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oyal collection in 1945. By the spring of 1945 he was sufficiently trusted by the royal
circle to be sent by King George VI with Morshead on a mission to Germany. A good
deal of unfounded mystery has been woven around this mission. The reason why the
King sent Morshead and Blunt to Germany was the recent capture by Patton’s Third
Army of the area surrounding the Friedrichshof, the castle built by Queen Victoria’s
eldest daughter, German Empress and Queen of Prussia, the seat of the Landgrave of
Hesse and his family. Philipp of Hesse, head of the family, had been arrested by the
Americans for his Nazi connections and his family evicted to a villa in the nearby village
while the castle was requisitioned as a club for officers. The King was obviously
concerned about the safety of family documents (rightly so, for one of the American
officers and his lover looted cases of jewellery and other objects from the castle, which
were later recovered in Chicago). With the permission of the Landgravine, Morshead
and Blunt removed from the castle a trunk of correspondence between Queen Victoria
and her daughter, the Empress Frederick, part of which had already been removed years
earlier by another Windsor courtier, Sir Frederick ‘Fritz’ Ponsonby, who had annoyed
both George V and the Kaiser by publishing the Empress’s letters to her mother, the
Queen, in an unauthorized version in 1927. The papers removed by Blunt and
Morshead, known as the Kronberg Papers, were deposited in the Royal Archives at
Windsor in August 1945 and were subsequently returned to the Landgrave of Hesse in
1951.
The mystery which later surrounded the Morshead/Blunt expedition arose from a
confusion over the discovery at about that time of a huge cache of German Foreign
Office documents buried in the Harz Mountains, among which was a file, later known as
the Marburg file, concerning the Duke of Windsor’s relations with the Germans
including the episodes in Lisbon in July 1940. Despite Churchill’s attempts to suppress
them, these were later published in the volumes of Captured German Documents in
1957. Rumour had it that Blunt had abstracted the most damaging of these letters and
used them to blackmail the royal family. Additional embroideries were that Blunt had
been parachuted behind enemy lines to lay hands on these incriminating documents.
According to Edward VII’s official biographer, however, not one single paper brought
back from Germany by Blunt and Morshead related to the Duke of Windsor.
In December 1945 the King entrusted Blunt with another delicate rescue mission to
Germany. This time it concerned family treasures belonging to the Hanovers which the
King feared might be looted by the Russians. After discussions with Prince Ernst August,
a number of valuable objects including the diamond crown of Queen Charlotte, wife of
George III, and the Gospel of Henry the Lion were spirited out of Germany in a secret
operation which horrified the Foreign Office and deposited for safe-keeping at Windsor.
(They were subsequently returned in equally secretive fashion to the Hanover family
during Elizabeth’s reign.) 10 Two years later, in August 1947, the King sent Blunt and
Morshead to the Kaiser’s former home in Holland, Haus Doom, where he had died in
exile. This time there was a connection; John Wheeler-Bennett, appointed to do the first
sifting of the Marburg file, reported that he had found a reference in the file to the role