CHAPTER ONE
STARCHED SHIRTS
A SENIOR MEMBER of the Queen’s household, who had originally come to Buckingham Palace on secondment from his job working for the Australian government, was on his way back home when he stopped at immigration control at Sydney Airport. The man at the desk leafed through his passport until he came to the page where the adviser had entered his profession. He gave it a quizzical look, then snapped the passport shut and handed it back.
‘Mate,’ he said, ‘there’s no T in courier.’
This story may have an apocryphal edge to it, but it was good enough to be told at the party marking the departure of one of the Queen’s private secretaries, Lord Janvrin, about one of his predecessors, the Australian Sir William Heseltine. Regardless of whether it is true, however, it raises two related points. One is that to contemporary ears there is something inescapably ridiculous about the word courtier. Who are these absurd characters, with their knee breeches and fawning ways, their courtly intrigues and scheming ambition? Which leads us to the second point: the very name suggests someone who is not to be trusted. When the Duchess of Sussex spoke in her interview with Oprah Winfrey of the difference between the royal family and the people running the institution, she knew it was a distinction that would resonate with people around the world. Ah yes, audiences said to themselves, we know what’s going on here. There’s the royal family, who are blamelessly just trying to do their best. And then there are the courtiers, who are up to no good.
These are the men in grey suits (a catchphrase much loved by the late Diana, Princess of Wales). Or the men with moustaches (Princess Margaret’s epithet of choice, from an era when the wearing of a grey suit did not really single anyone out). They are the enemies of youth, progress and true love, who can be relied upon only to pursue power at all costs and to betray anyone who crosses their path.
It is small wonder, then, that during the research for this book I encountered only a tiny handful of people who would admit to being courtiers. No, no, they would protest, I’m not a courtier. Can’t stand the word. I’m a modern professional, a seasoned purveyor of impartial advice who would be equally at home acting as a consultant to the CEO of a FTSE-100 company. You wouldn’t catch me in knee breeches.
* * *
COURTIERS HAVE been around for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. Whenever there is a monarch, there is a court; and whenever there is a court, there are courtiers. They look after the money, they provide advice, and they organise all those entertainments that are the essence of palace life. And, of course, they plot and scheme and attempt to curry favour with their principal.
This book is not a lengthy history of courtiers: there are simply too many of them for that. One could write a book just on the Cecil family, who have been wielding power and influence in England ever since Lord Burghley was treasurer to Queen Elizabeth I. Modern-day courtiers have had their own dynasties. Lord Stamfordham, who served Queen Victoria and George V, had a grandson, Michael Adeane, who was private secretary to Queen Elizabeth II for nineteen years. Michael’s son, Edward, was private secretary to the Prince of Wales.
Our fascination with courtiers is not hard to understand. They exert power, but do not rule. Instead, they live in the shadows, using their influence behind the scenes, not on the public stage. It is a world closed to the rest of us, with strange rules and peculiar dress codes, where survival is all and fortune’s favours are easily lost. Sir Walter Raleigh was not the only courtier who made the journey from court favourite to the executioner’s block. Fortunately, these days the worst an errant courtier can expect is to be escorted to the door with a pay-off and a gong.
One of the literary sensations of the sixteenth century was Baldassare Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier, a lengthy philosophical dialogue on the ideal courtier. It covers everything from the importance of noble birth to the nature of good advice, as well as tips on dancing (not advisable for elderly courtiers), conversation, games and practical jokes. It also contains a discussion on the appropriate dress for a courtier. Sobriety, according to one of the characters, is all important, ‘for things external often bear witness to the things within’.
When in doubt, apparently, wear black.
* * *
ALAN LASCELLES, who was always known as Tommy, would no doubt have approved of such solemn advice. One of the modern monarchy’s most famous courtiers, he began his royal service under Edward VIII when he was still Prince of Wales, and went on to become the epitome of the old-school palace insider. However, he was not born into royal service, unlike so many of his predecessors; nor did he initially have any particular wish to serve the royal family. His early years were not especially distinguished. Educated at Marlborough and Oxford, where he achieved a disappointing second, he twice failed the exam to get into the Foreign Office, and then tried unsuccessfully to get a job in journalism. During the First World War he was wounded and won the Military Cross, after which his family connections helped him get a job in India as aide-de-camp to the Governor of Bombay. He returned to England in 1920, with a wife – Joan, the daughter of the viceroy – but without any clear idea of what he should do with his life.
