BOOKS

Cabbages and kings

Alastair Forbes

CROWNED HEADS: A ROYAL QUEST by Veronica Maclean Hodder & Stoughton, £25, pp. 450 The publishers of this book have done their author no service in blurbing her, not even, as it happens, accurately, at the out- set as 'the daughter and granddaughter of courtiers', those `cortegianni, vil razza damnata' cursed by Rigoletto in Verdi's opera. The last courtier who could write was Fritz Ponsonby, whose diaries, like his daughter, Loelia Westminster's memoirs, Grace and Favour, do make excellent read- ing. Then 'Tommy' Lascelles was certainly something of a literary figure, my last sight of whom was as he escorted old Siegfried Sassoon to his Kensington Palace cottage, across the private road on which Princess Margaret unforgivingly likes to relate that she once nearly ordered the chauffeur of her Rolls to 'run the bugger down'. (Lady Maclean, incidentally, describes a touching meeting with the 'rather naive' Peter Townsend as they crossed on errands of mercy from Brindisi to Dubrovnik). Martin Charteris, as Provost of Eton, had a nice coup de plume, but even now, with a broken neck that inhibits the short, sharp Coburg bow introduced by Prince Albert, he remains too far on the far side of idolatry to be a useful historian of the Second Eliz- abethan reign, though perhaps when the Royal Archives are opened up, long after he and I are dead, he may prove my judg- ment to have been hasty.

Lady Maclean's grandfather, Lord Ribblesdale, is familiar to all from the wonderful portrait of him in hunting gear that belongs to the nation (thus attired and magnificently mounted, in olden Ascot days, he would precede the Royal proces- sion's arrival on the course), in which he is the very spit and image of her most lovable and sorely missed brother Hugh Fraser, whose splendid mother-in-law, Elizabeth Longford, remains the doyenne of Royal biographers.

I am in honour bound to declare my interest. The enchanting Veronica Maclean herself, a kind of fortissimo Tolstoyan Natasha plus laughter and giggles galore, has for decades been a favourite of mine, as have her four books, artistically pro- duced by Collins of dear dead English pub- lishing days that are no more, which I constantly re-read for pleasure and remi- niscence. They are certainly long overdue for reprinting, though perhaps in handier editions. All are worthy celebrations of the just affirmation of the great Monsieur Ude (Who he? Ed.) that 'Cookery in England, when well done, is superior to that of any country in the world.' By England, like so many Frenchmen who cannot be bothered to say Grande Bretagne, he clearly meant Scotland too, as the more than 80 recipes

contributed, with pertinent comments, by Lady Maclean herself to the 200 or so in her first mouth-watering anthology empha- sise. Her famous husband, Sir Fitzroy, whose first name testifies to his own bas- tard Royal Beaufort Plantagenet blood on his mother's side, contributed a brief but gallant foreword: 'When I married I weighed 10 stone. Now I weigh 15. Need I say more?'

So I could not escape a twinge of regret that she should ever have turned her back even briefly on the stoves in her homes in Argyll, Belgravia and Yugoslavia. Still, as her literary agent no doubt confirmed, the head lies particularly easy that writes of crowns and such. And so she signed up to seek interviews — that were in fact to turn out to be little more than audiences — with all the reigning Royals left in the world.

Fond of quoting such nursery saws as 'A place for everything and everything in its place', Veronica Maclean was soon put in hers rather sharply, the two monarchs with- in an hour's flying time from her London flat refusing to have anything to do with her. She clearly used the wrong channels to approach Queen Beatrix of the Nether- lands and King Baudoin of the Belgians, the latter now stripped down to the vesti- gial privileges of the dyslexic Swedish King.

That delightfully cosy man, the Sandringham-born King Olav, 'known,' lady Maclean writes, 'far and wide for hav- ing a very large heart with many soft spots in it', went and died on her just after a tete- a-tete lunch for which she had bought a pretty new hat, so she had to make do with a brief chat with his son and successor, filled out by an all too long description of the origins of Norwegian independence which has a very guidebooky ring to it. Not a word about the exploits of his very pretty show-jumping daughter, which, in that highly-sexed Jilly Cooper-worthy world, make the Princess Royal's distant past sound as prim as National Velvet.

She inexplicably omitted to visit delight- ful Denmark at all, preferring to call upon that country's extremely intelligent monarch in London, but failing to draw her out very interestingly. I am afraid Queen `Daisy', should she come to read Lady Maclean's last paragraph about Maastricht, about which the author seems to share Tebbitian illusions, will be extremely irri- tated. The tiny majority against ratification first time round certainly did not come from the Amalienborg Palace, or indeed from any part of the business, trades-union or cultural Danish community, but rather from the pre-Grunge hippy colony of Christianshavn.

Why she should suppose there is any- thing remotely Royal about such Serene Highnesses (Europe pullulates with holders of that style and title) as poor Prince Rainier of Monaco I cannot imagine, unless she has replaced her Almanach de Gotha with British tabloid nomenclature, which seems a pity. As for the estimable `Johnny' Luxembourg, with his splendid World War II record in the Irish Guards, why is his principality spelt throughout in the German way? And what can one do but weep at her misspelling of the word Habs- burg as Hapsburg throughout? This ancient dynasty springs from Swiss territory, a castle first known as Habicht's Burg, i.e. Hawk's Castle, and subsequently shortened. Pronunciation is never a reliable guide to spelling. Even such a dysgraphic as the present Duchess of Beaufort would never spell her recent brave, if foolhardy, exploit for charity as apseiling.

