by Andrew Marr
So in his first years as King, George VI had to endure the kind of loud clubland muttering and drawing-room whispering that was the 1930s equivalent of a Twitter persecution. He did not visit India for the expected Durbar (and, despite being its last Emperor, never visited India at all). Unhelpfully, the somewhat cloddish Archbishop of Canterbury of the day openly discussed his stammer. His brother bombarded him with unwanted advice from his Austrian exile. When his first prime minister, Stanley Baldwin, who had been an avuncular source of support, soon resigned, George VI was forlorn. Yet he again showed the tenacity that had won him his wife and subdued his stammer, applying himself to royal business and duty with a grim vigour Edward VIII had been incapable of. King Edward had horrified the political establishment by ignoring boxes of official papers, sending them back with whisky-glass stains or, worse, showing them around, so that Whitehall officials began to censor what was sent to the Palace.
George read his papers and kept his counsel, and began to overcome his meagre constitutional education. The establishment responded, warily and then with relief. The British press, which had hushed up the Edward and Wallis affair almost until the last moment, returned to its former instincts for loyalty and discretion. In many ways, this was bad for the monarchy. Though it allowed George VI to grow into the role of king, it meant that the royal family reverted to past habits, including a knee-jerk preference for ‘safe’ aristocratic and Conservative politicians, just at the moment when they were to prove wanting. The court was deeply suspicious of Churchill in particular, who had been belligerently pro-Edward. More generally, Lascelles and his colleagues provided a protective crust of tradition and precedence around the four-strong family, which lasted until the 1950s.
In the run-up to the Second World War George VI was still an inexperienced monarch, finding his way. When his second prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, embarked on the policy of appeasement, the King backed him so enthusiastically some MPs believed he was behaving too politically, breaking his constitutional role. George wanted to make personal King-to-Führer appeals himself, and he insisted on Chamberlain joining him on the balcony at Buckingham Palace after his now notorious visit to Munich to show the royal family’s support for appeasement. Today, the consensus is that this was a bad mistake, but at the time most British people were also delighted. The King issued a message to the Empire promising ‘the time of anxiety is past’ and thanking God and Mr Chamberlain for ‘a new era of friendship and prosperity’. This was a family view. His mother, Queen Mary, wrote to him expressing her exasperation with the critics of Munich – why couldn’t people simply be grateful that Chamberlain had come home bringing peace: ‘It is always so easy for people to criticize when they don’t know the ins and outs of the question.’ When, after the war had started and Britain’s early Norway campaign had failed, Chamberlain was forced to resign, the King was aghast and angry with the prime minister’s critics. To replace Chamberlain the King wanted Lord Halifax, another arch-appeaser and a high Tory aristocrat. It was with great reluctance that he eventually accepted that the intemperate and unreliable Winston Churchill was the better choice, and he took quite some time to get used to him. Princess Elizabeth, hearing the news of Chamberlain’s resignation, cried.
One eminent royal biographer concluded: ‘George VI was not a born leader. He could seem shy and harassed, aloof and even morose.’24 He was also famous for his outbursts of temper, his ‘gnashes’, as the family called them. Yet the war made his reputation, as it was to make Churchill’s and Mountbatten’s. Underneath the thin skin was an intelligent and sensitive man with an iron sense of duty. The first real evidence that he might prove a good king came in his visit to America just before the war. George VI was on a long-planned visit to Canada. President Roosevelt invited him south. It was the first time a reigning British sovereign had stepped into the USA. Roosevelt had seized his moment. According to his wife, he believed ‘we might all soon be engaged in a life or death struggle, in which Great Britain would be our first line of defence’ and wanted ‘to create a bond of friendship’.25
It worked. Both Queen Elizabeth and the King were greeted ecstatically and impressed American politicians, newspapers and crowds with their informality and warmth. The Queen wrote to her daughter revealing the informal excitements of dining outside, with all the food jumbled together, including ‘HOT DOGS!’ More is sometimes claimed for royal visits than can be properly measured or substantiated. This one certainly mattered. At his home on the Hudson River, President Roosevelt and George VI talked long into the night about such nitty-gritty issues as debts, steel exports, naval bases, the Soviet position and how to win round American opinion from isolationism. Roosevelt went far further than most Americans would have been comfortable with then: he promised, according to the King’s note, that ‘If London was bombed USA would come in.’ All this was meticulously recorded by him the next day and sent back to the British government. When President Obama visited London in the spring of 2011, he brought as a present for the Queen a bound volume of photographs of this visit: it meant a lot to her father and so to her too.