He was, however, well connected. Tommy’s first cousin, the 6th Earl of Harewood, was married to Princess Mary, who was sister to two monarchs, Edward VIII and George VI, and aunt to a third, Queen Elizabeth II. And he had a large circle of friends. Duff Hart-Davis, who edited Lascelles’s celebrated diaries, says: ‘He had a tremendous social life – he knew everybody.’1 In 1920, one of those friends passed Lascelles an unofficial offer from the Prince of Wales – David, the eldest son of George V, although he would later reign as Edward VIII – asking if he would like to join his office as an assistant private secretary, on a salary of £600 a year.
Lascelles was thrilled. ‘I have got a very deep admiration for the Prince,’ he wrote, ‘and I am convinced that the future of England is as much in his hands as in those of any individual.’2 His views were soon to change. The Prince of Wales was, at the time, the country’s most eligible bachelor, a status that he exploited with enthusiasm by embarking on a series of affairs, more often than not with married women. For the moment, however, his reputation remained unsullied, and his star in the ascendant.
Lascelles found his first real test during a transatlantic tour in 1924, when the American press developed an appetite for the salacious gossip that always followed in Edward’s wake. Judging by the ‘idiotic’ press coverage of the tour, said Lascelles, ‘you might think that he had done nothing but jazz and ride and flirt’. One particularly challenging occasion was when Edward’s travelling companion, the charming but reckless Edward ‘Fruity’ Metcalfe, managed to leave his wallet, containing several letters from the prince, in the flat of a New York prostitute. ‘Damned old fool,’ wrote Lascelles, ‘but it is impossible to be really angry with him, and tho the incident might do the Prince very serious harm, we have all rocked with laughter over it.’
Lascelles was doing his best to keep Edward on the straight and narrow. It was not easy. Esmé Howard, Britain’s ambassador in Washington, thought Lascelles ‘excellent in every way’ but ‘too young to have any great authority’.3 He was thirty-seven at the time, seven years older than the prince. Howard’s patronising remark is hard to square with the image we have of the older Lascelles, memorably portrayed in the Netflix series The Crown as a stern, unbending pillar of palace rectitude. Lascelles was tall, slim and elegant, with a neatly trimmed moustache and immaculately parted hair. His friends appreciated his shrewd judgement and dry wit, but to most people he was the ‘aloof, austere, jealous guardian of the royal prerogative; a man who had the reputation not only of not suffering fools gladly, but of rarely enduring their presence in the same room’.4
Although Lascelles had his concerns on that American trip about the prince’s romantic liaisons, he managed to take Edward’s behaviour in his stride. But as time passed, the scales began to fall from Lascelles’s eyes. In 1927, Lascelles wrote a letter to Godfrey Thomas, the prince’s private secretary (one rung up from Lascelles in the prince’s household), saying: ‘The cold fact remains that, as Joey [Legh, Edward’s equerry] and I both agree, it would be a real disaster if, by any ill chance, he was called on to accede to the throne now and that neither of us see any prospect of his fitting himself any better, as time goes on.’5
His concern was so great that, when they were in Ottawa that year, Lascelles had a ‘secret colloquy’ with the prime minister, Stanley Baldwin, who was with them on the Canadian tour. He recalled in his diaries: ‘I told him directly that, in my considered opinion, the Heir Apparent, in his unbridled pursuit of Wine and Women, and of whatever selfish whim occupied him at the moment, was rapidly going to the devil, and unless he mended his ways, would soon become no fit wearer of the British Crown.’ Lascelles had expected to get his ‘head bitten off’, but to his surprise, Baldwin said he agreed with every word. Lascelles told the prime minister: ‘You know, sometimes when I sit in York House waiting to get the result of some point-to-point in which he is riding, I can’t help thinking that the best thing that could happen to him, and to the country, would be for him to break his neck.’
