The Diamond Queen

by Andrew Marr

  Further afield, public holidays had been declared across the Commonwealth, with yet more fêtes, parades and parties. South Africa had grand military parades and schoolchildren around the world had been given the day off. For people outside Britain, and indeed across much of the country itself, the only way to follow the day’s events was by radio. In South Africa, 69 per cent of the English-speaking population was estimated to have listened in. Later, when television films had been flown in, Germans, French, Italians and many more would queue to watch the ceremony. In the United States, 85 million watched the rival NBC or CBS programmes. For most people in Britain too, this was the television Coronation. The collective memory is of people huddled round a small, rented set in someone else’s house or in the pub. The statistics back it up. Surveys suggested that 53 per cent of the adult population, some 19 million people, watched the BBC’s Coronation Special and of those the biggest proportion, 10.4 million, watched in friends’ houses while 7.8 million had rented or bought a set to view in their own home. A further 1.5 million watched in public places, such as cinemas, town halls and pubs.

  Afterwards a remarkable 98 per cent of those polled declared themselves ‘completely satisfied’ with the coverage, a proportion the BBC has not always achieved since. At the start of the 1950s most British people had never seen a television set. TV was not available in northern and central England or much of Scotland. Within five years of the Coronation, TV ownership had risen sixfold and the country’s entertainment habits were being overturned. Historians often credit the change simply to the Coronation. This is self-evident nonsense. While it is true that the BBC’s coverage of the Coronation propelled huge numbers of people to hire television sets, many of whom then bought them, nothing short of a totalitarian invasion or the plague could have halted the spread of the new medium. Still, it would be as important a symbolic moment in the growing of age of television as the General Strike of 1926 had been in the acknowledgement of radio’s power.

  On the day itself the coverage focused on the details of the Queen’s silken dress, her serious demeanour and the intricate choreography of the ancient ceremony, which goes back to at least 973 when King Edgar was crowned at Bath, as recorded in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. The presentation by the Archbishop of ‘Queen Elizabeth your undoubted Queen’ and the answering aristocratic cries of ‘Vivat!’ were perhaps the most dramatic moments. For the Queen nothing mattered more than the religious and spiritual heart of the ceremony, still vivid in her mind as an observer from 1937. Devout, she would not have dissented from Archbishop of Canterbury Geoffrey Fisher’s words in sermons before the Coronation, that she was ‘God-called’ to exert a spiritual power, leading her subjects by her personal example.

  The words he used about her giving herself as a sacrifice echo those she had broadcast from South Africa on her twenty-first birthday. The Coronation was a ceremony intended to awe and even to intimidate; and not only those watching, but its subject also. At its heart was not the procession, or even the firm thrusting of the heavy seven-pound crown onto her head, but the private moment when under a canopy Fisher anointed her with holy oil: ‘as Solomon was anointed King by Zadok the Priest and Nathan the Prophet, so be thou anointed, blessed and consecrated Queen over the Peoples, whom the Lord thy God hath given thee . . .’ This ancient tradition of anointing goes right back to biblical times, though by 1953 no other monarch in the world experienced it.

  For Fisher, the service was meant to demonstrate too that the Queen would exemplify domestic duty and fidelity and a united family home. (He had perhaps not studied the alleged origins of the ceremony, for King Edgar the Peaceable had been a notoriously libertine ruler, peaceful neither on the battlefield nor in the bed-chamber.) His argument rang out resonantly through 1950s Britain. Family was at the heart of the monarchical project: the royal family, then the British family, itself composed of traditional families, clustering round that family; then a further family of nations around that. Watching the Queen in the Abbey were young Prince Charles in a silk suit: the three-year-old Princess Anne, rather cross, had been judged too young to come and left at Buckingham Palace. Prince Philip, in full naval rig, would be the first to pledge his allegiance to her, kissing her on the left cheek and promising to become ‘your liege-man of life and limb and of earthly worship; and faith and truth I will bear unto you, to live and die, against all manner of folks’ – a sonorous promise he has stuck to. Later the ‘family’ metaphor for royalty, which seemed so obvious and strong that day, would be brutally challenged. But whoever’s fault all this was, it was not hers. The Queen would do her lifelong best to live up to the Archbishop’s uncompromising words.

