to sail home serenely, stopping off in various isolated and seldom-visited British dependencies – the Falkland Islands, St Helena and Ascension Island, for example – while also enjoying a month or so of the cheery naval quarterdeck fellowship that he had had to surrender when he signed up for the royal family.
But now plans have changed. Suddenly the once-respectful British press has become focused on tales of trouble in the royal marriage – ‘Intense speculation,’ runs one newsflash of the time from Reuters, ‘about relations between Her Majesty the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh’2 – with rumours of infidelity, and questions as to why Britain’s ‘model couple’ should have chosen to spend more than a third of a year apart. So, to quieten the rumours, Buckingham Palace has decided to bring forward the timetable of the Queen’s long-planned State Visit to Portugal, flying her out earlier to be reunited with her husband ahead of schedule in an assertive display of marital harmony.3
Behind the scenes, however, in their Britannia stateroom, we hear a private conversation that is confrontational. ‘The events of the past week …’ opens Elizabeth, referring to the leering and suggestive headlines. ‘The revelations … have just been too upsetting. Too painful.’
Philip opens his mouth to protest, then looks out of the porthole towards the quay, where more reporters and photographers are arriving.
‘So I thought,’ says his wife, ‘that we might take this opportunity where we have 24 hours alone, without children, without distraction … to put our cards on the table. And talk …’4
The tensions between Elizabeth II and her husband provide the principal personal theme of The Crown Season 2. The Mountbatten–Windsor marriage was the world’s most scrutinised until the ‘Camelot’ phenomenon of US President John F. Kennedy and his wife Jacqueline Bouvier in 1961 – which we shall visit briefly when the Kennedys come to London in Episode 208 (Chapter Eight). And alongside this private Windsor theme of marital trouble, we shall dig into the public drama of Britain in decline – the so-called Suez Crisis of late 1956. In a desperate, last-gasp reassertion of colon
ial authority, British and French paratroopers landed along the Suez Canal at the beginning of November 1956 to recapture the waterway that Egypt’s President Gamal Abdel Nasser had dared to claim for his nation the previous July. But this old-time exercise in force majeure proved as fallible as the glitter of Britain’s once-unchallenged monarchy. Welcome to a nation – and a marriage – in trouble …
‘I have never felt more alone,’ says Elizabeth, ‘than I have in the past five months.’
‘And why do you think that was?’ responds Philip … ‘Because you sent me away.’5
In the Preface we examined Peter Morgan’s famous ‘Stag Scene’ in his Oscar-winning movie The Queen, when Elizabeth II is poignantly depicted talking to a hunted deer, an imaginary tableau that captures a critical truth. Now here, near the beginning of Episode 201, we encounter the first of the ‘Stag Scenes’ in The Crown Season 2 – when the Queen goes to slip a surprise travelling gift (a ciné camera) into her husband’s briefcase before he leaves on his trip to Australia, only to discover the framed photograph of the Bolshoi Ballet star Galina Ulanova staring out at her. What is Elizabeth to make of that?
History tells us that Philip and Ulanova can never possibly have met, since the ballerina rarely left the Soviet Union – and then only briefly to destinations where Philip was not present. In the 1950s Ulanova’s celebrity was comparable to that of Britain’s Margot Fonteyn, and the Russian caused a sensation when she finally came to Covent Garden with the Bolshoi in October 1956.6 But Philip was not in London at the time – he was already on the other side of the world, carrying out his Olympic and Commonwealth duties aboard the Britannia.7
So the framed photograph in this scene never existed. It is a dramatic device intended to acknowledge the idea that the young Queen’s husband was popularly suspected of infidelity at the time, without providing conclusive evidence one way or the other – for how do we know? Ulanova acts as The Crown’s symbol of the various women with whom the Duke’s name was linked, accurately or not, in these years notably the Greek cabaret star Hélène Cordet, whom Philip had known since childhood, and with whom he reconnected in the mid-1940s, sparking rumours of romance when he became godfather to her son.8