Books

The princess and the peabrain

Alastair Forbes

Time and Chance: An Autobiography Peter Townsend (Collins 25.50)

The King was obviously devoted to the good-looking equerry. Indeed, some of his other courtiers would jealously joke that he seemed to regard him almost as a son. He was, however, altogether unaware that, to his younger daughter, this equerry was a 'blessed and beloved angel', her 'precious darling' to whom she was writing: '0 Good God, why not be together?. . . I really must marry you, though inwardly united, and in reality that is much more than the ceremony, yet that ceremony would be a protection.' She would even sign herself the equerry's 'affectionate and devoted wife and darling'.

In order to show that there is seldom much new under a Windsor sun, I write, of course, of George HI's daughter Princess Amelia and Charles Fitzroy, an equerry unusual only in that he was one of the many descendants in bastard lines of Charles II (the greatest peopler, until Hirold Wilson came along, of the British peerage), thinking it more tactful to pass over another equerry, that goosy-goosy-gander Thomas Garth who, one summer night, wandered downstairs into the Windsor chamber of Amelia's sister Princess Sophia who in turn, nine months to the day after this single penetrating peep, was to produce another little Tom. As Greville observed at the time: 'Women fall in love with anything — and opportunity and the accidents of the passions are of more importance than any positive merits of mind or of body.' These Princesses, Greville added, 'were secluded from the world, mixing with few people — their passions boiling over and ready to fall into the hands of the first man whom circumstances enabled to get at them'.

Readers who, like the worldly 'outgoing Editor of the New Statesman, were hoping to learn just how far Peter Townsend had stuck his neck out and into the hangman's noose for the, on paper at least, still Highly Treasonable capital offence of 'encompassing the virtue of the King's daughter', will put down his third piece of scissorsand-paste literary hackwork since receiving the Order of the Buckingham Palace Boot with their prurient curiosity on this point titillated but unsatisfied. The description, 'sensual, thrilling, perfect in looks and manners . . . slim, graceful, tender to the feel . . . a lovely plaything . . . a sweet soft thing', disappointingly turns out to refer only to his old pre-war Fury fighter aircraft, while the black and white photographs• rather than the grey prose are the only convincing reminders that his Sovereign's diminutive younger daughter was in those days an exceedingly pretty girl with whom any sujet moyen sensuel not directly employed by her Royal parents would think foul scorn that he should not attempt at least some mild flirtation. (It is true that in the previous century, when the only Jones about the place was the poor little Charles Kingsley boy waif found hiding under a sofa, and the much more ebenbiirtig Mecklenburg-Strelitz was the most familiar double-barrelled name on Court lips, Cousin Marie, a Duchess of that ilk, had, poor thing, been seduced and impregnated by a footman, but that was abroad and George VI had never, in his lifetime, to utter the Bostonian beef, recently quoted by Princess Margaret's friend Gore Vidal, 'It's hard to trust the help these days.') Most of this autobiography's references to sex are in fact confined to childhood reminiscences of the author's early excitement at the sight of a cow's swinging udders, of dancing classes with his cheek to the bosom of Miss Busby, the gym-mistress at the private school where a 'pederast' (sic, note French spelling) usher used to soap his private parts on bath night, and of the affront to his `pudor' (sic, a word obsolete in English and American but still of course in current use in French) when he was forced to run naked to a cold shower with his morning erection not yet even at halfmast. There is also statutory reference made to the tremendous tumescence of the Cerne Abbas giant seen from the air.

