Royal Sisters

by Anne Edwards

  Sir John Colville was later to claim that he and Churchill had often discussed the whole question of Margaret and Townsend and that Sir Winston, being an unrepentant sentimentalist, was privately opposed to any attempt to prevent the marriage; the idea of the beautiful Princess marrying a gallant Battle of Britain pilot appealed strongly to his imagination. Nor was Churchill impressed by arguments against the marriage of divorced people. He even had vowed to Colville that if, after two years’ separation, the lovers remained committed to each other, he would do all he could to help them attain their hearts’ desire (ah, but here was the hitch!) provided that Princess Margaret renounced her rights to the Throne and that her decision gave “the least possible pain and anxiety to the Queen.”

  Despite all good intentions, Elizabeth was, and would continue to be, hostage to a situation that was untenable whatever the final denouement. Sir John Colville’s denials notwithstanding, Townsend’s abrupt departure could not be soft-soaped with protestations that “he was going into voluntary exile.” Townsend had been given no choice in the matter other than to choose his place of expatriation, and even that had been the least of three evils.

  Since he had remained an officer in the Royal Air Force, the Service had the right to reactivate his standing and dispatch him to a new post. But neither the Queen nor her Ministers have the power to exile British subject, or to deny him the right to return to his country. Nor, in peacetime, does any branch of the Service have the right to stop an officer stationed abroad from returning to Britain when he is off duty unless he is being detained for disciplinary action.

  Townsend’s air attaché post was no more than a cover for an honorable exile. One cannot speculate on what might have occurred had he endeavored to return to Britain before the first year of foreign duty had ended, for he did not attempt to do so. His only concern was for the final outcome, which he sincerely believed would allow him and Margaret to have a life together.

  No sooner had he gone to Brussels and Margaret returned to London to face her uncertain future than the Queen realized that her sister might be denied the one thing she had ever truly wanted. All her life Lilibet had been protective of her little sister. Now, when it really mattered, and though she had power, she could do little to exert it on Margaret’s behalf. For while she was Head of State, which permitted divorce, she was also Head of the State Church, which did not. This constitutional contradiction was to give Elizabeth the gravest problem during the early years of her reign and it was not eased by the obvious unhappiness she saw in her sister’s face and observed in her actions.

  Margaret was being set up as an example, and her initial reaction was one of great bitterness. Letters flew almost daily back and forth between the lovers, Margaret’s decrying the political intrigue that had separated them and the efforts to make her end the affair, Townsend’s conciliatory, loving, encouraging, both restating their love over and over again.

  Margaret sought an audience with her sister immediately upon her return from South Africa, apparently in the hope that she could convince Elizabeth to intervene on her behalf. The Queen said that she could not, nor could she surreptitiously permit the two to meet at any time during the coming year. For perhaps the first and only time in their lives, Margaret felt a festering resentment toward her sister. She turned toward the Church for help and solace, and to her old friend, now the Reverend Simon Phipps, the curate of St. Peter’s in Huddersfield, Yorkshire, who became her confidant. She entered into serious religious study of the Bible and attended weekly postconfirmation classes at St. Paul’s vicarage in London with the Reverend Edward Barry Henderson, as well as two services on Sunday—“unusual even for a Royal—although only very exceptional circumstances would prevent them attending one.”

  Townsend’s social life in Brussels was necessarily limited. His face was so recognizable by now and the press so constantly at his heels he seldom attended an occasion that was not official. As Air Attaché he was to furnish information to Great Britain on air matters in Belgium; and as he once wrote, “I did not have to be a James Bond,” for he simply had to ask the commander of the Force Aérienne, the Belgian air force, “and got the answer.”

  He settled into a small flat and made friends with members of the British and French embassy staffs and some old and trusted RAF colleagues. His life was quiet, uneventful but not totally unrewarding. He worked to master French, renewed his interest in horses, in riding and racing, and drew life from the letters he received from his sons and from Margaret. But written words, no matter how warming, could not substitute for being with Margaret. “Our own world,” he wrote, “was a vacuum which had to be endured day in, day out, and during the yearning hours of the night.”

