Crown & Country: A History of England Through the Monarchy

by Starkey, David

  On 6 May the king, queen and their children processed to St Paul’s for a service of thanksgiving. The painting of the event shows a scene of almost Byzantine rigidity. Only two figures break rank: David Edward, who transfixes the spectator with an imperious stare, and Elizabeth, duchess of York, who simpers, Madonna-like, over her two little daughters. ‘We all went away’, the British prime minister remembered, ‘feeling that we had taken part in something very much like a Holy Communion.’

  Monarchy was no longer simply in alliance with religion; it had become a religion. It had also become a substitute at once calmer, saner and more decent for the virulent nationalisms of Continental Europe.

  But on 20 January 1936, only six months after his jubilee, George V died at Sandringham. Once heralds had proclaimed the death of kings. Now it was the BBC.

  The British Broadcasting Corporation was less than ten years old. It had been established by royal charter in 1927 and given a monopoly of the new medium of radio. Its first director general was John Reith. Like his friend Lang, Reith was an ambitious, driven, sexually ambiguous Scot who was determined to use the BBC to inculcate a morally cohesive society. Also like Lang, Reith saw the monarchy as central to his campaign. The result was an alliance between the monarchy and the corporation almost as close and important as that between the crown and the Church of England.

  George made the first Christmas broadcast from Sandringham on 25 December 1932; he broadcast again for the jubilee three years later – ‘I am speaking to the children above all. Remember, children, the king is speaking to you.’ Now radio would announce his death to Britain and the empire. At just gone midnight on the 20th, Reith himself read the final bulletin: ‘Death came peacefully to the king at 11.55 p.m.’ The next day Reith altered the text of Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin’s broadcast to the nation, ‘bringing in the moral authority, honour and dignity of the throne’.

  But as one tradition was invented, another was undone. At midnight on the 20th also, King Edward VIII, as he now was, ordered the clocks at Sandringham, kept half an hour fast since Edward VII’s time, to be put back to the right time. Lang, who by this time had succeeded as archbishop of Canterbury, reacted as though the new king had committed sacrilege. ‘I wonder what other customs will be put back also?’ he demanded.

  The answer was legion, for Edward delighted in treading on establishment toes and ruffling retainers’ feathers. He wanted substantial cuts in the coronation service; he was most reluctant to move into Buckingham Palace; he made slashing reductions in the staff and running costs at Sandringham and Balmoral; he walked in the street; broke convention by insisting that his left profile appear on postage stamps; and said ‘something must be done’ about the unemployed. But all this was more an attitude than a serious programme of modernization.

  Edward was serious about one thing, however: Wallis Simpson.

  V

  Wallis Simpson, born in 1896, and the impoverished descendant of two distinguished Southern families, was a classic woman on the make: hard-edged, firm-jawed, acquisitive and with a certain brittle style. ‘You can never be too rich or too thin,’ she is supposed to have said. She was also the most disruptive force in the twentieth-century British monarchy before the advent of Princess Diana.

  David Edward had first met Wallis in 1931 and had quickly decided that, since ‘to him she was the perfect woman’, she was his natural sexual and intellectual partner in life. But there were obstacles. She was American, divorced and presently remarried to an American businessman resident in London. It would have been difficult to think of anyone further from his family’s or the establishment’s idea of a queen.

  Edward was used to getting his own way. But, as prince of Wales, he had done so by breaking the rules. Now, as king, he would have to change them. This would have been difficult, though perhaps not impossible. He was popular and there was an embryonic ‘King’s Party’ with Winston Churchill himself as its leader. But, instead of exploiting these advantages, Edward, Micawber-like, merely waited for something to turn up. And, whether out of embarrassment or calculation, the establishment, led by the prime minister, Stanley Baldwin, played a similar waiting game. As did the British press, which threw a veil of silence over the affair.

