Now, suddenly, after Pearl Harbour, he was in Washington, writing memos and proposals for the conduct of the Allies. He was being marked out by the most senior generals as one of the most capable men in the American army. His ascent was incredible. In 1936 he was a Lieutenant Colonel, having been a Major since 1924. Six years later, in 1942, he became Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in North Africa. Two years after that, he became a five-star general. And after the war, of course, he became the President. So much for Eisenhower’s retirement.

This story ought to make us pause. Because the self-help industry around life-changes generally divides into two poles. On the one hand, there’s the easy optimism of American-style self-help and its relentless belief that anything is possible — change yourself, whenever, however. On the other, there are the gloomy determinists, who glower that we shouldn’t sell false hope to easy targets. A few weeks ago, Janan Ganesh gave voice to the latter view, attacking self-optimism as a false dream that major life decisions can be corrected. Instead, Ganesh says, the truth is more like an Ian McEwan novel: make a bad marriage or pick the wrong career, and you are unlikely to recover. “Life is path-dependent: each mistake narrows the next round of choices. A big one, or just an early one, can foreclose all hope of the life you wanted.” But this is far too binary. What Eisenhower’s story shows is that the truth is often messier and more complicated than anything you can fit into a pithy line. This is not a subject about which we can make happy generalisations, as I show in my new book Second Act.

Look around and you will see late bloomers everywhere in modern culture. David Nicholls, promoting his new novel, recently told The Times that his favourite writer is Penelope Fitzgerald, who published her first literary novel aged 62. The book that many consider to be her masterpiece, The Blue Flower, was published when she was 80. The American footballer Jalyx Hunt recently described himself as a late bloomer when talking about his acquisition by the Philadelphia Eagles after a steady rise through the ranks. Jerry Seinfeld is making his directorial debut aged 70. At this year’s Brit awards the singer Raye became the surprise star, a late-blooming sensation. And whatever you think of Joe Biden’s age, he is a symbol of a workforce that is more and more active as it gets older. Nearly one in five Americans over the age of 65 are in work — nearly double what it was 35 years ago.

This list is not supposed to make you feel like anything is possible. The self-helpists are too credulous. What these later achievements prove instead is that you do not simply wake up one day and discover that you are Toni Morrison. Late blooming is a long, hard slog. But it’s also true that we simply don’t know how many people could change things for themselves — given the opportunity, put in the right circumstances. Instead of polarising between self-help platitudes and cynical epigrams, we need a new mindset about talent, potential, and flourishing in the second half of our lives. And the pervasive spirit of this mindset must be the word “perhaps”. There is no law of late blooming. I am not presenting the biographical examples as incontrovertible, pure, or morally exceptional. What I can argue is that in all fields — including mathematics, where late blooming seems unfeasible — we underrate the potential of hidden talent. And the success stories are remarkably contingent on the chaos of the life lived. Past is prologue, not prediction.

As John Stuart Mill said, the main lesson of history is “the extraordinary susceptibility of human nature to external influences”. And it wasn’t only Eisenhower who began his second act in the midst of war. Looking at a sample of men born during the Great Depression who served throughout the Second World War and the Korean War, the sociologist Glen Elder found that men from disadvantaged backgrounds became more socially competent and had improved psychological health after military service. They also improved their occupation outcomes as a result of skills gained in the army. As well as going to college on the G.I. Bill, many army veterans completed high school and undertook craft or vocational training. The army was a bridge from one sort of life to another, often coming at a time when their prospects seemed settled. They went from being school leavers with poor prospects to veterans with the chance of a decent life. It had seemed too late to change, but it wasn’t.

For men already established in jobs and families, the military was more likely to be disruptive. But for those who were on the route to a disappointing life, military service improved their trajectory. There were many negative impacts of army service: mobilised men were more likely to divorce, particularly those who saw battle action and were in their 30s when the war started. But this goes to show the same thing — changing your life path is possible, whatever your age or current experiences. The more you change your circumstances, the more you can change yourself. In the United States, delinquent men who were given overseas service, for example, were much more likely to use training opportunities provided by the 1944 G.I. Bill. As one pair of sociologists said: “Overseas duty, which embodies radical change, provides a unique stepping stone to eventual turn-around among those stigmatized with a criminal conviction.” It changed the way people thought of them and changed the way they thought about themselves.

For a lot of people, mid-life is the time when a second act becomes possible or desirable. We find ourselves lost on the path in the middle of a dark wood, as Dante said, or in Robert Frost’s terms, life itself becomes too much like a pathless wood. In these circumstances, anyone would like to get away from earth awhile. The theory of the “happiness curve” will tell you this period of dissatisfaction is normal, biological, nothing to do with your life or your work or your lost dreams, just mere hormones. Apes have the same dips. Don’t try to get away, this theory says. Stick it out. The feeling will pass.

But not only is the data around that claim looking less and less certain, with new studies finding that the happiness curve might not exist at all, it also places everyone too neatly onto an average line. You are the person you are; you are not a statistical event. This is where self-help can be helpful. Aspiration and ambition are how we change the world. Focusing on the outlier success stories isn’t a way of selling a hollow dream to unsuspecting dupes. It’s part of a culture of aspiration of which we have become sceptical through overexposure. But while the transformation we’re too often promised is rare, change is very possible — as long as we get past culture war divides and be open to the immense range of ways an individual life can flourish.

But self-help lets us down when it comes to how we make a change in our lives. There are no simple solutions to help you leapfrog yourself into a new life. Instead, we can take some advice from a great late bloomer, Audrey Sutherland.

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Sutherland was a Hawaiian kayaker. She started exploring Hawaiian coastlines in her forties, and purchased an inflatable kayak, which was mocked by more experienced (and male) explorers. But she persisted and became competent and well-regarded. Then, when Sutherland turned 60, she looked herself in the mirror and said: “Getting older, aren’t you lady? Better do the physical things now. You can work at a desk later.” She quit her job and went on her first solo exploration in Artic waters.

This was a remarkable change. Capsizing meant risk of death. Camping involved bear encounters, alone in the woods. The coastline was ragged from logging. Cabins often required repair before she could sleep in them. But for the next 20 years, into her eighties, she undertook solo kayak explorations of the Alaskan and British Columbian coast.

Sutherland used to give talks at kayaking associations. At the end, she would tell the audience to close their eyes and think about the one big thing they wanted to do with their lives if they were given $5 million dollars tomorrow. Now, she would say, open your eyes and ask yourself: “What’s stopping me?”

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At one event, a man stood up and told her exactly what was stopping him. A job. A mortgage. Children. Elderly parents. A wife to support. This hardly elicited much sympathy from Sutherland, who had been a single, working, mother to four children, living on a moderate income. She replied: “Then you need to ask yourself: What part of my goal can I achieve now? What can I do now to achieve my goal later?”

That was how she did it. One step at a time. Read maps. Acquire cheap gear. Practice capsizing. Do preparatory treks in local terrain. Anything that gets you closer.

The stockbroker Chris Gardner said the same thing. He had gone from being a young black man with no degree, no connections, and no qualifications — with no access, that is, to the white, patrician finance world of the Eighties — to running his own firm. He was homeless for a short period and only got his break aged 27. For anyone who wants to be a late bloomer, he offered this most important piece of advice: “While you’re brushing your teeth, ask yourself: If tomorrow morning you could be doing anything in the world, what would it be? Second, what did you do today to make that tomorrow possible?”

Christopher Hitchens, that unthinking man’s iconoclast, once called her “an averagely-volatile woman from a disadvantaged family”. He was almost being nice, but like so many others, he only really used her as an excuse to tell hideous anecdotes. Craig Brown published a whole book that pasted together the worst stories that people recorded about her in their diaries. It was a sure and sorry way to ensure your letters were published after you were gone: put in an anecdote about Princess Margaret being difficult or looking, as Nancy Mitford had it, “excessively common”.

