The Queen: Elizabeth II and the Monarchy

The Cabinet had a single objective: to avoid a parliamentary row at a difficult time on what they regarded as a minor matter. On October 22nd, less than a month before the Wedding, Attlee and Dalton saw Lascelles and Sir Ulick Alexander, Keeper of the Privy Purse, in order, as Dalton recorded, to discuss ‘a new Civil List Bill and much more money for Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip’.19 It was a sticky meeting. In reply to the courtiers’ request on behalf of the royal couple, the premier and Chancellor threatened a full-scale Select Committee, which might open a pandora’s box, and bring every item of royal expenditure under review. In particular, Attlee pointed out, ‘it might even be impossible to prevent questions being asked as to the extent of any private fortunes belonging to the King and to other members of the Royal Family’.20 Dalton added that if the annuities were too high, ‘It would raise discord, and many awkward questions, and would impair the popularity of the Royal Family.’21 Why, asked the Chancellor, should the King not solve the problem himself, by increasing the Princess’s present allowance out of the Household Balances which were in credit, and were likely to continue so? When Alexander insisted that the surplus was only temporary, Dalton drew attention to £200,000 which had been lent by the King, out of these balances, to the Government – and which might be used to pay for Elizabeth and Philip. At this point Lascelles suggested that Dalton should have a personal audience with the King, to discuss the matter22 – and laid the ground for such a meeting by proposing to the Prime Minister a compromise. Parliament, he suggested, should make provision for the Princess – thereby avoiding the setting of a dangerous precedent by not doing so – but on the understanding that, while the difficult times lasted, the money would not be spent.23

Dalton’s audience took place on October 27th. It appeared to go well. Lascelles wrote afterwards that the Chancellor was ‘greatly pleased by his talk with HM,’24 and Dalton told the Prime Minister that he found the King ‘in a very happy mood’. The meeting seemed to resolve one of the royal difficulties – how to preserve the principle of provision by Parliament, without a Select Committee – by agreeing a formula that established a Select Committee in name, but not in reality. A royal message would announce that no burden should be placed on public funds while economic difficulties lasted. Then the Chancellor would propose the setting up of a Select Committee that would merely note that it was normal for provision to be made for an Heir on marriage, but that this would be delayed for the time being.

The affair, ‘so delicate from so many different points of view,’ Dalton wrote to Attlee, ‘has moved forward with an unexpected smoothness.’25 But had it? One thing it had not disposed of was the problem of how much the Princess and Prince would get, and how they would be paid. ‘The essential point,’ Dalton reminded the King, ‘was to prevent the development of an embarrassing debate.’ That, however, was more the Government’s problem than George VI’s. The royal concern, the King told the Chancellor, was ‘that he could not go on indefinitely making the additional provision from his own resources . . .’26 The gap between these two positions remained a wide one, and in the fortnight before the Budget it became the cause of a heated argument, which turned on the status of the royal wartime loan. The Government saw this as a fund of public money to be tapped; the Palace, on the other hand, regarded it as the product of royal frugality, and an essential part of the King’s accounts. It did not help Government-Palace relations that at the end of October it was decided, for technical constitutional reasons, that a proper Select Committee would be necessary after all.27

On November 7th, Dalton returned to the attack, sending the Palace a detailed proposal: the King should surrender the £200,000 saved during the War, and out of this sum a £10,000 annuity should be paid to Elizabeth (over and above the £15,000 Civil List income she was already getting), and £5,000 to Philip, making a joint total of £30,000, part of which should be taxable. If he imagined that this would do the trick, he was mistaken. The Palace was incensed at an amount which it considered derisory, and a poor return on its £200,000 wartime saving. Lascelles recorded the next day that the King considered the offer to be unacceptable.28 The prospect of a negotiated peace having thus faded, both sides now dug trenches. As Dalton approached the day on which he would have to give the most difficult Budget speech of his career, his attitude became even less tractable, and more infuriating to the Court. On November 10th, he returned to the Palace for another discussion with Lascelles and Alexander, and explained that his earlier offer had just been a bargaining position. The admission confirmed everything the Palace believed about him already. ‘He began by saying that he was not at all surprised that the King had rejected the offer,’ noted an exasperated Lascelles, who added that this was particularly remarkable in view of the fact that he had been told that Dalton had Cabinet backing.29