Indeed, George VI carried his notes with him throughout the war; a poignant thing, because when the conflict actually arrived his greatest role was to support the bigger and even more sensitive personality of his prime minister. Thrown into Churchill’s giant shadow, he never complained. George VI was privy to the deepest secrets of wartime, including the Enigma intercepts and prior knowledge of the invention and then the use of the atomic bomb. He and the arch-royalist Churchill became close friends, despite occasional spats. He worked hard, ruthlessly cut back the costs of the court and supported his extraordinary prime minister in every way. He famously refused to leave London during the Blitz – though the royal family spent their nights at Windsor, where the current Queen was largely sheltered from the privations of wartime. Buckingham Palace was bombed nine times.
He thought up the idea of the George Cross and George Medal to honour civilian heroes, building in a smaller way on his father’s creation of the OBE, and visited British forces in North Africa, Italy and – most dramatically – heavily bombed Malta. He argued with Churchill over the latter’s enthusiasm for going to France after D-Day, pointing out that as King he was unable to go and he was therefore being put in an unfair position. Churchill grumpily stayed at home a little longer. By the end of the war the King had become a genuine symbol of British doggedness: shy, devout, even in his awkwardness ‘one of us’ in an age when so many countries had monsters for their heads of state.
After the war was over, George supported Indian independence and demonstrated his hostility to South African racism during a visit there. Just as Queen Victoria had been horrified by US slavery, and had delighted in the close attention of her Indian servants, so George VI gave every indication of being genuinely colour-blind – though of course his empire as a whole was certainly not.
The King, however, was no radical and found it hard to swallow Churchill’s 1945 election defeat. He was privately dubious about Attlee’s socialist administration. Just as his father had had to cope with the first arrival of a Labour government in 1924, so the son had to swallow his instincts and deal with unfamiliar men holding alarming views. He coped but did not enjoy it. In many ways George VI remained a highly conservative pre-war traditionalist, meticulous (and fussy) about dress, honours and court precedence, obsessively keen on shooting – a thinner, clean-shaven version of his father. The future Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell said he was ‘a fairly reactionary person’. In great pain, needing an operation on his leg to restore the blood supply choked by arteriosclerosis, he was told he should be operated on in hospital and refused on the odd grounds of court protocol: ‘I have never heard of a King going to a hospital before.’ But he worked intensely hard and bit his rebellious tongue, and kept the constitutional monarchy in good repair. And all this was observed and noted by his elder daughter, the serious-minded girl he knew would be queen, and whom he introduced
early into the work and rituals that would entail. She talks about his influence even now. When she unveiled a memorial to him in the Mall in 1955 she praised his wartime steadfastness, his ‘friendliness and simplicity’, his ‘warm and friendly sympathies’, his ‘unassuming humanity’ and pointed out that he had sacrificed himself during bouts of serious illness: ‘his courage in overcoming it endeared him to everybody’. These are precisely the qualities George V had hoped the monarchy would become associated with after the torment of the Great War.
So, the House of Windsor has seen an unusually direct transmission of ideas and behaviour from its origin in 1917 through grandfather, father and daughter. It can be summed up as modernization by conservative people with a strong sense of duty and purpose. Elizabeth II follows her grandfather and father as Britain’s new model monarchs. They have been called the welfare monarchy, or the democracy monarchy, or even the suburban monarchy.
