The Crown

by Robert Lacey

  The Duke had already expressed himself in Madrid ‘… in strong terms against Churchill and against this war’.166 Now Spanish agents in Lisbon reported that ‘the Duke intends to postpone his departure for the Bahama Islands as long as possible … in hope of a turn of events favourable to him’.167 What could that ‘turn of events’ possibly be, after the retreat from Dunkirk and with Britain on the verge of collapse? ‘He characterises himself as a firm supporter of a peaceful arrangement with Germany,’ reported Oswald von Hoyningen-Huene, the German ambassador to Lisbon, who concluded his report with an encouragingly disloyal titbit: ‘The Duke definitely believes that continued severe bombings would make England ready for peace.’168

  Ribbentrop’s agents warmed up the Duke and Duchess by allowing the Duchess to send her maid Jeanne-Marguerite Moulichon to Paris to retrieve some treasured possessions, and by promising to maintain ‘an unobtrusive observation of the residence of the Duke’ throughout the German occupation of the city.169 Then they got serious, inviting the Duke and Duchessto leave Lisbon and come back to Spain, ‘since the Duke was likely yet to be called upon to play an important role in English policy and possibly to ascend the English throne’.170 This intriguing idea, noted the German ambassador Eberhard von Stohrer – the notion that the Germans were planning to depose George VI in the event of conquering Britain and to restore the crown to his elder brother – caused both Windsors to fall silent. ‘The Duchess especially became very pensive.’171

  When these damning revelations were published in 1957, the Duke of Windsor issued what he called a démenti, describing the German allegations as ‘in part complete fabrications and in part gross distortions of the truth’,172 and the Foreign Office of the time backed him up, shrugging the charges off as enemy fantasy and malice. But after the Duke’s death, the FO would disclose the compelling testimony of a British source, Marcus Cheke, a junior diplomat at the Lisbon embassy, who painstakingly noted the ex-King saying in July 1940 very much the same thing that the Germans had claimed. According to Cheke’s informant, ‘the Duke predicted the fall of the Churchill government, and its replacement by a Labour government which would negotiate peace with the Germans. The King [George VI] would abdicate, there would be a virtual revolution, and he (the Duke) would be recalled. Britain would then lead a coalition of France, Spain and Portugal, and Germany would be left free to march on Russia.’173

  The Duke of Windsor was planning, in other words, to become London’s equivalent of Vidkun Quisling, the Norwegian politician who ruled wartime Norway for Hitler and who made the name ‘Quisling’ a byword for ‘collaborator’ or ‘traitor’.174 The Duke’s defeatist attitude hardly matched the stirring spirit that Winston Churchill had famously put into words in the House of Commons on 4 June 1940 a few weeks earlier: ‘Even though large tracts of Europe and many old and famous states have fallen or may fall into the grip of the Gestapo and all the odious apparatus of Nazi rule,’ he declaimed, ‘we shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end …’175

  The Duke and Duchess of Windsor did not appear to find the prospect of the Nazi grip so odious. When Winston Churchill ordered the couple to make their way to the Bahamas without delay in the early days of July 1940, the Duke threatened to resign all his military ranks, while also demanding full financial compensation from the Civil List or other public funds for any move that might jeopardise his non-resident taxation status. He refused to leave Lisbon, and, as July advanced, he kept playing for time, talking to Ribbentrop’s messengers while awaiting the return of his wife’s maid from Paris, and also keeping a sharp eye on events in Britain.

  Towards the end of the month, however, Windsor confided to von Stohrer that he would, in fact, now embark for the Bahamas since ‘no prospect of peace existed at the moment’.176 In the Duke’s latest judgement, ‘the situation in England at the moment was still by no means hopeless. Therefore, he should not now, by negotiations carried on contrary to the orders of his Government, let loose against himself the propaganda of his English opponents … He could, if the occasion arose, take action even from the Bahamas.’177