Remember, these are not tabloid reports. This isn’t the rough and tumble of a free press. We are quoting public intellectuals. Despite Margaret being awful, as they saw it — trashy and appalling, rude and condescending, and, frankly, low brow — the elites found her irresistible. Few of us are too classy for gossip, too clever to mock an appearance instead of imagining what lies beneath it. Margaret’s punishment for projecting upper-class indifference, privileged selfishness, is to be seen as more of a soap-opera character than a woman. Perhaps that says more about us than her.

Her husband, horrible bully that he was, once set her dress on fire. “Good thing too, I hate that material,” he said. To which Margaret replied: “Material is a word we do not use. We call it stuff.” This sort of thing gets held up as inexhaustible snobbishness. Really, it’s a stiff upper lip, splendid resilience in the face of abuse. And anyway, can’t we live with a little high handedness in our princesses? Consider her nephew’s current reputation and Margaret’s blue-blooded insistence on calling scrambled eggs buttered eggs starts to look rather appealing. It’s a small price to pay for a stable and enduring monarchy: that a king’s daughter’s might occasionally be too royal.

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But living off the public purse makes you fair game for voyeuristic bitching: there is an assumed public ownership of Royal lives. The story of Margaret and the Queen, along with the Queen Mother, getting the giggles when T. S. Eliot read The Waste Land at Buckingham Palace is often reference to show what a bunch of philistines the Royal Family is — as if Modernist poetry has anything to do with constitutional monarchy. (And as if most of the rest of us wouldn’t have done the same. Eliot was a terrible reader.) When people enjoy that story, I am reminded of the painter Francis Bacon, who once booed Margaret off stage at a party because her singing wasn’t very good; the poor woman ran out in tears. Somehow when you are born into the Royal cage, many intelligent people think it is acceptable, maybe even clever, to treat you like you’re an animal.

People like Christopher Hitchens did this because they had a bigger target: the institution of monarchy. He could happily paint the Windsors as emotionless bastards without caring very much about their so-called victims. But the old saw about Margaret being the lamb sacrificed for the good of The Firm needs investigating. It fits the narrative of heartless Hanovarians to say that the Princess wasn’t allowed to marry Peter Townsend out of cruelty or myopic traditionalism or whatever. It’s a simplification, though, to see it as a case of the establishment crushing young love for the sake of expediency.

Sarah Bradford reports a friend saying “Princess Margaret was very religious, much more than you would think”. Yes, her desire to marry a divorcé was a moral and constitutional dilemma: the Queen was the head of a church that didn’t allow such things. But in the story about the institutional thwarting the individual, Margaret and her feelings have been ignored. As Bradford says: “Asked whether, as the general public perceived it, she had been sacrificed on the altar of the monarchy, the queen’s private secretary replied simply, ‘She sacrificed herself’.”

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Margaret defies the stereotype, then, of a selfish, useless celebrity. Jonathan Freedland once said of her: “Five decades before Paris Hilton, there was the current Queen’s sister, Princess Margaret — an object of glamour and gossip, permanently on vacation, internationally famous yet achieving nothing at all.” (If only she had written book reviews for the New York Review of Books!) If you are more interested in bourgeois tattle-rags than humdrum duties, it’s easy to share his view that she did nothing at all. But in reality, Margaret was a great charity worker. She was a patron of the London Lighthouse, an AIDs charity more famous for its association with Princess Diana, and she used to visit patients there and make them laugh. (She did her work without any media attention and before Princess Diana was involved.)

Margaret’s friend Lady Glenconner had a son with AIDs at the height of the epidemic; Margaret turned up and gave the boy a big hug as if nothing had changed. But while Diana was hugely — rightly — praised for shaking AIDs patients’ hands, Margaret remained in the shadows. Of course, Margaret didn’t want attention for her good works, but that doesn’t mean we should dismiss them.

In the stories told about Margaret, style so often comes before substance. It’s easy to use anecdotes to make someone look bad, but there are plenty of stories that make Margaret seem not just nice but remarkably normal — the opposite of the character drawn by gossipy republicans. Gore Vidal reported how he and she once saved a number of bees from drawing in a swimming pool at Windsor. “Go forth and make honey,” the charming and humorous Princess said, in what Vidal called “a powerful Hanoverian voice”. When she visited Lady Glenconner, she would do her friend’s hair and lay fires in the grates. On these visits, she showered out of a bucket, ate tinned food, and went scrambling up mountains. Away from people who were desperate to say something shocking and scathing about her, Margaret appears to have been quite ordinary. Likeable, even.

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One of the few people who seems to really understand Margaret is the biographer Selina Hastings, who said that the Princess,

“looked at the world outside between the bars of her extremely comfortable cage. She was inquisitive and she was courageous, and sometimes she ventured halfway out. But the moment it looked as though there may be difficulties, back she flew into her cage, slamming the door behind her.”

Margaret was forced into public life, and when she was expected to accept people’s offensive intrusions into her life, she sometimes refused. She wasn’t perfect; but she was goaded and cornered. As Ferdinand Mount said, “being ghastly is so much expected of her that it becomes her party piece”.

Craig Brown called her life “Cinderella in reverse”, in a classic example of our inability to see Margaret as anything but a character out of a story. “Nothing is as thrilling as they said it would be; no one is as amusing, as clever, as attractive or as interesting,” he wrote. He could have been talking about all the journalists, biographers, diarists, and so on, who used her to fill their pages.

Margaret, unlike Cinderella, was never destined to be a queen; she was first and foremost a sister. There was a constant, silent presence in her public life — a gold standard of decorum — against which she was judged. Elizabeth and Margaret are, like Kate and Meghan, presented as stereotyped female opposites: the good wife and the wayward celebrity, the modest Queen and the flagrant Princess. Such reductions make for a lonely life.

For Margaret, this perpetual isolation began at her sister’s coronation. According to Sarah Bradford, Margaret had “very mixed feelings because I adored my father and he was dead and yet I felt I had to be pleased for Lillibet being crowned Queen though I knew that in a way I’d lost her.” She was only 23 when that happened.

He died December 14, 1861, leaving Victoria to her famously prolonged and expressive grief. Victorian medicine gave him a sorry end: on the day before he died, he was doped with brandy every half hour. This was the shattering conclusion to one of the great nineteenth century romances. Two cousins who had met young and married passionately were tragically torn apart. But as Albert’s comment about setting no store by life suggests, the marriage was not always the fairytale it was supposed to be.

Albert had been ill for years: rheumatic, depressed, full of stomach cramps, shivering in between bouts of diarrhoea. But he had not always been a sickly royal. In his short time as Victoria’s consort, Albert transformed the monarchy and Britain. Those 42 years had been enough for him to achieve in a lifetime what most people couldn’t dream of in a dozen. He is a model of hard work, someone who ought to be an object of fascination to Progress Studies for his ability to see the big picture and the details, and to get things done.

The wonders of his name form a dizzying list. Without Albert, we would never have had the V&A, the Natural History Museum, the Royal Albert Hall, Imperial College. That swath of South Kensington was based on his vision and paid for by money raised by the Great Exhibition, which he enabled and promoted. His proposals for affordable, sanitary housing for the poor were presented there.

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Albert was a reformer. He built a close relationship with Robert Peel, the prime minister who revoked the Corn Laws, thus making bread affordable for labourers. When he was appointed Chancellor of Cambridge, the syllabus was limited to Maths and the Classics; only 40 students each year took honours degrees. He introduced the chance to study Moral Sciences and the Natural Sciences; he also proposed using the colleges’ income from rents to fund 700 places for poor students. In 1843, Albert drove through the streets of Birmingham, side-by-side with the radical mayor, and was cheered by republican Chartists: he put the monarchy in touch with the people.

