On August 15th, her mistress gave birth to a baby girl. Afterwards, Prince Charles, aged twenty-one months, was held up to the window to wave back at the onlookers.
The Princess took some time fully to recover. She had been expected to resume her public duties in October, but – on doctor’s orders – had to postpone or cancel all engagements for another month. There were further cancellations in November because of a ‘severe cold’. Later the same month – shortly after Charles’s second birthday – she flew to Malta to spend Christmas with her husband, while the children were taken to Sandringham to stay with their grandparents. Meanwhile, Philip had been promoted to Lieutenant-Commander, and at the beginning of September 1950 he was given command of the frigate HMS Magpie. The Magpie had been ordered to provide an escort for the Commander-in-Chief’s despatch vessel, HMS Surprise, for a visit to Philip’s relatives King Paul and Queen Frederika of Greece, in Athens. Princess Elizabeth accompanied her husband on the trip – and together they were warmly welcomed in the Greek capital.
Not everybody shared the devotion of a Bobo MacDonald. In January, the whole Royal Family’s education was dramatically advanced by the unexpected treachery – as they saw it – of Crawfie, now Mrs Buthlay, who had decided to cash in on her royal experiences. A letter from Princess Margaret to her former governess in March 1949 indicated concern at the Palace at the preparation of a revelatory book.73 There may have been an element of misunderstanding. After the book was written, the Queen was approached for permission, and even saw proofs.74 However, there was no doubt about the royal displeasure when the book was serialized, against the Royal Family’s express wishes, in the American Ladies’ Home Journal.
In March – spurred by the excitement caused in the United States – Woman’s Own ran it in Britain, advertising extracts as ‘The Loving, Human, Authentic Story of The Little Princesses’. The Palace tried to throw doubt on the accuracy of the account at every opportunity. ‘The Princess is not a bad sailor’ insisted the Comptroller of the Household in reply to a well-wisher who, on reading that the Heiress suffered from sea-sickness, had helpfully donated a patent remedy, ‘and to show how facts can be distorted, the voyage to the Channel Islands – on which occasion Miss Crawford reports that Her Royal Highness was prostrate – was in fact so calm that it was impossible to tell one was at sea, except for the subdued hum of the engines’.75 Undeterred, Mrs Buthlay wrote a stream of additional books and articles over the next few years, drawing on the same store of knowledge, though ever thinner and more repetitive as the store ran out.
Eventually, to the great satisfaction of Buckingham Palace, she over-reached herself by writing in imaginative detail about a royal event as if she had witnessed it, before it had taken place, and then finding herself unable to prevent publication of the article after the event had been cancelled. Her literary career ended forthwith. Mrs Buthlay died in 1986, unmourned at Buckingham Palace. According to a royal aide who went to the Palace a few years after the rumpus, ‘the only thing I was told was that letters signed Bongo or Biffo should not be put in the bin because they were probably from cousins. Letters from Marion Crawford should be handled with a very long pair of forceps.’76 Her name is still taboo: mention Crawfie to older royalty, and they stiffen. Yet there remains a little tragedy about the lack of a reconciliation. For the princesses, and especially Princess Elizabeth, were closer to Crawfie than almost anybody during their most formative years, and the bonds of understanding and affection had been strong.
Today it is difficult to appreciate an age of innocence in which Crawfie’s recollections caused such a sense of outrage. As A. N. Wilson puts it in his introduction to the 1993 reprint of Marion Crawford’s The Little Princesses, ‘though few books were written so mawkishly, few can have been written with such obvious love’.77 Kenneth Rose suggests that the Royal Family was angry because ‘their privacy had been purloined and sold for gain’.78 Yet there had been earlier accounts of the princesses’ childhood, almost as mawkish, and also for gain. Perhaps it was the disobedience that caused most fury, rather than either the content or the motive.
The Little Princesses marked a watershed. For the former governess had stumbled on a discovery that was to blight the Royal Family for the rest of the century: the market in intimate details of royal lives was a rising one. The financial value of revelations was already known, and had been remarked upon within the Palace before the war. What had changed, and would henceforth grow with increasing rapidity, was the voracity of the public appetite, and the profits-led crumbling of inhibitions about feeding it.
There was an irony: Crawfie’s writings caused a frisson because of the tightness with which royal privacy had been guarded, and the refusal to treat even the most modest press request for personal information as legitimate. The instrument of this policy was the King’s press secretary, Commander Richard Colville – an unbending ex-naval officer with no knowledge of the press, which he treated with a combination of distrust and lordly contempt. There was also a grundyish aspect: former colleagues fondly recall his countenance when, confronted by the latest newspaper lèse-majesté, the corners of his mouth would turn down in horror.79 Journalists called him ‘the Abominable No Man’, fellow courtiers dubbed him ‘Sunshine’. At the time of Crawfie’s offence, he had been in post for three years. The affair seemed to have a traumatic effect on him. So far from encouraging him to liberalize, it produced secrecy, greater hauteur, and greater prudery.
Commander Colville stayed at the Palace until 1968, a source of continuing aggravation to those on the press side who had to deal with him. His legacy – a belief that any titbit of above or below-stairs royal gossip was inherently interesting, because of the irritation its publication would cause to the Palace – still has its baleful effect. The Commander, however, was not alone in his attitude to the media. While George VI lived, his views received active support from Sir Alan Lascelles, who to some extent shared – even helped to inspire – the view that the Palace owed the press nothing, and that it would be better if the newspapers confined themselves to publishing official handouts.
Though author of the Princess’s Cape Town BBC speech, Lascelles regarded the technology of radio with a special wariness. Over-exposure, he believed, through such a direct medium as broadcasting, was one of the biggest potential dangers to the Royal Family – and a temptation to be resisted strongly.
At the height of the Crawfie furore, it was proposed that Princess Elizabeth should accept an invitation to broadcast to the Youth of the Empire on Empire Day. She herself was keen. Lascelles’s reaction, however, was unhesitatingly negative. ‘The world, as a whole,’ the courtier wrote in an internal Palace minute, ‘is pretty surfeited with broadcasts, and the last thing we want is for the world to feel that way about royal broadcasts.’ Christmas broadcasts, together with the occasional VE-Day or Silver Wedding, were quite enough. He therefore strongly advised against the Princess undertaking ‘an “out of the blue” broadcast this summer – or indeed at any time’.80 No Empire Day broadcast took place; and Princess Elizabeth remained – Crawfie outpourings apart – tantalizingly visible yet inaccessible, until many years after her accession as Queen.
Chapter 9
PHILIP RETURNED FROM MALTA in the summer of 1951 and bowed to the inevitable: that it was impossible to combine an active naval career with the role of active partner to the Heiress Presumptive – especially one who, because of the King’s illness, was expected to take on an increasing share of royal duties. It was a major sacrifice. He was barely thirty and, but for his marriage, his prospects of promotion to a high rank within the Navy of his adopted country were reckoned to be good. But he could not simultaneously accompany his wife, and command ships; his wife could not adapt her royal functions to suit his career; and he could not repeatedly take sabbaticals. When he left Malta, it was announced that he would not take up any further active naval appointments until after the return of the King and Queen from a Commonwealth tour now scheduled for the autumn. In fact, the break was a permanent one.
The result was a painful period of transition, which expressed itself in bursts of undirected energy and dismissive intolerance. According to his manservant, ‘he loved the sea and adored the Navy, and some of my gayest times with him were when he was serving’. After his return from the