Nor, perhaps, should too much be read into his nostalgic memories of Princess Margaret, whose all too voluntary vocal sessions at any piano within reach remain up to but not beyond Opportunity Knocks standards, 'lisping' at Balmoral, 'I gave my love a cherry, it had no stone'. Besides, treason, in these as in other matters, is, as Talleyrand once pointed out, 'a matter of dates'. Though it showed surprisingly black humour on the part of Mr Jocelyn Stevens, of all people, to follow up his Daily Express serialisation of this now quarterof-a-century-stale story with the rather more startling pictorial scoop underlining how differently they sometimes still order the matter in Jeddah, in England such statutes are honoured, if the poor pun can be permitted, more in the breach than in the observance. And it can be taken absolutely for granted that nowadays, from the highest to the lowest in the land, all carnal goods can be taken on premarital approval without having to be classified as 'damaged' on return. The Spectator, under its last owner, had even the bad taste to print some detailed medical case-notes on this sociological development. The wartime ambience of Windsor Castle was indeed for the Heiress Apparent's then pre-teenage sister so much a Little England in microcosm that at clever Caroline Blackwood's coming-out ball at Londonderry House, an early peacetime beano, shecould still inappropriately exclaim, with widened Hanoverian blue eyes and sneerY Coburg grimace, 'I hear there's a German here tonight', a characteristically tactless reference to her own and her hostess's Hohenzollern kinsman Fritzi, grandson of the man who literally single-handed supported his grandmother Queen Victoria during her last deathbed hours at Osborne, and grandfather-in-law-to-be of a future Duke of Wellington. Before her elder sister had been able to announce her betrothal to the man she loved, he, though a Prince of two friendly, allied nations, had been obliged to change his name from his father's to the anglicised version of the morganatic Hessian title Battenberg which those of his mother's family residing in Britain had been bullied into adopting during the first world war. His surviving three sisters, though all married to princely kinsmen of his wife, had for more than a decade in order to visit him to creep incognito into London from Germany or be content with dear Balmoral ('so like the Thuringian forest') beloved of Prince Albert.

Princess Margaret's upbringing had been, as Henry James said of Thoreau's, 'worse than provincial, it was parochial'. Export or Perish was a popular postwar slogan, but stick to Home Produce was the watchword at Court, where not unnaturally the Bronzino-beautiful Battle of Britain pilot, despite what he describes as his 'English body, chilled, neurotic and overwrought as it was, after years of war and privations', had become an instant cynosure when George VI, rashly in the event widening the normal catchment area for this confidential appointment, decided, on the advice of the Chief of the Air Staff, to take him on as an equerry. Authentic war hero he certainly was, since he had far more terrors to overcome than most (`The more I flew, the more fear, stark degrading fear possessed me') for even before the war he had suffered serious psychosomatic skin eruptions when on flying duty and later he succumbed to

more than one nervous breakdown.

Many of the King's subjects would not however have counted it exactly a wartime privation to be able to meet and marry in 1941 his 'tall and lively' twenty-year-old wife Rosemary and to become ten months later the father of the first of his two sons by that marriage. He now ungraciously writes that he thought it 'rather indecent' of her to throw her arms round him and to exclaim, on hearing of his appointment as equerry to the King, 'We're made'. I had occasion to see something of them both, either separately or together, and it was he and not she who struck me as being most noticeably on the make, while her discretion from first to last of her husband's adventure was, unlike his, exemplary. (Before his freakish running

in what one might call the primaries, as a candidate for a Royal hand, he had nursed ambitions for a Tory parliamentary constituency, for which the local chairman deemed him, despite his magnificent war record, too wet; though his most eminent cousin was Hugh Gaitskell, who had taken 'Inn as a boy for rides on the backstep of his bike — both families being the sort of salt of the earth and the Empire so easily derided by BBCynics and overpaid Yankee economist commentators.) Behind this Lone Ranger shyness, itself an outward symptom of his egocentricity, this Burma-born Haileyburian member of a large family cherished a secret megalomania not always quite as precise as his self-confessed 'burning ambition to become an ace'. Now he was either failing to decypher or determined to ignore the invisibly inked warning on the door of the House!told Dining Room at Buckingham Palace: Abandon Anthony Hope all ye who enter here'. What might be pardonable as the dream of an assistant housemaid was entirely unsuitable for an assistant Master of the Household, as the equerry quite soon became, the King finding that, as his greatgrandmother would have put it, 'Er passt zu ens sehr gut'. He was even forgiven for Shouting at the King to 'Shut up' when his Consort's soothing murmurs of `Bertie, Bertie' and sweet sleeve strokings had failed to soothe a Hanoverian hurricane Which blew up in the Royal car in South Africa, a country where Townsend longed to settle. In 1945 the Monarch installed the Townsends in pretty Adelaide Cottage in the Home Park, about which the author how makes belated complaints, particularly of its rudimentary heating system, evidently far short of the Belgian, American and French standards experienced since his expatriation. Here in the garden he failed to heed what Queen Victoria had had carved as an epitaph on the marble effigy of Dash, the favourite spaniel and closest childhood Fompanion she had skipped upstairs to bath Immediately on returning from her Coronation: 'His attachment was without self