  All this was brought to an end by the hostile reaction to the Simpsons’ collusive divorce on the flagrantly absurd grounds of his adultery. On 16 November, Edward saw Prime Minister Baldwin and the royal family and told them of his determination to marry Wallis and, if need be, to abdicate in order to do so. Then there was a diversion while the idea of a morganatic marriage was floated in which Wallis would become Edward’s wife but not his queen. This was submitted to and rejected by the cabinet, the opposition and the dominion governments. Edward made a final plea to be allowed to put his case directly to the people in a broadcast. This too was rejected and, cornered, on 11 December he signed the Act of Abdication. Only then, and with some trepidation, was Edward allowed to broadcast to the nation: ‘You must believe me’, he said, ‘when I tell you that I have found it impossible to carry the heavy burden of responsibility and to discharge my duties as king as I would wish to without the help and support of the woman I love.’

  The broadcast – improved if not substantially written by Churchill – showed Edward at his brilliant, media-savvy best, with all the qualities that, in different circumstances, might have made him the perfect modernizing king. But, by then, it was too late: the tortoise had beaten the hare; the conscientious, second-rate Albert George was king and the clocks, put forward at the beginning of Edward VIII’s brief reign, were turned back with a vengeance.

  Albert George chose the same royal name as his father and his signature was practically indistinguishable from his; he reverted to the same old-fashioned circle of friends and courtiers, such as Archbishop Lang, and he shared the same obsession with uniforms, with his only recorded innovation being the invention of pinched-in dress trousers to allow for the wearing of the Garter. They did not catch on. Above all, George VI, with his close-knit family whom he called ‘Us Four’, exemplified the family values that Edward VIII had so flagrantly defied.

  In one area, however, there was less break with the immediate past. George VI was not as ostentatiously pro-German as Edward VIII had been. But he was a passionate supporter of appeasement, and when Neville Chamberlain returned from Munich with ‘Peace in Our Time’, he was paraded with the king and queen on the balcony of Buckingham Palace in front of huge cheering crowds. It was an act of gross political partisanship worthy of Victoria at her most unconstrained.

  War came anyway, and Chamberlain was replaced by Winston Churchill as prime minister. As Churchill had also been Edward VIII’s leading supporter, early relations with the king and queen were strained. But they soon developed an effective division of labour.

  The royal family represented the sufferings of the British family on the home front. They remained in London, though spending most nights in the comparative safety of Windsor. Their food and clothes were rationed and George, who was frugal at the best of times, personally marked the five-inch maximum line on the baths in Buckingham Palace. And they took a direct hit when a daring daytime raid dropped a cluster of bombs on the palace, narrowly missing the king. ‘Now we can look the East End in the face,’ said Queen Elizabeth, who had been indefatigable in visiting bomb sites and comforting the survivors.

  But the role of war leader, symbolic as well as real, fell on Churchill. George was temperamentally unsuited to the task. But, understandably, he came to view Churchill’s prominence as a national icon with something like jealousy. Things came to a head when Churchill, with characteristic bravado, announced his determination to go in after the first wave of troops in the D-Day landings. Determined not to be outdone, the king scotched the scheme by threatening to accompany him! In the event, once secure beachheads had been established, they visited Normandy – but separately. All was forgiven, however, in victory, and on VE Day, 8 May 1945, Churchill joined the king
on the balcony of Buckingham Palace to celebrate the end of the war in Europe.

  Two months later, Churchill was crushingly defeated in a general election and a Labour government came to power committed to a full-blooded socialist programme of nationalization, redistributive taxation and welfare reform and with the huge majority needed to drive it through.

  The king also had to deal with a very different prime minister, Clement Attlee. Described by Churchill as ‘a modest man with plenty to be modest about’, Attlee’s trademark lengthy silences at first defeated the king, who had little small talk himself. In fact, they turned out to have much in common. Both were unassuming, hard working, ascetic and wedded to an unbending view of duty and public service which George had inherited from his family tradition and Attlee had imbibed in his public school days at Haleybury. United by this shared ethic of public service, socialism and the House of Windsor turned out, once again, not to be such uneasy bedfellows after all.