He also rudely awakened it to a new century of industrialisation, capitalism and technology. When he married Victoria, the royal household was still roasting 12 large joints of meat a day, and hundreds of candles were replaced overnight, irrespective of use. The monarchy was a sleepy old institution on the brink of republicanism. Albert was sent to save it.

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Albert tamed and tightened the royal household: he made it solvent and relevant. But he also tamed and tightened Victoria. The man behind the monuments is every bit as impressive as he is imagined to be, but like so many great Victorian men he combined public marvels with a darker domestic side. Victoria was broken into his expectations of a tradwife. This wasn’t just standard Victorian patriarchal dominance. As A.N.Wilson wrote in his absorbing biography of Albert — the first one since the 19th century — says: “Albert had entered wholeheartedly into the idea that he was being groomed and prepared to become Britain’s Enlightened Despot. Only the Little Woman on the throne was thwarting his ambition.” As well as being a beacon of progress and hard work, Albert’s life is a cautionary tale about how easily the pursuit of good deeds in a naughty world can become self-defeating and cruel.

When he was first married, Albert had complained: “The difficulty in filling my place with the proper dignity is that I am only the husband, and not the master in the house.” As with all his other achievements, he worked hard to establish things the way he thought they ought to be. After the first pregnancy started Albert moved his desk next to Victoria’s; when the child was born, she gave him the keys to Cabinet boxes. From here on, Albert expanded and maintained huge informal power, keeping, as Jane Ridley said, “a vigilant watch over all departments of government.”

He worked like a Catherine wheel. As Victoria had seven children in ten years — which for her involved depression and incapacitation — he became her de facto private secretary. Day and night, Albert drafted and copied letters. When Victoria wrote to her ministers, Albert influenced her, dictated to her, or wrote the letter himself. (Peel thought Albert’s endless letters were part of what made being Prime Minister unendurable.) He worked himself into an early grave trying to secure the power he thought should be his. In all this work, Alfred was, as Stanley Weintraub said, the uncrowned king.

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Albert manipulated Victoria, making her account for her moods and tempers. If she got angry, he would be silent, later sending her belittling notes admonishing her lack of self-control. These letters sometimes began, “Dear Child”. To help “improve” herself, Victoria kept a notebook of her shortcomings, writing down any instances when she had irritated or upset Albert, noting her failures to hold her tongue. If Albert was satisfied, he would give her a good certificate of improvement. He manipulated Victoria during a post-natal depression, lying about her childhood governess to have the woman removed from the household. This left Albert as the sole influence.

The effect of his disturbing treatment of Victoria is nowhere more evident than in the letters she wrote to their daughter Vicky after Albert died. So controlled had Queen Victoria been that for years afterwards she could barely do or think anything unless she felt her daughter’s “Dear Papa” — her Angel — would have approved. It’s not unreasonable to speculate that Victoria would have been treated far better by her husband if she hadn’t been unfortunate enough to be Queen.

The bullying was partly the result of their very different tempers. Before Albert, Victoria was a London girl who liked court life, with all its drinking, dancing, socialising and late nights. Before Victoria, Albert had been known to stay up until a reasonable hour playing sober games of dominoes. Albert took Victoria away from court life — quite literally — by establishing private royal residences on the Isle of Wight and in Scotland, living as if by Cowper’s dictum that “God made the country, and man made the town”. She followed because she was infatuated; he showed fewer signs of being in love with her.

His concern was to maintain bourgeois values, which were politically important. Victoria had to distance herself from her “wicked uncles”, the generation of Georgian and Regency rolling stones who had diminished the monarchy’s reputation; obese, dissolute, licentious and lecherous sybarites, her immediate predecessors William IV and George IV were the model of everything Victoria and Albert weren’t going to be. (Albert also had no-good relatives of his own to escape: his parents had both ended up in the middle of all sorts of scandals and had eventually divorced. Albert’s father then chose his own niece for his second wife.)

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We are used to a big royal family with a clear line of succession. It wasn’t like that before Victoria. Victoria’s second child, born in 1841, was the first Prince of Wales since 1762, when George III’s eldest son had been born. George III’s sons fathered plenty of children, but almost none of them was legitimate. Other than Victoria, the only heir was Princess Charlotte, who died in childbirth, leaving Victoria as the future monarch. If Victoria had died, the throne would have gone to Ernst, Duke of Cumberland, later King of Hannover, a notorious Right-winger rumoured to have murdered his valet and fathered a child with his sister.

With Victoria and Albert’s family, therefore, the monarchy was stabilising. As the world grew increasingly modern, they were a bulwark of traditional values. It wasn’t just the old-world feel of the gold coaches and mock-medieval robes that gave The Firm its publicity niche. Being a good old-fashioned family was (and is) essential to future success. The famous Winterhalter portrait of Albert and Victoria surrounded by their adorable children linked them with a middle class ideal of family. Their nine offspring were a sign that the Royal Family was respectable again, not Regency.

At Christmas, this message was broadcast far and wide. A popular etching of Albert, Victoria and their children admiring their newly decorated tree in 1848 makes the Winterhalter portrait look subtle. Albert is credited for starting the craze for Christmas trees in this country — the Victorian equivalent of Kate Middleton’s clothes selling out within hours of her wearing them.

William and Kate have just released their latest Christmas family portrait. It is as respectable and aspirational as a Boden catalogue and has more than a touch of Winterhalter about it. Taken on their “private vacation”, it owes a significant debt to Albert’s bourgeoise model. The Royal Family is still living in his shadow. And some of them, of course, are still struggling with the fact that not everyone can live up to his ideals.

And that’s why people worry about Prince Charles. Our future king threatens to be a politically active monarch. “I simply can’t see what I see and do nothing about it. I could not live with myself,” he told his biographer, Jonathan Dimbleby. The Black Spider Memos were the most worrying of his interventions to date; they revealed him successfully pestering ministers for changes in policy and spending. It is impossible to imagine the Queen sending 27 notes to ministers in just over a year asking for, among other things, specific items of defence expenditure. Perhaps Dimbleby is right to say, “a quiet constitutional revolution is afoot.”

And maybe that’s no bad thing. The last monarch to have a major influence over modern politics staged a few vital interventions. As Jane Ridley, author of a new biography of George V, told me: “George’s role was not to change things politically, but to react to events and crises, which he did with aplomb. He enabled the appointment of prime ministers at times when, through war or through political realignment, the party system was not functioning to produce agreed candidates.”

The political system has matured and stabilised since then. But it’s certainly showing its age now. It’s not unreasonable to imagine that, in the coming years, it will become so dysfunctional that a monarch must stick his nose in. And if he is obliged to be a more political monarch than his mother — long may she live — Charles ought to read Ridley’s account of his great-grandfather’s life, which provides a blueprint for how a monarch might effectively and acceptably involve himself in politics.

But it could also help Charles learn from his great-grandfather’s mistakes. For one thing, he needs to keep his voice down. George was notorious for blurting out his country-squire opinions. (“Of course you said it, George,” his wife, Queen Mary, admonishes him at one point, “we all heard you.”) Neutrality did not come naturally. He was so obviously a Tory. Just after he became king, when the Liberal Party was in power, he told the Permanent Secretary to the Treasury, “I don’t know how you can go on serving that damned fellow Lloyd George.” These ministers weren’t exactly thrilled to be working with a rude, reactionary king who they thought was “a dunderhead”. Especially because the nation was in the middle of a constitutional crisis.

