Fort Belvedere, December the 10th, 1936. The house sat in Windsor Great Park, Surrey, a Gothic folly of castellated towers and ornamental cannon. The kind of thing an Edwardian architect builds when someone rich and eccentric pays for it. Edward VIII had made it his retreat from the machinery of the crown, the room where he could be, in his own words, away from all that.
On this particular afternoon, the machinery came to him. Edward signed the instrument of abdication at Fort Belvedere in the presence of his three younger brothers, Prince Albert, Prince Henry, and Prince George. The document was precise. I, Edward VIII of Great Britain, Ireland, and the British Dominions beyond the seas, King, Emperor of India, do hereby declare my irrevocable determination to renounce the throne for myself and for my descendants.
He set his hand to it at the bottom. His brothers signed as witnesses. The transaction took minutes. At Buckingham Palace that afternoon, his assistant private secretary, a man named Alan Frederick Lascelles, known to everyone as Tommy, worked through the administrative requirements of a constitutional collapse.
He wasn’t a witness to the signing. He wasn’t invited to be. His position in the hierarchy placed him clearly in the second row. His immediate superior was Alexander Hardinge, the principal private secretary, the man who had written the pivotal letter to Edward 3 weeks earlier, warning him that the press silence was about to break.
Lascelles’ job had been, throughout Edward’s entire reign of 326 days, to manage the lesser correspondence, handle the subordinate audiences, and watch a king he had despised for almost a decade make precisely the catastrophic decisions Lascelles had told people he would make. The following day, December the 11th, 1936, Parliament passed His Majesty’s Declaration of Abdication Act, which received royal assent at 13 minutes to 2:00 in the afternoon.
That evening, Edward broadcast his farewell to the nation. The BBC transmission from Windsor, the voice that millions would remember, the phrase about the woman he loved. When it was over, Tommy Lascelles walked out of St. James’s Palace into the dark, encircled St. James’s Park three times, thinking about James II.
Not in triumph. He described the abdication in his own words as a real tragedy in my life. He had simply known since 1927 that it was coming. If you’ve watched The Crown, you’ve seen Lascelles, the tall, lean figure with the precisely parted hair and the basso profundo voice, played across the first two seasons by Pip Torrens.
The show makes him memorable by making him cold. The diaries, which are the actual Lascelles on the page in his own hand, make him considerably more interesting than that. He served four monarchs across 33 years. He was assistant private secretary to George V’s son while the son was still Prince of Wales, then to Edward VIII during the abdication, then to George VI as assistant and eventually as principal, and finally private secretary to Elizabeth II during the first year of her reign. He kept a diary for most of those years, written in black leather notebooks fitted with silver locks, described by his editor as “designed for his eyes alone.” In 2006, the central volume was published, King’s Counselor, Abdication and War, covering the years from the abdication crisis through the end of the Second
World War. An earlier volume, End of an Era, had appeared in the 1980s, and In Royal Service followed in 2017. Together, they constitute the most complete first-person record of the mid-20th century British monarchy that exists. Named, dated, with quotation marks around the actual conversations. What the people in the room actually said.
Almost nobody outside the historians guild has read them. Alan Frederick Lascelles was born on the 11th of April, 1887, at Sutton Waldron, Endorset. The sixth and youngest child and only surviving son of a Royal Navy commander. His father was a younger son of Henry Lascelles, the fourth Earl of Harewood, which made Tommy the grandson of an Earl without being one himself.
Before Marlborough College and Oxford, there was Hazelhurst Preparatory School. Before all of that, there was his father’s nickname for him as a small child, Tommy Tadpole, given because he had an unusually large head on a slender frame. The nickname became Tommy, which stuck for 94 years through four reigns and three world historical crises.
One source notes his children would eventually describe him as looking like a pot-bellied old beaver in his extreme old age. He used that description himself. A brief clarification here. Tommy Lascelles is distinct from his cousin Henry Lascelles, the sixth Earl of Harewood, who married Princess Mary, the sister of both Edward the VIII and George the VI.
