Although he was skittling around London dining with what Bertie Wooster would call some of the better elements, his diary never comes alive like it does when he shoots his first stag, or when he’s riding a horse. As a young graduate, he was rather louche. Suggested reading It's the Queen or tyrannyĪnd yet for someone with such strong principles, Lascelles lacked a sense of direction. He described the abdication as “a real tragedy in my life”. The stability of the monarchy mattered to him. The night the abdication was announced, Lascelles walked round and round St James’s Park, thinking about James II. When Harold Nicolson was commissioned to write George V’s biography, Lascelles told him it would be the biography of an institution, and that there would be no need to “descend into personalities”. Lascelles believed in the institution but said, “I have never idealised any member of the House of Windsor”. Edward, he said, was “habitually ready to sacrifice truth to his personal likes or dislikes” Edward’s celebrity wasn’t enough to maintain the monarchy. It is also why, irrespective of the way it happened, Lascelles came to believe the abdication was inevitable. (In one of his more venomous moments, Lascelles wrote that the King’s subjects would not tolerate “a shop-spoiled American, with two living husbands and a voice like a rusty saw”.) That is why, after the abdication, Lascelles went to some lengths to keep Edward out of the country, to try and eradicate the whole affair from the public mind. That is why the knighthood had to be refused, and why Wallis Simpson couldn’t be Queen. The public spectacle has to be a true enough expression of the values it upholds. Lascelles understood that although monarchy must be staged, that doesn’t mean it can be fake. It would have been wrong for those young men to be punished while Coward was honoured.Įssentially honourable, then, despite being memorably unpleasant. The King was constantly approving courts-martial against young RAF officers who had written dud cheques, and Coward had recently been fined for cheating his Income Tax. When Noël Coward was recommended for a knighthood, Lascelles advised George VI against. Suggested reading Can the monarchy survive?īut Lascelles wasn’t just a stickler for arcane and snobbish standards, nor did he take a cruel pleasure in enforcing them. Having been a courtier, on and off, from 1920-1953, he gives a fascinating insight into how to preserve a monarchy in a democracy. He had lived, grace-and-favour, at the Old Stables at Kensington Palace (he thought it was one of the nicest houses in England) since he retired in 1953. This man was Alan “Tommy” Lascelles, former Private Secretary to George VI and Queen Elizabeth II, and the Assistant Private Secretary to Edward VIII when he was Prince of Wales. In later retirement, he had become something of a hermit, looking like “a pot-bellied old beaver”, to use his own words, and growing an ungainly beard. Occasionally royalty stopped to chit chat on their way past, as Princess Margaret once did with her new baby. He read Shakespeare on the Tube as he travelled to meetings at the bank, and wrote amateur poetry. He had been a cultivated chap - a former Director of the Midland Bank, Secretary of the Literary Society and Director of the Royal Academy of Music. Forty years ago, on 10 August, a tall and wiry old man died at Kensington Palace, aged 94.
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