The royals - Kitty Kelley [50]
The Queen denounced Crawfie as a traitor and never spoke to her again. When Marion Crawford died in 1988 at the age of seventy-eight, no member of the royal family attended her funeral, wrote a condolence letter, or even sent flowers. As far as the Queen was concerned, Crawfie was dead* the day her book was published.
More than anyone else in the royal family, the Queen understood the power of the revealing detail and the humanizing anecdote. She knew the historical impact of a book like Crawfie’s, and despite its loving prose and affectionate stories, she never forgave the governess. The Queen did not like Crawfie’s rendering of her as a passive, uninvolved mother who cared little about her children’s education beyond their ability to sing and dance. The Queen felt betrayed seeing herself using the governess as a psychiatrist to talk to her difficult daughter, Margaret. “I knew that my real work as Royal Governess at the Palace was over,” wrote Crawfie, who had trained to be a child psychologist before entering royal service, “but in the new, busy life which Princess Margaret was leading, her mother thought an hour or two of quiet, unrestrained chat on general subjects might soothe her…. I had to go daily to the Palace to sit with Princess Margaret and discuss whatever subjects came up.”
Although Crawfie described the Queen as “one of the loveliest people I had ever seen,” she wrote that the Duchess of Kent was an “exceptionally beautiful woman” who, unlike the Queen, had married “the best-looking of all the Princes.”
The Queen also objected to seeing personal details in print, such as the King’s “blue-green draped bed” in his own bedroom “separate and away from the Queen.” She did not like the reference to Margaret Rose’s looking like “a plump navy-blue fish” in her bathing suit, and she was livid to read about “Uncle David” (the Duke of Windsor) being so “devoted to Lilibet.” She was miffed that Crawfie had allowed the world to eavesdrop on the transatlantic call that the King and Queen had made to their children in 1939: “We ended the conversation by holding the Queen’s corgi, Dookie, up and making him bark down the telephone by pinching his behind.”
And the Queen never forgave Crawfie for telling the stories of Lilibet’s nursery, which indicated the future Queen’s compulsive disorder as a child.
“She became almost too methodical and tidy,” Crawfie wrote. “She would hop out of bed several times a night to get her shoes quite straight, her clothes arranged so.” The image of such an obsessive youngster, “too dutiful for her own good,” was painful.
The Queen knew that The Little Princesses would make Marion Crawford the most quoted royal historian of the twentieth century, because no one before had been given such intimate access to the royal family. Afterward, any mention of the author’s name caused the Queen to turn away with displeasure. Her slang for treachery: “to do a Crawfie.”
The King and Queen ordered their lawyers to institute loyalty oaths* for all future servants. Anyone who dared to “do a Crawfie” was sued by the Palace and stopped by the courts. Because of Crawfie, the subsequent see-and-sell memoirs of the royal servants had to find their markets outside the United Kingdom. No British publisher would dare dishonor the monarchy by venturing into print with unauthorized recollections. To do so would show flagrant disrespect and, not incidentally, prejudice his prospects for a knighthood. Over the years secrets seeped out of the House of Windsor, stripping the monarchy of its mystique and deflating the fantasy. By 1994 the chimera had been so exposed that all deference was gone. Not even the threat of litigation intimidated royal servants. The fairy tale thoroughly dissolved when Prince Charles, the future King of England, went on television and admitted adultery. His valet then revealed the future King’s romps outside his marriage bed.
“He was in the bushes with his mistress and there was mud and muck everywhere,