The Harewood earldom connects both branches of the family. The men aren’t the same person. Viewers of The Crown occasionally conflate them. They shouldn’t. Marlborough College, he reportedly hated it. Trinity College, Oxford, he read classics, graduated in 1908 with a second-class degree. His biographers attribute the second class to a preference for horses, society, and extracurricular engagements over sustained work with Herodotus.
After Oxford, he spent several years in a state of cultivated drift that he later acknowledged without apology. He failed the Foreign Office examination twice, tried journalism, tried stockbroking, abandoned each. He was a young man of excellent connections and no particular direction. He once wrote to his uncle, “There is much in all the flummery and ceremonial which, even after a long course of military discipline, irritates me profoundly.
” He found pomp tedious. This will matter. The First World War gave him structure. He was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Bedfordshire Yeomanry, arrived on the Western Front in June 1915, rose to captain, was mentioned in dispatches, took a shrapnel wound to the arm, and received the Military Cross for gallantry while attached to the King’s Hussars.
He was 31 when it ended. He was different afterward, steadier, more deliberately purposeful, less inclined to drift. In 1919, he went to India as aide-de-camp to Lord Lloyd, the governor of Bombay, who was also his brother in law. In Delhi in March 1920, he married Joan Frances Vere Thesiger, the eldest daughter of Frederick Thesiger, the first Viscount Chelmsford, then serving as Viceroy of India.
The connection placed Lascelles on his return to England in 1920 as the son-in-law of a sitting Viceroy, a decorated military officer, and a classics graduate of Oxford. He was precisely the profile the palace recruited. That same year he received a letter passed through a friend named Letty Elco offering him a job with Edward, Prince of Wales.
The attraction, as he recorded it, was partly geographical. St. James’s Palace was half a mile from his house and a quarter of a mile from his club, but it was also genuine. “I have got a very deep admiration for the prince, and I’m convinced that the future of England is as much in his hands as in any individual.” He was 33 years old and he meant it.
If the job hadn’t come along, he wrote later, he would have signed on as an apprentice to a printing firm. He became assistant private secretary to the Prince of Wales in 1920. For the next 9 years, he watched everything. The Prince of Wales in 1920 was, by almost any measure, the most celebrated figure Britain had produced in a generation.
His tours of Canada, Australia, South Africa had turned into something approaching mass hysteria. Crowds pressed against barriers for hours. Women fainted. Lascelles initially found him the most attractive man he had ever met. And at the time, he wasn’t wrong. The prince was charming, energetic, apparently committed.
In the early years of the 1920s, the admiration was real. By the mid-20s, Lascelles had started keeping other notes. The pattern that established itself was consistent. The drinking, the gambling, the women. Edward treated his official duties, the visits, the engagements, the correspondence with governors and mayors and veterans organizations, as obstacles between himself and his pleasures.
When there was a scare in 1928 that George V might be seriously ill, the prince was occupied elsewhere and was visibly affronted at having to cut it short. In the diary, Lascelles would later call this an African tour, where Edward showed indifference to his father’s serious illness. In the published letters, he described Edward’s mode of life as showing unbridled pursuit of wine and women, and of whatever selfish whim occupied him at the moment.
He was also specific about the women. Years later, in a document preserved in the published diaries and addressing the romanticized narrative that Edward had fallen uniquely and deeply in love with Wallis Simpson, Lascelles was dismissive. He was never out of the thrall of one female after another. There was always a grande affaire, and coincidentally, as I know to my cost, an unbroken series of petites affaires, contracted and consummated in whatever highways and byways of the empire he was traversing at the moment. He called the sentimental version moonshine. He had been watching the reality for 9 years. The 1927 tour of Canada was the breaking point. Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin came on that tour. At some moment during those weeks, with the prince once again conducting himself in ways Lascelles found incompatible
with the future of the monarchy, Lascelles went to see the prime minister privately. He laid out what he had accumulated. Then Baldwin said, as Lascelles recorded in his diary, that sometimes when he sat waiting to get the result of some point-to-point in which the prince was riding, he couldn’t help thinking that the best thing that could happen to him and to the country would be for him to break his neck.