  On the very last day of July 1940, the day before he was due to set sail for Nassau, the Duke had a final meeting with his Lisbon contact, assuring him that he paid ‘full tribute to the Führer’s desire for peace, which was in complete agreement with his own point of view. He was firmly convinced that if he had been King it would never have come to war’, and he promised that he stood ready to return to England as soon as the moment was right.178 The Duke had exchanged secret contact details with his confidant, ‘and had agreed with him upon a code word, upon receiving which he would come back over’. These statements, concluded the dispatch, were ‘supported by firmness of will and the deepest sincerity, and had included an expression of admiration and sympathy for the Führer’.179

  It seems astonishing today that not a word of these startling Windsor promises to enemy agents found their way into the newspapers when they were revealed a decade and a half later. Whether totally true, totally imagined by the Germans, or something in between, the ex-King’s words were set out for all to read and judge in the official 615-page Stationery Office volume published in August 1957, and they remain to this day as authentic historical documents in the public domain. But Fleet Street chose to avoid controversy in the touchy months following Suez, taking its cue from the Foreign Office and noting the ex-King’s fondness for libel actions – he had enjoyed some success before the war suing the publishers William Heinemann for mildly adverse suggestions about his drinking habits.180 The press parroted the official line that the Duke had ‘never wavered in his loyalty to the British cause … The German records are necessarily a much-tainted source’ – while the BBC steadfastly looked the other way.181

  The Duke’s old chum Noël Coward was not fooled for a minute. The playwright treated the non-scandalous scandal as a huge joke, noting in his diary how ‘Secret papers have disclosed his pro-Nazi perfidy which, of course, I was perfectly aware of at the time. Poor dear, what a monumental ass he has always been!’182

  Not such an ass, however, that the Duke did not, in the end, get exactly what he had really wanted. For, even as Churchill’s secretary Jock Colville was noting that ‘the Duke of Windsor is being cantankerous and maddening’,183 and Churchill himself turned down the Duke’s request that Piper Fletcher should be released from his regiment, the Prime Minister took soundings with the ex-King’s best friend, the politician Walter Monckton, as well as with the Duke’s sworn enemy, his former private secretary ‘Tommy’ Lascelles. From their very different points of view, both men explained to Churchill that ‘HRH had to be treated as a petulant baby …’, warning that ‘there was a by no means remote possibility that he was prepared to force a break on this subject’.184

  Churchill drew a breath and relented. The Prime Minister had a war to fight, and he decided that he had already wasted enough time on the matter. ‘I have now succeeded,’ he telegraphed to the Duke in Lisbon on 24 July 1940, ‘in overcoming War Office objection to departure of Fletcher.’ So, throughout the remaining course of the Second World War, the new royal Governor of the Bahamas would be able to welcome guests to his table with his bagpipe-playing batman.185

  After the war, it was George VI, rather than Elizabeth, who actually had to deal with his elder brother’s efforts to secure some sort of job or public role in Britain, and it was the King who had to make clear to the Duke that the disclosures of the Marburg File ruled out any chance of his acceptance or special status at home: the job prospects described in the episode are based on the sort of positions the Duke had previously been offered and which still existed in 1957.

  But Elizabeth was always close to her parents on issues involving her troublesome uncle, and her mother and father would certainly have briefed their daughter fully on the Duke’s compromising contacts with the Nazis. Her senior staff – notably private secretary Tommy Lascelles – would also have considered it their duty to make their boss aw
are of all the most discreditable details known about the Windsors at the time of her accession in 1952, when assessing whether to invite the Duke and his wife to the coronation the following year. The couple were not invited.

  The theme of forgiveness is introduced into this episode by the American evangelist Dr Billy Graham, whom Elizabeth II invited to visit her at Windsor and Sandringham more than once in the course of her reign. She was – and is – a believer, personally subscribing to his fundamentalist gospel. The first of her encounters with Dr Graham was during his London Crusade in 1954, and the timing of this meeting has been shifted to 1957 to fit with the August publication of the Marburg File.

  During one visit the Queen invited the evangelist to help her with the preparations for her Christmas broadcast. ‘To illustrate a point,’ recalled Dr Graham, ‘she wanted to toss a stone into a pond to show how the ripples went out farther and farther. She asked me to come and listen to her practice the speech by the pond and give my impressions, which I did.’186

  On another occasion, Dr Graham was sitting beside the Queen at lunch at Windsor, having preached the Sunday sermon in the Chapel Royal. He told her he had been undecided until the last minute about his choice of sermon, and had almost preached about Jesus’s healing of the crippled man beside the pool at Bethesda, as related in the Gospel of Saint John: ‘Arise, take up thy bed and walk!’187

  The Queen’s eyes sparkled, he later related, and she bubbled over with enthusiasm.

