Exclusive: The Secret Life of Tommy Lascelles * Part V: Triumph and Wounded Feelings

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 IV: The Secret Romance I described the secret love affair of Sir Alan “Tommy” Lascelles, the most influential adviser in Buckingham Palace for twenty-seven years, and James Pope-Hennessy, the official biographer of Queen Mary, the queen consort of King George V. Drawing on letters I discovered at an archive in Los Angeles, I traced this intense romance from its beginnings in 1957 to an agonizing episode in the summer of 1958 that nearly ruptured their relationship. In Part V of this series for my Royals Extra subscribers, I will show how Tommy’s passion for James continued unabated even as he guided the biography of Queen Mary past the approval hurdles at Buckingham Palace to become what Lascelles called “one of the outstanding biographies in the English language.”

ICYMI: Part I: Setting the Stage

ICYMI: Part II: The Making of a Courtier

ICYMI: Part III: The Hidden Hand

James Pope-Hennessy returned to London from his five months of intense writing in Hagnau, Germany on August 21, 1958.  He did several more interviews for Queen Mary while Tommy Lascelles began softening the courtiers at Buckingham Palace. Tommy had given James unprecedented latitude in the colorful language he wove through his narrative—quite unlike any authorized royal biography before or since.

To cite several examples, James described Queen Mary’s mother, Princess Mary Adelaide as “very fat, very thick set and very proud…that mountain of a girl.” Queen Mary’s father, the volatile Duke of Teck had “an almost feminine urge to arrange and rearrange rooms.” Ever the outsider, he was “reduced to vegetating inconspicuously in England, pruning roses.” Queen Victoria “reminded one of an amiable field-mouse.” Sandringham House, the monarch’s estate in Norfolk, was “unrelievedly ugly.” Queen Mary had “no automatic or spontaneous understanding of a child’s mind or way of children.” King George V sometimes “reacted like a spoiled child” and “retained until his dying day the handwriting of a schoolboy.”

The book contained many spellbinding and imaginative passages. On her marriage to the future King George V, James described the future Queen Mary as “the fair, the sage, the hopeful young Duchess of York” who stood “full in the limelight, which glistens on the gold braid of her white dress and on her golden hair.” He called the First World War “a single long dark winter over Europe, made lurid by the bursting of shells and the roar of gun-fire, and drenched in a warm, steady downpour of young human blood.” When American divorcee Wallis Simpson was announced in the newspapers as a house guest of her lover, King Edward VIII, it gave “the same sort of jolt which a lifelong devotee of Henry James might feel on finding a few pages by Hemingway or Faulkner bound up in a copy of The Wings of The Dove.” The announcement of Wallis’s divorce petition was “like the three mallet-blows which precede the raising of the curtain in a French theatre,” an action that “declenched a drama which galvanized the literate world.”

Sir Owen Morshead, the Royal Librarian from 1926 to 1958

“No hesitation in calling it a masterpiece”

It was Tommy’s job to avoid censorship of what James had written. Even before James had finished his manuscript, Lascelles wrote to Royal Librarian Sir Owen Morshead in September 1958 that the book had “delighted, moved and amused me.” He had “no hesitation in calling it a masterpiece.” He could find “not one word in the book that could distress” Queen Elizabeth II or any member of the royal family. Around the same time, Tommy was advising James that he had “nothing at all to fear” from Morshead. James had been “mad as a wet hen” to read a letter from the Royal Librarian to Tommy that contained some criticism of Queen Mary.

The letter was “a blunt little thing,” Tommy told James, that “seemed ludicrously innocuous and anyhow, who cares a passing fuck what he says?” Lascelles then shared a “psychological tip” about Morshead: “What he wants is cosseting—stroke him continually like a cat, & he is yours for keeps. He has a suppressed inferiority complex, & he laps up friendly gestures like cream. You, with a very little effort on yr part, can have him exactly where you want him.” 

“The book of a gentleman, rare these days”

Lascelles went to bat with his successor as private secretary to Queen Elizabeth II, Sir Michael Adeane, in March 1959, writing a long letter of extravagant praise for Queen Mary before the Queen was due to read it. Tommy set three main criteria for his approval. Was it “a worthy and sympathetic portrait?” His answer was “an unqualified yes.” Was there “anything in the book that could offend, or distress, The Queen herself, or any members of her family?” Tommy concluded “No, nothing. It is throughout written in perfect taste—the book of a gentleman, rare these days.” Finally, would the “common reader” appreciate the book? “Here I can only say that Joan & I, who are average common readers, used to sit each side of the fire with sheets of typescript in our hands, wholly absorbed, and alternately laughing aloud, or wiping away surreptitious tears…I prophesy it will sell like hot cakes.” As for a hypothetical fourth question, whether the late King George VI would have liked the book, Tommy wrote that “I’m as sure as I can be that he wld have enjoyed it immensely.”

The Palace gave Queen Mary its stamp of approval at the end of April, and James telephoned Tommy with the good news. Lascelles was understandably delighted, but he was also angry with James for being careless with him yet again. In an anguished letter written on Friday May 2, 1959, Tommy told James of his “indescribable relief…perhaps even a greater relief than it was to you.” He described how anxious he had been for many months, worrying that despite all his efforts to inoculate the royal family and their top advisers against possible criticism, they could reject his assessment of the book. He desperately didn’t want to let James down.