Lascelles replied that he had often thought the same. This is, on one level, a remarkable exchange between two men of authority discussing the heir to the British throne in terms usually reserved for racehorses. On another level, it’s precisely what it sounds like. A private secretary telling a prime minister, 9 years before the abdication, that the succession was a problem.
Both men knew what they were saying. Both men chose to say it quietly and then go back to work. Lascelles resigned in January 1929. He didn’t do it by letter. He asked for an hour with the prince and got it. “I paced his room for the best part of an hour,” he recorded afterward, “telling him, as I might have told a younger brother, exactly what I thought of him and his whole scheme of life, and foretelling, with an accuracy that might have surprised me at the time, that he would lose the throne of England.” The prince absorbed all of this. Lascelles described him as largely unmoved. On walking out, Lascelles called himself an inverted Falstaff. “Thin,” he noted, “as thin in middle age as he had ever been, leaving Prince Hal to work out his own damnation.” He was 41 with three children, a house,
a wife, and no job. He had told the future king of England to his face that he would lose the throne. Most men in his position wouldn’t have done it. Most men in his position needed the employment. For 2 years after his resignation, Lascelles lived quietly in the English countryside, gardening, reading, letting the distance from the Prince of Wales accumulate.
Then, in 1931, came the posting to Canada. Vere Ponsonby, the 9th Earl of Bessborough, had been appointed Governor-General. He needed a secretary. Lascelles was recruited. He spent 4 years in Ottawa managing the colonial administrative machinery he had first encountered in Bombay. Solid work, if not glamorous work.
When Bessborough’s term ended in 1935, and Lascelles returned to England, he found an offer waiting. The position? Assistant Private Secretary to King George V, who was then 70, in declining health, and constitutionally unlikely to live another 7 years. The reason Lascelles hesitated is documented. He had told the King’s heir to his face that the heir would lose the throne.
Working for George V meant working for Edward’s household the moment George V died. And nobody could guarantee that wouldn’t happen soon. Lord Wigram, arranging the appointment, told him not to worry. The King was in good health and had years ahead of him. Lascelles accepted. He wrote to Joan, “It’s no use going about the world singing God save the King if one isn’t prepared to assist the deity when called upon.
” On his way north in January 1936 to begin the new job, a young man appeared in the doorway of his first-class carriage at Liverpool Street. Lascelles was about to tell him to leave when he recognized him as the Duke of York, the king’s second son, the one nobody had ever expected to reign. Halfway through the journey, the Duke said, “What’s all this about the king not being well?” George V was dead within 4 days.
The Duke of York became king within 12 months, and Lascelles, who had nearly told him to go away, was now the man who would spend the next 16 years at his side. George V died on the 20th of January 1936. Lascelles had been in post for a matter of weeks. Edward VIII’s reign lasted 326 days, during which Lascelles served as his assistant private secretary.
The crucial word being assistant. The principal private secretary was Alexander Harding, a different man of different temperament, more procedural, more disposed to manage things through protocol. Both of them watched the king with mounting alarm. It was Harding who, on the 13th of November 1936, drafted and delivered the stark private letter to Edward at Fort Belvedere.
The letter that named the crisis. Warned that the British press silence was collapsing and confronted the constitutional impossibility of the king’s position. That letter was Harding’s, not Lascelles’. The distinction matters for understanding what Lascelles actually was during the abdication. Not the man who orchestrated it, but the man who had been right about it for 9 years, now watching from the second row as the machinery of the Crown processed the inevitable.
His 1927 conversation with Baldwin had seeded across the governing establishment an official view of Edward’s character. By December 1936, when Baldwin’s position was that the king must choose between the Crown and Mrs. Simpson, that position rested on nearly a decade of institutional testimony about who Edward VIII was.
There was also an intelligence dimension to 1936 that Lascelles, with access to cabinet papers, would have been aware of. MI5 had conducted telephone surveillance of the king’s communications, confirmed in declassified documents, and had placed Wallis Simpson’s social contacts under monitoring.
The specific content of those files remain substantially classified. What can be said is that the security services were paying attention to the question of her associations with German diplomatic figures, that this concern was known to senior palace officials, and that it contributed to the wider establishment view that the king’s intended marriage wasn’t simply a personal matter.
