The Prophetic Tommy Lascelles

C laire Foy deservedly won a Primetime Emmy, a Golden Globe, and a Screen Actors Guild Award for her brilliant performance as the young Queen Elizabeth in the first two seasons of the Netflix series, The Crown. Yet in every scene in which he appeared in those dramas, Pip Torrens stole the show as the private secretary Elizabeth inherited from her father: the ramrod straight, not-to-be-crossed guardian of the Royal Family firm, Sir Alan Lascelles, universally known as “Tommy.”

Torrens’s work inspired me to find out more about Lascelles, who revealed himself to be a man of wit and keen insight in King’s Counsellor: Abdication and War — the Diaries of Sir Alan Lascelles, which was published in 2006, a quarter-century after Tommy Lascelles’s death.

As to the wit, here is Lascelles, then working for King George VI, reflecting on a rare day off at his country home during World War II:

Carting potatoes, of which we have a fine crop, I was continually struck by the resemblance which the average large potato bears to General de Gaulle, though the potato is, of course, the more malleable of the two.

Then there are Lascelles’s extended thoughts on his former employer, the abdicated King Edward VIII. He joined the private staff of the then–Prince of Wales in December 1920 as an assistant private secretary and was initially enthralled. “I have got a very deep admiration for the Prince,” he wrote, “and I am convinced that the future of England is as much in his hands as in those of any individual. . . . he is the most attractive man I have ever met.” For eight years, he traveled the world with his master, visiting the United States, Canada, and Africa. But as the diaries’ editor Duff Hart-Davis puts it in his introduction, Lascelles “gradually grew disillusioned: his admiration turned to despair, and in January 1929 he resigned, convinced that Edward was so self-absorbed and lacking in any sense of duty that he would never become fit to be King.”

In 1943, the Times of London commissioned an obituary of the man who had been created Duke of Windsor on his abdication, to be kept on ice until the duke died; the obituary’s author asked Lascelles for comments on a draft of the article. In his diary, Tommy offers some striking observations about the obituary’s subject:

No article of this kind designed for publication after the Duke of Windsor’s death can ever be wholly satisfactory, for it can’t bring out what I regard as the key to his baffling character . . . namely, that for some . . . reason his normal mental development stopped dead when he reached adolescence. I don’t mean his physical development, . . . but his mental, moral, and aesthetic development, which, broadly speaking, remained that of a boy of seventeen.

[This] would account for many of his vagaries of conduct, and for his often childish outlook on life — though I hasten to add that that outlook was often bewilderingly characterised by a shrewdness, a power of penetration, which hardened men of the world might envy. It would certainly account for the fact that . . . it was quite useless to expect him to appreciate any general rules of behavior; his only yardstick in measuring the advisability or non-advisability of any particular action was, “Can I get away with it?”

Edward VIII was not, it seemed, a cultivated man. Lascelles remembered a weekend with the heir apparent to the throne, after which the Prince of Wales said, “Look at this extraordinary little book which Lady Desborough says I ought to read. Have you ever heard of it?” Lascelles’s deadpan comment: “The extraordinary little book was Jane Eyre.” He then draws an apt conclusion:

[Edward’s ignorance of literature] is by no means irrelevant to any picture of him, for a good deal of his nervous restlessness and consequent lack of balance may have been due to his complete inability to find a safety-valve in a book (even a shilling-shocker), as ordinary men do when they are overwrought or over-tired. Reading meant no more to him than music to the tone-deaf.

Like his fellow private secretary, John Colville, whose brilliant diaries of his days serving Winston Churchill, The Fringes of Power, afford an exceptional “inside” look into British governance during World War II, Tommy Lascelles was the product of what is now sometimes deplored as an “elite.” That elite no doubt had its limitations and faults. But it was also an elite trained from childhood to a sense of duty, personal and patriotic. And that was what finally broke it for Tommy Lascelles when it came to Edward VIII. Thus his description of, and comment on, the king’s attitude and behavior when the abdication drama reached its climax in December 1936 over Edward’s determination to marry the twice-divorced Wallis Warfield Simpson:

When . . . the storm broke, he went one evening to see his mother at Marlborough House; she asked him to reflect on the effect his purposed action [i.e., abdication] would have on his family, on the Throne, and on the British Empire. His only answer, I have been told on the best authority, was, “Can’t you understand that nothing matters — nothing — except her happiness and mine?” That was the motto which, for some years past, had supplanted ‘Ich Dien’ [“I Serve,” the heraldic motto of the Prince of Wales] — and that was essentially the underlying principle of his brief reign. . . .

. . . He had, in my opinion and in my experience, no comprehension of the ordinary axioms of rational, or ethical, behaviour; fundamental ideas of duty, dignity, and self-sacrifice had no meaning for him, . . . isolated [as he was] . . . in the world of his own desires.

The Duke of Windsor was a unique, and uniquely shabby, man, and in any event no two human beings are identical in character, including identical twins. Yet it would be hard to deny that there are some striking resemblances between Tommy Lascelles’s portrait of Edward VIII, as heir apparent and then king, and a certain prominent personality in American public life today: shrewdness, to be sure, but also self-absorption and the dangers such narcissism poses to notions of constitutional order and duty.

We may well hope that at least some of today’s Washington courtiers see those dangers as clearly as Tommy Lascelles did — and will help guide public policy in a way that reflects something other than the ruler’s unruly willfulness.