  In the immediate aftermath of the Coronation, a time of parades, services of thanksgiving, a full-scale naval review at Spithead (there was even a Soviet ship) and Trooping the Colour, writers competed to find profound meaning in the ceremony.14 The editorial in a highbrow magazine of the day, Time and Tide, on 13 June exemplified the mood. The popular historian C. V. Wedgwood declared that no Queen or sovereign ‘was ever crowned more fully in the presence of the people’, which was factually accurate. The magazine’s editorial assertion that ‘Britain has regained in the past few days that spiritual and moral ascendancy in the world which was hers in 1940’ was certainly not. In the same magazine Robert L. Green, writing ‘As an American’, reassured readers that for Britain, ‘the years of dullness and cold caused by war and recovery were forgotten’. There was much in the same vein, and few sour notes anywhere to the right of the Communist Party.

  The diarist in the New Statesman thought the Coronation would have increased the number of people who felt ‘the whole thing is out of date, antiquated stuff . . . Working-class Britain was simply forgotten.’ Its formidable editor, Kingsley Martin, did not agree. He thought Labour’s traditional hostility to the monarchy had been silenced by the correct constitutional behaviour of George V and George VI and that the Queen was safely outside politics: ‘The first rule for all monarchs who wish to preserve their crowns in a democracy is that they should unreservedly accept the advice of the Prime Ministers and never under any circumstances become involved in party politics.’ The Queen is not an avid reader of the New Statesman but she followed the Editor Martin doctrine as closely as the Archbishop Fisher one. Martin went on to make one of the most thoughtful assessments of the value of monarchy to a democracy, which deserves to be quoted more often: ‘Constitutional monarchy is a subtle device which enables us, anthropologically speaking, both to adore and kill our Kings; by dividing supreme authority into two, we can lavish adulation upon the Crown and kick out the government when we choose.’15 And so, since 1953, we have.

  The Old Elephants and the Young Queen

  The monarch’s most important political job is to appoint a new prime minister if the incumbent should resign or die while in office. This was particularly uncomfortable during the early years of the Queen’s reign because of the Conservative habit of not electing a new leader but allowing one to ‘emerge’. In June 1953 Churchill, still frustrating his colleagues by his unwillingness to retire, suffered what seemed a devastating stroke. He was quietly hustled out of Downing Street to Chartwell, his home in Kent, to recuperate, though with little hope for a full recovery. During that summer an establishment news blackout, agreed by press tycoons strolling on the Chartwell lawn, meant that most British people had no idea that their prime minister was incapacitated. The Queen knew more than her subjects, though she wrote him a handwritten letter to say she hoped his stroke was ‘not too serious and that you will be quite recovered in a very short time’. It was serious; but, by an extraordinary act of will, Churchill did recover enough to carry on, monitoring his ability to feel his own stubble, to tie his bow tie, and so on, until he was able to accept an invitation from the Queen to go to the St Leger at Doncaster races and to Balmoral. At both places, large crowds gathered to cheer – whether more for the Queen or for Churchill it was hard to tell. He was able to speak to the Tory
conference in Margate that October and did not finally stand down as prime minister until April 1955.