Lascelles recorded Wallis Simpson with a venom that went beyond the constitutional objections. A shop-spoiled American with two living husbands and a voice like a rusty saw. He had formed this view without access to intelligence reports. The reports presumably didn’t improve it. On December the 10th, 1936, Edward signed.
On December the 11th, the act passed and the broadcast went out. That night, Tommy Lascelles walked three times round St. James’s Park in the dark thinking about James II. He described what he was doing, thinking about the last time the settled succession had been broken. The last time the institution had absorbed a rupture of this magnitude.
He called the abdication a real tragedy in my life. Three days later, he had lunch with Harold Nicolson and described Edward, now the Duke of Windsor, already gone, as being like a child in the fairy stories who had been given every gift except a soul. He also, quietly and professionally, went to some lengths afterward to keep Edward out of the country and to minimize the damage.
The abdication was over. The institution had to continue. The new king was the man from the railway carriage, Albert, Duke of York, now George VI. He was nothing like his brother. Where Edward had been charming and evasive, George was anxious and honest. Where Edward had treated constitutional duty as an imposition, George treated it as a responsibility he had not expected and was determined not to fail.
He had wept on the night of the abdication. He understood, in a way his brother never had, that the monarchy was an institution with obligations, not a position with privileges. He also stuttered badly. He had worked for years with the Australian speech therapist Lionel Logue to manage it.
His public appearances required effort that Edward’s had not. He was, in the words of one historian, the dutiful king, which is both a description and an assessment. Lascelles served him first as assistant private secretary through the coronation of May the 12th, 1937, and through the formative years of the new reign.
He helped organize the 1939 royal tour of Canada and the United States, the first time a reigning British sovereign had visited American soil, and was knighted by the king on the train approaching Buffalo. George the VI did it, according to Lascelles’ diary, giggling in a most disarming fashion. Lascelles noted that he could fairly claim to be the first man to be dubbed in a train, and also the first Englishman to be so treated by his sovereign on American soil.
The relationship between the two men was warm in a way Lascelles’ relationship with Edward the VIII had never been. George the VI was genuinely grateful for competent support, explicitly reliant on good advice, and aware of his own limitations in a way that made him constitutionally tractable in the best sense.
Lascelles, for his part, found a sovereign he could actually respect. The coronation morning in May 1937 has generated one of the most quoted remarks attributed to Lascelles, a reported reply to the new king’s question about whether the crown would suit him. The alleged response, “You will never know peace again, sir.
” circulates widely. Secondary sources acknowledge it may be apocryphal. The published diary does not confirm it. What is confirmed is the quality of the partnership that began that spring. By 1942, Alexander Harding’s relationship with George the VI had deteriorated to the point of dysfunction. Harding found delegation difficult.
His deputy found him impossible and said so. In July 1943, after a tense confrontation following the king’s visit to North Africa, a trip from which Harding returned while Lascelles had been left holding the administrative fort without the authority to run it, Hardinge tendered his resignation. George VI accepted immediately.
He told Lascelles he wanted him to take over. The next day, Hardinge came back and asked the King directly, did he really want him to go? “I told him I did.” George wrote in his diary. “It was difficult for me, but I knew I shouldn’t get this opportunity again.” Lascelles became principal private secretary in the summer of 1943, simultaneously taking on the role of keeper of the royal archives at Windsor Castle.
He was 56 years old. As principal private secretary, every cabinet paper crossed Lascelles’ desk. Every Allied war plan passed through his office. He drafted or refined the King’s broadcasts. He managed the relationship with Downing Street on a near daily basis, dealing with Winston Churchill with a respect that was genuine and a frustration that he documented extensively.
The diary of the war years, which forms the core of the 2006 published volume, is extraordinary. On Bernard Montgomery, “Sometimes I wonder whether Monty’s undoubted genius does not occasionally bring him to the verge of mental instability.” On Charles de Gaulle, noting a resemblance to a potato, “The potato is, of course, the more malleable of the two.