There, for the next few days, the matter rested. In his Budget speech on November 12th, Dalton – as expected – announced a series of tax increases and other deflationary measures. Next day, in Cabinet, his sole recorded contribution to the morning’s discussion concerned the forthcoming marriage of HRH Princess Elizabeth for which, he said, Parliament should be asked to make further financial provisions.30 A Draft Message from the King, in which His Majesty expressed willingness to ‘place at the disposal of the faithful Commons a sum derived from savings on the Civil List made during the war years’ was passed without a dissentient voice. Even the left seemed happy. The Minister of Health, Aneurin Bevin – who might have been expected to make a critical or at least quizzical comment – merely remarked that so long as Britain had one, ‘we ought never to lower the standards of the Monarchy’, and that he hoped the Select Committee would do its work quickly, and settle the whole matter while the Wedding was fresh in people’s minds. No figures were mentioned. ‘That is quite satisfactory’, Lascelles wrote to the King cautiously, ‘as far as it goes.’31

The same night, however, an unexpected development altered the picture in a fundamental way. Released from Budget concerns, Dalton might now have turned his attention fully to the Civil List problem. Instead, the discovery that he was the inadvertent source of a Budget leak, which appeared in an evening paper while he was still giving his speech, forced him to offer his resignation as Chancellor of the Exchequer. It was accepted. His friends were shocked, while the Opposition congratulated itself on an unexpected scalp.

Buckingham Palace could be forgiven if it secretly rejoiced as well. At any rate, it is unlikely that the King remonstrated with Attlee about the departure. Indeed, he now had a double reason for gratitude towards his Prime Minister on the subject of Mr Dalton. In 1945, Attlee had obliged by not appointing the renegade Etonian as Foreign Secretary; two and a half years later, he obliged once again by accepting Dalton’s resignation as Chancellor, at a moment of maximum convenience to the Palace.

In the negotiations, Dalton had appeared both resistant and devious, even – most maddeningly of all – gleeful. His successor, Sir Stafford Cripps, was none of these things. Despite his reputation for austerity (perhaps partly because of it), he was not only straightforward in his dealing with the Palace on the Civil List issue, he was also accommodating. As a result, a much more generous provision than Dalton had ever envisaged went through without a hitch.32 In December, the new Chancellor recommended to his colleagues a total provision of £50,000 – including a £25,000 increase for Elizabeth, with £10,000 for Philip – £20,000 more than Dalton’s offer. He also suggested that the King should make available only £100,000 of accumulated savings, for a period of four years.33 He was, however, taking a risk. The provision required Parliamentary approval which, in view of the need for a Select Committee, could not be taken for granted. Moreover, if they did not accept it, serious damage would be done to the prestige of the Monarchy, as well as to relations between Palace and Parliament.

The Committee began hearing evidence on December 3rd. A key witness was the King’s private secretary, who impressed MPs with a dire warning that the Civil List ‘may have to face a crisis of insolvency,’ if it did not receive adequate provision. Should this happen, three major economies would become necessary: the abolition of horse-drawn carriages, the disbandment of the Gentleman at Arms and Yeoman of the Guard, and the closing of Windsor Castle as a royal residence. ‘I don’t think any member of this Committee,’ he declared – repeating Bevan’s remark in Cabinet – ‘will disagree with me when I say that, so long as we have a Monarchy, the Monarchy’s work has got to be done well’.34

It was a close-run thing. Under only slightly different circumstances – with a less persuasive Chancellor, or one who commanded less authority among MPs – the decision might have gone the other way. As it was, five out of the twelve Labour MPs on the Committee, including the Chairman of the Parliamentary Party, were in favour of substantially lower annuities for the royal couple, backing figures of £35,000 for Elizabeth and £5,000 for Philip. In the final vote, Labour MPs, split evenly, and the higher figures proposed by the Chancellor required Tory and Liberal support to carry them.35

THE DEBATE over annuities for the Heiress and her husband had many echoes over the next half century, as inflation bit into the Civil List, while rising asset values simultaneously added to royal wealth. The question of what Parliament should provide, and what it was fair to ask the Monarch to pay out of private or accumulated resources, remained one of the central issues surrounding the institution.