  Although publicly neither Margaret nor Townsend was ever to release such a statement, Margaret had accepted his proposal of marriage, which they both hoped could take place directly after August 21, 1955, when she would celebrate her twenty-fifth birthday; and at this stage in their separation they did not consider any other arrangement.

  “Goodbye, wonderful Coronation Summer,” Chips Channon wrote, “I have revelled in you and drunk your pleasure to the dregs.” For the Queen the season’s end brought the reality of her new position glaringly into focus. Plans had been set for her to embark with Philip on a world tour on November 23 which would part them from home and children for six long months. They repaired to Balmoral for the month of September to spend time with their family before this difficult separation, the Queen Mother, Margaret, Princess Marina and her daughter, the seventeen-year-old Princess Alexandra, joining them.

  Despite efforts to make this a happy reunion, the atmosphere was glum. Margaret was in a “funk” and “forever huddling with the Preacher [Simon Phipps, who joined the group for a fortnight].” Shooting lunches were held most days, and a cocktail party was given and duly attended at Abergeldie. Although Sam Roberts, a young officer of the Guards, had also been included for the Balmoral stay, and with Martin Charteris and other Household members strenuous games of charades were played to help liven up the evenings, even the teenaged Alexandra found the atmosphere at Balmoral oppressive.

  The weather was damp and chilling. Alexandra had to have a boil lanced by the local doctor. “Ho. Ho! Charles was fascinated & insisted on watching,” she wrote her brother Eddie, Duke of Kent, who was at Sandhurst. “Gruesome child, don’t you think?” Charles was then confined to bed for three days with an ear infection and Anne for nearly a week with fever and a cold.

  The family and close Household staff reassembled at Royal Lodge to celebrate Elizabeth and Philip’s sixth wedding anniversary on November 20, just a few days before their departure for the world tour. Margaret seemed in a more settled frame of mind; and a renewed, even deeper attachment between the sisters was evident to members of the party. Margaret’s separation from Townsend did not seem such a sacrifice when balanced against the Queen’s approaching tour, which would keep her apart from her children during so many formative months of their young lives.

  This was to be the first world tour of a reigning British Sovereign. “It may well be,” Churchill declared, “that the journey the Queen is to take will be no less auspicious and the treasure she brings back no less bright, than when Drake first sailed an English ship around the world.” Twice, George VI had scheduled and then canceled the same tour; and Elizabeth had been on the first leg of a third attempt at the time of her father’s death. Churchill’s hope was that a Royal tour of such scope would help reestablish Britain’s prominence and world standing.

  At Prince Philip’s suggestion the route of the revived tour had been reversed so that they would travel westward. He felt (perhaps correctly) that an eastbound trip which began in Africa might bring back painful memories of the King’s death and their dramatic flight home from Entebbe.

  Long good-byes were exchanged with Charles and Anne the evening of November 23. Elizabeth was in tears during the ride to London Airport where crowds had gathered in the shivery cold t
o see the Royal couple off. With tears still glistening in her eyes, she waved to them as she entered the airport. Churchill, the Queen Mother, Margaret and the Duke and Duchess of Gloucester came aboard the B.O.A.C. Stratocruiser Canopus for a few last words. When the visitors had disembarked the Queen stood very erect in the doorway of the plane, Philip behind her. The hatch was closed; the plane’s motors revved. Still, no one left the tarmac until the airship had lifted off.

  While the Queen slept in her comfortable bunk bed, Canopus flew the Atlantic, setting down to refuel at Gander airfield, Newfoundland, at 3:25 A.M., local time, which was four hours behind the time in Britain. Elizabeth had managed a proper night’s rest, more than the roaring crowd who stood at the rim of the airfield singing “For she’s a jolly good fellow!” could claim. So began the tour that was to be viewed as “the most ambitious and certainly the most successful piece of public relations ever attempted.”

