Exclusive: The Secret Life of Tommy Lascelles * Part III: The Hidden Hand
The previously untold story of the clandestine May-December romance between the most influential royal courtier of the 20th century and the official biographer of Queen Mary
In Part II: The Making of a Courtier, I described the upbringing of Sir Alan “Tommy” Lascelles and his influential role as a senior adviser to British monarchs for more than three decades in the mid-20th century. He became well known in recent years after being memorably played in The Crown by Pip Torrens. Tommy’s less recognized but even more significant role was in shaping the perceptions of two kings and a queen consort through their official biographies. I revealed that Tommy Lascelles had a secret bisexual life that included two of the three biographers, James Pope-Hennessy (Queen Mary) and Harold Nicolson (King George V). At an archive in Los Angeles, I discovered correspondence that illuminates the intriguing romance between Tommy and James and offers a new perspective on the emotional life of the most influential courtier of the modern era. In Part III I will show how Lascelles’ supervision of the first two biographies led to his involvement with Pope-Hennessy after they met early in 1957.
ICYMI: Part I: Setting the Stage
ICYMI: A Message for the Royals Extra Community
As private secretary to King George VI in 1948, Tommy took on the added responsibility of overseeing a biography of the King’s father, King George V. In 1943 George VI had appointed Lascelles Keeper of the Royal Archives in the Round Tower at Windsor Castle, the collection of the papers of monarchs, their families, and their households spanning 250 years to the reign of King George III.
During the Second World War, King George VI began talking to Tommy Lascelles about the need for an official biography of his father, who had died in January 1936. They put off any decision until early 1948, when the King revisited the subject with some urgency, emphasizing that the biography should be written before the deaths of Tommy and Sir Owen Morshead, the Royal Librarian at Windsor Castle since 1926. (At the time, Morshead was only fifty-five, and Lascelles was sixty-one.) Tommy put together a panel of five eminent figures to recommend a suitable writer. Three of the five, including George Trevelyan, the historian and master of Trinity College, Cambridge, recommended Nicolson.
Sixty-one-year-old Nicolson was an inspired choice. The son of a British baron who served as a diplomat, Harold moved around Europe with his family before landing at Balliol College, Oxford. There he met Lascelles and became the first in Tommy’s series of lovers while at university. After graduating, Nicolson started out as a diplomat with several European postings before working in the Foreign Office. He turned to journalism and wrote biographies of Tennyson, Byron, and other leading literary figures. From 1935 to 1945 he was a Member of Parliament with a front row seat on the tumultuous 1930s and the Second World War. He was a prolific essayist, book reviewer, and radio commentator, and beginning in 1930, he kept extensive daily diaries. For nearly fifty years he was married to the aristocratic novelist and poet, Vita Sackville-West. They were devoted to one another even as they each had same-sex lovers. Together they created the gardens at Sissinghurst Castle in Kent, renowned as among the most beautiful in Britain.
Tommy strongly endorsed Nicolson to George VI but asked if the King had any problem with Nicolson being a personal friend of Tommy. “What do you feel yourself, Tommy?” replied the King. Lascelles said that because of their friendship, he wouldn’t have put forward Harold’s name on his own, but he concurred with the three “elder statesmen.” Queen Elizabeth agreed with the choice, as did George V’s widow, Queen Mary, and the Palace made a public announcement at the end of June 1948. It is highly unlikely that any of his royal supporters knew about Harold’s bisexuality or his affair with Tommy at Oxford. In those years, male homosexuality was a crime, and prominent figures were prosecuted for being gay.
“Omit things and incidents which were discreditable”
“It is not meant to be an ordinary biography,” Tommy told Nicolson. “You will be writing a book about a very ancient national institution, and you need not descend to personalities.” Tommy added that Harold “should not be expected to write one word that was not true,” nor to “praise or exaggerate.” But he must “omit things and incidents which were discreditable.”
“The idea is that I shall be shown every scrap of paper that exists,” Harold wrote to his wife Vita on June 8th. He would see “intimate letters” that even Tommy hadn’t read. Harold would have his own table at Windsor Castle and would do his research in the archives three days a week. Tommy instructed Owen Morshead to help him. They expected publication in four years.
Nicolson set about doing interviews as well. He twice spoke at length to Tommy Lascelles’ lifelong friend, John Gore, who had written King George V: A Personal Memoir. Gore had been commissioned by King George VI and Queen Mary on specific instructions—that he write about the late king in an “unadorned and accurate” way. They instructed him to ignore the “official aspects” of the King’s reign as well as “Queen Mary’s part.” Gore began the book in 1938 and published it in March 1941. The Times judged the book an “admirable mingling of discretion and liveliness” based on the late king’s diaries as well as the “recollections of friends and courtiers.”
“He characteristically used my remarks”
Although Tommy Lascelles was busy with his private secretary responsibilities, he quietly helped guide Gore’s book to publication. As he later wrote to Sir Michael Adeane, his successor as Queen Elizabeth II’s private secretary, he “read and re-read” the book, “chapter by chapter.” Tommy knew that his longtime friend could be counted on to stay within the boundaries, not least because of the discreet way Gore used Tommy as a source for his weekly column in The Sphere magazine under the penname The Old Stager. Once in a letter to his wife Joan in late 1941, Tommy off-handedly mentioned that after a conversation with Gore, he “characteristically used my remarks in his next weekly article.”
By the time Harold Nicolson caught up with John Gore, he had thoroughly annotated his book. He concluded that Gore had portrayed George V well and was surprised that the royal family permitted him to say as much as he did. When the two men finally met over lunch in November 1948 at the Travellers Club in London, Tommy was present, and Gore spoke with stunning candor.
Nicolson recorded in his diary that Gore believed George V to be quite stupid, and that there were times when he disliked him very much. Gore also cautioned that Owen Morshead was long-winded. When Gore and Nicolson met again in August 1949 at Gore’s home near Rogate in West Sussex, he warned Harold that Palace courtiers had advised him to downplay George V’s Tory prejudices. He confided that he had known Queen Elizabeth since she was a little girl, and that he had often stayed at her family’s home in Scotland. Nevertheless, she had come down hard on anything that she felt could expose George V to ridicule.
Nicolson and Lascelles met regularly—often over lunch at the Beefsteak Club in London. The private secretary kept tabs on progress and passed along suggestions from George VI, Queen Mary, and Queen Elizabeth. At one point Tommy counseled Harold that Queen Elizabeth was likely to ask him to cut anything that reflected well on the Labour Party, and that George VI would prefer that he not mention how badly George V treated his children.
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