Suburban, the Queen is not. She may spoon her breakfast cereal out of a Tupperware container but her court retains the velvety sheen and scale of Victoria’s. When she became Queen people talked rather pompously of a ‘new Elizabethan age’ and asked whether the Britain of the mid-twentieth century could surprise the world like the English of the age of Drake, Shakespeare and Bacon. The Queen put them right. In her Christmas broadcast of 1953 she said she did not ‘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’. Yet she went on to compare modern Britain, rich in courage and enterprise, with the poor, small but ‘great in spirit’ England of the earlier Elizabeth. The Tudors, of course, also reinvented themselves as a dynasty. In that, the Queen and the Windsors are more Tudor than mock-Tudor.
Glamorous Dickie
There are two other major characters without whom we cannot understand the Queen’s reign. One is, obviously, her mother, the young girl successfully wooed in the world of the ‘Bright Young Things’ who would live on into the current century, a presence at the Queen’s shoulder through most of her reign. The other is a less obvious influence, and a more ambiguous one, whose impact was at its height in the mid-twentieth century. Alongside the future Edward VIII on those post-1918 tours had been a besotted admirer who was also part of the family. Like the Prince, this man had been held in his grandmother Queen Victoria’s arms as a baby and given, as one of his names, ‘Albert’ in memory of her husband. He is remembered now simply as ‘Mountbatten’, the Prince’s cousin and one of the most exotic, too-big-to-be-true characters in twentieth-century British history.
As already noted, when Mountbatten was just fifteen his German-born but patriotically British father, Prince Louis Battenberg, had been forced to resign as First Sea Lord. He and his son were members of a relatively junior branch of the interwoven tree of European royal dynasties. But only relatively junior; the Battenbergs had holidayed with the Romanovs in Russia and felt entitled to meddle in the affairs of kings from Sweden to Greece. Louis Mountbatten, as he became, was a British naval officer in the Great War, who rose through the naval ranks between the wars, became very close to the future British king, and then topped that by marrying one of the richest women in Britain.
He got his great career break during the Second World War despite a series of early embarrassments as a serving captain. His destroyer, HMS Kelly, hit mines and once another ship, and was badly hit by bombers after Mountbatten had sent night-time signals which were picked up by the enemy. Yet Mountbatten’s sense of theatre, and his ability to make stirring speeches, meant that after he had nursed the wounded ship back home, he became a national hero and the subject of a wartime propaganda film by Noël Coward, In Which We Serve. His real ship was later bombed and sunk off Crete, where Mountbatten’s flotilla of destroyers was trying to hold off the German invasion. He was very lucky to survive; 136 members of his crew did not. Though the Kelly was facing impossible odds and none of this was his fault, his biographers and naval historians have generally concluded that he was a dashing but not particularly good commander of ships. But thanks to Winston Churchill, who had recognized a dynamic and publicity-conscious personality rather like his own, and with a little help from Coward, Mountbatten was soon raised far above his rank to become Chief of Combined Operations. Later he rose even further, to become Supreme Allied Commander for South East Asia. There he would successfully lead the fight to retake Burma and Malaya from the Japanese.
Wars accelerate everything, including promotions, but to go from being the captain of a destroyer mocked for depth-charging a shoal of fish to becoming one of the grand masters of strategy in a global conflict was quite extraordinary. Mountbatten’s charisma and the surging self-confidence that communicated itself in ever wider circles mattered particularly in the difficult conditions of the early 1940s. He had always milked his connections and shamelessly lobbied for every job he wanted, right back to his appointment accompanying the Prince of Wales on his foreign jaunts. After the abdication, he had quickly switched allegiance to the new King George VI (Queen Elizabeth was dryly amused) and never forgot to remind all around him about his close royal ties. Long ago Churchill had acquiesced in his father’s humiliating removal from the Admiralty; now Churchill was his fervent supporter. Mountbatten, it seemed, had everything. He had the flair for self-promotion that a tired Britain responded to, just like Churchill’s favoured soldier, Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery. He had good looks, personal courage, charm and the self-possession of a very wealthy man. And he was part of the royal establishment at a time when that still mattered very much. No wonder so many well-placed people hated him with such cold and sparkling intensity.