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The House of Lords had voted down a budget for the first time in centuries, and the Liberal government was threatening to neuter their lordships with the Parliament Bill, which would abolish the Lords’ veto of legislation. The Liberals prevailed — by manipulating the naïve new king. The PM, Asquith, bounced George V into a promise to create hundreds of new peers to vote through the Parliament Bill, if it didn’t get through the first time, by threatening a “King and Peers vs The People election”. George’s private secretary, Knollys, advised the king to make the promise — having not told him that if the Liberals resigned, the Tories would take over, avoiding the threatened election. (Knollys was rightly sacked for this low-grade duplicity.)

When the bill went to the Lords, it looked like Tory peers would defeat it. George couldn’t let that happen. If the Tory peers voted the Bill down, he would have to make good on his promise. And a supposedly neutral constitutional monarch would be in terrible trouble if he created hundreds of peers to favour one party over another. Talk about interfering.

His other private secretary, Lord Stamfordham, sprang to action. Ridley has been much praised for rescuing George from his reputation as a dullard. She ought to be celebrated, too, as a political historian: she has discovered that Stamfordham asked the Archbishop of Canterbury to get the bishops in the Lords to vote for the bill. A former Viceroy of India was summoned from Scotland to do the same. Lord St Aldwyn was “encouraged” to vote the right way, while Lord Rosebery was outright asked to do so. He did — and took 20 others into the lobby with him. The bill passed by 17 votes. There we have it: the palace’s interventions were decisive in a parliamentary vote.

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This is, supposedly, unthinkable. So strict is the non-interference principle, the monarch isn’t even allowed to go into the House of Commons, let alone have their flunkies tip the balance in a legislative vote. Imagine the uproar if it was revealed that Charles had persuaded enough of his aristocratic friends to squeeze a bill through Parliament. But George was dragged into politics by Asquith, and if the palace hadn’t interfered in the vote, he’d have ended up doing something even worse: making a load of new lords. Charles’s second lesson, then, is to keep out of things unless strictly necessary.

This was sharp work, especially from Stamfordham, one of the many supporting characters expertly handled by Ridley, who makes the page fizz, bristle, and shuffle with figures like the fantastically waspish Lady Geraldine Somerset, the heart-breaking Prince John, and the blinking but quietly effective Royal Librarian, Owen Morshead (you can practically hear him cough politely). Stamfordham is the best of them though: the king’s loyal retainer, darting around London, corralling politicians and producing clear, effective memos that kept the king better informed than his ministers. Like Jeeves, he always appears at the right moment with a solution to George’s woes.

Stamfordham’s advice kept George on the right side of the constitution. During the Irish Home Rule crisis, George drafted a crude letter threatening to veto a bill unless it was put to the electorate — something no monarch has done since 1708. The accepted wisdom is that the royal veto no longer exists. But Vernon Bogdanor, the constitutional expert, has said that the use of the veto in similar situations remains an open question. Imagine Parliament sent Charles III a bill to abolish civil liberties. We might well prefer him to copy his great-grandfather’s threatened intervention than his mother’s scrupulous impartiality.

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It was the very real threat of civil war in Ireland — a threat the complacent Asquith met with endless rounds of champagne and bridge — that drove George to meddle. Sounding a lot like Charles in conversation with Dimbleby, he wrote to Asquith in 1914, “I cannot help feeling that the government is drifting and taking me with it.” And without George, Ulster might have been bloodier: he organised a non-partisan conference, for instance, and told Bonar Law, the Tory leader, to restrain his practically seditious rhetoric — which is more than we expect of the Queen, but less than we might get from Charles.

Although he liked to flex his fading prerogative — like when he outrageously tried to refuse Lloyd George an election in 1918 — George turned his role into an enabling one. When he was asked to open the new Parliament in Belfast, he insisted on giving a speech in favour of peace. The speech opened the way for talks, proposed by that quiet hero Lord Stamfordham, leading to the Anglo-Irish treaty. The palace were arbitrators, not partisans.

It took the same role when Bonar Law resigned as prime minister in 1923, he was too ill to nominate a successor. Commotion ensued. The choice was between the unknown Stanley Baldwin and the experienced Lord Curzon. Curzon was the obvious choice to almost everyone, especially himself. But he was a peer. And it was increasingly obvious that having a lord for PM was unacceptable in the new age of democracy. The Conservative party chairman was inundated with letters for Baldwin, but it took a royal intervention to sort out the kerfuffle. George, in consultation with the party’s biggest actors — including Balfour and Salisbury — picked Stanley.

Nowadays, the Queen waits for the party to appoint a leader, taking a purely ceremonial role (imagine if she’d weighed in on the choice between Boris and Hunt). But the systems we use for selecting leaders will be challenged on day. Charles might have to do what George did and make a neutral intervention to keep the system running. We might be grateful.

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But Charles will have to learn to moderate himself. Ridley’s portrait is a of a deeply Tory, reactionary man, who learned from experience to rise above politics and intervene without prejudice. The same king who bellowed at a footman who dropped a tray, “That’s right, break up the bloody palace!”, sharply admonished a coal rich aristocrat who was bad mouthing the unions to “try living on their wages before judging the strikes.” When the government wanted to stop banks paying Russian money to unions during the General Strike, George intervened, furious at this attempt to “touch the pockets” of strikers. He had come a long way since the 1911 railway strike, when he wrote to Asquith proposing legislation to stop strikes spreading. At that point, he and Mary were worried about “encouraging socialism… and pandering to the Labour party”. Like our Queen, he moved with the times.

Unlike previous biographers, Ridley takes no superior pleasure in painting George as a philistine. She combines a historian’s rigour with even-handed admiration for George’s gruff and prickly character. He wasn’t cultured or metropolitan, but he well understood the way the country was changing and how politics needed to follow, despite the fact that he didn’t appreciate Cezanne.

It’s not uncommon for people to mock Charles, either. He’s no philistine, but he is a crank. There may be more acceptance of his views, but like George he seems to belong to another world. While the Queen is timeless, Charles is old-fashioned. Where she is restrained, he is amateurishly enthusiastic, passionately gathering causes. He isn’t known for his temper (George was almost constantly in a foul mood), but he has the air of being high maintenance. Let’s hope he finds himself a courtier as good Lord Stamfordham.

What might be more important, though, is Camilla. George’s Queen, the redoubtable Mary, has, until now, been undervalued as an effective consort; but Ridley shows her at George’s side, an essential part of the process. “George always used to tell me everything first”, Mary said as a dowager. If Charles has to be a politically active monarch, his success may well rely on his famously enduring bond with Camilla.

Jennings was, if not the poet of her age, certainly one of them. Her 1979 Selected Poems sold out in two weeks and went on to sell 50,000 copies. Her Collected Poems sold 35,000 copies. The 40 books she wrote and edited (including anthologies) sold about a quarter of a million copies. Schmidt wrote to Jennings, also in 1989, that she was “unrivalled”. This wasn’t strictly true — Wendy Cope and was also selling in great numbers in the late Eighties, and Larkin’s Collected Poems was published — but Schmidt was broadly right: few poets sell so well. Perhaps her work holds answers, then, to the question of why Brits have lost confidence in our poetry.

And yes, there has been a decline. Although 2019 data showed a surge in poetry sales, the bestsellers were Rupi Kaur, Leonard Cohen, John Cooper Clarke, Seamus Heaney, Carol Ann Duffy and Homer. We can count there one singer songwriter, one poet laureate, one performance poet, two dead poets, and an Insta poet. Traditional literary poetry is not well represented. Lyricists have adopted their cultural role. Bob Dylan won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2016. Two years later, Faber published selected Kate Bush lyrics. Next month, Paul McCartney’s complete lyrics will go on sale, in two volumes.

