by Roland Perry
Modin, in his memoirs, found Blunt ‘haughty’ yet still ‘a most agreeable companion’. The young Russian spymaster said that Blunt’s ‘words matched his deeds’. He ‘had a knack of looking at men in the same way he looked at pictures. He taught me, by example, that one can learn to understand people by noticing the fleeting expressions on their faces, and by contemplating their work.’ This must have been quite a difficult method of analysis for Blunt because, as Modin noted, he had ‘one curious defect: he hated to be looked directly in the eye. If one ventured to do this, he would look away.’ Years of carrying out illegal practices and hiding his true identity as a spy and homosexual led to his furtiveness.
George VI’s reign saw a further eroding of the monarch’s power and an acceleration of the British Empire’s dissolution.After World War II it was in decline. The end result was a long way from being the biggest, most powerful empire on earth, which the British could lay claim to its having been for several centuries. Two world wars had reduced the empire to a voluntary association of independent states, which became known as the Commonwealth and which owed almost everything to diplomacy and little to real power. Postwar British Labour Prime Minister Clement Atlee had no lust for empire building. He supported India and Pakistan becoming two independent states in 1947. Nevertheless, the myth of a great empire was maintained by developing the charisma of all matters royal. Princess Elizabeth, 21, married a third cousin (and descendent of Queen Victoria). This was Prince Philip of Greece, also a second cousin to Princess Elizabeth through King Christian IX of Denmark. He became the Duke of Edinburgh.
The princess loved him but her mother was under-impressed, especially with his three sisters marrying German noblemen, all of whom had Nazi connections. She called him ‘Philip the Hun’. It would have been better in his mother-in-law’s view if he had had money, but at least he had been born in Britain and had no Nazi links. The latter concern was a sensitivity concerning the king’s German family. In the atmosphere of postwar Britain, where the nation had to mourn its dead, clean up the Luftwaffe bombing and other mess created by the Nazis, the queen would have preferred a suitable Scot or Englishman. But Princess Elizabeth was besotted with the phlegmatic young and impoverished prince. She had been writing to him since she was thirteen. In her mind, mature for her years, he was the male partner she wanted. Unlike Victoria, who had also been smitten as an early teenager, Princess Elizabeth was determined to be successful in marrying her first love no matter what the opposition. After all, she was destined to be queen. He had to be a suitable partner and consort for life.
The invitees to the wedding reflected the nation’s mood. Philip’s German relatives, including his three sisters, were not asked. The Duke of Windsor was ignored also. Philip took the name Mountbatten, the surname of his mother’s British family but the Queen and Winston Churchill preferred that Windsor be retained.
‘I am the only man in the country not allowed to give his name to his children,’ Philip complained. But he did not appear too upset.Their first child, Charles, was born on 14 November 1948, thus creating a male heir to carry on the lineage of the royal house, whatever they labelled it.
In a move unimaginable in Victoria’s reign, George VI sensibly relinquished the title of Emperor of India, which had so titillated his great-grandmother. He remained King of Pakistan, but gave up that title when India became a republic in 1950. Transjordan (Jordan) in 1946, Burma in January 1948, Palestine (divided between Israel and the Arab States) in May 1948 and Ireland in 1949 opted out of the Commonwealth.
51
BLUNT ACQUISITIONS
George VI’s awareness of his great-grandmother’s affair with the thirteenth Lord Elphinstone caused him to reflect that he may have been railroaded into a marriage to Elizabeth (however happily in the end), which linked him with the Elphinstone family via Elizabeth’s sister’s husband, the sixteenth Lord Elphinstone. This would help ensure that the original relationship remained hushed up. There was no need for George VI to pass on this family secret to his daughter. He happily left that to his wife, who said she would oblige if and when the need arose. By 1950, with all the apparent letter evidence placed in the library, heavily edited or destroyed, there was not the concern that there had been in previous decades. Although there would have been more concern than ever if the royal family learned that their loyal art curator Anthony Blunt had passed the letters, in their original form, to Soviet intelligence. But his traitorous activities were only suspected by a select few in British Intelligence and not yet confirmed. Therefore Queen Elizabeth and Queen Mary did not think it necessary to inform the future queen of Victoria’s liaison, taking a ‘what she doesn’t know can’t hurt her’ attitude.
The queen and Queen Mary did let the princess know that Blunt had done her father special favours involving trips to Germany to retrieve important royal correspondence.The young Elizabeth inherited a loyalty to Blunt.
When questions were asked about the royal art historian, it was always said that he was a favourite of King George’s wife.‘Anthony’ was always available for parlour games at the palace and his work there was his life, along with his teaching activity at London’s Courtauld Institute of Art—and his continued secret postwar espionage work for the KGB.
There was a further layer of importance that endeared him to the royal family: no-one had a better eye for the value of art. Blunt advised the palace on drawings and paintings that should be bought, whether for the institution or the aggrandisement of individual members of the family. He played his part in creating a dazzling array of royal treasures, which were ‘of an unparalleled magnificence and variety’, according to the British historian J.H. Plumb, who had access to them.The wonderful trove included almost every great master of painting . . . ‘One of the finest of all Vermeers, magnificent Rembrandts, Rubens of spectacular quality. Portraits from Holbein to Winterhalter . . . hundreds of drawings by Leonardo da Vinci, exquisite examples of Michelangelo and Raphael; in paint or in pencil there is masterpiece after masterpiece.’
