by Andrew Marr
Almost everyone who has studied the party breakdown has concluded that, despite the surprise of the newspapers and Eden’s own preference, Macmillan was the obvious choice. Butler had been an appeaser and in the mid-1950s that still mattered. More important, he was seen as indecisive, excessively wily and not entirely loyal over Suez. There were thought to be more Tories, both in Parliament and the country, dead against Butler than there were against Macmillan – who would indeed quickly bind the bleeding wounds and stage an impressive Conservative comeback. Salisbury came from a noble lineage and was great friends with the royal family; but he was hardly holding one of the primary offices of state and was no longer an elected politician. It was a rum and old-fashioned way of switching prime ministers and it would sow seeds of doubt in many people’s minds about how Britain was run.
Democracy and Big Mac
Some fifteen months earlier a dishevelled and rather brilliant journalist on the Spectator called Henry Fairlie had written a column about the well-connected traitors Burgess and Maclean in which he coined the term ‘the establishment’ to describe the social exercise of power in England. What had happened over the Tory succession suggested that a magic circle of grandees was indeed still shuffling society’s cards and pulling Westminster’s strings. It was a compelling idea, but by then already out of date and only partially true. Debs were still presented at court. At Ascot and royal garden parties, the top hats, tails and uniforms were as ubiquitous as ever. As the 1950s waned a startling number of the cabinet were inter-related Old Etonians. Macmillan and aristocratic friends went shooting at Balmoral and Sandringham and the prime minister was mildly surprised at a flurry of media hostility when the Queen proposed to go tiger-shooting on a visit to India. In the City, bowler hats and rolled umbrellas remained ‘the thing’ and Whitehall followed a near-military system of ranking and caste. The only long-haired people at the BBC were female typists. Yet the establishment’s instincts and solidarity were coming apart – not that they had been quite that strong anyway. Even apparently tight social circles and families fell out, as they have always done. Salisbury himself had been among the old-school aristocrats who were most suspicious of Prince Philip.
Now he intervened in another highly sensitive Windsor dilemma. The trouble had begun on the day of the Coronation when journalists, already in the know, had noticed a gently intimate stroking by Princess Margaret of Group Captain Peter Townsend’s lapel. Discretion still held, just about, in the British press; but in New York the story about a possible further marriage, this time of the Queen’s sister, was swiftly published. It was followed, twelve days after the Coronation, by a British Sunday paper, the raucous People. This hypocritically told the story only to denounce it as obviously untrue, since ‘it is quite unthinkable that a royal princess, third in line of succession to the throne, should even contemplate marriage with a man who has been through the divorce courts’. Mischievous though it was, the newspaper had put its inky finger on a real problem. Divorce was a serious social and moral stigma. Under the archaic Royal Marriages Act, until the summer of 1955, when she would be twenty-five, Princess Margaret needed her sister’s permission to get married: a full two years away. The Queen, observing constitutional propriety, would in turn need the assent of her government. What would she do? What would it do?
Townsend, a decorated RAF war hero who had arrived at Buckingham Palace as equerry to the King in 1944, had had an unhappy wartime marriage, which had recently ended in divorce. He had been spotted by the young Margaret during the South African trip of 1947 and, though he was nearly sixteen years older than the Princess, they had fallen in love soon afterwards. He had declared his love at the beginning of Coronation year and informed the Queen’s private secretary, still at this point ‘Tommy’ Lascelles. A horrified Lascelles barked at Townsend that he was either bad or mad. Churchill agreed, and Townsend was rather brutally sent off to an RAF desk job in Belgium to get him out of the way of the vivacious and determined princess. There he bided his time, assuming that once the deadline passed and Margaret was twenty-five he would be free to marry her. Then in October 1955, Salisbury, a leading High Anglican, told his cabinet colleagues that he could not accept that the Queen’s sister could ever marry a divorced man – despite the fact that Townsend had been the innocent party in his divorce. Since the cabinet had to approve the marriage and would have been riven had Salisbury made a public issue of this, and resigned, the peer had effectively destroyed Princess Margaret’s hopes.