‘God forgive me,’ said Baldwin. ‘I have often thought the same.’6
If Lascelles nurtured any hopes that the prince would see the error of his ways, they were soon dispelled. The following year, likening himself to an ‘inverted Falstaff’, he retired in despair at the age of forty-two, and ‘left Prince Hal to work out his damnation’.7
And that should have been that. The prince did not mend his ways but instead embarked on the affair with the American divorcee Wallis Simpson that would later lead to him dramatically renouncing the throne. Meanwhile, Lascelles got on with his life, taking up a position as private secretary to the Governor-General of Canada. On his return from Ottawa in 1935, he was invited to return to royal service as assistant private secretary to King George V; but in January 1936, less than two months after Lascelles had accepted the job, the King died at Sandringham. Much to Lascelles’s surprise, the new King, who respected his abilities, took him on as assistant private secretary: Prince Hal and his inverted Falstaff had been thrown back together again. However, any rapprochement, such as it was, did not last long. In later years, Edward referred to his former adviser and confidant as ‘that evil snake Lascelles’.8 (He was not the only person to see a devious side to Lascelles: Chips Channon described him as sournois, the French for sly and deceitful.9) However, Lascelles survived to see out Edward’s abdication in December 1936, before becoming assistant private secretary to George VI under Alec Hardinge. When Hardinge resigned in 1943, Lascelles took over, and remained in the role until the King’s death.
* * *
SO IT WAS THAT by the time Elizabeth II ascended to the throne in 1952 Alan Lascelles had already served three Kings. He was a tough, experienced courtier, and just the man to break in the new Queen. After returning to the palace in 1936, he had watched Princess Elizabeth grow up: in South Africa, he had watched her come of age. The 1947 tour with the King and Queen was the first time that Elizabeth and Margaret had been abroad in their lives, and the trip marked the young heir to the throne’s debut on the world stage. Politically, it was also a highly sensitive trip, coming as it did at a time when South Africa was bitterly divided between the English and the Afrikaans- speaking populations. The latter were bent on breaking South Africa’s bonds with the Empire, and in the words of one historian, the visit was ‘essentially a mission to save [Prime Minister Jan] Smuts and the Crown of South Africa’.10
The curmudgeonly Lascelles was clearly entranced by Princess Elizabeth. After a particularly tedious state banquet in Cape Town (‘in thirty years of public dinners, I can’t recall one that caused me greater misery’) he wrote: ‘Princess Elizabeth is delightfully enthusiastic and interested; she has her grandmother’s passion for punctuality, and, to my delight, goes bounding furiously up the stairs to bolt her parents when they are more than usually late.’11
The tour is mostly remembered nowadays for the radio broadcast that Elizabeth made from Cape Town on her twenty- first birthday, in which, in those ringing, cut-glass tones, she declared ‘before you all that my whole life, whether it be long or short, shall be devoted to your service, and the service of our great imperial family to which we all belong’. That speech, which has become famous for expressing the sense of duty and service that would be the Queen’s watchwords throughout her reign, was written by Dermot Morrah, the writer and Times journalist, who had written a number of speeches for the King during the war. As soon as Lascelles received the first draft, he knew it was something special. ‘I have been reading drafts for many years now,’ he wrote to Morrah, ‘but I cannot recall one that has so completely satisfied me and left me feeling that no single word should be altered. Moreover, dusty cynic though I am, it moved me greatly. It has the trumpet-ring of the other Elizabeth’s Tilbury speech, combined with the immortal simplicity of Victoria’s “I will be good”.’
When Elizabeth read it, she told Lascelles it made her cry. ‘Good,’ he said, ‘for if it makes you cry now, it will make 200 million other people cry when they hear you deliver it, and that is what we want.’
It seemed to achieve its purpose. Summing up the success of the tour, Lascelles wrote in his diary: ‘The most satisfactory feature of the whole visit is the remarkable development of Princess Elizabeth. She has come on in the most surprising way, and in all the right direction.’ She had a ‘good, healthy sense of fun’, but could also ‘take on the old bores with much of her mother’s skill’.
