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  MOUNTBATTEN: ‘Why would you protect a man like Wilson?

  ELIZABETH: ‘I’m protecting the Prime Minister. I’m protecting the Constitution. I’m protecting Democracy.’

  MOUNTBATTEN: ‘But if the man at the heart of that democracy threatens to destroy it, are we supposed to stand by and do nothing?’

  ELIZABETH: ‘Yes. Doing nothing is EXACTLY what we do. And bide our time. And wait for the people who voted him in to vote him out again. If, indeed, that is what they decide to do …’466

  Cecil King’s Bank of England colleagues had been correct in seeing Wilson’s Operation Brutus as a limitation on their traditional financial freedoms. But as the Queen understood, and as Cecil King and Mountbatten did not – not, at least, when they conferred in Kinnerton Street – any control or limitation of any British freedom, no matter how apparently sacrosanct, is 100 per cent permissible so long as it has been supported by a democratic, voting majority in the British Houses of Parliament. The only way to change that is via the voting route. So it was for a general election and a subsequent parliamentary majority to depose and replace Harold Wilson – not Cecil Harmsworth King or ‘Dickie’ Mountbatten.

  The directors of IPC and Mirror Newspapers grasped that quickly enough. Within a matter of days, they gathered to demand King’s resignation for his wild and unauthorised ‘Enough is Enough’ editorial, and, when he refused, they sacked him ignominiously on 30 May 1968. King did not last out the year at the Bank of England, either.467

  ‘Dickie’ Mountbatten did survive into peaceful and dignified retirement, however, since the historical record showed that, whatever his private dreams and temptations, he knew how to hold them in check. He was certainly no right-wing conspirator. When Hugh Cudlipp had gone down to Broadlands early in May to set up the Kinnerton Street meeting and was cautiously probing Mountbatten’s ideas as to which prominent public figure might best restore national morale, the name that ‘Dickie’ suggested was not his own but that of Barbara Castle, the fiery left-wing activist who had just become Secretary of State for Employment.468

  At the crucial 8 May gathering, according to Philip Ziegler, Mountbatten’s official biographer, Solly Zuckerman had stormed out of the house into Kinnerton Street protesting, ‘This is rank treachery … I am a public servant and will have nothing to do with it’ – and Mountbatten had meekly followed his friend’s lead. According to Ziegler, Mountbatten then informed Cecil King and Hugh Cudlipp ‘courteously but firmly, that he could not even contemplate such a proposition’.469 He then ushered both men to the door, and that was the end of the matter. ‘Dangerous nonsense!’ was his diary entry for the day.470

  Zuckerman did remark later to Cudlipp, ‘I wonder what Dickie would have said if I hadn’t been there?’471 But when Cecil King wrote to Mountbatten two years later suggesting the possibility of another get-together, he received a firm brush-off. ‘I well recall our meeting,’ wrote Mountbatten, ‘but you will recall that at the end I came to the conclusion that there was nothing I could do to help in the matter. I am afraid my views are unaltered.’472

  So in the end, and in reality, the Queen never had to intervene to save Harold Wilson and British democracy from Cecil King and her husband’s uncle. In any case, Episode 305 portrays her as being more interested in her horse racing in May 1968 than in the processes of government, and while this certainly exaggerates her detachment from official business in these months – Elizabeth II has never been known to neglect her duties as Queen – it does fairly reflect the major changes she was making in the late 1960s to the horse breeding, training and racing operations that were such an important part of her life.

  Elizabeth’s love of horses went back to her very earliest years, when her grandfather, King George V, gave her a Shetland pony, Peggy, for Christmas – she was just four.473 Her very first riding lessons were, in fact, on the broad back of the Sovereign, then in his mid-sixties, who loved to get down on all fours and shuffle around the Palace corridors with Lilibet digging her heels into his sides.474 Once she was old enough, her grandfather would take her to the royal stud to explain the intricacies of breeding, and a few years after his death she was visiting the stud with her father the new King, George VI, when their guide apologised for forgetting the lineage of the mare that he was showing them, Bread Card – ‘I can’t remember her pedigree offhand, sir.’ At which the 12-year-old Elizabeth instantly piped up: ‘She is by the Derby winner Manna, out of Book Debt, by Buchan.’475

