Cinderella became a newspaper staple. Crawfie – who had been won over by the Prince from the beginning – took secret delight in the raffish style he introduced into the Palace, and in the pursed lips of servants and courtiers when he arrived hatless, with flannel trousers, and in an open-necked shirt with rolled-up sleeves.8
In August, after the King and Privy Council, including the Prime Minister, Archbishop of Canterbury and Leader of the Opposition, had formally approved the match (as they were required to do under the 1772 Royal Marriages Act), Lieutenant Mountbatten joined the Royal Family at Balmoral. Here the Court was able to assess, soberly, the new recruit. According to one below-stairs tale, Philip annoyed the King when they were in Scotland by bobbing a mock curtsey at him while wearing a kilt.9 Whether or not the story is true, it fits in with a picture of the Prince’s uneasy first summer in possession of the prize, regarded with caution by the King’s aristocratic friends, and potentially as dynamite by his courtiers. Jock Colville – in mellow mood, after his own first Balmoral working holiday – recorded his impressions of the royal life north of the border. He was struck by the contrasts with austerity London, even as experienced in Buckingham Palace. ‘There was luxury, sunshine and gaiety,’ he wrote, with ‘picnics on the moors every day; pleasant siestas in a garden ablaze with roses, stocks and antirrhinums; songs and games; and a most agreeable company with which to disport oneself.’ The company included Lord and Lady Eldon, the Salisburys, the Duke of Kent, David Bowes-Lyon, and Lady Violet Bonham Carter’s son Mark – several of them avowed disapprovers of the Prince.
Colville and Philip overlapped for a week, long enough for the Princess’s private secretary to form a provisionally favourable opinion, though also a cautious one. He liked the young naval officer, appreciated his difficulty in fitting into ‘the very English atmosphere that surrounds the Royal Family,’ especially when people like the Eldons and the Salisburys were around, and felt that he was intelligent and progressive, especially on the Commonwealth. But he was puzzled by the Philip–Elizabeth relationship. He recorded that the Princess was certainly in love with her fiancé. But he wondered about the apparently ‘dutiful’ appearance of the Prince.10 Perhaps Philip did not show his deeper feelings, perhaps Colville’s attitude was tinged with a little jealousy: he, after all, was the person who saw more of the Heiress than almost anybody – including, probably, her fiancé. Other impressions varied. One royal adviser remembers games of ‘murder’ at Balmoral, and bumping into the couple in the dark. ‘Somehow’, he recalls, ‘they always seemed to find each other when the lights went out.’11 Another, however, confirms Colville’s impression of a mysterious imbalance. ‘She was in love with him, you know’, he says. ‘Whether he was with her, I couldn’t say’.12
The marriage was fixed for November 20th. In the meantime, Princess Elizabeth took over from the Duke of Gloucester the function of the King’s ceremonial understudy. In October, she accompanied her father at the State Opening of Parliament for the first time, riding to the ceremony in the glass coach, with a lady-in-waiting. Royal Wedding fever – which was to reach epidemic proportions a few weeks later – had already gripped the capital: people began to line the procession route from Buckingham Palace to Westminster in the early hours of the morning, in the hope of catching a glimpse of the Princess as she passed.
However, the idea that the marriage of the Heiress Presumptive should be treated as a major national and imperial event was a novel one – in Eric Hobsbawm’s terminology, an invented tradition. Walter Bagehot had written a famous passage in The English Constitution, in which he declared that the women of Britain cared more about the marriage of a Prince of Wales than a ministry. Yet nineteenth and early twentieth century royal weddings had been comparatively modest occasions, and the marriages of the children of recent monarchs were essentially family events. Although the wedding of George VI as Duke of York had taken place in the Abbey, this was a departure from earlier practice. Edward VII, as Prince of Wales, had married in St. George’s Chapel, Windsor and George V, as Duke of York, had married in the Chapel Royal at St. James’s Palace. The wedding of Victoria, which took place after she had become Queen, was also at St. James’s Palace.
