by Anne Edwards
“I came away with the impression that she was amusing and witty (the light metre being placed near her was ‘like having your pulse taken— This is my best side—the difference is astonishing’—and laughter about raising the head in order to shorten the effect of the nose).... She had been up till 5:30 the night before (she likes the peace and anonymity of the 400 Club) and towards the end of the 2 hour sitting started to wilt [and] said no she couldn’t raise an elbow—it was an impossibility—[but she] did the whole performance with a good deal of grace.”
In a subsequent sitting, Beaton suggested she wear a gown that Sharman Douglas had said was most flattering. When she appeared in the dress, Beaton simply nodded. “Oh, yes, Ma’am! That will be very good for a head [shot].”
“That,” Margaret later told Beaton, “was snubs to me, snubs to [Sharman Douglas] and snubs to my dressmaker [Molyneaux].”
With her new friends and busy life Margaret should have been enjoying the best of times. “One always felt the tremendous nervous energy, the daring nature and cleverness was a kind of shield,” a friend observed. “That quizzical look in her eyes really reflected an inner confusion, a plea for better answers. I don’t believe she envied her sister. Yet, she did so long for a purpose to her life. Marriage and children did appeal to her—but it seemed she wanted more. What that might be I don’t think even she had the foggiest.”
Lilibet’s State Visit to Paris in May 1948, when she had been received with all the pomp and ceremony of a future Monarch by France’s President M. Vincent Auriol, had greatly increased her awareness of her own position. Members of her Household were quick to note “a queenly attitude. Even Prince Philip seemed to be more deferential.” By Christmas, 1949, she knew—as did the Queen, Margaret, Lascelles, the Prime Minister and Churchill—that the King had a life expectancy of less than five years. Not only was he suffering from arteriosclerosis, he had cirrhosis of the liver and an undiagnosed lung ailment.
Yet it appears that while others were told of the gravity of his condition, the King was not. And although the doctors advised him to rest more, he was determined to carry on as he always had done. The pain, stress and disappointments this caused led to frequent bouts of depression, eased in some measure by the good counsel of the Queen; for the King was not a man who normally confided his most personal feelings to either friend or clergy. Lilibet had been his ally, the only one he deemed would understand the tensions of his position. Much had passed unspoken between them that he seemed to accept as conveyed. He feared infirmity more than death and was deeply concerned that Lilibet, in either case, would have such grave responsibilities at so young an age. Although he spoke to her on the telephone every morning and she visited him almost daily, her marriage had left a void in his life.
Clarence House was finally ready for occupancy in July 1949. Charles was eight months old and in the care of two Scottish nurses, Mrs. Helen Lightbody and Miss Mabel Anderson, their “empire ... the pale blue nursery whose glass-fronted cabinets displayed toys museum-style—reminiscent of 145 Piccadilly.” Lilibet had breast-fed her son for the first three months. After that she saw less of him than her parents had of her as an infant. Her inescapable official engagements, accelerated because of the King’s inability to exhibit a high profile, were partly responsible. The basic nature of her husband was also contributory.
The King had been a hands-on father who enjoyed the company of his children and was not intimidated by the female hierarchy of the nursery. Philip was uncomfortable in that atmosphere. And while he looked forward to having a son to relate to on a sports and masculine level, a baby—even his own—did not interest him.
The reality of marriage to Britain’s Heir to the Throne was quite disparate from Philip’s prenuptial projection and this created some early disharmony in the marriage. Robert Lacey, in Majesty, cites as a possible cause the “ceremonial existence one footstep behind his wife ... the exact opposite of everything life had been preparing him for.” Philip was arrogant, “prickly ... staff at all levels found him difficult to deal with.”
He and Lilibet slept in separate bedrooms divided by their individual dressing rooms and adjoining baths. Her imposing and elaborately draped double bed “featured a crown suspended from the hangings.” Her private sitting room, which led off her bedroom, was decorated in a bright hollyhock chintz, rose cushions, and pastel Chinese patterned carpet. Philip’s apartments, which included a small paneled study (with a built-in refrigerator for ice and cold drinks), were quite nautical, almost ship-like, with pictures of ships on which he had served adorning the walls. The corgis slept in the corridor directly outside Lilibet’s bedroom door, and in the morning a terrible racket arose until Pearce, the footman, came to walk them.