■ shness/His fidelty without deceit/Reader, if you wo9ld be beloved and die regretted/Profit by the example of DASH'.

As the Princess did not know an aerofoil from an elevator, it struck some of us as a Shade odd that she should at his suggestion be entering an aircraft in the King's Cup Race, to be piloted by Townsend, which from 1949 on she did three years running, one year the pilot rushing, unaccompanied by his wife, into the house where the Prin cess was staying (and where the present Vice-Chairman of the BBC and myself were her fellow guests) in order, we were told, that he could give his plane's Royal entrant a leg by leg account of its progress and his Prowess. I thought it rather rum at the time but I thought it rummer still when, not long thereafter being invited to inspect the portrait of her that was being worked on by her very talented aunt Princess Marina, herself the daughter of another Royal artist, an irruption into the Yellow Drawing Room at Buckingham Palace was made by Townsend, then by his own description 'neither eligible nor available', who proceeded to point out what he declared to be the strengths and weaknesses of the likeness in the most extraordinarily possessive fashion possible.

Later, Rosemary Townsend went no further than to confirm my own suspicions by mildly observing that Peter seemed to have gone off his chump and was living far round any bend in the nearby Thames at Windsor. The by now Deputy Master of the Household was beginning to see a dazzling light beckoning to him at the end of his dreamy Walter Mitty tunnel-vision. Dozing in the heather, after a Balmoral picnic lunch with the guns, he became 'vaguely aware that someone was covering me with a coat. I opened one eye [Mitty = Gregory Peck in Roman Holiday] — to see Princess Margaret's lovely face [Mitty = Audrey Hepburn in ditto] very close looking into mine'. (One wonders if the movie rights have been sold yet, and to whom.) 'Then I opened the other eye, and saw, behind her, the King . . . I whispered, "You know your father is watching us?" at which she laughed, straightened up and went to his side. Then she took his arm and walked him away, leaving me to my dreams.' Students of Court form will note here the alarm signals of an equerry growing too big for his riding boots. By all means 'the King' instead of

'His Majesty', but 'your father' will never do. Social solecism apart, these two bornagain Christians must have known that they were already lusting Carterishly and adulterously after each other in their hearts. This was the time for the author to beat a tactful retreat back into the service, allowing himself the chance perhaps to return in the future to seek the misalliance of his dreams with fresh lustre acquired as a Rhodesian or South African Bigwig or some such.

Poor Princess Margaret, with no intellectual or other reserves to fall back on, was stunned by genuine grief at the loss of her beloved father and found it hard to adjust to her now very different life, but the Townsends meanwhile 'kept up the pretence of conjugal unity', even entertaining together their new Sovereign, Prince Philip and Princess Margaret at Adelaide Cottage within half-a-year of the outset of the new reign. Six months later they were divorced, Rosemary, as always the gentleman (Townsend being only the gentleman rider, a very different thing), agreeing to be the 'guilty party', a now obsolete role in such proceedings, while the 'innocent husband's' eyes filled with self-pitying tears as 'a par ticularly lovely' picture of his wife was handed to him in court as evidence of iden tification. He went off-duty to Sandringham where he sought out comforting Bible texts with Princess Margaret, always a highly dangerous pastime for the idle hands of unattached adults. One day at Windsor, 'when everyone had gone to London for some ceremony' (except presumably for a few more reliable remaining Royal servants, circumstances identical to those surrounding Princess Sophia a century and a half before), he 'told her, very quietly, of his feelings', and heard 'with immense gladness' but 'sorely troubled' that they were reciprocated. 'Boys and girls, madly in love', he writes, 'generally do not act intelligently', and these two nominal adults, with threescore and more years for their aggregate age, proceeded to demonstrate immaturity in the precise clinical sense of the word.