” On the atomic bomb, months before Hiroshima, a cryptic diary note about a hush-hush operation involving harnessing the atom. On the Normandy deception, he recorded, months before D-Day, that military intelligence needed the King’s scheduled visits to ports and military sites to help bamboozle the German intelligence regarding the time and place for Overlord.
He knew everything. He was one of the handful of people who knew about the development of the atomic bomb. He wrote it all down. The most quoted exchange from the wartime diary involves Churchill’s plan to watch the Normandy landings from the deck of a Royal Navy flagship. Churchill raised it at lunch with George VI in early June 1944.
The king, lit by the same Nelsonian spirit, announced he intended to come, too. Lascelles was confronted with the prospect of the king and the prime minister on the same vessel in a combat zone and worked out how to stop it. The argument he used with the king, whether he was prepared to advise Princess Elizabeth on the choice of her first prime minister in the event of her father and Winston being sent to the bottom of the English Channel, Elizabeth was 18.
The king conceded. Churchill, facing the same argument applied to himself, eventually gave way, too, telling Lascelles, “I suppose that if that poor ship should go to the bottom, you will all say, ‘I told you so.'” The footnote to this exchange, Harold Macmillan, who had been putting out incendiary bombs in St.
James’s Street with the Duke of Devonshire on the 9th of October 1940, appears in Lascelles’ diary that night as H. Macmillan, a name that in 1940 required a footnote in the published edition. By 1957, it didn’t. Lascelles’ relationship with Churchill was respectful and constitutionally tense in equal measure.
He pushed back when he needed to. When Churchill proposed flying over the lines in North Africa to see the situation himself, Lascelles blocked it through the king. When Churchill wanted to broadcast to the nation in ways that Lascelles thought constitutionally improper, sharp telephone calls were made from the palace.
One source describes Lascelles snatching Churchill back from various overreaches without quite putting it in those terms. The diary was candid about all of it. In January 1965, Lascelles attended Churchill’s state funeral and wrote to a friend afterward, “I cried a good deal. I was very fond of the old man, who was for many years abundantly kind to me.
And I am more sure than I am of future life that but for him, I shouldn’t be sitting here a free man.” This isn’t the diary of a cold man. It’s the diary of a man who kept his emotions for the private page. He also had a consistent theory of institutional fairness that went beyond mere procedure. When Noël Coward was recommended for a knighthood, Lascelles advised the king against it.
The reason he gave? The king was approving courts-martial against young RAF officers who had written checks that bounced, and Coward had recently been fined for evading income tax. It would have been wrong for those young men to be punished while Coward was honored. Coward’s knighthood came later from a different monarch.
The principle Lascelles was applying wasn’t snobbery. It was consistency. George VI’s health failed through the early 1950s. Surgery in September 1951 removed part of a lung. By the winter, Princess Elizabeth was appearing in his place at public engagements. On the 6th of February, 1952, at Sandringham, the The died in his sleep.
He was 56 years old. Elizabeth was in Kenya when it happened at Sagana Lodge having spent the night at Treetops Hotel watching wildlife. Philip told her. She was 25. The royal party flew back. She landed at Heathrow on the 7th of February. Lascelles was among those waiting. The transition required management, proclamations, parliamentary communications, the formal mechanics from one reign to the next.
He held the administrative structure together in the days before a 25-year-old woman who had not expected to become Queen this early could take the full weight of it. He served her through 1952 and into 1953 managing the coronation preparations and overseeing the authorized biographies of George V, George VI, and Queen Mary that would shape the public record of the monarchy for decades.
His influence on those volumes guiding what was emphasized, what was softened, what the palace would and wouldn’t approve was considerable. The coronation was set for the 2nd of June, 1953. Westminster Abbey, June the 2nd, 1953. All eyes were officially on the new Queen.
A journalist named Audrey Whiting covering the event for her publication noticed something else. In the crowd of official attendees, Princess Margaret leaned toward a decorated RAF officer named Group Captain Peter Townsend and picked a piece of lint from his uniform. The gesture was attentive, easy, entirely unguarded. It was the gesture of someone who had forgotten they were being watched.