Bobo helped her mistress dress for the day while John Dean assisted Philip. The door was usually left ajar between the two dressing rooms so that their occupants could converse. Conditions for the staff were much improved at Clarence House. Lilibet was a considerate mistress of her Household. But still the turnover in staff (eighteen at most times) was enormous, due mostly to the long hours and low pay of Royal service.
His desk job at the Admiralty had been a great disappointment to Philip. His one great ambition was to command his own ship, a desire he conveyed many times to both Mountbatten and Alan Lascelles. Finally, in September, he was transferred to the Royal Navy College at Greenwich just outside London to take a six-week staff course to help prepare him for this eventuality. The Naval examiner failed him at the end in his Torpedo and Anti-Submarine papers. Admiral Sir Arthur John Power summoned Philip’s friend and Equerry, Lieutenant Michael Parker, to his office and suggested that the grade might be overruled and Lieutenant Mountbatten passed. When Parker informed him of this, Philip insisted on sitting the exams again. This time he passed and took up a posting in Malta as First Lieutenant and second-in-command of HMS Chequers. Lord (Vice-Admiral) Mountbatten, his Indian idyll completed, was overseeing the Cruiser Squadron in the Mediterranean and was his commanding officer.
Just after Philip left for Malta in October, Lilibet joined her parents at Sandringham. She had been shocked to find her father looking terribly frail and disturbed to see him struggle so to pursue the outdoor activities he enjoyed. He was keener on duck shooting than any other shotgun sport, but it meant running the risk of taking a chill in the cold dampness of an autumn dawn. The doctors and the Queen pleaded with him not to go. Finally, they gave in and Lilibet, who had never joined her father in this sport before, accompanied him.
Wrapped warmly, a scarf about her head, Lilibet—with the King—left Sandringham in darkness and crossed over the small bridge to Franklin Pond. There, in the silence, she crouched beside her father, waiting with him for the first light of dawn. Shooting alone (his daughter carefully studying his form), the King brought down a total of forty ducks. Never again would he be able to go wildfowling, but the joy he displayed sharing this last experience with Lilibet seemed ample compensation.
The Edinburghs were reunited in Malta on November 20, 1949, the date of their second anniversary. Philip, with Mountbatten and the Governor, Sir Gerald Creasy, stood waiting in a brisk, cool breeze at the airfield when the sleek, silver Viking of the King’s Fleet arrived with his wife. They drove to the palatial white Villa Guardamangia, which overlooked the sea, where they would be the guests of the Mountbattens for the following five weeks. However, Philip reported for duty on the 1,710-ton destroyer Chequers (under Mountbatten’s command) two days later and commuted back and forth between his seven-by-nine-foot ship’s cabin and the grandeur of the Villa.
Despite a crowded official schedule that included calls on one Indian and two Pakistani destroyers, visits to local hospitals, a dedication of a war memorial, a State Review of the Fleet in the Grand Harbour and a ceremony on December 14 to celebrate the King’s birthday, Lilibet looked on their stay in Malta as a second honeymoon. The Mountbattens arranged a gala time with beach parties, club dances, gracious dinners and garden p
arties; and Malta’s picturesque old palaces, the narrow cobbled streets, the rich aquamarine blue of the surrounding waters of the island and the soft fall of the semi-tropical rains contributed to the romantic aura. Philip appeared happy and relaxed. He played polo (Mountbatten’s favorite sport) while Lilibet watched. She took pictures with her camera and bought presents from the local shops to send home like other tourists and Navy wives, and, although the Villa Guardamangia was vast, they shared a bedroom when Philip was off duty.
Lilibet glowed. Her staff believed she was a woman deeply in love and content in her life. Unlike her father, she wore the Royal mantle comfortably. At times she displayed a patronizing air. She was a perfectionist and expected the best from each member of her staff. And although she had promised to “obey” in her marriage service, she gave the distinct impression that she held a firm grasp on her Royal prerogative.