That diary entry included one more prediction: ‘My impression, by the way, is that we shall all be subscribing to a wedding present before the year is out.’ Lascelles had insider knowledge here. Prince Philip of Greece had, in fact, already asked Elizabeth to marry him late the previous summer, and had been accepted. The King and Queen were of the attitude that Elizabeth should not hurry into a decision; as one former courtier told the historian Ben Pimlott, ‘The King and Queen basically said: “Come with us to South Africa and then decide.”’12
Lascelles was already deeply involved with the negotiations behind the scenes to smooth the path of Prince Philip joining the royal family. In one sense Philip was an excellent match for Elizabeth – he was royal on both his mother’s and his father’s sides of the family (his mother, a great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria, was born at Windsor Castle), and he’d had what they used to call a ‘good war’, having served in the Royal Navy and been mentioned in dispatches. But he was rootless, impecunious and a foreigner: worse yet, he had undeniably German ancestry.
There was, then, plenty of opposition to the idea of Elizabeth marrying Philip. Tommy Lascelles told the diarist Harold Nicolson that the King and Queen were initially unimpressed: ‘The family were at first horrified when they saw that Prince Philip was making up to Princess Elizabeth. They felt he was rough, ill-mannered, uneducated and would probably prove unfaithful.’13 Lascelles may well have privately agreed with this verdict, although he later came round to Philip.
Whatever the stuffed shirts at the palace thought of Philip, he thought equally little of them. Edward Ford, the assistant private secretary, said that Philip refused to be deferential or ingratiating. ‘He behaved with all the self-confidence of a naval officer who’d had a good war. He didn’t show the respect which an English boy of his age would have had for the older people around him. He wasn’t in the least afraid to tell Lord Salisbury [the eminent Tory and wartime cabinet minister] what his own opinions were.’14
Philip’s friend Mike Parker told the writer Robert Lacey: ‘The Salisburys and the hunting and shooting aristocrats around the King and Queen did not like him at all. And the same went for Lascelles and the old-time courtiers. They were absolutely bloody to him – and it didn’t help that all his sisters were married to Germans.’15 John Brabourne, who was married to Lord Mountbatten’s daughter Patricia, used the same language to testify how the royal establishment did its best to make Philip feel unwelcome. ‘We were at Balmoral that summer, and they were absolutely bloody to him. They didn’t like him, they didn’t trust him, and it showed. Not at all nice.’16
Nevertheless, on 18 March 1947, Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten of Chester Street became a British citizen, and his engagement to Princess Elizabeth was announced less than four months later. They married on 20 November that year, with the bride wearing a dress designed by Norman Hartnell, made of ivory silk and decorated with pearls. Winston Churchill thought the wedding provided the touch of romance that the country needed in those bleak post-war years, describing it as ‘a flash of colour on the hard road we have to travel’.17
Whether Lascelles warmed to Philip as time passed or was just good at hiding his true feelings is not clear. But by the time the newly married Princess Elizabeth was pregnant with her first child, Charles – born in November 1948 – Lascelles was capable of sounding impressed, not least because Philip had managed to do the one thing that was expected of him. ‘Such a nice young man,’ he told Harold Nicolson. ‘Such a sense of duty – not a fool in any way – so much in love, poor boy – and after all put the heir to the throne in the family way all according to plan.’18
Despite the private secretary’s kind words, it seems likely that relations between him and Philip remained cool. Until the Queen acceded to the throne, she and Philip had been living at Clarence House, which they had gone to great efforts to make a proper home. Among the innovations overseen by Philip were the installation of a cinema in the basement, a closet in his dressing room that would produce the required suit or uniform at the press of a button, and an electric trouser press. After the death of George VI in 1952, the couple were very reluctant to move into Buckingham Palace, but Lascelles – and Winston Churchill, the prime minister – insisted. Buckingham Palace was the headquarters of the monarchy, and that is where the sovereign should live. Once he had accepted his fate, Philip, with his modernising ways and relentless appetite for efficiency, started trying to transform the palace into somewhere fit for the second half of the twentieth century. In this mission, he was assisted by his friend Mike Parker, who had joined his staff as equerry-in-waiting – essentially Philip’s right-hand man, helping him run his life. ‘Philip and I were mates and I felt I could be a useful ally to him at court,’ said Parker. ‘The King was fine, very friendly, very helpful, but the traditional courtiers weren’t always so easy’.19
The pair promptly embarked on a study of the organisation and its methods, which included an exploration of the labyrinthine palace basements. ‘We were fascinated by the wine cellar, which went on for miles and miles,’ recalled Parker. ‘There were one or two very ancient wines indeed, plus some very old menus from the early Victorian period, which were utterly fascinating.’20 However, Philip’s efforts at reorganisation had little impact when faced with resistance from the hidebound Lascelles, who remained as intransigent as ever. ‘When he first arrived on the scene, the courtiers were a bunch of old starched shirts,’ a friend told the historian Ben Pimlott. ‘It was assumed that everything would go on in the old way.’21 Philip, of course, could be equally difficult. Cantankerous, abrasive, intolerant and buoyed by immense self-belief, he had the capacity to rub people up the wrong way when he might have achieved more by trying to win them round. Rows flared up frequently. ‘He always began a sentence with the word “No!”, pointing his finger,’ said one ex-courtier.22
Mike Parker was not cut from the same cloth as the old-school courtiers. Ebullient and extrovert, he was an Australian who had become a friend to Philip while they were both serving on the destroyer HMS Wallace in 1942. In North Africa, and towards the end of the war in Australia, they would take shore leave together.