Blunt also had a say in what was acquired from the decorative arts in furniture, bronze, china, glass and jewels. Plumb believed that only Paris’s Louvre, the Metropolitan Museum in New York, London’s National Gallery and the Victorian and Albert Museum could better the royals’ collection ‘in quality and range. If the monarch’s collection were placed in one building, it would take its place as one of the most outstanding museums in the world.’
Not only had Blunt helped the Windsor dynasty and the institution of the monarchy, survive, he had done much to make the moderately wealthy Windsor members asset-rich.But his cosy,safe set-up evaporated on 25 May 1951, when two members of Modin’s British network—Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean—defected to Moscow. The rest of them and others under suspicion of working for Soviet intelligence, were interrogated by MI5 investigations in what became a hysterical witch-hunt. Blunt was a suspect. He was known to be close to Burgess. MI5 pulled him in for questioning. Both he and Modin realised that MI5 had no solid evidence against him beyond his friendship with Burgess.Yes, he had written some art reviews through a ‘Marxist’ prism in the 1930s, but no, he had never been a member of the Communist Party while at Cambridge.The defections meant that Modin’s network had to break up. Blunt stood up well to the initial questioning by MI5. His method was to shrug and say he did not ‘have a clue why or how any of this happened’.
This stalled MI5 but Modin knew its operatives would come hard after Blunt. Moscow Centre gave Modin orders to persuade Blunt to defect. Spy-master and spy met in an emergency meeting in Normand Park, a small square in West London. Modin put a defection plan to him and painted a rosy picture of life in Moscow.
‘No doubt you can also guarantee me total access to the Louvre and the Chateau de Versailles whenever I need to go there for my work,’ Blunt said cynically.
It was his way of saying he would never defect. But after his opening remark, he became blunt. He said he couldn’t possibly live in the
Soviet Union.
‘I know perfectly well how your people live,’ Blunt said, recalling his own trip there in 1936. He assured Modin ‘it would be very hard, almost unbearable for me to do likewise.’
Blunt went on to explain that he would never denounce Burgess. He was living in the hope that Burgess, his former lover and closest of friends, would return to England because there was no proof of him being a Soviet agent. In the meantime Blunt planned to withstand questioning.
‘Burgess is the reason I refuse categorically to leave,’ he told Modin.
George VI was informed about the interrogation of Blunt. As there was no proof against him, he was left in his job and nothing was said. But George VI told an equerry in touch with MI5:‘Under no circumstance is he to be asked about some special missions he made for me after the war. This work had nothing to do with security matters. It was private family business.’
The king was not about to discuss any of that ‘family business’ or the Victoria–Vicky and Edward VIII letters that had caused so much concern. George VI’s health had been impaired by the war and was always under stress. He smoked heavily to relieve it and had fallen into the trap that had helped to kill his grandfather and father. His smoking led to lung cancer and arteriosclerosis. Doctors for all three were aware of medical problems associated with nicotine yet the usual prescription in the era was to cut down on pipes, cigars and cigarettes, usually when it was too late to save a patient. George VI had a lung removed in September 1951 after a malignant tumour was found. The king’s speech for the state opening of parliament was read for him by the lord chancellor, Lord Simonds. George VI’s 1951 Christmas broadcast was read in sections and then edited together. His daughter, the capable Princess Elizabeth, who had blossomed into an attractive young woman, was being eased into his duties. She set out with her husband of four years for a tour of Australia via Kenya on 31 January 1952.Against doctors’ orders, George VI insisted on going to the airport to see her off, perhaps sensing that it might be the last time he would see her.
On 6 February, he died in his sleep at Sandringham House after a fifteen-year reign. He was 56. His daughter flew back from Kenya as Queen Elizabeth II. His funeral took place at St George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle, on 15 February 1952. Queen Elizabeth II’s grandfather had been granted, posthumously, his wish to see her on the throne. After a run of four successive males (three of them ailing)—the debauched Edward VII; the competent, uninspiring George V; the selfish, hedonist Edward VIII; and the courageous, low-key George VI—the 25-year-old Elizabeth brought a breath of fresh air to the monarchy that had been lacking for 115 years, since Victoria became queen at age eighteen. Elizabeth had been educated privately. She received tuition from home in constitutional history from Henry Marten, Vice-Provost of Eton College, and was taught French by several governesses.
In 1955,Queen Elizabeth’s Uncle Sidney,the sixteenth Lord Elphinstone, died aged 86. He had lived a good and long life without extending himself beyond what was expected from a wealthy Scottish nobleman. In his later years, he had revelled in the knowledge that he was the uncle to the reigning monarch. His successor was the 41-year-old John Alexander Elphinstone, the seventeenth lord, who returned to the early family experience of the thirteenth lord and his forbears and relatives as a member of the British armed forces. He fought in World War II against the Germans and became a POW on 12 June 1940. John Alexander spent 1944 and 1945 as one of the ‘Prominente’ prisoners (including officers and those of the nobility) at Germany’s Colditz prison.This was a POW camp in Colditz Castle on a cliff overlooking the town of the same name in Saxony. The thousand-year-old fortress was in the heart of Hitler’s Reich, about 640 kilometres from any frontier not under Nazi control in the war. In mid-April 1945, American soldiers scaled its thick walls and liberated John Alexander along with hundreds of other prominent POWs.