And while there is lots of poetry these days — festivals, competitions, prizes, resident poets, commissions from public bodies, Poems on the Underground, and so on — there are few readers relative to other serious writing. Poetry’s audience is broadly an audience of people on creative writing courses — or who belong in some way part to the poetry scene. The common reader is looking elsewhere.

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As Ruth Padel said, the fault begins with Modernism, which took poetry into “elitist” and “obscure” territory. And it is this force that Jennings was reacting against. She was a traditional poet; like Kingsley Amis, who gave her her start by publishing her in an anthology, she was part of The Movement, a literary grouping that felt that while poetry matters deeply, it is not what makes the world go round. They were trying to avoid being too literary, too pretentious, too poetic. They wanted to stay close to their audience, unlike Modernism, which erected a giant “No Through Way” sign, in Betjeman’s words. They disliked what Amis would later call — in a dismissive remark about his son Martin’s work — “buggering about with the reader.”

When obscurity was in vogue, Jennings’ poetry was about “big” topics — so much so that it often seems, deceptively, like anyone could say what she does. That’s a talent many Modernists simply didn’t want to have. No wonder readers left. Jennings had a large audience because she was not trying to write poetry that excluded. In accordance with her Catholic faith, she saw poetry as communion and communication. This is a world away from the recent Nobel Laureate Louise Glück, who once said she had no interest in widening her audience.

Perhaps this is defeatism. Nowadays, poetry has a lot to compete with. We have many other things to entertain us of an evening: television, movies, the internet. As Nicholson Baker wrote in his novel The Anthologist:

At some point you have to set aside snobbery and what you think is culture and recognise that any random episode of Friends is probably better, more uplifting for the human spirit, than ninety-nine percent of the poetry or drama or fiction or history ever published.

Unlike much internet culture, most modern poetry does not leave you — as Elizabeth Jennings would say — “excited, charged and changed”. A pop song like I Will Survive has likely had more positive cultural impact than an entire generation of poets.

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An obvious answer suggests itself. Make poetry better. This is certainly the view of Dana Gioia, the Poet Laureate of California, whose 1991 essay Can Poetry Matter? argued that poetry was (and is) in such a state because poetry has become a closed shop: it’s become a question of people with creative writing degrees and teaching jobs writing poems for each other. Gioia has helped revive the culture of poetry reading in America with the Poetry Out Loud Recitation Contest, an old-fashioned way to make literary writing relevant to the common reader. It works. The programme has engaged 4 million students since 2005.

Unsurprisingly, Gioia has also written a moving apology of Jennings’ life and work. He notes that she is overlooked because she was traditional at a time when innovation was in vogue. “She was not.” Gioia says, “the average professor’s idea of a modern poet.”

Now, the common reader is drawn to writers that are, like Jennings, not the average critic’s idea of a poet. Instapoets have discovered popularity most literary poets couldn’t dream of: Rupi Kaur and Holly McNish have sold millions of copies. But this engagement from the common reader is not good enough for a sizeable chunk of the poetic establishment. Rebecca Watts’ view, from her 2018 polemic The Cult of the Nobel Amateur, is all too common: she complains of “the rise of a cohort of young female poets who are currently being lauded by the poetic establishment for their ‘honesty’ and ‘accessibility’ — buzzwords for the open denigration of intellectual engagement and rejection of craft that characterises their work.” Her conclusion? “Artless poetry sells.”

Watts is right, of course. Much of the poetry she discussed wasn’t very good. But it’s telling, perhaps, that her objections are not only with the finished poem, but with the process of its production: she criticises McNish for writing poetry without redrafting or revising. This was, however, precisely Jennings’ technique. In the second half of her life, she sent bagfuls of spiral bound notebooks to Schmidt, who had to go through and discover the poems contained in the mass of writing.

There is now, thankfully, a New Selected Poems of Jennings’ work — edited, ironically, by Rebecca Watts. One day, perhaps, Rupi Kaur might be a slightly forgotten poet with a new Selected Poems that hopes to make people remember her value. There are many excellent lines of poetry hidden among the mass of her work, waiting for a serious editor.

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After all, Kaur and her ilk speak in an internet idiom that many literary poets lack. The average Insta-scroller is not looking for transcendence; but they probably stand more chance of discovering it than someone who flicks through a literary magazine on a rainy afternoon. If high-brow poetry is going to retrieve its audience, it needs to take account of Jennings’ dictum, “Poetry’s got too far away from life — become too much a parlour game for dons and clever young men.” As Jeremy Paxman said in 2014 after judging the Forward Poetry Prize, “poetry has contrived at its own irrelevance.”

Jennings’ poetry never got too far away from life. The erratic, distressing conditions of her daily existence meant she couldn’t turn her work into a parlour game. Jennings was lonely. She worked as a librarian and an editor for Chatto and Windus, but was essentially unfitted for employment. She lived with her parents well into adulthood until they moved away, devastating her. She suffered a mid-life mental breakdown and endured mid-century treatment including electro-shock therapy. She drank too much. There were multiple suicide attempts. People said, when she accepted her CBE from the Queen, that she had an eccentric appearance, a euphemism for saying she looked poor. (The Times called her “The bag lady of the sonnets”, a remark that remains beneath that paper’s dignity.) She did look poor. She was poor. But the distress, disorder and romantic adventure of her life makes her work — unlike so much contemporary poetry — passionate. To use the “buzzwords” to which Watts so objects: this gives it “honesty” and “accessibility.”

Literary poetry’s real problem is that it is inaccessible. Not only is it locked away in obscure print magazines, it sounds like it is locked away in obscure print magazines. Many literati want to preserve this elite status. Their “concerns” about popular poetry becoming a form of “content” or — heaven forbid — “consumer driven” are of a piece with closed shops everywhere. It’s telling, I think, that Watts’ article made a comparison between popular poetry and Donald Trump. Bad taste aside, this shows us that the highbrows feel under threat.

If we are going to find new lyricists with the immediacy, potency, and inventiveness of Sappho, Herrick, and Frost, we most likely need to look online. Sure, a lot of internet poetry is trash. But so is most highbrow poetry. There’s only one test, over the long run: popularity. As Samuel Johnson said of Pilgrim’s Progress: “it has had the best evidence of its merit, the general and continued approbation of mankind.” So steer clear of the literary reviews and start scrolling Insta. Chances are, the next Elizabeth Jennings is out there.

Like so much of Woolf’s diaries, that last description has an echo in her fiction. In Mrs Dalloway, Clarissa, the eponymous wife, thinks about how much she dislikes her own appearance, her “ridiculous little face, beaked like a birds’”.

In her new, annotated edition of Mrs Dalloway, Merve Emre doesn’t footnote the parakeets. But she is frank about Woolf’s less sympathetic side — and the ghastly personal beliefs she subsumed into her fiction:

“The fact is that the working classes are detestable”, Woolf would write in her diary in 1920 — a prejudice she harboured and took great care to ironise in Mrs Dalloway.

Indeed, the point of Mrs Dalloway is to show the thoughtless distance that existed between the comfortable world of the rich and the unquiet world of the poor. Woolf “took great care” to transform the rudeness of her diaries: what appears as shockingly nasty and unprovoked becomes artful and observant — empathetic, even — in her fiction.

Because we do think about other people like that. We can’t control our thoughts. And Mrs Dalloway is concerned with the inner life (“one’s life,” Woolf wrote, “is not confined to one’s body and what one says and does”). Clarissa is so polite, so well mannered, so poised; Woolf drew on her own nastiness to show Clarissa’s interior: frustrated, suppressed, annoyed — about even the smallest things. “For Heaven’s sake, leave your knife alone! she cried to herself in irrepressible irritation.”