  The Royal Party was to travel fifty thousand miles. The itinerary after Gander, Newfoundland, included Bermuda, Jamaica (where they would board the ship Gothic), Cristóbal (Panama Canal), Balboa, Fiji, Tonga; Auckland and Wellington, New Zealand; Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and Fremantle, Australia; Tasmania, the Cocos Islands, Ceylon, Aden—and, airborne again—on to Uganda to open the new Owen Falls Dam on the Nile; to Entebbe, and finally to Libya where the newly completed Royal Yacht Britannia was to meet them with Prince Charles and Princess Anne (who would be visiting the Mountbattens in Malta) aboard, giving the Royal Family the opportunity for a two-week sea voyage together before returning home.

  The Queen was vociferously cheered wherever she went. And there were many memorable highlights of the tour, not the least of them being the visit to Tonga where the statuesque Queen Salote hosted a great feast with “pyramids of roast pig, shiploads of yams, coconuts and fruit,” on the lawns of her palace; and the “Speech from the Throne,” which Elizabeth delivered in the Parliament House in Wellington, New Zealand, dressed in her magnificent Coronation gown. (The day before, she had been giving a speech in front of the Town Hall when a summer shower suddenly erupted. The Deputy Mayor “hurriedly stripped off his raincoat. ‘Thank you, Sir Walter Raleigh,’ said the Queen, loud enough for the microphone to catch.”) Her visit to Tasmania proved immensely moving when Australia’s oldest soldier, ninety-nine-year old William Hunt, told her, as she stood beneath a full-length portrait of Queen Victoria in her Coronation robes, “I served Queen Victoria, and now I salute her great-great-granddaughter.”

  The tour was a success to equal the best of Churchill’s hopes. By the end, Elizabeth seemed to have grown in stature. Her professionalism at the job of queenliness was striking. The high, girlish voice had lowered, paced itself into a new maturity. Those who had seen her mother during her tour of Australia twenty-five years earlier claimed she had fully inherited her charm. The index cards with lists of the names, titles, occupations and—when possible—small relevant anecdotes of the dignitaries she was to meet, concealed in her pocketbook (always one with a top clasp for easy access) and carried with her on most occasions, were carefully read en route to the engagement and often between waves to the crowds who lined the streets. This extra bit of industry contributed a personal touch to her introductions and was always appreciated.

  A six-thousand-word directive was sent out by Sir Michael Adeane to all Royal hosts before Elizabeth’s arrival notifying them that: The Queen did not lay foundation stones but would not mind planting trees. No product of commercial manufacture could be presented, nor gifts of a magenta color, “since it was a hue the Queen disliked and she could not therefore use the gift with any of her clothes.” Small offerings by children, veterans, and the working staffs and patients of hospitals were “accepted when a refusal would lead to hurt feelings, as were perishable fruit, food and flowers.” Animals were not to be given.

  Sundays and Mondays were kept partially free from appearances, but on these days Elizabeth had to study the multitudinous notes Adeane gave her on the communities she was to visit in the coming week, the presentations and speeches that must be given and accepted. Churchill sent her long, dictated weekly reports of affairs at home and to his chagrin and embarrassment she answered them at equal length in longhand. Then there were detailed letters to the children and to her mother, also always written in her own hand. Her energy appeared to be indefatigable.

  “What the Queen did find a strain was that as she was passing somebody, it was the one moment in their life when they could see the Queen and therefore she must be smiling,” Lady Pamela Hicks, then Montbatten, recalled, “but she couldn’t maintain that smile for a motorcade which was lasting perhaps 45 minutes. You get a twitch. So there is a moment when you have to relax your muscles, and of course that one moment when you are not smiling—it’s the despair of some people who then think you are looking frightfully cross.”

  No film star ever faced a greater onslaught of public attention. Although Richard Colville and Martin Charteris were far more organized and protective than the common variety of press representative, even their careful supervision could not overcome the Queen’s difficult task of trying to appear human while being treated “as a waxwork, actually moving and speaking.” When she attended the races “the entire crowd between [her] box and the course would have their backs to the course and would gaze at her with their racing-glasses.” This same phenomenon occurred at almost all large public events.

