Exclusive: The Secret Life of Tommy Lascelles * Part I: Setting the Stage

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

Yesterday I informed my Royals Extra subscribers that I would be offering something different as well as new. It is a multi-part series about the secret life of Sir Alan “Tommy” Lascelles, the most powerful man behind the throne during the twenty-seven years he worked for the British royal family. After his retirement in 1953 at age sixty-six, he continued as an influential adviser to Queen Elizabeth II. I will be publishing six posts on consecutive days. They are titled “Part I: Setting the Stage,” “Part II: The Making of a Courtier,” “Part III: The Hidden Hand,” “Part IV: The Secret Romance,” “Part V: Triumph and Wounded Feelings,” and “Part VI: Tragic Libertine and Boho Hermit.”

I have known about Tommy Lascelles’ secret life since I discovered its details at the Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities in Los Angeles five years ago. I have been pondering how to tell this important and previously unknown story for some time, and I decided that instead of publishing it on consecutive weekends according to my usual schedule on Royals Extra, I would do it as a daily series so readers could more easily follow the story. I invite subscribers to share their thoughts and reactions in the comments section.

Anyone who has watched The Crown would recognize Sir Alan “Tommy” Lascelles from his vivid portrayal by Pip Torrens in the first three seasons.  With his perfectly parted black hair, bold nose, piercing dark eyes under arched eyebrows, tidy brush mustache, and basso profundo voice, Tommy Lascelles commanded attention.  He served the royal family as a private secretary to King George V, King Edward VIII, King George VI, and Queen Elizabeth II. He was erudite and punctilious, and he rigorously enforced the prerogatives and conduct of the royal family.

Pip Torrens as Sir Alan “Tommy” Lascelles in The Crown

Everyone called him “Tommy”—a throwback to his childhood when his father nicknamed him “Tommy Tadpole” because he had a large head and a skinny body. The only exception was Sir Winston Churchill, who called him Alan. Tommy could be trusted with the most sensitive information about the royal family as well as the government. During the Second World War he was among the handful of people who knew about the development of the atomic bomb. 

“Most people were a little frightened of him”

At six foot one and 140 pounds, he was a stiff-necked and intimidating presence, by turns an enforcer, confidant, consigliere, and strategist. “Most people were a little frightened of him,” wrote Eileen Parker, whose husband Mike worked in the Royal Household. “He tended to be very short with sloppiness and bad judgment.”  Duff Hart-Davis, the editor of his published diaries and letters, described Tommy’s “moral outlook” as “severe,” and his code of conduct as “unbending.”  Group Captain Peter Townsend, who served with Lascelles as equerry to King George VI, chafed at Tommy’s “archaic, uncomfortable outlook” and concluded he was “cold, rigid, and inhibited.”  Princess Margaret said Tommy “ruined” her life when he helped thwart her plan to marry Townsend, a divorcee sixteen years her senior.

Sir Alan Lascelles as the monarch’s private secretary

Perhaps the most enduring of Lascelles’ contributions was supervising the official biographies of King George V, King George VI, and Queen Mary that were published between 1952 and 1959. These books by Harold Nicolson, John Wheeler-Bennett, and James Pope-Hennessy shaped the view of the royal family for decades. Each was scrupulously researched and impeccably written. All three biographers had definite ideas, and Tommy pulled powerful strings while molding and improving their narratives with his “sharpest blue pencil” as he guided their manuscripts to unquestioned royal approval.

“The essentials of his inner life elude me”

Tommy Lascelles was a more complex character than anyone in the royal family could imagine. Even his lifelong friend, the writer John Gore, had to admit that “at the end of it all, the essentials of his inner life elude me.” Tommy was practiced at keeping secrets because he led a clandestine bisexual life, a fact known only to a select group of other similarly closeted gay men. The price of exposure in those days was severe in Britain, where male homosexuality was a crime. Prominent figures including actor John Gielgud and wartime code breaker Alan Turing had been prosecuted for being gay. Tommy needed to remain opaque to avoid scandal or blackmail. He also needed to preserve his marriage to the former Joan Thesiger—a daughter of Lord Chelmsford, the British Viceroy of India from 1916 to 1921—whom he had loved and admired since their courtship and wedding in 1920, and who bore him three children.