'How to consummate this mutual pleasure was the problem,' writes the author in his best Monsieur Jordain style. You don't say! His imagination, he adds, never at a loss for a cliche, 'boggled at the prospect of my becoming a member of the Royal Family'. Boggled perhaps, but no more than it had been Mittyishly boggling away on the back burner for years. 'All we could hope was that with time and patience, some solution might evolve.' Meanwhile, he neither felt the slightest conscientious compulsion to resign from a position whose trust he had so weakly betrayed, his perverted taste for risk overcoming his sense of duty and gratitude to his Royal employers of eight years, nor did he feel able to say, after the fashion of those pretty inscribed Battersea enamel boxes: 'I love too well to kiss and tell'. No wonder that the Queen's Private Secretary, the vital constitutional link with her government, on receiving the complacently delivered communication from his lips, could only say, 'You must be either mad or bad'. The author says he had 'hoped for a more helpful reaction'. Then more fool, or knave, he. And more fool or knave he for not knowing, as he quite incredibly asserts he did not, what scandal he was creating during Coronation Year in the foreign press and elsewhere for the family which had shown him such kindness. More fool certainly he for not knowing that it was 'Tommy' Lascelles's constitutional duty to consult the Prime Minister.

Then, on Coronation Day, Ihe soppy pair took pains to afficher their intimacy

for the American press so that soon Fleet Street began to give echoing tongue. Inevitably he was ordered to take up an RAF appointment abroad (his original sec ondment as equerry had been for only three months), though not very far abroad. He could have found his way back to normal service duties in due course, the age limit for aircrew having been extended to fifty-five and NATO offering much 'scope for useful work and promotion. He petulantly blames Lascelles for making it impossible for him to exercise the technical 'legal custody' of his two sons which he had a few months before been awarded, omitting disingenuously to explain that they had been entrusted to what he admits to being 'the good care and control of their mother'. He even blames Lascelles and not his own sublime self indulgence for the 'brutal separation' from which, he believes, his youngest son 'has never quite recovered'. All the facts that over the next year or two began to impinge on the silly, separated couple could have been ascertained by the eldest Townsend son or any other schoolboy from a brief study in any public library. The marital status of some Government ministers who had been through the divorce courts in one capacity or another had nothing whatsoever to do with the case.

Townsend's attitude to the press seems partly based on a sort of Wilsonian self

induced paranoia and partly on the precedent set by a previous RAF backerinto-the-limelight, aircraftsman T. E. Shaw. Quite able to give the lie direct to a reporter's question about the health of the King when he knew him to be doomed and likely to die from one day to another, which he shortly did, his answers to questions about himself were always couched in language calculated to ensure headline reminders of his romance and the fact that his cap was still set over the windmill and into the ring. It was at his insistent instigation that Princess Margaret finally sought to discover the answer to the only question, political or religious, that was ever at stake in their affair, just as it has been the only one in so many other alliances and misalliances, with or without the benefit of clergy, in all walks of life, before or since. What would they have to live on and how would it compare to the quite unusually sybaritic train de vie of Clarence House (whose jolly, popular chatelaine may pause, with chocolate box tongs en garde, on reading the reference in this book, by her former Comptroller Designate and former prospective sonin-law self-designate, to her embonpoint)? In short, if the money was right the marriage was on; if not, it was off.