Nonetheless, at Malta’s Saddle Club Dance in mid-December, she was seen momentarily to place her gloved hand on Philip’s bare one and give it a loving squeeze; and, during a photographic session in the garden of the Villa Guardamangia, she exhibited great pride in the fact that he towered over her, and laughingly suggested that perhaps she should wear higher heels so that she could at least reach his shoulder.
A week before Christmas she sailed from Malta to Athens on the frigate Surpise, accompanied by two escort ships, Magpie (with Philip on duty) and Chieftain. The visit was supposed to be unofficial and a time for Lilibet to get better acquainted with Philip’s family—they were to be the guests of his cousins, King Paul and Queen Frederika. Cannons boomed as Surprise and her escorts entered Phaleron Bay and the streets of Athens were filled with cheering people as King Paul himself drove the visiting Royal couple in an open car to the summer palace at Tatoi.
This three-day excursion was the beginning of a new alliance for Lilibet with Philip’s family. Within the next year she would welcome all three of his sisters and her nephews and nieces at Clarence House for varying stays.
Chequers was detailed for patrol in the Red Sea at the end of December. Lilibet returned to Malta with Philip for Christmas, the first one that “us four” had not been together, and flew home two days later, spending a day at Clarence House with her new secretary, Major Martin Charteris, to go through the correspondence that had accumulated in her absence. On the thirty-first, she was driven down to Sandringham in time to celebrate the New Year with Charles and her family.
The first month of 1950, spent at Sandringham with their parents, was an important occasion for the sisters. Lilibet had just learned that she was to have a second child in August. They had much to talk about and they rode together, walked in the woods, went shopping in nearby King’s Lynn, played with Charles, and exchanged their private concerns about their father, Margaret’s romantic ambivalence and the problems of growing up Royal. They spent a great deal of time with their parents, suspecting this might be the last opportunity to recapture the life of their youth and the clannish security of their small family. Evenings were occupied playing charades or doing giant jigsaw puzzles before one of the great log-burning hearths at Sandringham.
The King’s affection for Sandringham went deep. “Dear old Sandringham,” his father, King George V, had called it, “the place I love better than anywhere else in the world.” His son had inherited the sentiment. “I want Lilibet & Philip to get to know it too as I have always been so happy here & I love the place,” he wrote to Queen Mary. And when Charles had been left in his and the Queen’s care while Lilibet joined Philip in Malta, he had written his daughter, “Charles is too sweet stumping around the room [learning how to walk] & we shall love having him at Sandringham. He is the fifth generation to live there & I hope he will get to love the place.”
The Edinburghs did not return to London until the first week in February. Lilibet had a great deal on her mind. Her father was failing badly. Would Philip have to give up his dream of commanding a ship to play the thankless role of Consort sooner than either of them had expected? How would she deal with his frustration? And most torturing—was she truly prepared for the task that lay before her?
She was reunited with Philip in Malta for a few days in April. When Chequers sailed for Alexandria, she flew home to await the birth of her second child. Margaret came by Clarence House more frequently than she had, and was herself marking time as she waited for real love to enter her life. Princess Anne [the name the King had wanted for his second daughter] Elizabeth Alice Louise was born at Clarence House on a sunny Tuesday morning, August 15, the same day Philip (although on leave from the Navy) was given his own ship, the frigate Magpie.
Four weeks later, and after a week of shooting with the King at Balmoral, Philip flew to Malta to take up his command and for the next six months Lilibet would commute back and forth between Malta and London, the Villa Guardamangia now leased in her name as the Mountbattens had returned home.
Coincidentally, on the same date as Princess Anne’s birth, Peter Townsend was appointed Deputy Master of the Household—“a position,” he noted, “while it tended to confirm me as a permanent fixture in the King’s Household, tended also to dislodge me further from the insecure place I occupied in my own.”
Footnote
* Now Heathrow Airport.