Harold Nicolson as a young man

A further complication for Tommy Lascelles was that two of the royal biographers he oversaw, Harold Nicolson and James Pope-Hennessy, had more than a professional relationship with him. Harold Nicolson had been his first lover at Oxford University, and afterward they maintained a close friendship as Nicolson led a discreet gay life while married to the writer Vita Sackville-West. “If their marriage is seen as a harbor,” wrote their son Nigel, “their love affairs were mere ports of call.”

“Very attractive if not strictly handsome”

James Pope-Hennessy and Tommy Lascelles began their affair in 1957 when James was working on his Queen Mary biography. He was nearly three decades younger than Tommy and uniquely problematic.  A conspicuously talented writer, he was also promiscuous and wild, a heavy drinker constantly running out of money.  James Lees-Milne, a bisexual who wrote Harold Nicolson’s authorized biography, described Pope-Hennessy as “very attractive if not strictly handsome,” with “abundant raven black hair, a pale complexion, large protuberant brown eyes and an alert expression.” He was “bright, observant, mischievous, and amusing. His charm was annihilating.”

James Pope-Hennessy’s author photo for Queen Mary, 1959

Harold Nicolson helped Lascelles and Pope-Hennessy navigate surprising emotional storms and keep the Queen Mary biography on track. Nicolson had special insights into the man affectionately known as “Jamesy.” In 1936 when Pope-Hennessy was nineteen years old, he and forty-nine-year-old Nicolson had an affair of their own. They had been introduced by Nicolson’s son Nigel, who knew Pope-Hennessy at Balliol College, Oxford. “Harold unabashedly loved James without being under any illusions about his standards, ethical, moral, political, or social,” wrote Lees-Milne. “He always forgave James for the most outrageous behavior.”

“Exceptional fluency and precision”

Tommy Lascelles died in August 1981 at age ninety-four. He kept detailed journals at various intervals in his life, and he maintained a wide-ranging and rich correspondence with family and friends. Three volumes of his writing were published in 1986 (End of an Era), 1989 (In Royal Service), and 2006, (King’s Counsellor). All were edited by his friend Duff Hart-Davis, who described Lascelles’ “exceptional fluency and precision, hardly ever crossing out a word.” Rather than being kept at the Royal Archives in Windsor Castle, the Lascelles papers are held at Churchill College, Cambridge. I have read in detail the portion of correspondence that is open for research. The rest of the collection remains closed at the request of the Lascelles family as well as the Royal Librarian at Windsor. No specific explanation has been given for the continued closure more than four decades after the death of Tommy Lascelles.

The diaries that Lascelles began in earnest at age eighteen were “bound in black leather and fitted with silver locks” and “designed for his eyes only,” wrote Hart-Davis. Reviewing King’s Counsellor, Philip Ziegler, the author of biographies including the official life of King Edward VIII, recalled visits to the elderly courtier at his home next to Kensington Palace: “Lascelles delighted in tantalizing this now elderly scribe by extracting from a locked chest a volume of his diaries, reading a few sentences aloud, and then returning it to its repository. `That won’t be seen by anyone for 50 years,’ he would pronounce with some relish. `It is the duty of the private secretary to be private.’”

In my book, George VI and Elizabeth: The Marriage That Saved the Monarchy, I briefly alluded to Tommy’s secret life, but I knew that its particulars deserved to be written and considered by readers at greater length. I have now been able to piece together Tommy and James’s story exclusively for my Royals Extra subscribers, drawing primarily on correspondence at the Getty Research Institute that I found in the papers of James’s brother, Sir John Pope-Hennessy, a renowned art historian who served as the Director of both the Victoria and Albert Museum and the British Museum in London. Some of the language may be shocking, but overall, the impassioned letters shed new light on a man who had exceptional influence within the royal family for more than thirty years.

NEXT Part II: The Making of a Courtier