Old ways or new? Love or religion? The press was now divided, with the more popular papers, and those on the left, backing the Princess’s right to marry. Eden had broken the news to her that, if she went ahead, she would lose her position in the line of succession and her expanded Civil List allowance. She would have to live abroad. The story, having been ignited by a popular newspaper, was now concluded by the highbrow Times, which argued in its editorial for 24 October that the Queen was society’s ‘universal representative in whom her people see their better selves ideally reflected; and since part of their ideal is family life, the Queen’s family has its own part in the reflection’. The proposed marriage would make it inevitable ‘that this reflection becomes distorted’. Princess Margaret finally bowed to the pressure and announced that she had decided not to marry Townsend, ‘mindful of the Church’s teaching that Christian marriage is indissoluble, and conscious of my duty to the Commonwealth . . .’ It seems to have been a devastating blow to her. She told friends later that she particularly blamed Lascelles and Churchill for what she had been put through and never completely recovered her balance. Of course, no one can ever know how a marriage that did not happen might have worked out, but this was a warthog-like assertion of the rule book which seems cruel and faintly silly.
What did the Queen do? Earlier biographers who knew those involved believe she stood aside from her sister’s dilemma, refusing to discuss it and deliberately avoiding taking a position. From a modern perspective this might seem odd. After all, Townsend knew the Queen and Prince Philip. They seem to have liked him, and wished both him and Princess Margaret well. Should she not have been assertive in her sister’s cause? The answer is surely that she decided to think as Queen first and sister second. Only two years before, in her Coronation Oath, she had promised the church and the world that she would uphold the highest values of Christian family life. She meant it. She could not ignore her bishops or ministers. She was pulled by natural affection. But she was also tugged by duty, and time and again in her life it has been duty whose pull proved strongest. Thankfully the Townsend episode would not be repeated. Attitudes were changing and divorce slowly became more socially acceptable. But this was an ominous early signal of the problems ahead for the ‘ideal family’ version of modern monarchy. Real families are untidy. Emotions cannot always be conveniently bottled up. Press prurience rarely helps.
For the press was sick of the old habits of discretion, firmed up by wartime patriotism as well as censorship, and now coming loose. The Margaret affair was an early clang of the warning bell. Prince Philip’s decision to tour a swathe of the Commonwealth without his wife in Britannia for six months during the winter of 1956–7 prompted newspaper speculation about the state of the Queen’s marriage, leading to an official statement from the Palace: ‘It is quite untrue that there is any rift between the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh.’ Well-meant but ham-fisted, the statement only inflamed the story. In this period too, Prince Philip became infuriated by the press coverage, complaining bitterly to friends about it and sounding increasingly cynical about journalism. An outward-going, optimistic man, keen to explain himself, would begin to turn into a more suspicious one who went about expecting to be misunderstood. This was a bad loss for the British monarchy but there was probably no help for it. The press was not going to defer or self-censor for long. Papers were fighting cut-throat battles for a large and lucrative market, increasingly worried about television swiping their profits, and in no mood to hold back o
n good stories.
In any event, it was unwise to build the institution on the implied promise that Royals would never again misbehave or love unwisely. The ‘family monarchy’ of George V and George VI, following the uxorious Victoria, was not the whole story of kings and queens in Britain or anywhere else; historians have always plundered royalty for its scandals. So should the Queen, perhaps, have used her popularity during this period to reconsider family values and personal morality as the central building block of modern monarchy? Easy to say. But what would she have put in its place? And how could she have advanced some new idea? This was a time, after all, when she was a happy and contented mother and wife herself, deferring happily to Prince Philip in domestic matters. After the Townsend episode there seemed to be no family problems ahead. These were years of innocence.