  This encyclopaedic command of horse flesh was the basis of the expertise Elizabeth brought to a golden age of royal racing following her accession in 1952, when she steered her father’s bloodstock and trainers to a sequence of victories unseen since the reign of Charles II. Thanks to horses like Aureole, whose 1954 successes were featured in Season 1 of The Crown,476 Elizabeth twice came top of the fiercely competitive British horse-racing ‘ladder’, accumulating the prize money that made her the leading owner in Britain in both 1954 and 1957.

  But this success did not outlast the 1950s. The 1960s crop of yearlings from the royal stud proved the worst for decades, with only three wins from eight foals, while Captain Cecil Boyd-Rochfort, her principal trainer at Newmarket, had 12 of her horses in training in 1960 without a single one winning a race.477 Part of the trouble came from the sheer venerability which Boyd-Rochfort (80 years old in 1967) shared with the rest of the ageing royal racing team. But Elizabeth was honest and flexible enough to see that new thinking was required on her own part as well, and she decided to make changes.

  The mid-1960s was a period of serious re-evaluation in British horse-racing circles when it came to the central question of how to breed, train up and put out a racing champion. Elizabeth herself had long subscribed to the old-school focus on a high-class pedigree that was almost noble or royal, with a principal emphasis on stamina. But by the mid-1960s racing experts were questioning this orthodoxy. The ‘stayers’ were losing out to horses who defied the ‘science’ of it all – apparent ‘flukes’ of breeding that seemed to find some extra sprinting capacity from somewhere unidentified, and Elizabeth decided that this was the direction into which she should shift her own bloodstock strategy.

  ‘The emphasis was on “staying” blood,’ she stated in a rare interview that she gave on the subject of her horses in the early 1970s, ‘and recently I’ve been trying to inject a bit more speed.’478

  The key to the Queen’s new thinking was her old friend ‘Porchey’ – Henry Herbert, Lord Porchester, the future Earl of Carnarvon – whom we have met in earlier episodes.479 A successful horse breeder and owner in his own right, ‘Porchey’ had been gently encouraging Elizabeth to push against the orthodoxies of the Boyd-Rochfort generation, notably in persuading her to take a lease in 1962 on the Polhampton Stud near his own HQ at Highclere Castle in Hampshire – familiar to modern television viewers as the setting for Downton Abbey. This had shifted Elizabeth’s horse-racing centre of gravity down from East Anglia into her week-to-week Windsor routine, giving her more hands-on involvement with her equine team.

  When those who know the Queen best try to define what makes her really tick, they begin and end with her horses. The first newspaper that she opens every morning is the Racing Post (Sporting Life prior to 1986), and her very first telephone calls, long before office hours, have always been to ‘Porchey’ (1924– 2001) or to her trainers, early risers like herself. When she has no official business in Windsor, and especially at weekends, she goes out to check on her latest runners, visiting them in their stables to feed them clover and carrots, and always taking her camera to record their progress – like a parent on sports day.480

  For the last three decades of the twentieth century ‘Porchey’ was Elizabeth’s regular companion on these horsey outings, and they chatted about much more than horses together. With a strong instinct for public service, Lord Porchester (the seventh Earl of Carnarvon after 1987) served in the local Territorial Army, and successfully stood for election to the Hampshir
e County Council, of which he eventually became chairman. He also served as chairman of the South East Economic Planning Council.

  Early in 1968, Elizabeth asked ‘Porchey’ to undertake a far-reaching enquiry into her future racing strategy, and this provides the basis for the foreign horse excursions in which we see her engaging in this episode. In May 1967 Elizabeth and ‘Porchey’ made a private visit to Normandy, to study the top studs in France and watch their leading stallions in action. She did not, in fact, visit America in 1968 as depicted, but since 1964 she had been flying some of the finest royal mares to Kentucky for the injection of speed that ‘Porchey’ had recommended.