  The result was that when George, having outlived Attlee’s government by only a few months, died prematurely at the age of fifty-seven, he left an inheritance that was surprisingly unscathed. He also left it to a daughter who was determined to keep it that way.

  Chapter 25

  New Kingdom

  Elizabeth II

  ‘MY HEART IS TOO FULL’, Queen Elizabeth II told her Accession Council in February 1952, ‘for me to say more to you today than that I shall always work as my father did.’ Ten months later, her grandfather, George V, had joined her father, George VI, as a model. ‘My father, and my grandfather before him,’ she said, in her first Christmas broadcast to Britain and the Commonwealth, ‘worked all their lives to unite our peoples ever more closely … I shall strive to carry on their work.’ For all the brave talk of a ‘New Elizabethan Age’, this was to be a monarchy that looked firmly back to the past – but not perhaps all that far.

  I

  Elizabeth had always been a character: self-possessed, authoritative and aware of her position from an extraordinarily young age. She gave the Windsor wave in her perambulator; was curtseying to her grandparents by the age of two; and wore Norman Hartnell to her first state function at nine. In contrast, her education, at the hands of devoted governesses, was modest and undemanding. Outside experts were brought in only in history, French and, most successfully, riding, the latter of which, along with dogs, became a lifelong passion. Books, on the other hand, remained alien: reading was for state papers. Surrounded by doting parents and servants, she had a happy, secure upbringing. Indeed, for a preternatu-rally orderly, conformist child, it was perhaps a bit too secure.

  It would be hard to think of a greater contrast with the childhood of Elizabeth’s distant cousin, Prince Philip of Greece. Born on a kitchen table, exiled as a baby and homeless at nine when his parents split up, he’d lived the life of adventurer and poor relation with only his wits, his good looks and his royal connections to depend on. And it was these last which led to his meeting Elizabeth in 1939 on a royal visit to Dartmouth Naval College, where he was then a cadet. He was eighteen; she thirteen. He showed off; she fell, and remained, deeply in love. There was opposition, especially from the stuffier courtiers. But Elizabeth, as usual, got her way, and they were married in 1947. It was, and perhaps remains, a marriage of opposites.

  Just over four years later, on 6 February 1952, George VI was dead and Elizabeth became queen. At the time, she was up a giant fig tree watching big game in East Africa, on the first leg of an imperial tour.

  On the flight back her private secretary went over the rituals that surrounded the ‘demise of the Crown’. The new queen got up once or twice to relieve her feelings in private. But there was none of her father’s nervous anxiety about an unlooked-for and unwelcome burden; still less of her uncle’s chippy resentment. Instead there was a calm acceptance – part religious and part robust common sense – of the job she had been born to do. She was aware of its history, though not especially curious about it. Above all, she was utterly unseduced by its romance. Others might enthuse about the New Elizabethan Age, but not the second Elizabeth herself. ‘Frankly,’ she said in her second Christmas broadcast, ‘I do not myself feel at all like my great Tudor forebear, who was blessed with neither husband nor children, who ruled as a despot and was never able to leave her native shores.’ Elizabeth II, in contrast, was wife, mother, constitutional sovereign of a democracy and head of the empire – or Commonwealth, as people were learning to call it. But she was still queen – a Windsor queen. And it was the rituals and values of the House of Windsor established by her grandfather, George V, which were unrolled once more.

  Her father, George VI, lay in state in Westminster Hall, in the ceremony invented by George V for his father, Edward VII. Her mother, Queen Elizabeth, was given the title of queen mother, first conferred by George V on his widowed mother, Queen Alexandra. Above all, and against the furious protests of her husband, she announced that the name of the royal house would remain the House of Windsor, as George V had decreed in 1917. To soothe Philip’s feelings, she made him chairman of the committee to plan the coronation. He was eager for ‘some features relevant to the world today [to] be introduced’. But his was a lone voice on a committee whose collective memory stretched back more than fifty years. The result was that the coronation of 1953 was a polished replay of the historicist pageantry of the earlier Windsor coronations of 1937 and 1910.