The choice of Westminster Abbey as the venue – made in consultation with the Prime Minister and Cabinet – was a decision to turn the day into a popular celebration of a kind, and on a scale, that had not taken place since before the war. It was to be a jamboree fit for a people’s princess, which would show that the Labour Government knew how to give everybody a good time, even in the depths of economic adversity. There were also – as at the time of George VI’s Coronation – diplomatic points to be made. In place of the restrained show of imperial might of 1937, the wedding of a decade later would be a peace-loving Empire parade, reminding people – as the South African tour had also sought to do – of the continuing strength of Commonwealth and imperial ties in the wake of Indian independence. Finally, Princess Elizabeth’s wedding to an undivorced, unforeign, relative provided both Monarchy and public with the Heir-to-the-Throne marriage of which they had been deprived in the 1930s, and which – it was fervently hoped – would blot out the memory of an unsuitable match with a suitable one, while perpetuating the new Windsor line.
Yet the arguments did not wash with everybody. Hugh Dalton, the Labour Chancellor of the Exchequer, described 1947 – in a phrase echoed by Elizabeth in a different context many years later – as his own, and the nation’s, ‘annus horrendus’. Not only was it an exceptionally uncomfortable year because of the protracted freeze-up in the first part of it. It was also economically a catastrophic one, with a fuel crisis which stopped factories, put millions out of work, and helped to precipitate a financial collapse that stalled the Government’s reform programme. In August – a few days after the Abbey announcement – the large North American dollar loan which had helped to pay for early post-war reconstruction ran out, and the free exchange of dollars and sterling was abruptly ended. In a restructuring of the Government in September, Sir Stafford Cripps, the President of the Board of Trade, was given the powerful new post of Minister of Economic Affairs, in order to strengthen the export drive. An Emergency Budget was scheduled for November, and Dalton was expected to announce the most restrictive package of measures since Labour came to office.
Against such a background there was some feeling, especially on the left, that a major state occasion was out of keeping with the rigour of the times. The Communist MP, William Gallagher, attacked the marriage both on the grounds of Philip’s ancestry (‘I am quite certain that he has not forsaken the family politics,’ he told the Commons), at a time of Greek repression, and because of the ‘lavish expenditure’ involved.13 A group of Labour MPs added their own voice, sending a letter to the Chief Whip in protest at the likely cost.14 On October 28th, Dalton responded to the attacks by declaring that only the decorations in Whitehall and outside the Palace would be funded by the taxpayer – everything else would be financed by the King’s Civil List.15 On the eve of the Wedding, Chips Channon reckoned that Labour had got the worst of both worlds, laying itself open to criticism for spending too much, while actually appearing mean. Somebody in the Government he noted, ‘apparently advised simplicity, misjudging the English people’s love of pageantry and a show’.16
There was certainly fierce pressure on the Palace not only to limit expenditure but, above all – at a time of foreign-exchange shortage – to buy British. Indeed, such were the jitters of the Government on the subject, that it became the cause for behind-the-scenes friction. In October, Lascelles responded with extreme testiness to a request for information from the Prime Minister, who was facing a hostile question, about a suggestion that ‘Lyons silk’ was being used for the bride’s dress. ‘The wedding dress contains silk from Chinese silk worms but woven in Scotland and Kent’, replied the courtier. ‘The wedding train contains silk produced by Kentish silk worms and woven in London. The going-away dress contains 4 or 5 yards of Lyons silk which was not specially imported but was part of the stock held by the dress maker (Hartnell) under permit.’ (Norman Hartnell had his own say. Faced with the accusation that, in troubled times, the silk might be ideologically suspect, he made a firm answer: ‘Our worms are Chinese worms’, he coldly informed his accusers, ‘– from Nationalist China, of course!’17) As for the suggestion that the Palace was insufficiently careful on such matters, Lascelles tartly reminded