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heart he was and quite unlike the ‘stuffed shirt’ image of his courtier days.
Lascelles’s replacement as Elizabeth’s Private Secretary, Sir Michael Adeane, who was
to serve the Queen for nearly twenty years from 1953 to 1972, could have been
described as ‘Palace-bred’. Born in 1910, he was the grandson of Lord Stamfordham,
Assistant Private Secretary to Queen Victoria and Private Secretary to George V as
Prince of Wales and as King. Stamfordham had not belonged to the high aristocracy,
being born plain Arthur Bigge, the son of a Northumbrian parson, but he was perhaps
the most influential Private Secretary of the century upon whom George V greatly
depended and in whom he had confided since his youth. He relied on Stamfordham for
advice on everything, even the name of his dynasty. It was at Stamfordham’s suggestion
that the name Windsor had been chosen in 1917. His grandson, Michael Adeane, had the
establishment background characteristic of top household officials: Eton and Cambridge,
then a commission in his father’s regiment, the Coldstream Guards. After serving as an
aide-de-camp to the Governor-General of Canada, Lord Tweedsmuir (the writer John
Buchan), he had joined the royal household in 1937 as an Assistant Private Secretary to
George VI until war broke out, when he had returned to his regiment. In 1945 he came
back to his job at the Palace before succeeding Lascelles as Private Secretary. Adeane
was the ideal royal official, intelligent, self-effacing and not without the sense of
humour necessary to survive life at court. He certainly showed the self-control and calm
temperament which enabled him to cope in the famous story of how one day, as he was
hurrying out of Buckingham Palace on an urgent mission, he was accosted by a royal
biographer with questions to ask. With impeccable courtesy he stood listening, showing
merely the faintest sign of wanting to leave, but it was only after several minutes that
he said, ‘I do hope you’ll forgive me, but I’ve just heard that my house is on fire. I
wouldn’t mind but as it’s part of St James’s Palace…’
Adeane was generally regarded as a ‘safe pair of hands’; the Palace job fitted him like
a glove and to Elizabeth he represented continuity, tradition and caution, qualities
which she appreciated. Altrincham’s naming of Adeane as among the ‘second-rate lot…
lacking in gumption’ was unfair, on academic grounds alone – he had a First Class
degree in History from Cambridge. ‘Michael Adeane was highly civilized,’ his artist
friend, John Ward, RA, whom he introduced to the royal household, said. ‘He drew and
did watercolours. He was a very distinguished, shrewd man, who would face difficulties
head on and never evade anything.’ He was, however, more inclined to a cautious
conservatism and old-fashioned attitudes than his colleagues in the Private Office. Alone
among the Palace Secretaries he was a supporter of the Suez operation and he was more
likely than the other two men in the Private Office to take the view that what was good
enough in his grandfather’s time was good enough for him.
The late Martin Charter is (Lord Charter is of Amisfield in later life), educated at Eton
and the Royal Military College at Sandhurst, the grandson of an earl and a duke, had
the ideal background for the royal household, but lacked the blinkered approach and
faint touch of pomposity that often went with it. Highly intelligent and cultivated, he
had a puckish sense of humour and a quizzical approach to life which lightened the