  For understandable reasons, including pride and worry about his successor, Churchill was in danger of entangling the new Queen in a political crisis. During the quiet, slow summer of his illness, in August 1953, Macmillan had realized Churchill would use the excuse of the post-Coronation tour to delay again. Though the Queen could dissolve Parliament by telegram, if there was a deadlock in the Conservative Party about his successor she would not be able to intervene, Macmillan noted, ‘in one of those rare crises where the Crown still has a role to play’.16 Senior Tories were alarmed enough to debate whether four of five of them should go to the Queen in a group and ask her to put pressure on Churchill. Lord Moran, Churchill’s devoted doctor, thought ‘there is only one person . . . who can get him to do this and it is the Queen’. Lascelles was consulted but reckoned it would not work: ‘If she said her part, he would say charmingly, “It’s very good of you, Ma’am, to think of it” – and then he would very politely brush it aside . . . The King might have done it . . . but he is gone.’17

  The Queen would have been put in a horrible position had she been asked, in effect, to terminate the career of the country’s greatest war leader. He was the most senior of what we might call her elephant-premiers – the grand old men with wartime experience, who felt a fatherly relationship towards the young Queen, though without always treating her well. Churchill, Eden and Macmillan come into this category (Alec Douglas-Home had a different relationship) and the real break did not come for another decade, with Harold Wilson in 1964. It would have been better for the country had Churchill retired a couple of years earlier. He was no longer up to it and Eden would have been more seasoned in office. But it was unreasonable to have expected the Queen to fix this so early in her reign. Mind you, one can never be sure how she would have reacted if asked. Later, when someone remarked to her how marvellous it must have been to have Sir Winston as her first prime minister, she replied: ‘Not at all. I found him most obstinate.’

  In any event, she put no pressure on Churchill. His audiences with her, for which he dressed up in morning coat and top hat, grew longer and longer. He said they mostly talked about racing and polo and expressed anger at anything touching the Queen’s status. A Daily Mirror headline in November 1953 asking ‘Why Not Open the Palace to the People?’ aroused his particular fury. The previous February Lord Moran had recorded an interesting conversation during which he complained to Churchill about the possible abolition of the upper chamber and got little sympathy from the prime minister: ‘The House of Lords means nothing to him. The history of England, its romance and changing fortunes, is for Winston embodied in the Royal House. He looked at a new photograph of the Queen. She was in white, with long white gloves, smiling and radiant. “Lovely,” he murmured, “She’s a pet. I fear they may ask her to do too much. She’s doing so well.” ’18 Churchill was entranced and doubly pleased to be made a Knight of the Garter by her in June 1954.

  This enchantment with the Queen did not extend to her husband. It may well have been worsened by an old man’s jealous crush, but Churchill was already hostile to Prince Philip’s family. He blamed Lord Mountbatten personally for the loss of British India, a ludicrous charge, reminding us that Churchill’s sense of history had largish blind spots. He thought Mountbatten was in general rather to the left in politics, which was not a ludicrous charge. According to his doctor, Churchill said he did not like or trust Prince Philip, and just hoped he would do the country no harm. This mistrust crystallized in Churchill strongly opposing Philip on the sensitive question of the family name.

  The problem went back to the terms of George V’s creation of the Windsor dynasty. In 1917 he had simply not thought through the possibility of the Crown passing to another Queen and her children and, therefore, the fate of the new Windsor surname. Before the start of the Queen’s reign, legal advice had been that, as with any family, the children would take their father’s surname. Prince Philip was not particularly hung up on the name Mountbatten, itself a modern invention, and suggested Edinburgh, or even Edinburgh-Windsor, as possibilities. But he wanted to be recognized for himself. At a dinner party in his home Broadlands on the eve of George VI’s funeral, Lord Mountbatten then stirred things up. He boasted that ‘the House of Mountbatten’ now reigned. This was heard by that ardent royal traditionalist, Prince August of Hanover, who passed it back to George V’s widow, Queen Mary. She was outraged and protested to the prime minister. Churchill immediately took her side.