  Towards the end of Episode 305 a mildly jealous Prince Philip indecorously suggests that it was not just Her Majesty’s racehorses that ‘Porchey’ was very keen on injecting – and the lifelong personal friendship that Elizabeth II enjoyed with Lord Porchester until his death aged 77 in 2001 has sometimes been a source of innuendo. But there is no historical basis for any suggestion of impropriety – and The Crown certainly has no truck with it. On their 1967 trip to Normandy, for example, Elizabeth and ‘Porchey’ were accompanied by his Anglo-American wife Jean Wallop, who remained one of the Queen’s closest personal friends until her own death in April 2019.

  The touching and unashamed intimacy enjoyed by Elizabeth II and Lord Porchester went back to the passion for horses they discovered they shared when they first got to know each other as teenagers. We have seen this relationship developing in previous episodes of The Crown, and 305 is the episode that makes it official. On 1 January 1970 Queen Elizabeth II formally named Lord Porchester as her racing manager, completing her racing team on the same day with the recruitment of another fresh thinker, Michael Oswald, previously based at Newmarket, who was appointed Director of the Royal Studs. With Elizabeth and ‘Porchey’, Oswald completed the ambitious and open-minded ‘triumvirate’ that would run the royal racing stables for the rest of the twentieth century, re-establishing the Queen as a leading racehorse owner, not simply in Britain, but in the world.

  ‘My philosophy about racing is simple,’ said Elizabeth in her rare 1973 interview. ‘I enjoy breeding a horse that is faster than other people’s. I enjoy going racing, but basically I love horses. A Thoroughbred epitomises a really good horse to me, and my particular hope for the future, like all breeders of horses, is to breed the winner of the Derby.’481

  The last time anyone checked the record – sometime around 2018 – racehorses owned by Queen Elizabeth II had won nearly 1,700 professional contests, including four of the five great British classics: the Oaks, the St Leger, the 1,000 Guineas and the 2,000 Guineas. In 1953, the year of her coronation, Elizabeth’s much-cherished horse Aureole finished a close second in the Epsom Derby – but the Derby remains the one racing classic in which Her Majesty has yet to triumph.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  ‘TYWYSOG CYMRU’ (PRINCE OF WALES)

  FEBRUARY–OCTOBER 1969

  ENTER PRINCE CHARLES, CENTRE STAGE – AT LAST. WE HAVE encountered the future Sovereign as a growing boy, notably in Episode 209 as he struggled through his unhappy schooldays at Gordonstoun in the shadow of his father. But now the Prince advances into the limelight – literally. As Episode 306 opens, we meet Charles at Cambridge, preparing to step onto the stage as Richard II, Shakespeare’s lonely royal. In reality the Prince was never cast in such an elevated Shakespearean role. But he did participate actively in the university’s Dryden Society, and, as a fan of Harry Secombe and The Goon Show, he participated in comedy sketches – most famously while sitting in a dustbin.

  Charles had acted in both Henry V and Macbeth while he was at Gordonstoun, delivering performances that had provided rare high spots in his almost uniformly miserable Scottish education. So script writers Peter Morgan and James Graham focus on the irony of a royal performer who truly loved acting – with the additional irony that Charles was incapable of acting in real life when it might well have suited him to strike a pose.

  This became apparent in the spring of 1969 when the Prince gave his first radio interview – to the avuncular Jack de Manio on the BBC Today programme. Charles was about to head off to the west coast of Wales for a spell at Aberystwyth University prior to his investiture as Prince of Wales, and de Manio asked him his feelings about the Welsh Nationalists who were protesting against his arrival.

  ‘I don’t blame people demonstrating like that,’ replied Charles quite openly. ‘They’ve never seen me before. They don’t know what I’m like. I’ve hardly been to Wales, and you can’t really expect people to be over-zealous about the fact of having a so-called English Prince to come amongst them …’482

  1969 – Prince Charles in a Footlights review at Cambridge

  The angry demonstrators were essentially the reason why Prince Charles was heading for Wales – and you did not need to be a Welsh Nationalist to feel that the whole idea of the heir to the British throne being called ‘Prince of Wales’ had something fishy and unconvincing about it. Why was the royal heir not Prince of Scotland – or Prince of Birmingham for that matter? The English status of the title went back to 1301 when King Edward I of England, having defeated the last Welsh Prince of Wales, Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, and paraded his severed head through the streets of London, invested his son and heir Edward, the future Edward II, with Llywelyn’s same title as Prince of Wales, hoping that Welsh hearts would view England more fondly for the gesture.