  The tour was exhausting but deeply satisfying as well. For Elizabeth believed, with good reason, that a bond had been struck between herself and her Dominions.

  On a personal level, the long periods at sea had brought her closer to Philip than she had been since their days in Malta. They were together more than they had ever been, and in tighter, often almost claustrophobic conditions, long hours being spent on board ship and traveling by train and car. He had been a comfort, a tremendous help and a good companion. They returned home on Saturday, May 15, 1954, after 173 days abroad, and were welcomed on a scale and with a fervor that might have made an uninformed observer conclude “that she had returned from a voyage of six years, not six months, and that her land had been under foreign occupation in her absence.”

  Although an icy wind whipped through London, tens of thousands of people milled around outside the Palace, roaring themselves hoarse as the Queen (looking slim in a stylish pink coat), Philip (in Naval uniform) and the children (both in yellow) made brief appearances on the crimson-draped balcony. As if to defy the Maytime blasts, the Mall had been decorated with immense yellow standards topped with dazzling white lions and unicorns, each standard hung with a shield representing the name and emblem of a country visited on the tour.

  What made the Queen’s homecoming so unique was that she was the first English Monarch to sail the forty-two nautical miles from the sea up the Thames to the Strand and through the Port of London. At Tower Bridge, where Britannia had been anchored and the Royal Party transferred for the final lap to a navy-blue motor launch, “every inch of the Tower gardens, every slimy wharf, and every rusty warehouse roof was jammed with people, and the river was crowded with a perfect Dunkirk of boats, smart and shabby—the smart customers sitting in basket chairs and drinking champagne, the not-so-smart wearing each other’s hats and drinking light ale.”

  The tour and the Queen’s triumphant return gave Elizabeth selfconfidence enough to deal with any inexpedience—which was a good thing because in two short months the year of imposed separation between her sister and Townsend would come to an end and she would have to begin to prepare Margaret for the inevitable.

  *  *  *

  “Our joy at being together again was indescribable,” Townsend wrote of their reunion. “We were together for a couple of hours and talked as if we had left off only yesterday.” He had flown back to London under the name of Mr. Carter and—with a whacking dollop of cloak-and-dagger intrigue—had been whisked directly from the plane by special detectives and driven in an inconspicuous car to Harro
ds, where he was met in the book department by Brigadier Norman Gwatkin of the Lord Chamberlain’s Office and swept out to another waiting vehicle and then driven to Clarence House.

  They reaffirmed their love and their desire to go through with their plans. They believed they would have another year of waiting until Margaret was of the age where she would be free of the Queen’s official veto, and did not anticipate any further obstacles. After this short visit, Townsend was driven to see his sons before being put on board an aircraft returning him to Belgium. To everyone’s astonishment, the press had been outfoxed and had not even learned of his visit.

  The world tour had given Philip a better sense of his place in the Monarchy. He had been accepted everywhere they went, not only because he was the Queen’s husband but for himself. The Queen had never been a great speaker, nor for that matter was she a compelling conversationalist. Philip, on the other hand, could be both. Outspoken, often dogmatic, he had his own sometimes controversial opinions on mainstream issues, especially those dealing with science and agriculture, and did not hesitate to express them. Soon, he was requested to give as many speeches as the Queen. Paramount to him now was that he not be regarded merely as the second handshake in a receiving line. (His passport number was 1, but that was because the Queen has no passport.)

  Elizabeth remained inside the tight little circle of her courtiers. Philip found Richard Colville starchy, but Michael Adeane was more malleable to outside suggestion than the retired Lascelles had been. And the closeness Philip had enjoyed with his wife on the tour was a positive factor in their relationship upon their return. Perhaps Elizabeth did not have the physical passion for her husband that Victoria had felt for Albert at the same age, but she was strongly affected by him, admired and respected him, and held a great pride in his manliness.