She is good on little King Hussein, but fancy letting her proof-readers misspell the name of our much missed friend the late poet-diplomat Sir Charles Johnston, who had so much helped her to understand him and his country long ago. She gets better as she travels East of Suez, passing on knowledge acquired I know not how most interestingly, as well as refreshing memory, as she especially did mine over Malaysia, bringing that remarkable man Gerald Tem- pler back to life for me, though she is reti- cent about some of the many sultans' many sins. Her coup in being received by the Japanese Emperor and his wife was no less than one would expect from someone with strong diplomatic and Jardine-Matheson links with the Orient, whose mysteries, however, she clearly fails to pierce. Her healthy dislike of missionaries comes to the fore in Tonga, where her audience with the huge King (she is put off by his 'shades', by which she means not his ancestors but his dark glasses) was the shortest of all, but I am grateful to have learned from her that the name of the father of the three delight- ful Tongan boys who called me 'Uncle Ali', Tevita, is simply a Tongan corruption of the Welsh David.

The other David, Edward, Prince of Wales, was the first Royal she really remembers, when he failed to give her a ride in the plane which landed at her family home of Beauly Castle. Of this visit I was most surprised to read, not that he had elected to sit next to pretty Mary Lindley, now Keswick, ignoring strict precedence, but that Lady Lovat had spoken of place- ment (which means 'investment') rather than place a table, which is what she meant.

It is obviously with the British Royals that she is most at home, 'the monarch I know and love best' being not unnaturally the commoner-born Scottish lady from Glamis who was so briefly the last Emper- ess. On the latter's first trip outside the U.K. with her family after World War II to South Africa there is not a black or Coloured face to be seen in the pictures of the crowds that greeted them. She has seen far more changes than anyone else of whom she by Royal habit asks that ques- tion. The author and her husband stay reg- ularly with her at Royal Lodge and you can be sure that Sir Fitzroy would not as her neighbour at table choose the same open- ing conversational gambit as that the other day of Lord Bonham Carter, who brightly observed, 'I've just been writing your obitu- ary, Ma'am'. She was, for once, not amused. It is true that she may have recalled the day at Balmoral long ago when the already gauche young Bonham Carter narrowly avoided regicide but instead pep- pered the king's detective's hat.

`Our Royal Lodge weekends are invari- ably happy ones', writes Lady Maclean. There is walking and talking (occasionally shouting), swimming and sleeping, eating and feasting and singing.' They enjoy the Royal services in the little Royal Chapel in Windsor Park. Cf Noel Coward's diary, where, on a single page after tea with Princess Marina one day, and lunch at the Savoy Grill on another with the present reviewer, gratifyingly described as 'lovely company and makes me laugh a great deal', he records his weekend stay with the Queen Mother: 'And very gay and charm- ing it was. I even went to church with her, because I thought she'd like me to. The service was mercifully brief.'

Of Prince Philip, the author's informa- tion is sketchy and often wrong. There was, in fact, never any real constitutional diffi- culty about his nationality. As a direct descendant of the Electress Sophia he had no need of naturalisation, but the Law Officers, the Lord Chancellor's department and the Palace are woefully slow on the uptake. She is equally at sea about his par- ents. His beautiful mother was virtually stone-deaf, but could lip-read in several languages, which made her a popular chap- erone for her daughters and nieces when they went to the silent movies, for obvious and often hilarious reasons. Later she was to suffer an almost textbook case of schizophrenia on the eve of her daughters' debuts, but they all succeeded in marrying extremely well, all the same. Her daugh- ters, as loyal descendants of King Christian IX, called their paternal grand- parents Apapa and Amama, but Princess Alice, when she came to live out the last years of her life at Buckingham Palace, insisted on Prince Charles and his sister calling her Yaya, which is demotic Greek for Granny.

'I originally intended to leave Prince Charles' troubled marriage out of these pages', writes Lady Maclean, 'but it has become a subject of national debate.' She can say that again, what with Screwtapes following Wanktapes or vice versa ad infinitum. After variously describing the Prince as a 'leprechaun' and a 'nervous racehorse' she insists that on top of all his certain other qualities he has particularly strong 'empathy'. But had this ever been true, his poor pretty young wife might have been saved what the author rightly calls `the disillusionment, bewilderment and loneliness, which must have been very hard to bear for someone so young', though she adds that she herself 'doesn't believe unhappiness is wasted time'. It seems a pity, though, that she didn't ask either the prince or his grandmother just how much study they had made of bulimia, or of the Minnesota Method of treating the sufferer, or even how often, if at all, they had, through Dr Lipsedge, acquired some insight into this serious complication of Depressive illness. The Queen Mother her- self once wrote to Edith Sitwell about being 'banged about by grief and sadness', but she doesn't seem to have understood the despair of her grandson's young wife.

Well, her oldest daughter, on whom, as Robert Graves once remarked, 'those holy oils have really taken', will soldier on until death do her part from the throne. One needs a good Head of State. It would be nice to think we could one day get one as good as Richard von Weiszacker has been for Germany.

As for Lady Maclean, who so disarmingly admits to having set off on her quest 'not very well equipped for the task', she cer- tainly deserves an Alpha for Effort. Nobody can know better than she how sometimes a too ambitious recipe can result in a soufflé that simply fails to rise. The delightful dedicate of her last book read: 'For Fitz, who only asks for more when it is good.' Even if this time there may be few demands for seconds, I certain- ly hope she is all the same laughing her way to the bank.

'I know I've seen this but damned if I can remember what it's about.'