  After the cabinet meeting of 6 March 1952, which discussed the issue, Harold Macmillan noted that, ‘poor Churchill, who wants to adopt a paternal and fatherly attitude to the Queen, was clearly much distressed himself, and a little alarmed for the future’.19 Macmillan thought Queen Mary was behind it all, favouring Windsor ‘and all the emphasis on the truly British and native character of the Royal Family. It is also clear that the Duke has the normal attitude of many men towards a mother-in-law of strong character, accentuated by the peculiar circumstances of his position . . . It is more than likely that he has been told that we are suspicious of him on political grounds.’ They were. Underneath the apparently banal question of the royal name were deeper currents. Tory ministers feared that Philip and his uncle Mountbatten hoped to mount a gentle constitutional coup, influencing the Queen towards some kind of joint – and more leftish – monarchy. There was no evidence for that, but Philip was certainly seen after the war as more open to Labour than the traditional royals. By 3 April Churchill was reporting back that the Queen had accepted that her children would be Windsor. Her private secretary Lascelles described standing over her like one of the barons at Runnymede. Nastily, Macmillan wrote in his diary that although ‘this has been a painful episode . . . it is a very good thing that the influence of the Consort and his family should have had an early rebuff’.

  It was unfortunate that the cabal of men in charge paid so little heed to Prince Philip’s feelings and the hurt seems to have rankled for a long time. The Queen is said to have been hurt too, and it caused trouble because Philip’s very identity in his new family was being questioned. He famously complained that he felt ‘like a bloody amoeba’. The Queen may have felt she had no option but to side with her father’s memory and her ministers’ views against her husband, but it was a badly handled episode. She later tried to make it up to him, provoking another cabinet debate in February 1955 as to whether he could be called ‘Prince of the Commonwealth’ – but Canada and South Africa were not keen. Scottish members of the cabinet likewise vetoed Churchill’s notion of ‘Prince of England’. Macmillan noted that the Queen ‘still hankers after some distinctive title for the Duke of Edinburgh’ but it was reckoned that simply calling him ‘the Prince’ was ‘too Machiavelli’.

  There the matter rested, not happily. The Queen continued to treat Churchill with deference. When he finally left office, she and the Duke of Edinburgh joined him for a farewell dinner party at Number Ten, an honour not repeated until Wilson left office in 1976. Later, as reports came in of his failing health, she was initiating the idea that when he died he should lie in state in Westminster Hall. He would be the unique commoner, in death as in life.

  It was a rough time for Prince Philip generally. The Queen had wanted him to take over from her as Colonel of the Grenadier Guards, a role she had had since her teenage years and one she particularly valued. A particularly savage lieutenant colonel led a revolt against having ‘some bloody Greek’ and Prince Philip quietly retreated, hurt, and became Colonel of the Welsh Guards instead. When his son grew to the age when as Prince of Wales that job was appropriate for him, it was suggested that Philip go to the Grenadiers after all. A lesser man might have told them where to stick their bearskins. Prince Philip accepted, becoming a very engaged and committed figurehead for the Grenadiers, and remains so today. Though, as we shall see, the family name continued to cause arguments, perhaps the final say about Prince P
hilip’s status did not come until 2011 when, aged ninety, he was made Lord High Admiral, a title the Queen herself had carried till then.

  The cabinet continued to spend what seems an inordinate amount of time discussing minor royal questions. Pursuing a property claim, Prince Ernst of Hanover, who had been on the German side in the war, tried to claim British citizenship through an Act of 1705. For obscure reasons the cabinet was told this would have had the effect of stripping the Mountbattens of their legal status. Macmillan recorded that as to Mountbatten himself this didn’t matter, since ‘Admirals of the Fleet, it seems, are bastards anyway’, while his brother Lord Milford Haven might lose his seat in the Lords, ‘but he was a bad lot, so nobody seemed to mind’.20 This gives something of the acrid establishment atmosphere of the time. One of the oddities from the Prince Ernst case was that it became clear that, by the same 1705 Act, Prince Philip had been legally British all along and Mountbatten’s campaign to naturalize him had been entirely unnecessary.