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ehaviour. She knew Cliveden, the setting for the Profumo scandal, well, having often
been over to tea there with her mother and sister during the reign of Bill Astor’s mother,
the formidable Nancy. Although she was nearer Bill’s age than she was Macmillan’s, she
was probably as shocked as her Prime Minister by the goings-on revealed daily in the
press. Unlike Macmillan, however, she appeared relatively relaxed to find herself one of
the targets of the new-wave satirists. The year before she had been reported as
‘chuckling her way through’ the review Beyond the Fringe, accompanied by two other
targets, the Foreign Secretary, the Earl of Home, and the Lord Chamberlain, the Earl of
Scarbrough. The cast felt that they had failed; one was reported as saying that if they
had wounded the establishment as much as they had intended to, the Queen’s advisers
would not have let her come.
In the midst of the welter of society and spy scandals, the counterintelligence service,
MI5, learned through the FBI that there was definite evidence that the distinguished art
historian Sir Anthony Blunt was a Soviet spy. It had been Blunt who had tipped off the
spies Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, enabling them to escape to Moscow in 1952
(after a telephone call from Kim Philby, who had himself fled to Russia in February
1963). After the defection of Burgess, one of Blunt’s closest friends, MI5 had questioned
Blunt on fourteen occasions, but it was not until 1964 that suspicions they harboured
about him were confirmed. On the surface it appeared extraordinarily unlikely that a
man like Blunt, a member of the Queen’s household, a favourite of the late Queen Mary,
and a popular and respected director of the Courtauld Institute since 1947, should have
been a spy for the Soviets since 1936–7. He had worked for MI5 from 1940 to 1945 and
in 1956, for his services as Surveyor, had been made a Knight Commander of the Royal
Victorian Order, which is in Elizabeth’s personal gift.
Blunt was a very English spy. Tall, thin, blond and charming, immensely intelligent
and cultivated, he had been born in the respectably dull seaside town of Bournemouth in
1907, the son of a clergyman and of the daughter of a member of the Indian Civil
Service. ‘His father was a kinsman of the poet, anti-imperialist, and libertine Wilfrid
Scawen Blunt, his mother a friend of the future Queen Mary,’ wrote his biographer;
‘both these connections were to have a curious significance for Blunt’s future career.’ 9
While at Trinity College, Cambridge, he had been a member of the exclusive society, the
Apostles, dedicated to the cult of the intellect, freedom of thought and the denial of all
moral restraints beyond loyalty to friends. An influential minority of the Apostles was,
like Blunt and his friend Burgess, homosexual, a secret network at a time when
homosexual acts were illegal. Like Burgess and other Cambridge friends he was recruited
by the Russians at Cambridge during the 1930s. Blunt appears to have been inspired by
hatred of fascism, devotion to Burgess and the thrill of secret betrayal of a philistine
establishment. All this made his long service at the Palace, the very heart of the
establishment, all the more paradoxical.
To Elizabeth, he was a familiar if distant figure. He had been recruited by the Royal
Librarian, Sir Owen Morshead, to assist with the cataloguing of the Old Master drawings
in the Library at Windsor and had published a catalogue of the French drawings in the