Eventually the anti-Mountbatten camp came to include Churchill too. After the war, and Churchill’s defeat in the 1945 general election, the new Labour prime minister Clement Attlee asked Mountbatten to become the last Viceroy of India and finish the independence negotiations with India and Pakistan. He did so, working to a very tight timetable and with energetic ruthlessness. He and his lively wife Edwina enjoyed the grand style of the final days of the Indian Empire. Their vice-regal house put Buckingham Palace to shame; their daughter compared it to the greatest palaces of the Russian Tsar, which ‘Dickie’ also knew. Beyond the busy but civilized withdrawal of the senior echelons of the Raj, a ragged dissolution began across the subcontinent. Mountbatten worked hard for a total of 125 days to end Britain’s Indian Empire, taking brutal decisions fast, a man doing a job to a timetable set in London. Nobody had fought for the Empire harder or had loved it more than Churchill, who now regarded his former protégé as a traitor.
The partition resulted in terrible bloodshed, the worst slaughter and migration in the history of the subcontinent. This was not Mountbatten’s fault. He and Edwina did their best to organize help. Yet at some level Britain no longer seemed to care about the agonies of its former colonized people. Mountbatten returned to the navy and continued to prosper until becoming Admiral of the Fleet, Chief of the Defence Staff and at last, in 1955, First Sea Lord – the job his father had been forced from forty-one years before. That final great promotion was with the reluctant agreement of the elderly prime minister, Winston Churchill. Revenge rarely comes sweeter. ‘Thrill to sit under Papa’s picture,’ wrote Mountbatten in his diary on his first day as he moved back to his father’s old office.
Mountbatten was a huge influence on the Windsors during the earlier part of the Queen’s reign – if not so directly on her, then on her husband and her son. First and most obviously, he acted as a kind of semi-guardian to Prince Philip from early 1930 onwards. In its most melodramatic version the story has Mountbatten shaping Philip in his own image, intriguing to marry him off to Princess Elizabeth and then exulting in a family triumph when she became Queen. This is greatly overcooked. It is true that Mountbatten urged Philip to follow a naval career. It is also true that Mountbatten was as keen a dynastic matchmaker as any old lady in a Polish shtetl. At one point he tried to interest Prince Ch
arles in one of his granddaughters. In Prince Philip’s case, he worked hard and successfully to achieve his naturalization as a British citizen rather than a Greek one. It seemed a difficult business, finally achieved in February 1947, when Philip also took his mother’s anglicized name, Mountbatten, rather than what would have been his paternal family name, the Danish one of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glucksburg. This made it much easier for him to marry. Finally, it is true that after the marriage, Mountbatten campaigned long, hard and unsuccessfully for the replacement of ‘Windsor’ as the dynastic name, with Mountbatten-Windsor. In this, he had the support of Philip, who, as we shall see, bitterly objected to not being able to pass his name on to his children.
But the Duke of Edinburgh has repeatedly made it clear that he thinks Mountbatten overstated his involvement in his upbringing, complaining that his own father and mother were being written out of the picture, and that he had spent more time staying with his grandmother and other relatives. One gets the impression that he resented ‘Uncle Dickie’ overplaying his hand. It was he, not his uncle, who decided he should marry the future Queen. Philip wrote a terse letter to Mountbatten at the time they were wooing, effectively, if humorously, warning him off: ‘I am not being rude, but it is apparent that you like being General Manager of this little show, and I am rather afraid she might not take to the idea quite as docilely as I do . . .’26 Much later, Mountbatten would develop a closer relationship with Philip’s first son, Prince Charles. By then, he had long been a special intimate of the inner royal family, included in holidays and private visits, his self-serving and oft-repeated stories listened to with tolerant amusement, and his vast range of connections admired. Yet for all the affection and warmth there was something held back, at least by the older Royals.