To use the language of Twitter, Clarissa Dalloway is trying to control her inner troll — just as Woolf was disguising, ironising and converting hers. In the online age, we are constantly confronted with the dilemma of appropriately expressing our thoughts, of not feeling free to express what ought to be acceptable, of feeling obliged to disguise or edit ourselves, or simply of disliking our own personality. The Annotated Mrs Dalloway is timely.

Woolf wrote in her diary that she detested “egoistical: personal” writing — of the kind that proliferates, now, in autofiction. She worked to be formal, objective. But Emre finds Woolf’s life surfacing everywhere. Woolf’s thoughts, and her self, are irrepressible. Her half-brother used to fondle her in bed, and Emre suggests we can see him “peeping out” from behind Hugh Whitbread, a “sexually abusive” character. Woolf’s early suicide attempt is drawn on. Like Septimus, the soldier suffering from PTSD, Woolf once hallucinated birds talking to her in ancient Greek.

The form of the footnotes mirrors their eclectic contents. They are laid out in thick margins, but sometimes they don’t run in sync with the text, so you have to scout around for the relevant note. There is at least one pile up, where a page of images is put in to allow the notes to catch up with the novel. Emre has created a kaleidoscope of revealing and illuminating images: contemporary photos of London; Duncan Grant’s painting of Regents Park; an etching of Oxford Street by Joseph Purnell; the Tatler cover for May 1922; an X-Ray of a hand. There are also frequent maps showing the characters’ routes through London.

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Just as Woolf’s fragmentary syntax reflects the irrepressible flux of a busy mind, the images and footnotes give a sense of the emergent bustle of London — one of the novel’s essential metaphors — and the disjoined way in which we piece our thoughts together. We are used to this of course — or we should be. Modern culture is chaotic. Social channels and comment threads enable everyone to footnote everything. But still, the annotations show what a marvel it is that Woolf managed to hold together this strange and vivid story — in her head and on the page.

It wasn’t easy. Emre shows how Woolf worked and worked and worked at this book. She was weary with the effort. She resented distractions — she often did. Throughout the letters and diaries, Woolf complains about the demands of other people. “We have seen an endless number of people”. Clarissa’s inventor was, like her, a reluctant hostess. Without people, she relaxed. She wrote to Vita Sackville-West from Sussex in 1928, “I am in soaring health and spirits after one day here and have sat looking at cows for 3 hours instead of chasing round London buying scraps of meat and coming home to find Clive, Miss Jenkins, Sybil, etc.”

Her diary, when she is home, crashes around from notes of where she has been, what she did, who was there, into convoluted psychological, ethical, and philosophical considerations. Just when the discussion becomes intractably deep, she flips into personal admin, grumbles, plans for work, gossip. Woolf seems calmer — nicer — when she is relieved of her anxieties, ambitions, and activities. Unquiet minds, we might speculate, produce unpleasant remarks. They also produce good art. Mrs Dalloway crashes around, too.

Woolf examined her own mind for material, but the novel wasn’t simply a re-working of her diary. Remember: Woolf took great care. She had almost impossibly high standards: she once told E.M. Forster that he wasn’t really a novelist. The poor man had nothing to say other than “Ah!” She criticised him for being unable to marry “satire and sympathy; fantasy and fact.” To meet Woolf’s high standards, then, one must transform the biographical. We must look for the way her rudeness is recreated — not merely expressed — in her art. What we dislike in her private voice, we most likely, unsuspectingly, admire in her public art. If only the same were true of our own vicious internet selves.

It would be easy to cancel Woolf today — parts of her, at least. Emre’s notes introduce critical debates about Woolf’s racism: the diaries are full of unacceptable remarks about Indian people. Mrs Dalloway, however, is not so straightforward. Woolf unflinchingly portrays how the English upper classes saw Indian women as mere objects of desire; as Emre (summarising Supriya Chaudhuri) says: “she represents prejudice from the intimate position of who feels it… Woolf is critiquing what she knows best: her failure to transcend her own racism.” By reading Woolf, we might critique our own rudeness. We might learn, like her, to use our lesser thoughts to encourage ourselves into empathy.

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Because some of the rudeness Woolf buried in her novels has become more, not less, acceptable: Emre shows many lines that were cut from the original draft of Mrs Dalloway, a lot of them about same-sex attraction. Clarissa’s memory of her first kiss with Sally was rewritten so that it described something spiritual and nostalgic, rather than a physical pleasure: “she became instantly soothed and yet stimulated as if myriads of bells chimed.” As with her racism, when writing about concealed desires, Woolf wrote about unacceptable things from the intimate vantage point of one who has experienced them.

Today’s literature looks for the personal everywhere — memoirs proliferate, especially from the unmemorable. But today’s culture is often intolerant of imperfection. We are too close to ourselves, perhaps, to see ourselves clearly, and accept what we find. The distance of fiction can help us see our irrepressible thoughts — to understand we are not obliged to be what we think or say or write.

If you think we live in dramatic political times, this Act was the product of a much more febrile and rambunctious period. There was no single cause of the Lords crisis; it was a combination of inevitable changes in democratic politics, high cunning, and silly plots. If there was a single event that set things in motion, it was this: in December 1905, Arthur Balfour became the last Prime Minister to cede power to the leader of the opposition without having first been defeated in a general election. He thought the Liberals would disagree about Ireland and be unable to form a cabinet. Instead, they did the obvious thing: got themselves in order and called an election against a long-serving, increasingly out-of-touch government.

In early 1906, the Liberal Party won a whopping victory, increasing their seat count by 214. Balfour became another last: the last Prime Minister to lose his seat in an election. Defeat didn’t dent his belief that his party ought to be the ultimate arbiters, though. Balfour announced: “The great Unionist Party should still control, whether in power or in opposition, the destinies of this great Empire.” These Liberals weren’t the sort of chaps you want handling questions of empire and social reform. The Tories must remain in charge, one way or another.

Balfour’s statement might seem like the usual press release bluster. But the leader had a scheme. The Tories had a stonking majority of hereditary peers in the House of Lords. And so, having lost an election in the lower house, Balfour started running the country from the upper. He and Lord Lansdowne, Conservative leader in the Lords, thought they could take an approach of “caution and tact” to voting down government legislation in the Lords. It didn’t work. In 1907, the Liberal government passed nine measures in the Commons. The Lords rejected five of them. Lloyd George jibed that the peerage was Mr Balfour’s poodle.

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Tory brass knew Lords reform was necessary. Balfour agreed in principle. But he ended up rejecting the idea, claiming that Lords reforming would weaken the Commons (this from the man using Earls and Marquesses to vote down government legislation!) Not that Balfour felt the need to demean himself with explanations; he was still Tory leader largely because no-one else could take over. He was too posh to push: “I am certainly not going to condescend to go about the country explaining that I am ‘honest and industrious’ like a second coachman out of place!”

Meanwhile Balfour saw opportunity in the threat of the growing German navy. He pushed the Liberals to accept that British ships had to be built. This neat distraction unified his grouchy party. New ships meant new taxes. The Tories preferred the indirect taxation of putting tariffs on imports — making food more expensive. The justification was that age-old Tory favourite: the alternative was the confiscation of private property, the thin end of the socialistic wedge. The Liberals, led by H. H. Asquith, stood for Free Trade and Cheap Bread — and had to accommodate themselves to the new class of Labour voters who had made themselves known in the 1906 election. In the 1909 budget, the Chancellor David Lloyd George proposed raising money via a “super-tax” on the wealthy, as well as other taxes designed to hit landowners.