15
In November 1950—“that month of infamy” as far as the sisters were concerned—Marion Crawford published a book titled The Little Princesses, a memoir of her years with the Royal Family. Shortly thereafter all members of the Household were required to sign a document vowing never to publish their memoirs or any details related to their Royal employment. “It was a contract,” one person said. “If we broke it, we could be sued.” As far as “us four” were concerned, there could be no extenuating circumstances. Whatever her motives, Crawfie was to be set up as an example.
George Buthlay, Crawfie’s husband, was a man of modest means and by the time he and Crawfie had married was well into middle age. Crawfie had the cottage in Kensington Gardens, but like George she dreamed of one day retiring to a bungalow of their own in Aberdeen. She was also receiving a monthly pension of one half her final salary. This sounds fair enough. However, her taxable earnings of eight pounds fifty pence a week (five pounds over her starting wage in 1932) had been skivvyishly low. One Palace employee has said, “You take the job with the Royal Family for all sorts of reasons—but not for the money.” The average wage for a governess or tutor, and she was both, in a well-to-do home or private school was triple that salary and would have included living accommodations as comfortable, if perhaps not as glamorous. And no other position would have demanded so great a sacrifice of her private life.
Crawfie was a frugal Scotswoman, and she had always sent money home to assist her family. Her clothing expenses had been high, for she believed she must look well to be seen in public with the Princesses. Her savings were not nearly adequate enough for the purchase of a small home in Aberdeen, and her pension did not cover the running expenses of the cottage in Kensington Gardens and her food and transportation. She was obliged to regularly dip into her savings to make up the difference since George, nearing sixty, had not been able to find suitable employment.
Sometime in the fall of 1949, a publisher had approached her with a more than substantial offer of three thousand pounds to write a memoir of her life with the Royal Family. She told the firm that she would have to think about it. A month later she signed a contract. Crawfie had broken a cardinal rule and could not have been unaware of the Royal wrath this would provoke. At no time does it seem that she notified the staff at the Palace of her project or asked for cooperation or approval of the book. The Little Princesses was published by Odhams (Watford) Ltd. and was, at worst, an insider’s loving, somewhat mawkish and idealized portrait of the day-to-day existence of the Royal Family, especially the sisters, through the seventeen years of Crawfie’s association. No scandals or even a hint of one were revealed in the slim eighty pages of text and forty-eight pages of photo
graphs—none of them privately taken by herself or any member of the family, all of whom emerged human, likable and to be admired, with the possible exception of Edward VIII.
Marion Crawford’s crime was not what she might have revealed but that she had dared to publish the book (which became an instant best seller) in the first place. Those close to the Queen and Lilibet believed they had been the most incensed by Crawfie’s disloyalty. The book’s publication made her an immediate outcast from the Court, cut off not only from the sisters she had raised and to whom she had dedicated half her life but from her former good friends and co-workers. Within a few short weeks she received formal notice that her grace-and-favour home had been withdrawn and she would have to vacate the premises. She now began a regular column for a woman’s magazine.
Crawfie’s betrayal of trust and subsequent ostracism sent a chill of fear through all levels of the Royal Household, which was then, as today, “clearly defined and undemocratic, with little overlapping and no fraternity between groups.” Peter Townsend was in the highest echelon. He had suffered no great financial hardship as an Equerry for he had remained on the payroll of the RAF all the while he was serving in that capacity. His new position as Deputy Master of the Household (directly under Sir Piers Legh, Master of the Household) did not add a large amount to his income. He now had a sunny private office in a quiet wing of the Palace and work that was more challenging, although the position had much in common with the kind of desk job he had never wanted in the RAF. He remained an additional Equerry-in-Waiting and would continue to travel with the Royal Family to their various homes. The new job also meant he would work consecutively, not two weeks on and two weeks off.
Only when he was to be at Windsor would he be home at nights with Rosemary. They soon drifted apart, each going separate ways. Some “vestiges of real affection remained,” Townsend recalled, “yet, conjugal life ... had come to a standstill. Both of us, in our own way, continued our sterile, uneasy existence.” Like Margaret, he was marking time.