Whiting’s editor refused to publish. He wasn’t, reportedly, prepared to spoil the Queen’s special day. The story was real. The relationship it revealed was real, and both were about to become impossible to contain. Townsend had served as equerry to George the VI and was now attached to the Queen Mother’s household.
He was a Battle of Britain ace, holder of the Distinguished Flying Cross and the Distinguished Service Order, a war hero by any conventional measure. He had also divorced his first wife in November 1952. Princess Margaret was 22 years old, 11 years his junior, and in love with him. Townsend went to Lascelles and said he wanted to marry the princess.
Lascelles’ documented response, “You must be either mad or bad.” The constitutional problem was specific, not personal. The Royal Marriages Act of 1772 required any descendant of George the II to obtain the sovereign’s consent to marry. Princess Margaret wouldn’t turn 25, the age at which she could apply to Parliament directly, bypassing the Crown, until August 1955.
The Queen was also the Supreme Governor of the Church of England, which didn’t permit the remarriage of divorced persons. A marriage between Margaret and Townsend would force the Queen into an impossible public position. Either endorse the remarriage of a divorced man as head of the church that officially couldn’t condone it, or block her sister’s happiness and absorb the political fallout.
Lascelles spelled this out to the Queen. He didn’t act alone. Winston Churchill concurred with his recommendation, as did Geoffrey Fisher, the Archbishop of Canterbury. The decision to send Townsend abroad was collaborative, but Lascelles had framed the constitutional argument, had told Townsend he was either mad or bad, and had shaped the institutional response before the politicians were fully in the room.
On the 15th of July, 1953, 6 weeks after the coronation, Group Captain Peter Townsend took up his posting as air attaché at the British Embassy in Brussels. Princess Margaret said later that Tommy Lascelles had ruined her life. The factual record supports the complaint in its immediate form. His recommendation determined the course of events.
What the record also shows is that Lascelles had been making this category of decision for 30 years, and that each time he made it, the fixed point was the same. The institution’s coherence and everything else as variable. He had seen one abdication already. He had concluded in 1927 and again in 1936 that personal attachments that created constitutional impossibilities weren’t the institution’s problem to absorb.
In 1953, facing a different person and a different attachment, he reached the same conclusion by the same logic. On the 31st of October, 1955, Margaret issued her statement. She wouldn’t marry Peter Townsend. She said she had been mindful that Christian marriage was indissoluble and conscious of her duty to the Commonwealth.
Lascelles was already retired. At the end of 1953, Tommy Lascelles stepped down. He was 66 years old and had been in service with a gap for Canada since 1920. Churchill asked him twice whether he would like a hereditary peerage. The Queen asked once. He declined every time. He said that the Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the Bath, which he received on retirement, rated much higher than a peerage.
He wasn’t being modest. He had a precise view of what distinctions meant, and a peerage didn’t mean what Churchill thought it meant. The Queen gave him a Rolls-Royce. He moved into a grace and favor apartment in the old stable block at Kensington Palace, one of the nicest houses in England, he thought, where he would live for the next 28 years.
He grew a beard that he described himself as ungainly. He read Shakespeare on the underground on his way to meetings at the Midland Bank, where he had become a director. He watched royalty stop to chat with him in the gardens, including Princess Margaret with her new baby. He told his daughter, when asked what he would have done differently, that he would have bred horses.
Race horses or cart horses? Any sort of horses. He didn’t stop writing. The black leather notebooks, fitted with silver locks, had accumulated across his career. He had written in them most nights. They were, as he put it in a description to a friend in 1965, the private day-to-day ramblings of a hardened egotistical scribbler.
When the historian Philip Ziegler came to visit in the 1970s, Lascelles would unlock a chest, extract a volume, read a few sentences aloud, and return it. “That won’t be seen by anyone for 50 years,” he reportedly told Ziegler. “It’s the duty of the private secretary to be private.” The publication, when it came, required the Queen’s personal authorization.
King’s Counselor: Abdication and War, edited by Duff Hart Davis and published in 2006 by Weidenfeld and Nicolson, drew on the diary volumes covering the years from the abdication crisis through 1946, when Lascelles simply stopped. He was, in the words of the Canadian Encyclopedia’s review, “just too tired to continue.