Balfour and Lansdowne wanted to let the budget pass the Lords, although some peers threatened to sack their staff in protest at the new taxes. Then Lloyd George gave his Limehouse speech, throwing shade on the recalcitrant toffs: “What is the labour they are going to choose for dismissal? Are they going to threaten to devastate rural England by feeding and dressing themselves?” Tory peers frothed. Balfour schemed again. If the Lords voted down the budget, there would be a general election, and the Tories could promise tariffs that would protect British jobs. The peers rejected the budget. The first election of 1910 was held (with 92% turnout). The Liberals lost 123 seats.

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The brouhaha really got going at this point. The Liberals stayed in government with the support of Irish Nationalists and Labour, giving them a majority of over a hundred. The alliance complicated the game. Passing the budget was no longer sufficient. The Irish Nationalists insisted that the Lords must lose their veto, something Liberals had been talking about since the 1880s, so that a bill could be passed giving Home Rule to Ireland. To the Tory party, this was intensely unacceptable.

There followed months of protracted and frankly useless negotiations. As always with Lords reform, a slew of clever but unpopular proposals came and went like the tide. There were Tories who would have accepted a form of federal Home Rule, but Lansdowne was stubborn. This, you see, was the thin end of the imperial wedge. There was even a plan to mix life peerages and a select number of hereditaries. Ultimately, there was no compromise. The crisis was crystallising dividing lines in British politics that would continue for years.

A second 1910 election was held. Only this time, Asquith had a scheme worthy of Balfour. There was a new king, George V, and the Prime Minister had secretly got him to agree to create a mass of new peers that would vote for the legislation, if necessary. Edward VII had refused him this promise without a second election, but George, having been on the throne for less than seven months, was bounced into rather flustered agreement by the duplicitous Asquith. The game was up. Balfour had schemed his way into a ridiculous position. The King had been duped. The Tory peers had gained nothing by holding out for everything.

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The Parliament Act 1911 passed the Commons five months after the second 1910 election. While Asquith drew up his list of potential new peers to swamp the Lords, Balfour was labouring under the strange idea that the king might take the Tory side. It was quite a shock when Asquith present the list in July. He spent half an hour at the dispatch box, his voice hardly audible as Tory MPs howled “Traitor! Traitor! Traitor!” Balfour caved and announced his shadow cabinet’s policy: to pass the bill. By November, he had resigned. Many Tory peers became “last ditchers,” opposing Asquith to the bitter end. Most, of course, flaked out.

The peers’ great fear, besides Irish Home Rule, was that the hereditary principle would be toppled. Life peerages, which would allow commoners to sit in the Lords, were mooted in this crisis. They weren’t introduced until the 1950s, though. And the hereditary peers weren’t removed from the House of Lords until 1999. Those negotiations ran much more smoothly thanks to the under rated Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 7th Marquess of Salisbury. A master of High Politics who makes Peter Mandelson look like a playground gossip, Salisbury negotiated for 92 hereditary peers to retain their place in the Lords. Unlike Balfour, Salisbury knew the value of compromise. Those hereditary peers don’t seem to be going anywhere, anytime soon.

Still, every time a government is elected, more life peers are added to make sure the numbers even out. There are now nearly 800 members. Charles Moore described it as “an ermine slum.” It is the only upper chamber in the world that is bigger than the lower chamber. Many peers are useless. The Lords lingers on, but calls for reform and complaints of its wastefulness are frequent. As with the negotiations of 1910, there is a plethora of proposals about what to do with them. Most are convoluted, impractical, or simply haphazard (remember Nick Clegg’s Senate?). Robert Salisbury has proposed the simplest answer of anyone: “a directly elected federal parliament. It would sit in the chamber of the House of Lords. The House of Lords would be abolished… The chamber of the Commons would become the seat of the English parliament.”

It is hard to imagine an idea less favourable to the “last ditchers” who so passionately objected to the Parliament Act 1911 — which can only be another reason to implement it. If only someone with sufficient vision could persuade him back into politics: Lord Salisbury retired from the House of Lords in 2017, on the day of Theresa May’s snap general election. Her Brexit nightmare and Boris’s ineptitude have revived many of the conditions of the 1910 crisis. And the House of Lords is the unsolved problem of British democracy we always return to at such times. Many of the semi-redundant life peers are now just as keen to keep their place as the hereditaries used to be. They should worry about a new Balfour coming to defend them. Then their time really would be up.

This man was Alan “Tommy” Lascelles, former Private Secretary to George VI and Queen Elizabeth II, and the Assistant Private Secretary to Edward VIII when he was Prince of Wales. He had lived, grace-and-favour, at the Old Stables at Kensington Palace (he thought it was one of the nicest houses in England) since he retired in 1953. Having been a courtier, on and off, from 1920-1953, he gives a fascinating insight into how to preserve a monarchy in a democracy.

Lascelles gets caricatured as a stiff-arsed, hard-bristled, curmudgeonly enforcer of horrible rules in The Crown, forever thwarting true love’s course. As well as playing a role in Edward VIII’s abdication, Lascelles is seen as one of the Establishment men who decided Princess Margaret couldn’t marry Peter Townsend. But despite this crucial role in modern Royal history, the real Lascelles remains slightly out of sight to us. There is no biography. His archives in Churchill College, Cambridge are largely closed — especially material relating to the monarchy. Edward Owens, who recently wrote a book about the royal family and the mass media, was denied access to them. His diaries, although excellent, were selectively edited by his friend Rupert Hart-Davis; they reveal a much more emotional, sensible, likeable man than the popular image.

There is no consensus, then, on Lascelles’s true character. To Edward VIII, living in exile as the Duke of Windsor, Lascelles was always “that snake”. The feeling was mutual. When Harold Nicolson had lunch with Lascelles three days after the Abdication, the courtier said the former King was “like a child in the fairy stories who had been given every gift except a soul”. He was also spitting with rage about the fact that Edward VIII was not patriotic enough: “He never cared about England or the English.” Ferdinand Mount remembers Lascelles visiting his school, where Mount “was startled by his explosion of venom against the Duke of Windsor … He was memorably unpleasant.”

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But Lascelles wasn’t just a stickler for arcane and snobbish standards, nor did he take a cruel pleasure in enforcing them. He stood for fair play and pragmatism. When Noël Coward was recommended for a knighthood, Lascelles advised George VI against. The King was constantly approving courts-martial against young RAF officers who had written dud cheques, and Coward had recently been fined for cheating his Income Tax. It would have been wrong for those young men to be punished while Coward was honoured.

Essentially honourable, then, despite being memorably unpleasant. Lascelles understood that although monarchy must be staged, that doesn’t mean it can be fake. The public spectacle has to be a true enough expression of the values it upholds. That is why the knighthood had to be refused, and why Wallis Simpson couldn’t be Queen. (In one of his more venomous moments, Lascelles wrote that the King’s subjects would not tolerate “a shop-spoiled American, with two living husbands and a voice like a rusty saw”.) That is why, after the abdication, Lascelles went to some lengths to keep Edward out of the country, to try and eradicate the whole affair from the public mind. It is also why, irrespective of the way it happened, Lascelles came to believe the abdication was inevitable. Edward, he said, was “habitually ready to sacrifice truth to his personal likes or dislikes”; Edward’s celebrity wasn’t enough to maintain the monarchy.

Lascelles believed in the institution but said, “I have never idealised any member of the House of Windsor”. When Harold Nicolson was commissioned to write George V’s biography, Lascelles told him it would be the biography of an institution, and that there would be no need to “descend into personalities”. This isn’t just bluster. The night the abdication was announced, Lascelles walked round and round St James’s Park, thinking about James II. The stability of the monarchy mattered to him. He described the abdication as “a real tragedy in my life”.