In 1947, however, few matters were of smaller interest to the public. Despite the Government’s misgivings, ‘Royal Wedding Week’ in mid-November provided the national carnival of the decade: a spectacular display of conspicuous consumption, for royalty and subjects alike, which revealed – to those who cared to note it – the public longing for a relaxation of controls after eight years of tight regulation. If there was popular criticism or resentment, little of it ever became public. Mass Observation discovered discontent, here and there, about the extravagance. People questioned about the 300 clothing coupons and £1,200 spent on the wedding dress split evenly on whether it was reasonable or not. The journalist Jill Craigie described the decision to design a calf-length trousseau for the Princess as ‘a major victory for the vested interests of the fashion houses.’36 However, opinion polls showed a mellowing of opinion as the day approached, with a rise between July and November from 40 to 60 per cent of people actively approving of the arrangements.37

During the autumn, pre-nuptial excitement focused fetishistically on the physical details of the preparations, including the wedding presents which arrived by the crate-load from all over the world. A souvenir book was published listing all 2,428 of them, and the gifts themselves were put on show, tickets a shilling each, at St James’s Palace. ‘After the scarcity, the make-do of the war years,’ wrote Crawfie, who beat Princess Elizabeth to the altar by getting married, more modestly, in September, ‘this sudden lavishness was unnerving.’38 Presents ranged from a gold tiara from the Emperor of Ethiopia to a large number of nylon stockings, home-knitted jumpers and hand-made tea cosies.39 There were political gifts, like a 175-piece porcelain dinner service from Chiang Kai-Shek and his wife; well-chosen ones, like a chestnut filly (Astrakhan) from the Aga Khan; and puzzling ones, like the item given by the Mahatma Gandhi, which the catalogue described as a ‘fringed lacework cloth made out of yarn spun by the donor on his own spinning wheel.’40 Queen Mary thought it was the Indian leader’s famous loincloth, and took a dim view. ‘Such an indelicate gift,’ she told Lady Airlie.41 Not included in the exhibition were hundreds of tons of tinned food from British communities abroad, which were distributed to needy widows and pensioners, with a message from the bride.42

All exhibited gifts were carefully and democratically itemised in the catalogue, regardless of splendour. The pot pourri of the exhibition, appropriate for the times, was reflected in a preview party for donors, attended by rich and poor, ‘peers and factory workers, statesmen and schoolgirls, old age pensioners and housewives, visitors from the provinces, the Continent and the United States.’43 Such social mixing, however, was not to everybody’s taste; nor were many of the gifts. Chips Channon, caught in the crush, noted with admiration a wreath of diamond roses given by the Nizam of Hyderabad, but ‘was struck by how ghastly some of the presents were, though the crowd made it difficult to see.’44 He owed his own invitation to gift No. 797, listed as a ‘silver cigarette case, sunray pattern set with a cabochon sapphire in a gold thumb piece.’45

The Princess herself spent much of her time before the Wedding thanking the more important corporate donors in person. For such occasions, she had a set speech, which was like a cutdown version of her Cape Town broadcast and a wedding rehearsal combined. ‘As long as we live’, she recited in her thank-you to the City of London, ‘it will be the constant purpose of Lieutenant Mountbatten and myself to serve a people who are so dear to me and to show ourselves deserving of their esteem’.46

Of almost as great interest as ‘the presents’ was ‘the cake’ – a topic of special fascination because younger members of the population, reared on sugar rationing, found it difficult even to imagine a culinary creation of such opulence. The problem of having the wedding cake made was solved by a neat and characteristic royal exploitation of professional snobbery, vanity and loyalty. Royal-connected cake manufacturers were graciously permitted to present an example of their work, in return for an invitation to the viewing party in the mirror-lined State dining-room, in the presence of the King and Queen, who wandered around, asking polite questions about the ingredients. The winners had the satisfaction of knowing that their cakes had been consumed by royal guests.47 There were twelve cakes in all, the biggest of which stood four feet high, and took four months to make.48

