The Crown

by Robert Lacey

  Altrincham had been particularly scornful of the annual summer ‘debutante’ parties, where hundreds of wealthy and aristocratic young women came to the Palace to be ‘presented’ to the Queen in a ceremony at which, in all but words, she initiated them as new members of the nation’s ‘upper’ classes, blessing them in a lace-gloved laying-on of hands. In the swing round of press opinion that followed, Reynolds News congratulated the rebel peer for ‘saying out loud what many people are thinking’.136

  As it happened, some people were already thinking these things inside Buckingham Palace – starting with the Queen herself, who had from the start of her reign disliked the facile and empty ‘debutante’ parties where she was required to sit motionless, nodding like a totem, while hundreds of simpering young women, noble, rich and nouveau riche, filed and curtseyed in front of her. Aware of the need to widen her court circle, she had already set up a slightly more relaxed system of welcoming people to the Palace – over informal luncheons where professionally qualified guests like the managing director of Wembley Stadium and the chairman of the National Coal Board could offer her a different perspective from the traditional stuffed shirts.

  Elizabeth had already agreed to the televising of her Christmas speech that year, and plans were also under way to rebuild the bombed chapel at Buckingham Palace as a picture gallery in which the royal art treasures, hitherto reserved for the eyes of visiting heads of states and special guests, would now be accessible to ordinary visitors, with the novel and mildly populist possibility that there might be a shop where members of the general public could buy ‘royal’ souvenirs. Finally, in November 1957, the Lord Chancellor announced that, after 1958, the ‘deb’ presentation rituals would come to an end, to be replaced by additional garden parties to which ‘guests from more varied backgrounds and walks of life’ could be invited.137

  1957 – Elizabeth II’s first televised Christmas broadcast

  Some courtiers whispered snidely that the ‘deb’ parties might actually have been ended a year earlier if the Palace had not wished to avoid being seen dancing to Lord Altrincham’s tune, but others were more generous. Many years later in 1988 Martin Charteris, the most beloved and trusted of all the Queen’s private secretaries, happened to be on the platform of a well-attended meeting at Eton College with Altrincham, where he told him for the record – ‘You did a great service to the monarchy, and I’m happy to say so publicly.’138

  We know that Altrincham was certainly invited to Buckingham Palace in 1957 to meet Martin Charteris in the middle of the furore over his article, and there is some suggestion that he may also have met the Duke of Edinburgh at that time, off the record. It seems unlikely that he would have met the Queen, but later evidence does suggest that Elizabeth retained over the years a particular interest in her strangely loyal critic, and came to admire Altrincham for the causes and reforms that he championed – not least his proposals for the reform and modernising of her monarchy.

  By 1988 Altrincham had long ceased to be a lord. On 31 July 1963 he had taken advantage of the new Peerage Act, which passed into law that day, to renounce his title – becoming the second English peer to seek to step ‘down’ into normal, non-titled life.139 Narrowly preceding him in the renunciation stakes was Anthony Wedgwood Benn, the former Viscount Stansgate, whose efforts over several years had brought about this important change in the hereditary system.140

  Like Altrincham, Wedgwood Benn was the son of a middle ranking politician – in his case, William Wedgwood Benn (1877–1960), who had served as Secretary of State for India in Ramsay MacDonald’s short-lived Labour government of 1929–31. Both fathers had been awarded their peerages in the 1940s (Benn/Stansgate in 1942 and Grigg/Altrincham in 1945) for the same basic reason – to boost their respective political party’s numbers in the House of Lords, where hereditary peers continued to exercise the ancient voting majority that they would maintain for most of the century.

