Robert Lacey - The Crown: The Official Companion, Volume 1: Elizabeth II, Winston Churchill, and the Making of a Young Queen (1947–1955)

Copyright 2017 by Left Bank Pictures (Television) Limited

Text copyright 2017 by Robert Lacey

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Crown Archetype, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

crownpublishing.com

Originally published in hardcover in Great Britain by Blick Publishing, London, in 2017.

Crown Archetype and colophon is a registered trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN9781524762285

Ebook ISBN9781524762308

Text design adapted from the design by Emily Rough

Cover illustration: photograph of Elizabeth II William Hustler and Georgina Hustler/National Portrait Gallery, London; portrait of Claire Foy Netflix, Inc./photograph by Jason Bell

Image credits appear on .

v4.1

a

THE

CROWN

FOREWORD BY

PETER MORGAN

W hat is real? And what is imagined? What is truth, and what is fiction? What happened? What did not? Its become clear that many viewers, while watching The Crown, did so while scrolling through the pages of Wikipedia, searching for answers to these questions.

It was an extraordinary pleasure to write The Crown, to anatomise the many vivid characters and events that make up the story in the years 19471955. But it was sheer agony to condense ten dramatic event-filled years of history into just ten hours of television. So I was delighted by the suggestion that the royal historian Robert Lacey should take up the challenge to clear things up and separate fact from fiction while telling us a great deal more. So, let me hand you over to Robert to take you back to 1947, when the King realizes he is gravely ill and his eldest daughter, the shy, 21-year-old Princess Elizabeth, is about to marry a handsome but fractious young foreigner of whom nobody seems comfortably sure

1

WOLFERTON SPLASH

Love and marriage

B uckingham Palace, 1947 reads the caption, and Episode 1 of The Crown takes us straight inside it to discover the cancer-stricken King George VI leaning over a lavatory bowl, painfully coughing up his lifes blood. The King is dying, make ready for the QueenKneeling in the palace throne room is Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten RN, lean and threadbare in his wartime uniform, ready to be ennobled before his wedding to Princess Elizabeth the next day. The Lord Chancellor, the Earl Marshal and a row of stern establishment faces look on as the ailing monarch takes hold of the sword that will transform his future son-in-law from commoner to royal, their eyes darting with alarm as the King starts to stutter. Then George VI gamely clenches his jaw, twists his tongue around Philips trio of titles, and rounds off the list with the highest honour in his gift, the Order of the Garter, with which Edward III first knighted his fighting companions in 1348. His Majesty has been pleased to authorise the use of the prefix His Royal Highness by Lieut. Philip Mountbatten, reported The Times next day, 20th November 1947, and to approve that the dignity of a Dukedom of the United Kingdom be conferred upon him by the name, style and title of Baron Greenwich of Greenwich [a tribute to Philips naval background], Earl of Merioneth [a nod to Wales] and Duke of Edinburgh [a traditional royal dukedom and a compliment to Scotland]The King touched Lieut. Mountbatten on each shoulder with a sword as he knelt before him in the ceremony of the accolade of knighthood, and invested him with the insignia of the Order of the Garter.

The newly ennobled Philip Mountbatten sports his Order of the Garter sash (

Which is all pretty much as we see things on the screen. The foreigner had been made familiar with just one difference. As a prelude to the investiture scene we watch His Royal Highness Prince Philip of Greece and Denmark renounce his Greek nationality and all foreign titles to become a British citizen. The obscure and dubious foreign prince becomes a brave British war hero in front of our eyes.

In reality, however, Philip had already become a British citizen earlier that year via the routine, form-filling legal process, and certainly not inside Buckingham Palace. History records that Prince Philip of Greece renounced his Greek titles to receive his British citizenship on 18th March 1947 under the British Nationality and Status of Aliens Act so he went by the name of plain Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten RN for a full eight months before his father-in-law ennobled him that November.

You are watching a historical drama, dear reader, not a history documentary. The Crown is a work of creative fiction that has been inspired by the wisdom and spirit of real events. To understand Philip, we need to witness his renunciation of his foreign royal status at the very moment we first meet him, the better to savour his full entry into the House of Windsor the next day. What you see on the screen is both truth and invention in the age-old tradition of historical drama. Friedrich Schillers revered and much translated Maria Stuart, first staged in 1800, is often cited as the classic example of a history play, depicting the bitter clash of personalities when Mary Queen of Scots came face to face with Queen Elizabeth I except that in history the two women never met.

The Viking SpiritIn 1935 Prince Philip of Greece (aged 14) played Donalbane in Shakespeares Macbeth as a pupil at Gordonstoun, the progressive academy in northern Scotland established by the Jewish educationalist Kurt Hahn, after he fled Nazi Germany.