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played in the Duke of Windsor saga by the Kaiser, whose son Frederick William and his
wife Cecilie were both used by Hitler as royal intermediaries. There can have been no
other serious explanation for the King’s anxiety to search Haus Doom, which was no
longer in any danger from enemy looting. In fact no serious documentary material at all
was discovered, only the Kaiser’s Garter Star and Field Marshal’s baton, a Cosway
miniature of the Duke of Clarence and some copies of nineteenth-century letters. Further
suspicions about the significance of the Blunt/Morshead mission were raised by
Spycatcher Peter Wright’s statement that when he interrogated Blunt twenty years later
in 1967, the Palace put an embargo on any questions about his missions to Germany.
That in itself could seem suspicious to anyone unfamiliar with Palace methods and
sensitivities. Palace officials simply wanted to keep the royal family out of a case in
which they were not in fact embroiled, but which could raise, as it has, all sorts of
unpleasant questions. It could be assumed that they were concerned not, as has been
implied, with the Windsor connection, but with questions about the import and export of
the collections.
The intelligence authorities decided on an immunity deal for Blunt. There were
several reasons for this decision, not least that the unmasking of the ‘fourth man’ in the
wake of the Philby defection and the Profumo scandal would be profoundly damaging
and embarrassing. The revelation that the royal art historian and Knight of the Royal
Victorian Order had been yet another highly placed Soviet spy was simply not to be
contemplated. Further, counter-intelligence officers advised that it would be best to
leave him alone and extract from him the confession that MI5’s officer, Nicholas Elliot,
had failed to get from Philby: a full list of those recruited and how they operated. The
deal was approved by the Home Secretary, Henry Brooke, with the co-operation of
Michael Adeane. The Palace, it must be assumed, took all these reasons into account in
agreeing to play along – ‘Blunt sang like a canary,’ a courtier said. From then on until
1979, when he was finally publicly unmasked by Mrs Thatcher’s statement in the House
of Commons, stripped of his knighthood and disgraced, Blunt never came into the
Private Secretaries’ Office. He knew, and they knew, but it was a well-kept secret. At
one point it was only by the use of some delicate footwork that Martin Charteris
managed to avoid the automatic granting of a further promotion for Blunt within the
Royal Victorian Order to GCVO (this did not mean any special favour: ‘Promotion
within the Royal Victorian Order’, one courtier said, ‘is as inevitable as death’).
Elizabeth knew about Blunt and the immunity from the beginning, as Roy Jenkins
discovered when a civil servant remembered that, as Home Secretary, he should be told
about it in 1966 – six months after he had actually taken office. In October 1967 when
Richard Crossman, visiting Balmoral, attempted to discuss the Philby story, he found
himself cut short. He asked whether the Queen had read the revelations in the Sunday
newspapers that Philby, who had fled to Moscow four years previously, had been a
Soviet agent since before the war. The answer was, ‘No, she didn’t read that kind of
thing.’ ‘I was suddenly aware’, Crossman wrote, ‘that this was not a subject which we
ought to discuss.’ 11 At the Palace, apart from Elizabeth and her Private Secretaries,