Exclusive: The Secret Life of Tommy Lascelles * Part II: The Making of a Courtier
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 I: Setting the Stage, I described the central role of Sir Alan “Tommy” Lascelles—memorably played in The Crown by Pip Torrens—as a senior adviser to four British monarchs for more than three decades in the mid-20th century and his less recognized but even more significant part 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. This is the previously untold story that I am presenting to my Royals Extra subscribers.
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Alan Frederick Lascelles, born on April 11, 1887, was ideally suited to be a royal courtier. He had impeccable aristocratic lineage and was close to Britain’s top-tier families. The Hon. Frederick Canning Lascelles, Tommy’s father, was the younger brother of the 5th Earl of Harewood. Tommy’s first cousin Harry, the 6th Earl of Harewood, was exceedingly rich and married to Princess Mary, the only daughter of King George V.
Tommy was the youngest in his family and had four older sisters. His mother died of cancer when he was only three. He described his father as a “bearded ex-naval officer, who ran his house like a man-of-war.” After leaving the Royal Navy at age thirty, Frederick “did nothing whatever for the next forty years save hunt four days a week and shoot all through the winter,” and “go to Norway salmon-fishing in the summer,” Tommy wrote.
“The same social traditions as myself”
That left little room for Tommy, who was shipped off to a preparatory boarding school at age nine. He would ordinarily have been ticketed for Eton, but Marlborough offered him a scholarship. He hated the school that many years later educated its most famous graduate, Kate Middleton, the future Princess of Wales. Lascelles snobbishly dismissed Marlborough students for not sharing “the same social traditions as myself.” Their grandfathers had been “county cricketers” and his had been Masters of Foxhounds.
On entering Trinity College, Oxford, in October 1905, Tommy flourished with his “own tribe,” nearly all Old Etonians. One of them—encountered while having tea at Balliol College less than a week after his arrival—was Harold Nicolson. Tommy studied history and philosophy and mastered Greek and Latin. He reveled in the company of “men who understood books, horses, music,” and who “found liberty from the dour conventionality.” He felt “the joy of shouting at the moon and of talking at the fire; the joy of being-alive-with-others.”
What Tommy declined to record was what he confided to James Pope-Hennessy in an undated letter, probably in the summer of 1958, revealed here for the first time:
“A lonely and damnably sentimental boy”
Tommy told James that they had much in common and explained that since his youth he had fantasized about an “empty pedestal” on which he placed mostly “unsuitable” men, but only in sequence. He called himself “monandrous” as later in life he became “happily monogamous.” At Oxford, when he was a “lonely and damnably sentimental boy,” he filled his imaginary pedestal first with Harold Nicolson, then Julian Grenfell, followed by Gerard Anderson, both of whom were killed in the First World War. He said he couldn’t adequately describe the “depth & breadth” of his feelings for the three men, each of whom was “a god to me.” In his published diaries, Tommy characterized Grenfell—the eldest son of the first Lord Desborough---as “the best of men,” with “amazing” looks: “a rather refined Botticelli Mars, leaner, harder and more forceful.”
Tommy whirled through the Oxford social and sporting scene of balls, house parties, hunts, and point-to-points. Fox hunting became an obsession. He was a beautiful rider, blessed with the “long, flat thighs” of the Lascelles family. He was equally enthralled by fishing— “the only really pure sport left.” He wrote in mind-numbing detail to his father about his fishing adventures. One letter ran twenty-eight pages.
“The red–russet of a windy autumn noonday”
But Tommy was also capable of piquant and lyrical expression. He encountered one young woman who tittered “like a rain-pipe with a hole in it.” The music of Brahms summoned “the red-russet of a windy autumn noonday, with a dash of salt in the air.” He loved Shakespeare and Kipling, and he hated Dickens. He graduated from Oxford with a 2nd class degree in Literae Humaniores (known as “Greats,” the Oxford term for Classics)—a reflection more of his enjoyment of the university experience than a marker of his intelligence.
Tommy served as a captain in Flanders and France during the First World War, but his cavalry regiment, the Bedford Yeomanry, was held in reserve while more than a dozen of his close friends were cut down in the trenches. He grieved intensely when Julian Grenfell died in May 1915 at Ypres after being hit in the head by a shell fragment. When Tommy finally made it to the front lines, he was wounded and won the Military Cross for bravery.
After the war Tommy traveled to India to work as an aide-de-camp to his brother-in-law, Lord Lloyd, the Governor of Bombay. In December 1919 during at a round-up of wild elephants in Mysore, he met Joan Thesiger, the eldest daughter of the British Viceroy, Lord Chelmsford. Tommy was thirty-two, and Joan was twenty-four when they fell in love and spent a week together with the Maharajah’s house party. Tommy was suitably impressed when Joan killed a nine-foot tigress with one shot. She returned to Delhi, and they “corresponded feverishly” for the following month until he bolted from Bombay and proposed to her while exploring the tombs of the Lodi Kings in Delhi.
“Looked best in boots and breeches”
They were married in Delhi on March 16th and took their honeymoon in Kashmir. He described Joan as “absolutely natural and unaffected…She likes all the things I do, can ride and shoot and in my opinion is very beautiful.” The editor of his published letters and diaries, Duff Hart-Davis, considered her “more than a little masculine,” and Tommy thought she “looked best in boots and breeches.” To his friend Letty Elcho, the wife of Hugo Charteris, one of Scotland’s grandest aristocrats, Tommy wrote that he had “tumbled into such a seventh heaven of happiness as I never hoped to reach…I’m alive again now for the first time since I left Oxford.”
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