Not in politics, however: there are no innocent years there. As a fierce imperialist, Salisbury would fall out with Macmillan over decolonization and emerge as the first president of the right-wing Monday Club. Indeed, by that Easter Salisbury had resigned over Cyprus, believing Macmillan had not been tough enough with the rebel leader, Archbishop Makarios, and leading Macmillan to reflect that throughout history ‘the Cecils, when any friend or colleague has been in real trouble, have stabbed him in the back’. When the Macmillans went to Balmoral for their first August visit, perhaps tactlessly, Salisbury was among the party. It did not, seemingly, go smoothly, with Macmillan tending to lecture the Queen and being unimpressed by Prince Philip: ‘He is against us being a nuclear power. I don’t altogether like the tone of his talk. It is too like that of a clever undergraduate, who has just discovered Socialism.’ This was an absurd judgement on Macmillan’s part: the grand premier had clearly had his tweeds ruffled by Prince Philip, who though studiously non-party, always sounded more like a radical of the free market, pro-business right, than of the left.
Macmillan went on to become a pivotal prime minister in the Queen’s reign, in that, after the ups and downs of the Churchill and Eden administrations, she had time to develop a longer and somewhat more equal relationship with him. He was in a sense her first ‘normal’ prime minister. As foreign secretary in 1955 he had been impressed, and somewhat chastened, to discover how hard she worked to understand political issues, in this case over Iraq: ‘I did my best to explain the position to her, without boring her. She showed (as her father used to) an uncanny knowledge of details and personalities. She must read the telegrams very carefully.’ There were signs that he bored her from time to time – once, when gloomily mentioning his possible resignation, he was rather hurt at her ‘lack of consternation’ – but in general, whatever her private feelings, the relationship seemed to blossom. He sent her long despatches and often referred to her close reading of papers and sympathetic understanding of his problems. Adeane encouraged him to stay for a drink after his weekly audience, and Macmillan did his best to please her in small ways, trying, as we have seen, to help in the vexed question of Prince Philip’s title and the family surname.
Abroad, ‘the winds of change’ swept through much of Britain’s African territory although the country still aspired to global reach with her newly purchased nuclear weaponry and initially stood proudly aloof from the experimental European Economic Community. From 1959 as Secretary for the Colonies, Iain Macleod was charged with what was, in effect, a fire sale of the remaining parts of the British Empire. On this issue the Queen now began to assert herself directly, showing a new steeliness during a row in 1961 over whether or not she should go ahead with a visit to Ghana. In 1957 Ghana had been the first black Commonwealth country to win independence, under Kwame Nkrumah, closely followed by Nigeria. The visit had already been delayed, because of the Queen’s third pregnancy, greatly to Nkrumah’s personal distress. By now, however, he had established a personal, anti-democratic and indeed dictatorial rule in what had become a republic. This led to deep questions about the purpose of the Commonwealth. Ought it to be an organization of democratic nations under the Queen, or was it a family which continued to embrace its members, more or less however they behaved? Apartheid South Africa, disliking Macmillan’s decolonization policy, declared itself a republic and left the Commonwealth in 1961, but some of the same issues, of human rights and democracy, applied to black nations too. Many British politicians, putting democracy before the brotherhood of the Commonwealth, wanted the Queen to cancel. Macmillan worried that if the matter came up in the Commons he might be defeated.
The Queen was determined to go. According to Macmillan she told him she ‘means to be a Queen and not a puppet’ and, if ordered not to do what she thought was her duty, ‘did not know how she could carry on’. The biographer Lady Longford records the Queen arguing that cancelling might push Ghana towards the Soviet Union: ‘How silly should I look, if I was scared to visit Ghana and then Khrushchev went and had a good reception?’26 In the run-up to her visit Nkrumah had organized a round-up of dissidents, after which a terrorist bomb went off in the capital Accra, blowing both legs off his statue, so apart from the political dilemma there was a clear risk to the Queen’s safety. She did go, made a speech stating that the Commonwealth family could include a wide amount of disagreement, danced with Nkrumah and was hailed locally as ‘the greatest socialist monarch in the world’. At the banquet many of the seats were unfilled, having been prepared for opposition leaders now in jail.
Though the Queen had demonstrated her cool unconcern for her own safety – a trait repeated later – and gritty determination that the Commonwealth should come first, she had not resolved the central dilemma. Or rather she had done so in a way that has often seemed very unsatisfactory since. ‘Family’ was to be treated with kid gloves, at the national as at the personal level. The Commonwealth, an organization of high ideals, pragmatically accepted some brutal and undemocratic regimes rather than lose members. The excuse that it was better to stay close and try to influence them is what parents say about off-the-rails teenagers. But what is tough love, and what is merely fluffy appeasement? Macmillan’s withdrawal from empire, essential as it was, would involve the Queen in more morally difficult choices as she worked hard to create a real role as head of a fractious Commonwealth – some of whose members were now looking more to communist Moscow than to monarchical London.