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And yet for someone with such strong principles, Lascelles lacked a sense of direction. As a young graduate, he was rather louche. Although he was skittling around London dining with what Bertie Wooster would call some of the better elements, his diary never comes alive like it does when he shoots his first stag, or when he’s riding a horse. (He gives thanks that he inherited the “long, flat Lascelles thighs.”) His main interest as a young man — just like Edward VIII’s — was to be active. A series of possible careers — Foreign Office, stockbroker, journalist — were tried, hated, failed or simply never started. Without the war, he would have been edging towards becoming a drifter. Instead, despite a somewhat inactive war, he was awarded the Military Cross.

After the Armistice, he worked for his brother-in-law, the Governor of Bombay. Writing to his uncle Adolphus Liddell (another slightly lost soul) he said: “there is much in all the flummery and ceremonial which, even after a long course of military discipline, irritates me profoundly.” We might be surprised at this lack of admiration for imperial flummery. This is, after all, Alan Lascelles: reactionary, establishment stalwart, slayer of marriages, arch defender of the old order. But it was precisely this slightly detached view that made him such a good courtier.

Lascelles believed in the substance of royalty, not just the display. The day after George V died, nearly 20 years after that complaint about imperial flummery, the King’s body was taken to a little church at the end of the garden at Sandringham for a small private ceremony ahead of the large, public spectacle:

“The guardsmen, with scarcely a sound, slung the coffin on their shoulders and laid it before the altar; and there, after a very brief service, we left it, to be watched for thirty-six hours by the men of the Sandringham Estate. I daresay when all the tumult and shouting dies, that little ceremony will remain in my mind as the most impressive of all.”

Lascelles was not the sort of Royalist who was in it for the memorial plates and days out at the park. He was a genuine believer. He could talk of the King as a Deity with little exaggeration. He was burying the head of his tribe. This is why there was such a kerfuffle with the new King. Edward VIII wanted to run a very different sort of tribe.

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Lascelles’s history with Edward VIII is essential to understanding later events. When he returned from India in 1920, his friend Letty Elcho brought him a letter offering a job with Edward VIII, then Prince of Wales. Lascelles was attracted to the job partly because St. James’s Palace was half a mile from his house and a quarter of a mile from his club, but mostly because “I have got a very deep admiration for the Prince, and I am convinced that the future of England is as much in his hands as in any individual”. Remarkably, had this job not come along, he would have signed on as an apprentice to a printing firm.

This deep admiration would not last, and Lascelles’s ability to see the ridiculous in the Royal was important to his role as a courtier. After nine years of watching the Prince drink, gamble, womanise, neglect his duties, be rude to members of the British establishment, and — shockingly for the feudal Alan — show very little interest when there was a scare that George V might die, he stormed out in 1929, in the sort of resignation so many of us have dreamed of making:

When he asked me why I wanted to leave him, I paced his room for the best part of an hour, telling him, as I might have told a younger brother, exactly what I thought of him and his whole scheme of life, and foretelling, with an accuracy that might have surprised me at the time, that he would lose the throne of England.

Most of us, after such an exit, would never go back. And Lascelles had only drifted into the role. Quitting it, he called himself “an inverted Falstaff” (because he was thin, just as thin in middle age as when he was young), leaving Prince Hal to “work out his own damnation”. But, after two years of reading and gardening with his family in the country, and a stint working for the Governor General in Canada, he was asked to re-join the Royal staff.

At first, he refused. The job was with George V, who he once described as “the godhead” — but Lascelles had said in his resignation letter: “Very few men can go on being private secretaries all their lives, and I am not one of them.” And besides, he pointed out, when the king died, he would be in a very difficult position, to put it mildly, having told the next-in-line exactly what he thought of him. Clive Wigram, George V’s Private Secretary — who was hiring Lascelles to be his assistant — told him not to worry. The King was in splendid health and had years left in him. Lascelles wrote to his wife Joan saying he was going to take the job: “It is no use going about the world singing ‘God Save the King’ if one isn’t prepared to assist the Deity when called upon.”

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And so, in January 1936, he travelled to Norfolk to start his new job. He had found a first-class carriage reserved for him at Liverpool Street. Once the journey was underway, “a young man appeared in the doorway of my carriage. I was about to tell him to go away when I recognised him as the Duke of York.” It was a good thing he recognised him. The young man would accede as George VI within 12 months, and Lascelles would become his Private Secretary in 1943. The Duke of York said to him halfway through the journey, “What’s all this about the King not being well?” George V died within four days. The soulless Edward was king.

And so, from a combination of lassitude, duty, and blue-blooded patriotism, Lascelles ended up as Assistant Private Secretary to a man he was morally repulsed by. Gentlemen do not just drop out of Royal service because they dislike the new King. It is perhaps surprising that Edward kept Lascelles on. But it seems obvious from this distance — as it seemed to Lascelles then — that Edward had never planned to make it that far and wasn’t going to stay long.

The royal family is meant to bring spectacle to our lives by displaying theirs: a glittering pageant of Births, Deaths, and Marriages. As the monarchy lost power through the nineteenth century, they replaced it with performance. Public engagement became Queen Victoria’s way of maintaining her relevance. And this new mode of royal existence is part of what made Edward VIII such a star as Prince of Wales: his tours of America, Canada, and South Africa were massive successes. But by the end of George V’s reign, British royalty had consolidated a new covenant with the people: “private probity, public spectacle.”

Lascelles was the high priest of the Georgian model and had seen first-hand that Edward was all public spectacle and no private probity. A courtier out of duty (and because he found nothing else to do), he realised that unless the royal family stuck to its principles — to the principles forced on it by a changing world — it would suffer. To the extent that he was a propagandist, an enemy of Edward VIII, a reactionary, and everything else he is claimed to be, it was because he realised the royal family had very little choice. Much of what Lascelles is said to have brought about may well have been inevitable as monarchy adjusted to democracy.

He had always been a slightly unwilling courtier. (He told his daughter long after he retired that, if he could have his life again, he would breed horses. “Racehorses, or cart-horses: any sort of horses.”) He was good at it, though. It remains to be seen whether he will eventually be remembered as the last of the old school who helped the monarchy transition to its modern function — or as a crusty old reactionary who needlessly destroyed a clutch of happy lives. But when his archives are eventually dusted off, I doubt we will find any dark secrets in there. We already know the fundamentals. He was a man who believed in royal morals underpinning royal spectacles.

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What would he make of the modern monarchy? In his 1990 review of Philip Ziegler’s Edward VIII, Christopher Hitchens observed that “the magic of the throne is now inextricable from Charles and the Annenbergs, Diana and Donald Trump — the extension of Edward’s international white-trash habit into modern showbiz and celeb culture.” This line might stand as a eulogy for the Lascelles’s school: that there is little point in having a Royal Family unless they adhere to certain difficult and sometimes out-of-date principles. For Lascelles, as for the public at that time, those principles were about marriage. One of the last things he did was sit in the garden of Kensington Palace to watch the firework celebrations of Charles and Diana’s wedding. The next day, he asked for news about the event every few minutes, anxious it should all be going well. He died two weeks later.

Undoubtedly, the sort of revelations we have heard about the Royal Family since would have been anathema to his sense of decorum. But Tommy didn’t speculate. A young man from the BBC once tried to persuade him to appear in what Lascelles called “a television orgy on The Future of the British Monarchy”. Lascelles gave a forthright reply: “I told him I would as soon walk stark naked down Piccadilly.” We might find it easy to dismiss him as an old fogey. But how confidently can we say that we are beyond his concerns about private probity? Are we above worrying about what makes an acceptable royal spouse?