In 1956, Anthony Blunt was knighted. After his several interrogations by British Intelligence, the award was an endorsement from the palace, and an indication that he would be protected because of his special letter-collecting missions for George VI.
52
STRAIGHT LIES
In January 1963, Kim Philby, a key member of British double agents under Modin’s control, left Beirut for Moscow, and became the third defection of the so-called ‘Cambridge Ring’ recruited by the KGB in the 1930s. It was kept secret by the intelligence services and the British government but the ramifications for the Soviet Union’s brilliant group of spies were huge.The witch-hunt of the 1950s now had a new intensity as MI5 ‘spy-catchers’ cast their net far and wide in search of Philby’s connections. But there was not yet concern at the palace about Blunt’s link to him or the Russians. More problematic for the royal family was the health of Blunt’s lover, Guy Burgess, who was dying of alcoholism in Moscow. All the spy agencies on both sides were nervous about his condition and what would be the consequences of his death.
In June 1963, Michael Adeane, the queen’s private secretary, met Blunt in the basement at Buckingham Palace where he was examining some painting restorations.They had known each other since they had both attended Cambridge 30 years earlier.
‘Her majesty would like you to do her a little favour,’ Adeane said. Blunt put down a frame he had been inspecting as the secretary explained a problem over a set of drawings of the Duke of Edinburgh made by osteopath and surgeon Stephen Ward. Ward was a key witness in a sex and spy scandal. He had supplied prostitutes for parliamentarians, including British Minister for War John Profumo. It was potentially more than embarrassing for the royals if the sketches were known widely to the public, and media attention would have caused this.
‘It would be most useful if you could acquire the drawings,’ Adeane said.
‘I think we would have to purchase more than Ward’s sketches,’ Blunt reflected.
‘Why?’
‘I would have to go to the gallery where they’re on display and not make my intentions too obvious.’
Adeane understood. Blunt was given instructions to buy up the entire display, including the works by six other artists.
Burgess died on 30 August 1963. Blunt was devastated that his ex-lover had gone. He was now vulnerable to the renewed intense questioning coming from MI5’s self-styled ‘Gestapo’ unit after Kim Philby’s defection seven months earlier. Meanwhile Michael Whitney Straight, the only American member of the Cambridge Ring, also felt the pressure to keep quiet was off with Burgess’s death. Burgess and Blunt in tandem had seduced and recruited Straight at Cambridge in 1936 and he had spied on American government departments and the White House for nearly three decades. Straight was bisexual and this had been held over him by the KGB as a useful blackmail tool. If he did not do what was required by his Moscow masters, he would be ‘outed’, to his public shame, on two counts, his sexuality and his spying, which was also the pressure point for Blunt to keep him in place.
With the West’s Intelligence net tightening on both sides of the Atlantic, Modin worked out a fall-back strategy, which was passed to all agents. If Blunt should confess, or admit to being recruited in the 1930s at Cambridge, the ‘line’ from all the KGB recruits would be that they had sent ‘information’ to the Soviet Union during the war to help in the fight against fascism. They were to say they had not spied for the KGB after the end of World War II; that is, 1945. The other element of their combined misinformation was that they would all lead Western Intelligence interrogators up wrong alleys. They were to hint at Western spies who were innocent, and to take investigators away from actual agents. Philby had started the deception in his ‘confessions’ to MI5 before he defected. Now Blunt, who was named by Straight as having recruited him, settled himself in for a long journey of denial and deception.
Peter Wright, the main MI5 spy-hunter, was aware that Blunt was his biggest potential ‘catch’ so far and he was keen to force a confession from him after years of detective work.Wright’s deputy, Arthur Martin, flew to Washington DC to question Straight, th
e scion of the rich Whitney family, who’d had no trouble dancing around the interrogation by the US’s Federal Bureau of Investigation.The FBI had no idea of the UK culture of espionage and Straight had few sleepless nights meeting the bureau’s demands as its probed him. But Martin was different. He grilled Straight and managed to squeeze out of him an admittance of his recruitment to the KGB by Blunt. Martin asked Straight what he knew of Blunt’s spying after the war.
‘He was a palace courtier by then,’ Straight said dismissively while playing the KGB line.‘Even his special missions for the King after the war had nothing to do with the Russians, except that Moscow would have received, I presume, whatever information he retrieved for his majesty.’
‘What missions were these?’ Martin asked, his tape recorder running.
‘He had to bring back from Germany any correspondence that implicated Edward VIII’s connection to Hitler.’ As an afterthought he added. ‘There were other letters, correspondence between Queen Victoria and the princess royal.’
‘You say Moscow received it all?’
‘Oh, yes,Anthony was very good at photography,’ Straight said with a laugh.