Macmillan’s great trick was to keep a good front, while paddling desperately below the water as he tried to adapt to radically different circumstances. This impersonator of an unflappable toff must in private have brought his Queen much bad and dramatic news, even without ‘the winds of change’. There were the embarrassing deals that needed to be done with the United States to maintain a British nuclear capacity that worked; the loss of South Africa from the Commonwealth; the terrifying stand-offs between the US and the USSR; the startling decline of British manufacturing and recurrent problems with trade balances and inflation; the consequent plea for membership of the Common Market and President de Gaulle’s humiliating ‘non’; the sexual and spying scandals at home. For the Queen, all this must have added up to one of the hardest periods of adaptation of her reign. That frothy post-Coronation enthusiasm for a new Elizabethan Age was crashing like spume against a comfortless, rocky shore.
To safely sustain the monarchy the Queen would have to change it. She was greatly helped by Prince Philip, who, after the outside attacks on the stuffiness of the monarchy by Lord Altrincham and Malcolm Muggeridge, seems to have been emboldened in his reformist ideas. He was enthusiastic about opening up the Palace for lunch and supper parties, which allowed the Queen to meet a wider range of people. Characteristic guest lists from 1957 included the pianist Myra Hess, the Labour MP (and future prime minister) Jim Callaghan, the runner Chris Brasher, the Ealing film-producer Michael Balcon, the editor of The Economist, Donald Tyerman, the poet John Betjeman and the actress Joyce Grenfell. If these were modest steps towards a more informed and informal style, they seemed radical to those used to her father’s court. Then the Queen, on her own initiative, finally abolis
hed the aristocratic flummery of the Season. The presentation of debutantes at Buckingham Palace, waiting on gilt chairs in their white silk dresses until summoned by the Lord Chamberlain to curtsey to the Queen, sitting on her throne below a red canopy, had continued until 1958. In that year, 1,400 girls were paraded over three days until the Queen ended the practice. What made the presentations a target for reform, rather than some of the other old customs of monarchy? Partly, it was that the bloodstock market aspect of it was embarrassingly class-conscious. Partly, it had become a subject for jokes: in the tart words of the Queen’s tart sister, ‘every tart in London was getting in’.
A more significant reform for most people was the Queen’s reluctant agreement to appear regularly once a year on television. Prince Philip backed a long-time ambition of the BBC by persuading his wife to give her traditional Christmas Day broadcast in vision rather than by radio. It was a gamble. The radio microphone had been an instrument of torture for her father, while the Queen felt uncomfortable talking to a camera. She lacks the glib actorly touch that an autocue requires. Yet the gamble paid off, with nearly half the entire population watching the message by the early 1960s. The Christmas messages became an important way for the Queen to communicate directly and although most of what she said was unsurprising, gently optimistic and routine, she worked hard with Prince Philip on the tone, and often made headlines. Even when she did not, millions found the address becoming a ritual part of a British Christmas, even standing to attention in front of their television sets to watch it.
These were only modest reforms at a time when the country was changing very fast. Was the Queen let down by her advisers at the time? In criticizing the tweedy and unimaginative atmosphere of the old court, Altrincham and Muggeridge had had a point. It would be unreasonable to expect the Palace to be ahead of the times, but it had fallen a long way behind the changing atmosphere of the country, and, despite Prince Philip, would stay well behind. The key courtiers were by now old and very cautious, too distanced from the Queen’s generation, never mind younger ones. Her instinct usually was to wait for advice and consider it, rather than to initiate change herself. Nor were the politicians of the time any help. The Queen was moving into a country where the ghosts of George V and George VI were no longer sufficient guides. Nor were the cabinet ministers. Macmillan needed her as part of his controversial balancing act and enjoyed playing the elderly uncle; but she would need to move beyond him, too.