I don’t know why Brexiters feel so oppressed by Bruxellian rule and devoid of sovereignty, given that a three-part series is commissioned by a major broadcaster every time a shopping list or a bus ticket is discovered that once came within three metres of anyone closer than 18th in line to the throne.
In the case of The Queen’s Lost Family – a companion piece to 2015’s The Queen’s Lost Cousin, about Prince William of Gloucester, which is not to be confused with The Queen’s Hidden Cousins, which came a few years before that – it was Channel 4, rather than the BBC, but otherwise it was business as usual.
First, take a cache of recently unearthed letters: here, a bundle of correspondence tucked away at Harewood House, near Leeds, the marital home of Princess Mary, the only daughter of George V and Queen Mary. (You would think they could afford more names, the royals, but no. Still, this parsimony doubtless endeared them to the Yorkshire folk.)
Next, explain in hushed, breathless tones that these are letters written by and to the royal siblings and their friends – and who those siblings are, for the plebs who haven’t already absorbed the basics via the 300 programmes a year that are broadcast on the subject of Edward (shagger, abdicator, Nazi, all-round dingus), Bertie (the Queen’s dad) and the others (Henry, military man until he met Beryl Markham and became a dingus; George, the family darling until he became a shagger; John, who died aged 13; and the aforementioned Mary).
Third, re-explain in hushed, breathless tones that these are actual letters written by and to the actual royal siblings and their friends using their actual royal hands.
Then, point out that these were private letters, written with the expectation of privacy, before reading out choice excerpts where the Saxe-Coburg and Gotha offspring really let rip. Generally, Edward delivers best, talking about his father’s “wretched life” and the “foul way” he treats Mary, and lamenting the increasingly propagandist nature of his 1921 tour of the empire. (Sample quote from contemporary newsreel covering Edward’s arrival in India: “Even the horses seem pleased!”)
After the Amritsar massacre, however, Edward felt the bloom was really off the rose. “Christ, how I loathe my job now and all the press-puffed empty success. I feel I am through with it and long to die. Don’t breathe a word! No one must know how I feel about my life.” You do feel sorry for the dingus in a gilded cage, although not as sorry as you do for the hundreds of people killed at Amritsar.
The programme took us at a brisk trot through the two generations’ dissatisfactions and frustrations with each other, the efforts to shore up the monarchy against the more perilous dissatisfactions and frustrations of the disillusioned postwar populace still waiting for a land fit for heroes. Even giving some of them the vote hadn’t properly dissipated tensions. “No one knew what the wuuhking classes wuh going to do with thahr new voice!” explained Deborah Cadbury in her own chocolatey one.
Bertie and the Princess Royal kept ploughing respectable furrows, marrying Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon (the Queen’s mum) and Henry Lascelles (the cousin of Tommy Lascelles – Pip Torrens in The Crown – who would later serve as private secretary to Bertie and the Queen), while George V and Queen Mary did their best to keep the rest of their increasingly dissolute children in order – not to much avail. In the wake of the General Strike, Edward was sent on another publicity tour and behaved abominably throughout. At one point, his assistant private secretary (Tommy Lascelles again) recorded his opinion that “the heir apparent, in his unbridled pursuit of wine and women and whatever selfish whim occupied him at the moment, was rapidly going to the devil and, unless he mended his ways, would soon become no fit wearer of the British crown”. Baby, you ain’t seen nothing yet.
You have seen it all before, illuminated slightly differently according to which cache was found in which nook or cranny of which palatial dwelling, and which socio-historical heads have been dragooned into talking us through it again. It is becoming quite comforting, really – an audiovisual strand being twisted into the rope of constitutional continuity that we are told binds us through the ages. It does give the lie to one adage, though, because there is actually nothing you can think of that wasn’t exactly like the home life of at least one of our own dear queens.
• This article was corrected on 12 August 2019. The boy on the left of the picture was George VI, not George V as originally stated.
