Attlee’s advocacy worked, but it failed to supply the all-party support for the Select Committee recommendations which the Palace would have liked. Although no more than thirty-three MPs voted for a left-wing amendment to give no increase in the Civil List at all, an amendment proposed by Webb to limit the couple’s total to £40,000 was defeated only by 291 to 165 – indicating a large dissentient vote among Labour backbenchers, and a significant rate of abstention among ministers. A mere 122 Labour MPs opposed Webb’s amendment, while 106, including eleven ministers, were unaccounted for. In short, if Labour had voted on its own, the Webb reduction to the List payments would have been carried. As it was, the Princess and Duke got their increases in spite of, not because of, the votes of the governing party.8
‘There was much criticism of the sums proposed but none of the Monarchy as such,’ noted Colville who, with other courtiers, keenly watched the proceedings from the Distinguished Strangers’ Gallery. ‘There was, however, a large school on the Labour backbenches which said the country wanted a “Scandinavian monarchy” with less pageantry and pomp rather than a “ceremonial monarchy”. Cripps spoke admirably and was most effective in debate and Eden was also telling.’9 Chips Channon blamed the Palace for the tactical error, as he saw it, of failing to invite enough ordinary MPs to the Wedding, which had resulted in a lengthy and embarrassing debate. He concluded that ‘the Royal Family had, I think, a deserved jolt.’10
THE FIRST DUTY and ambition of an Heir to the Throne was swiftly accomplished: early in the New Year, Princess Elizabeth became pregnant. The announcement was not made until the summer. In the meantime, the publicity created by the Wedding, combined with the Princess’s new status, helped to increase her list of engagements.
With the marriage, as Ziegler has written, ‘the monarchy gained a new and incomparably brighter focus of attention. The King was in no sense forgotten . . . but in a curious way he was written off. Elizabeth was the future.’11 The young Princess who signed no documents, made no decisions and uttered few words in public that were her own, continued to have a hypnotic effect wherever she went. As time passed, however, there was a shift in the tone and quality of the adulation. By chance, the marriage had coincided, not just with a crisis, but with the nadir of the nation’s peacetime fortunes. Thereafter, both the economy and living conditions began to improve. It was as if the Wedding had been a good omen; and the Princess – a healthy, composed, pretty, wifely symbol of post-war youth and possibility, with her exquisitely designed couture that made imaginative use of clothing coupons, and her picture-book war-hero husband – stood for a new alternative to drabness.
It was an enjoyable life, and less demanding than the frequency of her newsreel appearances made it appear. Yet it was also – as Colville perceived – a remarkably aimless one, devoid of any content apart from pleasing and being seen. The Princess’s private secretary, an ambitious and high-flying diplomat on secondment, had had a more exciting life than this, and he determined to inject some element of purpose, or at least of understanding, into the repetitive royal round. Once the Wedding was out of the way, he set himself the task of extending his employer’s political education.
He found the Princess easier to instruct than her husband. After going through some paperwork with both of them, he noted that Philip became impatient if his interest was not immediately aroused; and that Elizabeth concentrated better on details.12 In order to advance the Princess’s knowledge, though possibly also to increase his own, he hit on the idea of getting her included in the distribution of Foreign Office telegrams. The less technical ones, he wrote to Lascelles, ‘would give HRH an idea of world affairs which she cannot possibly get from the newspapers.’13 The Foreign Office consented, as did the King, and the first box of telegrams arrived on January 16th. In addition, rather like Crawfie and Queen Mary before the war, Colville decided to take the Princess on educational trips. Shortly after the arrival of the first FO box, they sat and watched a Foreign Affairs debate in the House of Commons. As the Princess entered, ‘all eyes there turned in her direction,’ according to the press.14 The Princess sat demurely, while the Duke, who accompanied them, made lively comments.
Compensating for the deficiencies of a royal education was an uphill struggle. Though she appeared to read the telegrams, Colville was disappointed to find Princess Elizabeth at first uninterested in politics. However, his attempt to widen her experience continued. In February, he took her to a juvenile court for a day, in the not very optimistic hope of persuading her to improve her knowledge of the social services.15 In this, he achieved more success than he perhaps realized. At any rate, the Princess picked up enough to assist her in one of the most necessary of royal skills, that of talking brightly to distinguished guests about areas that concerned them. When Eleanor Roosevelt stayed at Windsor Castle the same spring during a visit to England for the unveiling of a statue of her husband, she was greatly flattered that the King’s daughter sought her out with a question about homes for young women offenders. She found the Heiress ‘very serious-minded’ and she was impressed ‘that this young Princess was so interested in social problems and how they were being handled’.16
There were also other horizon-expanding excursions in addition to the formal round. In May 1948, Tom Driberg complained to Lord Mountbatten that the Princess and Duke had made the wrong kind of visit to the Commons at the wrong time. Before the war, he pointed out, members of the Royal Family had dined informally in private rooms at the House with MPs of the then ruling party. He suggested taking the Princess to the House at Question Time. ‘To get the ethos, the feel, of Parliament’, he wrote, ‘she really ought to watch Bevan, Gaitskell, Harold Wilson, Morrison etc. parrying the everyday cuts, often pretty effectively and wittily.’17 If this particular suggestion reached Clarence House, it was ignored. However, Driberg’s belief that the Princess had no contact with leading Labour figures was not quite correct. In fact, a meeting with a couple of the Labour politicians on his list had occurred only the month before.
This took the form of a small dinner party held by the Prime Minister and his wife for the royal couple, to which a few of the younger members of the Government, including the President of the Board of Trade, Harold Wilson, and the Minister of Fuel and Power, Hugh Gaitskell, and their wives were invited. The gathering was indeed a strange one. The politicians could not decide whether it was appropriate to admit to the kind of feelings their constituents would have had at such an intimate meeting with royalty, or to put on a show of jacobin disdain. While they waited to greet the royal guests in the drawing room at No 10, they made nervous schoolboy jokes. ‘We had been talking about capital punishment,’ Gaitskell recorded. ‘Harold reminded us that it was still a capital offence to rape a Royal Princess!’ When the Princess and Duke arrived, the ministers and their wives were faced with the problem which often seems to beset prominent socialists in the presence of royalty: whether it was sillier to bow and curtsey, or not to. Dora Gaitskell could hardly bring herself to curtsey, but Mrs Attlee, entering into the spirit of things, ‘suddenly swung round and curtsied low to the Duke.’
After dinner, each minister was summoned to the sofa, to spend a quarter of an hour in conversation with the twenty-two-year-old guest of honour, who must have found the experience as taxing as they did. Gaitskell formed the same opinion as Colville. ‘She had a very pretty voice and quite an easy manner but is not, I think, very interested in politics or affairs generally’, he concluded. She tried hard, but evidently found it more difficult to think of things to say about the fuel economy than about homes for bad girls. Gamely, she remarked that her grandmother’s house was the coldest she knew. Why? inquired the minister. The Princess replied that ‘it was because of her national duty’.18
Colville’s ambitions to extend