He told Philip’s biographer Tim Heald: ‘Of course we had fun in North Africa, but never anything outrageous. We’d drink together and then we’d go and have a bloody good meal. People are always asking, “Did you go to the local estaminets and screw everything in sight?” And the answer is, “No! It never came into the picture. There was so much else to do.”’ He did admit, however, that ‘there were always armfuls of girls’.23
Close to Philip, and an invaluable ally against the crusty types at the palace, Parker was the epitome of the friend-turned-courtier. Such figures would always enjoy an intimacy with their principal that no employee could ever hope to match. But they are as vulnerable to the vicissitudes of court life as any. For Parker, the end came in 1957 with an unfortunately timed divorce while he and Philip were on the royal yacht Britannia on a four-month trip around the outlying territories of the Commonwealth. The length of the tour had already prompted speculation in the press about the state of Philip and Elizabeth’s marriage: when the news broke that Parker’s wife was suing him for divorce, the threat of the palace being tainted by scandal proved too much. Parker flew back from Gibraltar and, to save his employer embarrassment, handed in his resignation. When he arrived at London Airport, where he found himself compelled to give a press conference, Parker was relieved to see the Queen’s press secretary Commander Richard Colville, a man with whom he had hitherto had frosty relations. Assuming that Colville had come to help out, Parker was about to thank him when the press secretary spoke. ‘Hello, Parker,’ he said. ‘I’ve just come to let you know that from now on, you’re on your own.’24 With that, he was gone.
This was entirely in character for Colville. When he had joined the palace in 1947, he’d had absolutely no experience of working with journalists, and would go on to treat them all with a mixture of intolerance, scorn and contempt for the rest of his career. It was a philosophy he shared with Lascelles, who – despite having recommended the creation of the press secretary role in the first place – believed that the press should confine themselves to publishing official handouts, and not ask impudent questions. Royal biographer Kenneth Rose wrote of Colville: ‘Lacking previous knowledge of the Press, he seemed to make no distinction between journalists in search of scandal or sensation and those – the majority – who needed little encouragement to stimulate and strengthen loyalty to the Crown. All were made to feel that their questions were impertinent if not downright vulgar.’25 When a Canadian journalist asked if he could look round Buckingham Palace, he was told: ‘I am not what you Americans would call a public relations officer.’ Journalists called him ‘The Incredible No-Man’. To the Queen’s assistant private secretary Martin Charteris, he was simply ‘an anti-press secretary’.26 Colville’s unhelpfulness was not just confined to his relationship with the press, it turned out: as Parker discovered, it also included his own colleagues.
While someone like Mike Parker was always liable to fall foul of the palace old guard, Tommy Lascelles was a true survivor. The extent of the influence he wielded was underlined a few days after the Queen came to the throne in 1952. Queen Mary, the Queen’s grandmother, had heard about a recent house party at Lord Mountbatten’s home, Broadlands, at which the controversial and ambitious Mountbatten had been heard to boast that ‘the house of Mountbatten now reigned’. Mary was furious, and summoned the prime minister’s private secretary to complain. Churchill, no fan of Mountbatten, was as outraged as Queen Mary, as was the rest of the cabinet, and a recommendation was made to Elizabeth that the family name should remain as Windsor.
Copyright © 2022 by Valentine Low