  ‘I wish you had!’ she exclaimed. ‘That is my favourite story.’188

  1954 – Dr Billy Graham preaches on his first London crusade

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  ‘MATRIMONIUM’

  AUGUST 1959–MAY 1960

  ANTONY ARMSTRONG-JONES, THE PHOTOGRAPHER AND MAN about town who married Princess Margaret in May 1960, was the first commoner to marry a senior member of the royal family since Anne Boleyn married Henry VIII in 1533.189 Then, when the couple broke up in 1978, they achieved another landmark – the closest-to-the-top royal divorce since Henry parted from Anne of Cleves in 1540.190 Inasmuch as we can tell from the murkily available evidence, the photographer and the younger sister of the respectable Elizabeth II leapt into more sexual shenanigans with more varied partners in their one single marriage than the Tudor ‘Merry Monarch’ managed in six.

  Well, that is the historical context. In future episodes, The Crown will be exploring some of Princess Margaret’s midlife sexual adventures. But let us start here with Episode 207 and the story of how she decided to marry her highly attractive – and highly dangerous – husband. Talk about ‘Free Love’! For Antony Armstrong-Jones and Princess Margaret, the shenanigans were there from the very start, inherent in their complex characters and personal histories. We have already studied the Princess’s troubles with Group Captain Townsend,191 followed by her failed engagement to Billy Wallace and her life in Episode 204 as a ‘half-baked, jazz-mad Teddy Girl’.192 Now let us turn to the equally challenging and curious case of her incredibly talented and – as it proved – incredibly troublesome husband.

  The parents of Antony Armstrong-Jones separated almost as soon as he was born on 7 March 1930, and had divorced by the time he was five, so Tony, as he was known, and his elder sister Susan (b. 1927) experienced a life of conflict and unhappy compartments, moving from one temporary home to another. Theirs was a loveless and emotionally deprived childhood, shuttling between bitter, feuding parents who specialised in the clever verbal put-down and the ‘blanking’ of each other with flinty superiority – weapons that would become Tony’s own waspish trademarks in later life.

  His father Ronnie was a successful barrister, the gregarious, chatty son of a Welsh doctor who had hyphenated Armstrong into the family name in 1913 to distinguish himself from legions of other Welsh Dr Joneses. By one count, Ronald Armstrong-Jones QC changed addresses as many as 27 times in his life,193 and he enjoyed the changing company of almost as many girlfriends – a parental example that Tony would certainly absorb and seek to emulate in his own spectacular love career.

  His mother Anne Messel was a polished figure, presented at court in 1922 and a famous society beauty – a ‘Deb of the Year’,194 in fact. She was the elder sister of Oliver Messel, the celebrated stage and costume designer who helped shape her widely admired wardrobe. Anne soon tired of the amusing but relatively impecunious Ronnie Armstrong-Jones, moving on to Michael Parsons, the sixth Earl of Rosse, an Irish peer based in the handsome seventeenth-century castle of Birr, Co. Offaly, with a West Yorkshire stately home, Womersley Park, to match. She wasted no time bearing her earl an heir and spare – two handsome young men who, being titled, instantly became her favourite offspring. Anne Rosse was a snob from her ovaries to her fingertips.

  ‘These are my sons,’ she would say, introducing her two Rosse children. ‘Oh, and this is my other son’ – indicating Tony.195 Throughout his life, recalled his friends, the usually ebullient Armstrong-Jones was terrified of his mother. ‘Anne Rosse just had to walk into the room,’ recalled his friend the journalist Francis Wyndham, ‘and Tony would freeze. The impact she had upon him was uncanny.’196

  As Tony’s authorised biographer Anne de Courcy has perceptively remarked, young Armstrong-Jones was simultaneously entranced by his mother’s glittering figure, while nursing the pain of her rejection of him as a child: ‘A child who has not had proper mothering often not only cannot form a proper relationship with a woman in later life,’ wrote de Courcy, ‘but also cannot trust women – sometimes to the extent of wanting to be first to strike a blow.’197