  As it happened, young Edward had been born in Caernarfon Castle while his father was campaigning there, and legend had it that Edward I proudly presented the infant to a crowd of discontented Welsh barons, promising them a prince ‘born in Wales, who speaks not a word of English’. Being a baby, young Edward was at that point incapable of speaking any language at all – and when he was eventually proclaimed Prince of Wales at the age of 17 the investiture took place at a parliament in Lincoln.483

  Such tokenism did not do much for Anglo-Welsh relations in 1301, and it did not seem to be making much difference six centuries later. In 1963 an underground organisation calling itself the Free Wales Army started performing military manoeuvres on remote Welsh mountainsides, where their clandestine radio transmitters called on Welsh patriots to rise up against their ‘colonial’ English oppressors.

  The police laughed off their occasional thefts of gelignite – until 1968 when an RAF warrant officer was seriously injured by a bomb for which Welsh Nationalists claimed the credit. Shortly afterwards another bomb destroyed the Temple of Peace in Cardiff, and one more was found in the lost luggage department of Cardiff railway station. More respectably – and more worryingly – for the Labour government in London, a Welsh Nationalist, Gwynfor Evans, triumphed in the Carmarthen by-election of July 1966, ousting a Labour candidate and giving Plaid Cymru, ‘The Party of Wales’, its first ever seat at Westminster.

  Separatist Celtic victories are never good news for London-based political parties. But the Labour Party has always had to view them with particular anxiety, given their electoral reliance upon the socialist voting traditions of the Welsh and Scottish heartlands. Hence the curious scene at the opening of this episode as Prime Minister Harold Wilson assembles the most radical socialist firebrands in his Labour cabinet – Tony Benn, Barbara Castle and Richard Crossman – to confer earnestly with the hereditary Earl Marshal, the Duke of Norfolk and his team of titled, old-school cohorts in order to make sure that the investiture of the latest Prince of Wales would go off with proper feudal dignity.

  Until the Welsh Nationalist victory of 1966 Prince Charles had been heading for three uninterrupted years at Cambridge University studying Archaeology and Anthropology – his personal choice, on the basis of just two A level passes. Now Harold Wilson had a better plan. The wily Prime Minister proposed to the Queen, and Elizabeth accepted, that the Prince should interrupt his studies in England for a term at Aberystwyth University. There Charles could learn Welsh in a proper Welsh environment and prepare for the elaborate pageant at Caernarfo
n Castle that was intended to revive the memories of Edward I. Nineteen million viewers were expected to tune in for the ceremony in Britain – with a further 500 million watching worldwide.484

  Much was made of the quasi-Arthurian origins of the spectacle, but this was a fraud. No such ceremony had been held for more than 250 years and the precedent on which Charles’s ceremony was actually based was the investiture in July 1911 of George V’s ill-fated son, King Edward VIII – known to his family, as it happened, by the Welsh name of ‘David’. As with Prince Charles half a century later, the fundamental inspiration for the 1911 investiture was political. Britain’s Welsh Chancellor of the Exchequer and future Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, wanted to shore up his Liberal vote in Wales, while also making much of the fact that he himself had been born in a humble cottage not far from Caernarfon Castle.

  The consequence was that the young Prince Edward, just 17, had to dress up in what he later described as a ‘preposterous rig’ of white silk breeches and stockings, a purple velvet surcoat edged with ermine and white silk, and a gold coronet adorned with pearls and amethysts. Edward’s scorn for the outfit did not prevent him, after he became the Duke of Windsor from taking the entire kit with him into exile following his abdication in 1936, along with his garter robes which he liked to try on from time to time in later life, whirling round the garden of Le Moulin de la Tuilerie, his French country house, shouting out to his Duchess, ‘Look, it still fits me like a glove!’485