  Both sons wished to shed this ‘honour’ acquired by their fathers – the Conservative Altrincham for simple reasons of principle and preference, the Labour Stansgate for additional political motives. In November 1960 Anthony Wedgwood Benn’s rising career as the Labour MP for Bristol South East had been abruptly halted by the death of his father and his automatic succession to the Stansgate title, which he found impossible to escape. The Speaker of the Commons denied Stansgate any further access to his Commons seat, or even the right to make a plea from the bar of the house. But the young activist did manage to get his name onto the ballot paper for the Bristol South East by-election that followed his ‘elevation’, and there he garnered 23,275 supporters – nearly 70 per cent of the vote.141

  It was clearly ridiculous that the electoral court should nonetheless award the seat in Westminster to his Conservative opponent, who had polled only 10,231, and Benn’s right to commoner status and a seat in the Commons became a national issue.142 In 1963 Harold Macmillan’s government agreed to make parliamentary time for the new Peerage Act which would make renunciation possible (and also admit hereditary peeresses to the Lords), and they decided not to run a Tory candidate when the no longer noble Mr Wedgwood Benn went down to Bristol again, to be triumphantly re-elected that August at the age of 38. In later years, ‘Wedgie’ Benn would drop his double-barrelled name as well as his title, to become plain Tony Benn, serving as Labour’s Minister for Industry as well as for Energy in the 1970s, then challenging Neil Kinnock unsuccessfully for the leadership of the Labour Party as he moved politically ever leftwards.

  John Grigg, the ex-Lord Altrincham, aged 39 in 1963, chose to walk away from partisan politics. Mild-mannered and bookish, with a fondness for Scottish hill-walking, Grigg devoted his life to liberal and humane causes – starting with the challenge of capital punishment, which had been a principal focus of his attention since the early 1950s. ‘The gallows is a piece of medieval furniture completely out of place in a civilised modern society,’ he wrote in one of the many campaigning articles he published on the subject. ‘When it has gone the way of the rack and the block, those who now firmly believe in it will soon be wondering why it was retained for so long.’143

  Grigg’s passion had been captured by the fate of Timothy Evans, a troubled and handicapped character – ‘weak in mind and body’, as Grigg later wrote144 – who was hanged in 1950 for the death of his infant daughter Geraldine, in a case linked to evidence that he had also killed his wife. Three years later, Evans’s neighbour, ex-Special Constable John Christie, who had given crucial testimony against Evans, was convicted of murdering his own wife in a trial in which he confessed to having murdered a number of other women – including Mrs Evans, with subsequent enquiries establishing that Christie must also have murdered the Evans’s baby, Geraldine. Evans had gone to the gallows protesting his innocence, but the judge had directed the jury to believe the false evidence provided by Christie.

  Working with Ian Gilmour, owner and editor of The Spectator, Grigg co-wrote The Case of Timothy Evans: An Appeal to Reason, an eloquent pamphlet that convinced many of Evans’s innocence.145 Then in October 1955 Grigg joined Gilmour and the editors of The Observer and The Yorkshire Post in a delegation to the Home Secretary, Major Gwilym Lloyd George, to request a review of the case. Their request was rejected, but both men continued to argue on the basis of other miscarriages of justice – notably the hangings of Derek Bentley in 1953146 and Ruth Ellis in 1955147 – with Altrincham serving as treasurer of the National Campaign for the Abolition of Capital Punishment (NCACP).

  Their persistence was rewarded with the new Homicide Act of 1957,148 which significantly reduced the number of offences punishable by execution, followed eight years later by the Murder (Abolition of Death Penalty) Act 1965,149 guided through the Commons by the veteran Labour campaigner Sydney Silverman. This Act suspended capital punishment for five years (abolition became permanent in 1969), and in October 1966, Labour Home Secretary Roy Jenkins formally recommended a posthumous royal pardon for Timothy Evans that was
granted in October 1966.150

  ‘Man is born to err,’ wrote Grigg in The Guardian a few days later, ‘yet it is the hardest thing in the world to persuade officialdom (which includes the legal establishment) to admit that it has made a mistake. Ordinary people were convinced long ago that Timothy Evans was probably innocent, and they welcome the Home Secretary’s decision – so prompt by him, so belated by the State.’151

  In his moment of triumph after a dozen years’ hard fighting, it was typical that John Grigg should take no credit at all for himself and his fellow campaigners, choosing instead to bestow praise on Roy Jenkins. ‘In his short time at the Home Office,’ he wrote, ‘he has already given clear evidence of being the best man in the job this century, and quite possibly the best since [Robert] Peel.’152

  In 1960 Grigg had had to close down his National and English Review for lack of funds, but he continued his social campaigning through the pages of The Times, The Spectator, and particularly The Guardian, where, for more than a decade, his eloquent weekly columns helped nudge late twentieth-century Britain into being a fairer, calmer and more equal place: justice for Timothy Evans, the end of the gallows, racial equality, homosexual law reform, divorce law reform, women priests in the Church of England – many were the causes for which John Grigg (who died in 2001, aged 77) fought bravely and successfully over the years.

