Memorably unpleasant —Tommy Lascelles (Pip Torrens) in The Crown. Credit: Netflix
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Forty years ago, on 10 August, a tall and wiry old man died at Kensington Palace, aged 94. 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. He read Shakespeare on the Tube as he travelled to meetings at the bank, and wrote amateur poetry. Occasionally royalty stopped to chit chat on their way past, as Princess Margaret once did with her new baby. 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.
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. 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. Having been a courtier, on and off, from 1920-1953, he gives a fascinating insight into how to preserve a monarchy in a democracy.
Lascelles gets caricatured as a stiff-arsed, hard-bristled, curmudgeonly enforcer of horrible rules in The Crown, forever thwarting true love’s course. As well as playing a role in Edward VIII’s abdication, Lascelles is seen as one of the Establishment men who decided Princess Margaret couldn’t marry Peter Townsend. But despite this crucial role in modern Royal history, the real Lascelles remains slightly out of sight to us. There is no biography. His archives in Churchill College, Cambridge are largely closed — especially material relating to the monarchy. Edward Owens, who recently wrote a book about the royal family and the mass media, was denied access to them. His diaries, although excellent, were selectively edited by his friend Rupert Hart-Davis; they reveal a much more emotional, sensible, likeable man than the popular image.
There is no consensus, then, on Lascelles’s true character. To Edward VIII, living in exile as the Duke of Windsor, Lascelles was always “that snake”. The feeling was mutual. When Harold Nicolson had lunch with Lascelles three days after the Abdication, the courtier said the former King was “like a child in the fairy stories who had been given every gift except a soul”. He was also spitting with rage about the fact that Edward VIII was not patriotic enough: “He never cared about England or the English.” Ferdinand Mount remembers Lascelles visiting his school, where Mount “was startled by his explosion of venom against the Duke of Windsor … He was memorably unpleasant.”
But Lascelles wasn’t just a stickler for arcane and snobbish standards, nor did he take a cruel pleasure in enforcing them. He stood for fair play and pragmatism. When Noël Coward was recommended for a knighthood, Lascelles advised George VI against. 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. It would have been wrong for those young men to be punished while Coward was honoured.
Essentially honourable, then, despite being memorably unpleasant. Lascelles understood that although monarchy must be staged, that doesn’t mean it can be fake. The public spectacle has to be a true enough expression of the values it upholds. That is why the knighthood had to be refused, and why Wallis Simpson couldn’t be Queen. (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. It is also why, irrespective of the way it happened, Lascelles came to believe the abdication was inevitable. 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.
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SubscribeThe Crown, which basically turned into a hit job on the royal family, tried to set up Lascelles as the villain, but he was the best character in the show (along with Anne).
I’d argue the hit job (which it was undoubtedly intended to be) failed as well. Most people have learned to apply a de-woking filter to current broadcast media. You need it in this country.
Totally agree. #TeamTommy
Why not a picture of the man rather than an actor
Great article. I have recently finished listening to the audio version of King’s Counsellor which as a nice touch is narrated by Pip Torrens. In his diaries, Tommy comes across a cultured, balanced and empathetic man and gives an interesting insight into the war years, government and monarchy. It’s a great piece of history.
Interesting article. One niggle: the author writes, “He could talk of the King as a Deity with little exaggeration”, but in the subsequent quotation which is presumably the basis for this, Lascelles is clearly referring to God and not to the King.
Not seen ‘The Crown’ yet but Lascelles sounds like a fascinating dude from this narrative.
The last thing Lascelles could be described as was a “dude”.
‘Dude’ it is in my lexicon!
One of the right kind of British or English! I am pro Monarchy, especially the enlightened sort. It is the position itself, not the individual that matters more so. Thankfully i’m grateful for Queens Elizabeth (both of them) – each have been and are ‘great’ in different ways, but both i feel esteemed the highest principles of monarchy and sought and seek to engender high regard for one’s estate and state in this tragic world of forms. I think the state’s monarch is the exemplar for the personal or individual. Each are sovereign essentially. Another form of ‘as above, so below’. Balance.
Not sure about Margaret’s marriage. It didn’t seem to stop her later and she never seemed particularly happy.
We seem to want the family to be middle class when it is above such things hierarchically. A pity we cannot have the rambunctious army princes alongside the more sober emperors.