The Courtier Who Read Classics

I recently got hooked on The Crown, some years after everyone else, and found myself rewinding one character more than any other: Tommy Lascelles. Not for the plot. For the sentences.

Sir Alan Lascelles served four monarchs: George V, Edward VIII, George VI and, at the start of her reign, the young Elizabeth II. In the show he speaks the way few people speak anymore, in whole sentences that know where they are going before they begin, every clause in its place and the decisive word held back until the end. His Latin and his classics show in every line he is given. People do not talk like that by accident. They are trained to. I guessed Latin before I looked it up.

The training

I was right. Alan Lascelles was born in 1887, went to Marlborough College, and read classics at Trinity College, Oxford, graduating in 1908. A boy educated that way spent years turning English into Latin and Latin back into English, and he came out of it with a habit of mind: the periodic sentence, as Cicero built it, in which the meaning is suspended until the last word and the listener has no choice but to wait for it.

That is the Lascelles of The Crown. A refusal from him arrives fully formed. By the time you realize the answer is no, the sentence has already closed behind you.

He never let the Latin go. In 1950, when the question arose of whether a sovereign could ever refuse a prime minister’s request to dissolve Parliament, he answered it in a letter to The Times, and signed it Senex, Latin for an old man. Constitutional historians still call his answer the Lascelles Principles.

Knowledge is power

The seventh episode of the first season is titled in Latin: Scientia Potentia Est, knowledge is power, a phrase descended from Francis Bacon. In it, the young Queen, conscious of how thin her schooling was beside that of the men who served her, hires a tutor. The men around her had read classics. She had been taught the constitution and little else.

Lascelles had no army and no vote. His power was the power of the person who knows the precedent, writes the memorandum, and decides what reaches the desk. He knew the secret history of the monarchy because he had sat inside it. When Edward VIII abdicated in 1936, Lascelles, who had served him and despaired of him, recorded that he went out and walked three times round St James’s Park in the dark, thinking of James II.

The performance

Pip Torrens plays him with almost nothing: a lowered eyelid, a pause before a verb, a courtesy so perfect it becomes a wall. It is a performance built, like Lascelles’ own sentences, on restraint, and it is one of the best things in the series.

If you have not seen The Crown, I recommend it, for Torrens and for the rest of an extraordinary cast. Claire Foy, above all, plays the young Elizabeth II as a woman learning in public how much of herself the office will require, and doing it almost entirely with her eyes. She won a Golden Globe and an Emmy for it, and deserved both. Watch it once for the story. Watch it again, as I have, for the sentences.

The official trailer for the first season of The Crown, from Netflix.

The diaries

If you would rather hear Lascelles in his own words, you can. His diaries, King’s Counsellor: Abdication and War, edited by Duff Hart-Davis, are available from Amazon and other fine booksellers. The audiobook is narrated by Pip Torrens himself, which is about as close as one can come to being briefed by Tommy Lascelles in person.

The Queen in that episode envied the men around her their education. It is still available, and it still begins where theirs began, with Latin.