Finally, there was ‘The Dress’. Of all the totemic artefacts associated with the royal wedding none drove the press and public to greater frenzy than this garment – partly, again, because of the shortages, which had made fine materials hard or impossible even for well-off people to obtain. Accounts of the wedding dress were caressing: according to Norman Hartnell’s own description, it was made of ‘clinging ivory silk’, trailed with jasmine, smilax, seringa and rose-like blossoms, and included a large number of small pearls. Others were even more lyrical. James Laver, fashion expert at the Victoria and Albert, spoke of Hartnell’s creation of Botticelli curves, and of the raised pearls arranged as York roses, entwined with ears of corn. By the device of reversed embroidery, the design had ‘alternated star flowers and orange blossom, now tulle on satin, and now satin on tulle, the whole encrusted with pearls and crystals.’49 A mythology surrounded the production. Hartnell himself liked to recount that his manager, returning from America after a component-hunting expedition, had replied to the question at the customs about whether he had anything to declare, ‘Yes, ten thousand pearls, for the wedding dress of Princess Elizabeth.’50 Like the presents, the dress was put on display, and at times the queue of people waiting to see it stretched the length of the Mall.

After the build-up, the Wedding became, in the words of an American monarchophile, ‘a movie premiere, an election, a World Series and Guy Fawkes Night all rolled into one’.51 It was also, at its core, a gathering of the remnants of European royalty – a vast, rivalrous, beleaguered, mutually suspicious and mutually loyal, and frequently impoverished, extended family. In this respect, the Wedding was different from a Coronation, which was a state more than a personal event. Because of the background of the groom, special attention was directed at the least significant members of this inter-related, uniformed, bemedalled and be-jewelled galère, who included the flotsam of two world wars and many revolutions – and for whom Lieutenant Mountbatten was both an object of envy, and a morale-boosting proof that they still had a place in the world.

Since 1918 – if not before – the British Royal Family had been the premier dynasty; and now, with fewer surviving monarchies than ever, its pre-eminence was even more apparent. ‘You are the big potato,’ Smuts was overheard saying to the King’s mother at the wedding-eve party; ‘all the other queens are small potatoes.’52 Nobody doubted it or that this was an occasion for big potatoes to show cousinly solicitude to small ones, whatever their circumstances. Lady Airlie cast her mind back to 1939 or even 1914. Old friends were reunited, she wrote, old jealousies swept away.53 ‘It was a tremendous meeting place,’ recalls Princess Margaret. ‘People who had been starving in little garrets all over Europe, suddenly reappeared.’54 Queen Alexandra of Yugoslavia likened the atmosphere to that of a boarding school, in which all the royal families belonged to the same house: the Wedding reminded her of a reunion of school friends, all ‘shedding their grown-up facade, and romping together in an abandon of gossip, leg-pulling and long-remembered family jokes’. Many of the visiting royals – especially the mendicant ones, who had their travel expenses discreetly paid by the Windsors – crowded round a communal table in the dining room at Claridges, where they were put up, adding to the illusion of an unruly and cacophonous academy.55

However, simple accounts of happy high jinks, and of bygones being bygones, did not give the whole picture. Delicate decisions had to be made. Though Philip’s mother was invited, his three surviving, German-married sisters were not. Nor was the Duke of Windsor, who spent the day morosely in New York in his Waldorf Towers suite. A few who came might have done better to have stayed away. ‘When I am back behind the Iron Curtain,’ Queen Helen of Romania remarked during her brief stay, ‘I shall wonder whether this is all a dream.’56 Her words acquired a special poignancy because the Government in Bucharest used the opportunity afforded by King Michael’s absence to declare a republic.

On the eve of the main event there was a dinner for foreign royalty, and a grand party at the Palace, attended by crowned heads, presidents and premiers. Much was made of the down-at-heel condition of royal adornments, of tiaras taken out of storage and dusted down: as though the ostentation was easier to justify if it was seen as a fancy dress parade, rather than the display of real luxury. Crown jewels were worn as if they were paste, almost apologetically – leading some of the kings and queens who still had thrones to feel superior. ‘Queen Juliana of the Netherlands was frightfully scathing about everybody’s jewellery,’ recalls Pamela Hicks, a bridesmaid. ‘“It’s so dirty,” she kept saying.’57 Lady Airlie wrote that ‘anyone fortunate enough to have a new dress drew all eyes’. However, all the famous diamonds were visible, ‘even though most of them had not been cleaned since 1939’.58