  Elizabeth underwent the same earnest religious preparations at the hands of the archbishop of Canterbury as her parents in 1937. She rehearsed as meticulously as they had done, and sharply called Philip into line when he failed to take the esoteric rituals seriously. She was crowned with the massive St Edward’s Crown, first used, after an interval of more than two centuries, for her grandfather in 1910. And, despite the Labour government of 1945–51 having eroded still further the political power of the Lords by the new Parliament Act of 1949, and having reduced many of them to virtual penury by its punitive taxation, the peerage continued to dominate the coronation. They also supplied its only moment of humour. This took place towards the end, when the backwoods peer Lord Mowbray, Seagrave and Stourton hurled himself down from the dais, where, as premier baron, he had performed homage on behalf of the baronage, with his robe bunched up, mothballs and bits of ermine flying, and with conspicuously filthy fingernails.

  But there was one hugely important innovation nonetheless. For a new mass medium had appeared alongside radio and cinema: television. Microphones and cine-cameras had been allowed in the Abbey for the coronation of 1937; should TV be permitted to broadcast the crowning of Elizabeth II? The queen herself, with her conservative instincts, was firmly opposed. But a press campaign quickly forced a retreat. The result was that, on 2 June 1953, I, then a boy of eight in my Sunday best, gathered along with countless millions more to watch the coronation on a neighbour’s television set, which had been bought specially for the occasion. It was the first time that I had seen television or a monarch. And I have never forgotten it.

  Elizabeth’s fear had been that television would trivialize or vulgarize the ceremony. She need not have worried. Instead, the mellifluous, silken-tongued Richard Dimbleby delivered a commentary whose stately language complemented and occasionally outdid the text of the service itself.

  DIMBLEBY: Her Majesty returns the orb and the archbishop now places on the fourth finger of her right hand the ring, the ring whereupon is set a sapphire and on it a ruby cross. This is often called the Ring of England.

  ARCHBISHOP: Receive the ring of kingly dignity and the seal of catholic faith and as thou art this day consecrated head and prince so may you continue steadfastly as the defender of Christ’s religion …

  And so on, as the two voices and one language interwove like the verses and responses in the Book of Common Prayer.

  The coronation of 1953 was the apotheosis of the Windsor monarchy. The ceremony was perfect. The empire, despite Indian independence in 1947, seemed more or less intact. The queen, with he
r youth and sincerity, was the most attractive embodiment yet of the Windsor values of family, service and duty. And television, far from being a threat, had proved itself to be the most effective means for their dissemination. Elizabeth, it seemed, had been right to stick with the tried and tested formula of Georges V and VI. And Philip’s instinct to modernize had been wrong. Or had it?

  Philip had now been married to Elizabeth getting on for ten years. By the same stage in his marriage, Prince Albert, Philip’s predecessor as royal consort, had established an absolute supremacy over Queen Victoria’s mind in both the public and the private spheres. This made him, in effect, permanent prime minister and king-in-all-but-name. No one – not the politicians, the royal household and least of all Elizabeth, who jealously kept her red boxes to herself – was going to concede any such position to Philip. Nor is there any sign that he wanted it, given his own maverick tendencies. Instead, he acted as a sort of licensed dissident-cum-court-jester, prone to break protocol, tread on toes and generally ruffle feathers. But, for one who was so frequently rude himself, he had a singularly thin skin. It was a combination that guaranteed bad relations with the press.

  More positively, Philip, like Albert before him, showed an informed interest in industry and technology. He was passionate about sport and worked tirelessly to ensure that the sprawling suburban housing developments of the 1950s and 1960s had adequate recreation grounds. Above all, Elizabeth, who had created a minor sensation when she promised to ‘obey’ in her marriage vows, ceded him headship of their family. It was the same domestic role that Victoria had given Albert, and Philip exercised it in the same way by trying to make his sons new editions of his younger self. Albert’s educational experiment with his children was intellectual; Philip’s physical. But the results were just as disastrous.