  But people always tended to remember the former Lord Altrincham as the naughty young peer who had once dared to criticise the Queen, often asking him to explain why he had so hated the monarchy. To which the erudite Grigg liked to reply briefly with a question: ‘Does a literary critic hate books?’153

  CHAPTER SIX

  ‘VERGANGENHEIT’

  AUGUST 1957

  Documents on German Foreign Policy 1918–1945: Series D, D Volume X (1937–1945), The War Years, June 23–August 31, 1940, Editor-in-Chief (Great Britain) – The Hon. Margaret Lambert, published by Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, August 1957 …154

  It was hardly the shortest or snappiest of titles for a book, and it was certainly not the most fashionable of publishers, but HMSO’s tenth collection of Nazi wartime documents caused something of a stir when it landed in London at the end of the summer after Suez. For there on page 2 (and appearing on 17 other pages), nestling cosily in the company of Hitler, Goering, Hess, Himmler, Ribbentrop and the very worst villains of the Third Reich was the name of His Royal Highness Edward Albert Christian George Andrew Patrick David – Prince of Wales, King Edward VIII and Duke of Windsor – along with that of his wife Wallis, the Duchess.155 Little more than a decade following the desperate and bloody events of the Second World War, people could read in black and white how the exiled Windsors had welcomed and negotiated quite seriously with Nazi agents in 1940, not treating them as Britain’s mortal enemies – but, quite the contrary, as their friends.

  The papers documented a series of secret negotiations between the Duke and Duchess and German diplomats in Madrid and Lisbon in the first summer of the war, at one of the darkest moments in the hostilities, when, far from offering the slightest disagreement with the Axis mission to subjugate Britain, the couple had conferred in cordial terms with Hitler’s Iberian emissaries – and had even offered them advice on their war strategy.156 It seemed to be smiles all round, in fact, whenever these two Windsors and Fascists met.

  Episode 206 of The Crown opens with the literal unearthing of these sinister revelations – in US-occupied Thuringia, central Germany, on 14 May 1945, a few days following Hitler’s suicide and the Axis surrender of German forces to Britain’s General Bernard Montgomery.157 We find ourselves in a bright, sunlit pine forest, following a convoy of US Jeeps and other military vehicles through the woods as captured Nazi translator, Carl von Loesch, speaking impeccable English, guides the victorious US and British intelligence officers to a small clearing, where he points to a spot beneath the trees. Digging reveals a metal can wrapped in an old waterproof cape, and when the can is taken back to the nearby castle of Marburg it is opened to reveal Nazi documents and numerous metal canisters containing microfilm.158

  We watch analysts thread the microfilm into a reader, scanning the copied documents – letters and despatches dated June, July and August 1940 – until they come across the names ‘Hitler’, ‘Windsor’ and ‘Ribbentrop’ appearing alongside each other in typewritten German script, not just in one document but in a whole sequence relating to a series of Windsor–Nazi flirtations that had taken place five years earlier while the Duke and Duchess were staying in Lisbon.159 We see the documents being gathered together into one dossier – known henceforward as the ‘Marburg File’ – and we follow the file as it makes its way up through the ranks of US and UK intelligence to end up in front of the Duke’s horrified brother, King George VI.