” The career went on until 1953. The diary stopped 7 years earlier. An earlier published volume, End of an Era, covering his life to 1920, had appeared in the 1980s. And In Royal Service, covering the Prince of Wales years, followed in 2017. The critical response to King’s Counselor, where it reached historians, was significant.
The Canadian Encyclopedia called the writing “historically valuable and entrancing”, noting that Lascelles had written with the knowledge that the diary wouldn’t be made public for decades, which meant his elegantly composed commentary was truthful to the point of bluntness. The Courtier’s book, published in 2022, noted that the diaries show a different side of Lascelles to the stuffy, formal individual depicted in The Crown.
More emotional, more sensible, more likeable than the television version. More capable of humor and more capable of grief. The papers, all of them, 60 boxes, are held at Churchill Archives Centre, Churchill College, Cambridge. The associated papers were deposited by Hart Davis in December 2005, the year before publication.
Some sections remain closed until the 1st of January 2028, at the specific request of the Royal Archives. What is open has been sufficient to confirm what the published diaries imply. That the version of events most people know about the 20th century British monarchy is a carefully managed public account.
And that a more complete account was written down nightly by the man whose job was to manage it. Tommy Lascelles died on the 10th of August 1981 at Kensington Palace. He was 94 years old. His wife, Joan, had preceded him by a decade. He had outlived George VI by 29 years. He had outlived Edward VIII, who died as the Duke of Windsor in Paris on the 28th of May, 1972, by nine.
He outlived almost everyone who had been in the room. In the weeks before he died, he sat in the garden at Kensington Palace watching the fireworks from Charles and Diana’s wedding. He asked for news of how it was going every few minutes, anxious that it should all be well. He died two weeks later.
The cast of the century he had shaped from the inside was still alive around him. Princess Margaret, with 12 years remaining. The Queen Mother, with 20. Charles, 32. Diana, 20. Walter Bagehot wrote in 1867 that the English constitution has dignified parts and efficient parts. The dignified parts inspire awe and generate popular deference.
The efficient parts do the actual governing. The monarchy, in Bagehot’s framework, was the most dignified of all the dignified elements. What Lascelles spent 33 years demonstrating, from the inside, night by night, in the black leather notebooks, was that even the dignified parts require efficient management.
That the management, when it happens, happens in the corridors. That the man who shapes the decisions isn’t always the man on whom the decisions appear to rest. In 1950, writing under the pseudonym Senex, in a letter published by The Times, Lascelles set out what became known as the Lascelles principles.
The constitutional conventions governing when a monarch may refuse a prime minister’s request to dissolve Parliament, constitutional scholars still cite them. He signed it with a Latin word for old man. He didn’t put his own name on it because he was, as the diary repeatedly demonstrates, constitutionally opposed to crediting himself publicly with anything.
He had also, every night of his career, written it down. The published diary contains what no official biography contains, the actual sentences. Montgomery is a genius on the edge of instability. De Gaulle is less malleable than a potato. Edward VIII was given every gift except a soul.
Winston Churchill, conceding the D-Day argument, says you will all say I told you so if the ship goes down. These aren’t reconstructed scenes. They are what Lascelles wrote on the evening in question, in the notebook, which he then locked. He wasn’t a cynic performing institutional loyalty. He believed in the monarchy genuinely, in the way men believe in things they have thought about seriously and concluded are worth defending.
“I have never idealized any member of the House of Windsor,” he said, and the diary confirms this absolutely. He found them variously magnificent, incompetent, admirable, and tragic. But the institution as distinct from the individuals, that he believed in without reservation for 94 years. The diaries aren’t secret.
They were never secret. They were published in libraries, on bookshelves, in the footnotes of every serious royal biography produced in the past 20 years. The story most people take from The Crown, from the dramatized versions, the romanticized versions, the versions where the courtier is the cold functionary and the monarch is the human being, isn’t wrong in its broad strokes, but it isn’t sourced to the man in the corridor.
He left his report. He locked it for decades. He waited. We are now finally, more than 80 years late, beginning to read it. If you want more stories from behind the crown, subscribe.