  When he was 16 and had just been given his first motorbike, Antony Armstrong-Jones contracted polio. In later years doctors would link the two events – the strain of repeatedly kick-starting the awkward 250 BSA having created the muscle trauma onto which the polio virus could get attached in those pre-vaccination days. The teenager nearly died. Polio – also known as infantile paralysis – was a plague in the 1940s: one day you had a headache, and an hour later you were paralysed. How far the virus crept up your spine determined whether you lived or died, and how much you could breathe or walk afterwards.198 Tony was rushed by ambulance to the Liverpool Royal Infirmary, where he would spend the next six months, emerging with a withered left leg that was an inch shorter than his right. Throughout his life he had a permanent limp.

  He also emerged with a command of deaf and dumb sign language that he learned from one of his fellow patients, and a deep empathy for the disabled which would come to inspire his charity work as a royal. ‘Disabled people are not rejects,’ he would later write. ‘They are not manufacturers’ seconds, to be treated cheaply. Their rights and opportunities must be the same as the rest’199 – and he would campaign to the end of his life for the improvement of disabled access everywhere,200 from trains (where, even at the end of the twentieth century, wheelchair users had to travel in the unheated and loo-less metal guard’s cage) to cinemas, theatres, the Chelsea Flower Show and London taxi cabs (all of which now accommodate wheelchairs).

  The most affecting aspect of Tony’s six long months of convalescence, however, was the fact that his mother never once visited him in hospital – and nor did his father. His jolly uncle Oliver Messel arranged for some of his theatrical friends – Noël Coward, Beatrice Lillie and Marlene Dietrich – to visit the boy when their tours took them through Liverpool: Marlene sat by his bedside and sang him ‘The Boys in the Back Room’.201 But his only family visitor was his sister Susan, for whom he spent hours knitting enormous scarves, while also stitching petit point.

  It was hardly surprising that the 16-year-old’s long spell in solitary confinement should encourage a profound scepticism towards the conventional bonds of affection. He clearly came to resolve, consciously or otherwise, that he was emotionally on his own, and that he would play by different rules when it came to matters of what other people called ‘the heart’. This sometimes chilling cynicism also contributed, he would later acknowledge, to his steely-eyed proficiency a
s a photographer. ‘Taking photographs,’ he liked to say, ‘is a very nasty thing to do.’202

  Tony had acquired his first camera soon after he started at Eton in 1943 – a cheap device he had swapped with another boy in exchange for a microscope that had been an expensive present from his grandfather. Rapidly discovering how much of the artistry lay in the developing and printing, he filled his seven-foot-long school bedroom with trays and chemicals, plus a homemade enlarger built from old biscuit tins and tomato soup cans. In the course of his school career he revived the moribund Eton Photographic Society, and when he went up to Cambridge (Jesus College) in October 1949, he started taking pictures for Cameo, a small magazine started by his friend Jocelyn Stevens.

  There he developed his own edgy style of portraiture, letting his subjects stew, rather than putting them at their ease. ‘I’m not a great one for chatting people up,’ he would later say, ‘because it’s phony. I don’t want people to feel at ease. You want a bit of edge. There are quite long, agonized silences. I love it. Something strange might happen … It’s very cruel.’203 Early on he discovered that black and white images were his forte, rather than colour.204

  He came down from Cambridge ‘without taking a degree’ – he failed his exams, in other words. But he had enjoyed some success on the river, coxing the Light Blues to a three and a half-length victory over Oxford in the 1950 Boat Race – and he had no doubt about his destiny: to work as a photographer. Just before Christmas 1950, not yet 21, he got a job working as an assistant in the studio of the society photographer Stirling Henry Nahum – the Duke of Edinburgh’s friend, ‘Baron’. Tony’s weekly wage as one of Baron’s 30 or so skivvies, setting the lights and loading the film for wedding and debutante photographs, was £2 15s. 1d.,205 but he rapidly launched into a freelance career, taking bread and butter society pictures of his own, while also contributing to Tatler and Picture Post and later to Jocelyn Stevens’s stylish and successful Queen magazine.