ONE TICKLISH question, which exercised the finest and most antiquarian minds at Buckingham Palace almost until the Wedding itself, was what Philip Mountbatten should be called and how he should be styled. Since he was no longer Greek, his royal title was meaningless, and anyway he had abandoned it; yet it was taken for granted that the Heiress’s consort could not remain a commoner. The problem was finding a suitable English title, and an appropriate rank. In choosing one, future children – including the future Heir or Heiress – had to be taken into account. Would they be named after their father or their mother? Consulted on this point, the Lord Chancellor, Lord Jowett, replied that the 1917 Proclamation which changed the Royal Family’s name to Windsor, did not include under the general rubric George V’s married female descendants. Elizabeth, and her issue, were excluded, and would take their names from her husband.59

At the end of July, Dermot Morrah – who had covered the tour of South Africa for The Times and felt a passionate concern about the minutiae of royal etiquette – sent a memorandum to his editor, who passed it on to the Palace, listing some twenty alternative labels for Lieutenant Mountbatten, with comments on each. He gave ‘Edinburgh’ a high ranking. Though it had the drawback of lacking antiquity, ‘having been first conferred only in 1726,’ the adoption of it, he suggested, would be seen as a compliment to Scotland. Lascelles added his own notes, and passed on the list to the King.60 In view of Philip’s naval background, either the Earl or Duke of Greenwich was considered a possibility.61 Finally, Baron Greenwich, Earl of Merioneth, Duke of Edinburgh was agreed. However, the question of a ‘Royal’ Dukedom – whether Philip should be called ‘His Royal Highness’, following his marriage – still had to be sorted out. The King became greatly exercised on this issue. ‘Can you find out how Prince Henry of Battenberg who was Serene Highness was created Royal Highness by Q. Victoria on his marriage to Princess Beatrice?’, the King pencilled to Lascelles in August. ‘This will give me a Precedent in this case.’ In September, after consultations with the Home Secretary, it was decided to bestow the ‘HRH’ title which Philip had turned down before the engagement, but which his marriage to the Princess would justify. The King’s attention now turned to the complex question of his future son-in-law’s coat-of-arms. Rough sketches were commissioned, and the Monarch spent many productive hours poring over them, noting down his comments.62

At the end of September, Philip’s transmogrification into an Englishman was completed with his formal reception into the Anglican Church by the Archbishop of Canterbury in the chapel at Lambeth Palace – at roughly the same time as his mother, Princess Alice, was making arrangements for the founding of her own Greek Orthodox order of working nuns. There was one more detail: in November, the King bestowed the Garter on both the Princess and Philip – though too late for the wedding service sheets, which described him as ‘Philip Mountbatten, RN’. Popularly, however, he had always been known as ‘Prince Philip’ – a title to which his wife, as Queen, finally gave regal sanction ten years later.

Courtiers continued to weigh him up. In late October, Philip accompanied Elizabeth on her last pre-marriage engagement, to launch the Cunard liner the Caronia from the Clydebank shipyard of John Brown and Co. On the way back, the royal train was delayed in a siding, and Jock Colville walked down the line with his employer’s fiancé, climbing with him into the signal box. ‘I watched P. narrowly,’ he recorded. ‘He is a strong believer in the hail-fellow-well-met as opposed to the semi-divine interpretation of Monarchy.’ However, during a conversation with some of the railwaymen, there was one ‘appalling gaffe’. When the signalman said jokingly that he was waiting for promotion until somebody died, noted Colville, ‘Philip replied, “Like me!” No doubt he meant in the Navy, but another interpretation was obvious.’ Colville wrote that he expected the future consort to be popular with the crowd, but that he could also be vulgar, and that his manner towards Princess Elizabeth at times was quite off-hand.63 However, even the Princess’s acidic private secretary was not immune from the rising tide of sentiment towards the young couple, and the sense of a storybook romance. Close contact with both of them also caused him to revise his opinions. ‘As the day drew nearer’, Colville acknowledged immediately after the Wedding, ‘I began to think, as I now sincerely do, that the Princess and Philip really are in love.’