The Queen: Elizabeth II and the Monarchy. Ben Pimlott

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 the Prime Minister that, only recently, the Privy Purse had found it necessary to tick off the Board of Trade for recommending an Austrian ornament-maker for the wedding dress’s trimmings, a recommendation which had threatened the Palace ‘with an appreciable amount of embarrassing publicity’.¹⁸

      A bigger problem, however, than the cost of the Wedding was the cost of the Princess. The marriage of an Heir to the Throne automatically involved a review of the Heir’s Civil List – and the month in which this was taking place could scarcely have been less propitious. Buckingham Palace asked for a total of £50,000 per annum for the couple – a net increase of £35,000. The Government – conscious of left-wing backbenchers whose working-class constituents had been told to tighten their belts – replied that this was politically impossible. It did not ease discussions on such a delicate matter that the Chancellor, responsible both for the Budget and for finding the cash for the King’s daughter, happened to be the son of a former tutor to George V, and – for complex domestic reasons – was heartily disliked by the Royal Family, which regarded him as a turncoat. Dalton, antiroyal since his youth, was not particularly good at concealing the wry pleasure he derived from the twist of fate that had made him royal paymaster.

      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,