38656356325923

against Churchill, representing the ancien régime of the aristocratic ruling class, and
towards Socialism and a Labour Government under Attlee in the landslide election of
1945. The landed aristocracy, former pillars of the throne, a class to which Elizabeth’s
father belonged in spirit and her mother by birth, was in terminal decline burdened by
the heavy taxation necessary to pay for the establishment of the Welfare State. The King
did at times feel threatened as he saw his fellow monarchs abroad defeated by
Communism, while at home the large country estates of his youth were disappearing.
‘Everything is going now,’ he told Vita Sackville-West in 1948, on hearing that her
family home, Knole, had been taken over by the National Trust. ‘Before long I shall also
have to go.’ After a visit by King Michael of Romania, who had been recently exiled
from his country, the King, according to Vita’s son, Ben Nicolson, visiting Windsor as
Assistant Surveyor of the King’s Pictures, was ‘worried much by the prospects of a
Republic’, mirroring his father’s fears in 1918. 11
Elizabeth was aware that her father felt he would have to tread carefully, especially
when it came to financial negotiations with the Government. Now, as in 1918, the cost
of the monarchy had to be seen to be justified. Mountbatten acted as a channel of
communication with the ruling Labour Party. The MP and journalist Tom Driberg
warned him that there was considerable feeling in the Labour Party against lavish
allowances for the Prince on his marriage, or undue extravagance over the ceremony
itself. Mountbatten promised to pass on the information. He wrote to Driberg from India
in July:
You can rest assured that he [Philip] thoroughly understands this problem and indeed he spoke to me about
it when I was home in May. I am sure he is entirely on the side of cutting down the display of the wedding,
and his own personal feelings are against receiving any civil list for the very reasons which you give. I have,
however, persuaded him that it is essential he should take something. [Philip had virtually no money
beyond his pay; his] tiny little two-seater made a big hole in his private fortune, and except when travelling
on an officer’s warrant he usually goes Third-class by train… as a future Prince Consort, however, I think
you will agree that Third-class travel would be regarded as a stunt and a sixpenny tip to a porter as stingey…
It really amounts to this: you have either got to give up the Monarchy or give the wretched people who have
to carry out the functions of the Crown enough money to be able to do it with the same dignity at least as the
Prime Minister or Lord Mayor of London is afforded. 12
Despite refusing the King’s request to declare a public holiday for his daughter’s
wedding, thought inappropriate at a time of strikes and low productivity, the Labour
Government responded sympathetically to his proposals for financial provision for her
and her husband, suggesting an annuity of £50,000 for the Princess upon her marriage
(later whittled down to £40,000 by the House of Commons), 90 per cent of which was to
be tax-free, and £10,000 for her husband. In return, the King handed over to the
Treasury £100,000 savings made on the Civil List during the war years’ economies (as
George V had done in the First World War) to contribute towards the cost of these
annuities. Even in the afterglow of the wedding the debate on the allowances for
Elizabeth and Philip caused resentment, as John Gordon of the Express informed his