The money was not right. At best a Bill of Renunciation would be laid before Parliament, freeing the Princess not only of her responsibilities under the Royal Marriage Act, thus enabling her to marry Townsend, but also of her rights of succession and naturally all monies from the Civil List as well as all other perks and privileges pertaining to her previous rank and precedence. She did not need Sir Seymour Egerton, her bank manager, to tell her that her inheritance from old Maggie Greville would hardly subsidise love in a cottage, even'one considerably smaller than Adelaide. Nor did anybody, in or out of-her family, seem eager to put the hat round for her. In marked contrast to her sister, whose kindness and courtesy behind a natural reserve are legendary, the Princess had already in her brief years of public life displayed a disagreeable lack of good manners and consideration to all and sundry, on right as on left, and such popularity as she possessed was to be found amongst those who had been neither in her employ nor in her circle of acquaintance, many of the latter having suffered sufficiently from her spoiled rankpulling and snubs to wish to see her inde

finitely marooned on Mustique or stone more convenient desert island with her cavaliere servente. Politicians in particular had long prayed with added fervour for God to save Queen Elizabeth II, long to reign over them, lest they one day wake to find themselves living the nightmare of Tuesday audiences with her ill-educated, Ili' informed and sullen sister.

So it was not persons of an especially 'Establishmentarian' turn of mind alone who found that the advice tendered to his sovereign by Sir Anthony Eden, inclif' ferently demoted here to 'Mr' Eden by the author, was the most unexceptionably serISible act of his brief and disastrous pre; miership. At this point, even Townsend realised that the folie a deux was over and promptly proceeded to write himself a dif

ferent part, for one of those comedies al which the country excels. 'No people cheat like the English,' Melbourne used to say. SO he concocted, or so he claims, 'with claritY and fluency', that supreme example of the Higher Hypocrisy, the communiqué issued

later by the Princess renouncing a civil mar

riage to her father's former equerry because she was 'mindful of the Church's teaching

and conscious of my duty to the Conr monwealth'. After this successful atteniPt to get his name enshrined in a footling fool note to a once great country's increasinglY frivolous history, Townsend proceeded to go round the world in a Land-Rover (rather as the defrocked Rector of Stiffkey wen,t round the seaside resorts first in a barrel and finally in a lion's cage) and wrote an account of the experience flatter than that unfortunate man's county of Norfolk, an abridged version of it being included in this book. Even such colourful characters as he was to meet and make his companions on the way, such as Jim Callaghan's pet aver sion, the brilliant diplomat Sir Fred Warner, come out improbably two-dimensional, while the wisdom of the West and East la condensed into corny cracker mottoes without the jokes.

Though rejected by the Princess he continued, as he still does, to flirt with the press, pretending persecution at all times save when it ignores him. Even the braves beiges rejected him, seeing in him just a sort of Liliane Baels who had failed, even morganatically, to make it. All but one that is, a sweet girl much younger and prettier than the Princess who got away, if without her periwinkle popeyes, and who fell corn' passionately and passionately for him and, has given him something never vouchsafe° to her predecessor in his affections, a haPPY marriage and three children to keep holl both feeling and looking half his age. She is presumably the person who hastaught him French, the language from which large parts of his book appear to have been trans' lated, consciously or unconsciously, man" of the words and expressions employe. being either obsolete or meaningless In English or existing only in French. you don't, for example, use 'agonising' f°,r 'dying' in English, nor in our language 15

there a translation in use of the proverb jamaLs deux sans trois. We say jumpseat and not strapontin. There are many more such Gallicisms in the text of a book that need never have appeared had its author only Signed the Crawfie Clause included in the contracts of the Palace staff since his day.

'Your money or your life with the equerry,' the politicians had politely said as they pointed their pistols at the would-be Royal runaway, turning her carriage round In mid-gallop almost before the penny had time to drop. But Townsend, to judge him from this book and its predecessors, still makes a living solely from exploiting his life as the courtier who went too far a-courting. One must hope that he will now find alternative ways of bringing up his nice-looking family in their nice-looking house in the Paris green belt and that this will be his last shameful pot-boiler about the unhappy Princess whose coronet he failed to chalk up on his fuselage in his second Battle of Britain, a pranging fall like Lucifer's from the first. It is curious that one of his recurring themes should be the significance in his life of the dates 15-16 July. Nearly three hundred years ago that was exactly when Count Konigsmark disappeared forever While on his way to an assignation with the Hanoverian Princess Sophia Dorothea, herself to be locked up unseen for the remaining thirty-two years of her life. Konigsmark called himself 'a poor butterfly burnt by the flame'. Townsend has mastered the art of literally living happily ever after off his Royal past.