  The pictures of this opening sequence closely trace what happened in real life – right down to the can of documents and microfilms wrapped in the old waterproof cape. Carl von Loesch was an assistant to Hitler’s chief interpreter, Paul Schmidt, and, to sidestep war crimes charges, he had parlayed his knowledge of where he and Schmidt had buried Ribbentrop’s most sensitive archives, including such treasures as the secret protocols of the Nazi–Soviet Pact negotiated with Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov in August 1939.160 Also in the cache were the damning details of Ribbentrop’s dealings with the Duke and Duchess when they took refuge in Spain and Portugal the following summer.

  The Duke and Duchess had headed for Fascist Spain at the end of June 1940 as German armies swept across France, fleeing from their villa near Cannes to stop in Barcelona and Madrid, then moving south to Portugal, where they took up residence in a villa in Cascais, just outside Lisbon. They were scared for their own safety, they were worried about the fate and contents of their two houses in German-conquered territory and the Duke was also seeking a new wartime role (he had previously been attached to the headquarters staff of the defeated Allied troops in France).

  But when Winston Churchill telegraphed urgently to offer the couple immediate sanctuary in England, with a plane to bring them home, the ex-King refused – on the grounds that his brother George VI and his family, and particularly his mother Queen Mary, were still declining to accord Wallis the full royal dignity of ‘Her Royal Highness’ status, and would not receive her at all, in fact. The Duke preferred to stay out of the country and risk enemy capture rather than accept that ‘dishonour’ to his wife161 – though he had not done much for his own honour by forsaking his military post as the Germans approached France. Any regular staff officer would have faced court martial for such unauthorised desertion.

  With the Battle of Britain raging in the skies overhead, and the British Army struggling to get home from Dunkirk, it might be imagined that Winston Churchill had better things to worry about in the summer of 1940 than squabbles in the royal family. But early that July the Prime Minister sat down with the war cabinet to puzzle out an ingenious solution to assuage royal pride – and also limit the Duke and Duchess’s ability to connect with the enemy. The former King would be offered the plumed pomp of colonial governorship in the Bahamas, an archipelago a few hundred miles off the coast of Florida (and within flying distance of the shops of New York). The Duke would become Governor, while the Duchess could play Her Grace (not Her Royal Highness) with the local community more than 4,000 miles away from London. George VI – and his mother Queen Mary – gave the plan the nod.

  Yet the Duke continued to say ‘No’. He yearned for more recognition from his family, and he had come to feel affronted by the absence of his personal bagpiper and batman, Alistair Fletcher, who had been called up for military duty. The ex-King grudgingly accepted the idea of service in the Bahamas – but he declined to travel there until Piper Fletcher had been discharged from his regiment and was back polishing his shoes again. The highlight of any evening with the Duke and Duchess was the moment when Fletcher – or, on occasions, the Duke himself – piped the guests in for dinner.

  To seek to blackmail th
e British government at such a perilous moment over the services of an able-bodied young serviceman surely verged on sabotage, if not downright treason on the Duke’s part – ‘It’s incredible to haggle in such a way at this time,’ wrote George VI’s private secretary, Alec Hardinge.162 And it was at this point in Lisbon that local German agents who were aware of the stand-off with London – though not of the scarcely believable detail of the bagpipe-playing batman – stepped forward on German Foreign Minister Ribbentrop’s behalf.

  Ribbentrop had socialised with the Duke and Duchess when they visited Germany in October 1937 to be lionised by Hitler and other leading Nazis, and he had first-hand knowledge of their pro-Fascist and dismissively anti-Semitic views.163 He got on well with the couple. There were even rumours that he had enjoyed an affair with the Duchess during visits to London in the early 1930s – with the picturesque legend that he sent her a bouquet of 17 carnations to commemorate the number of times that they had slept together.164

  This seems more than fanciful. There is little evidence to show that the Duchess and Ribbentrop were in the same place at the same time frequently enough to consummate an affair once, let alone 17 times. But less than a year after the Abdication, the exiled couple had been delighted to find a friendly head of state willing to receive them with full honours – and when he met Hitler, the Duke had even ventured a tentative, raised-arm Nazi salute.165 Two and a half years later, in July 1940, Ribbentrop continued the conversations that were to be republished so damningly in the Documents on German Foreign Policy, Series D Volume X.