When the threat of invasion became acute in the spring of 1940, Queen Mary — widow of George V, mother of the reigning king — was moved from London to Badminton House, the Gloucestershire seat of her niece's husband, the 10th Duke of Beaufort.[1] She remained there for the duration of the war, with a household of some sixty staff, a private secretary, and a rotating cast of visitors that included, at various points, most of the senior figures of the royal family. Badminton in wartime was not a retreat from public life so much as a relocation of it: a functioning royal household, fully staffed, operating at a remove from the bombing and from the scrutiny of London.
Among the people who passed through that household with some regularity was Tancred Borenius — Finnish-born, the first holder of the Durning-Lawrence chair in art history at University College London, co-founder of Apollo magazine, and a long-standing art adviser to the Lascelles family and, by extension, to Queen Mary herself.[2] Borenius accompanied the Queen on holidays in Yorkshire before the war and was trusted by George VI with the safekeeping of Old Master drawings during the 1939 Milan exhibition. He was, by any reasonable measure, exactly the kind of figure a great house in this period would have on its visitors' list: scholarly, discreet, socially fluent, and entirely unthreatening.
The Geneva mission
What is documented about Borenius is more interesting than his art-world credentials suggest. In January 1941, he travelled — at the instruction of Claude Dansey, deputy director of MI6 — from Bristol to Lisbon to Geneva, ostensibly on Polish Relief Fund business.[3] The Fund's own minute book records his absence from mid-January to mid-March, longer than the stated errand required. In Geneva he met Carl Jacob Burckhardt of the International Committee of the Red Cross and conveyed, in terms later recorded in the diary of the German diplomat Ulrich von Hassell, that Britain remained willing to discuss peace terms — though not, in his words, for very much longer.[4] Von Hassell's diary describes Borenius as sent by "englischen Stellen" — English quarters — a phrase that does not specify whether those quarters were intelligence, diplomatic, or royal.
Borenius was equipped for the journey, according to an account his son later gave the historian John Harris, with a cyanide pill "the size of a golf ball" and a codebook.[5] An art historian acting as a back-channel intermediary for peace feelers, travelling with a suicide pill, while remaining a fixture of the Dowager Queen's social circle at Badminton, is not a comfortable detail for any tidy account of where the war's diplomacy actually happened. It sits, uneasily, at the exact intersection the period's appeasement historiography keeps returning to: the great house, the trusted family retainer, and the conversation that official channels never recorded.
"Sent by English quarters" — von Hassell's diary, on the man UCL's first professor of art history was carrying messages for in Geneva.
A room with no minutes
What makes Badminton useful, as a setting and as a historical problem, is the same thing that makes any great house of this period useful: nobody official was in the room. Civil servants minute Cabinet committees. They do not minute drawing-room conversation between a Dowager Queen, her art adviser, and a son visiting from RAF duties. The institutional record of the Second World War is extraordinarily comprehensive about decisions made in Whitehall and almost entirely silent about what was said in the houses where the people who made those decisions actually spent their evenings. Badminton, for two years, was one of those houses — and one of the few where a Finnish art historian with a cyanide pill in his luggage was a welcome and unremarkable guest.
Borenius had chosen the painting himself — a quiet thing, Dutch, unremarkable enough that nobody would ask why a new frame was needed for it. Albert took the measurements twice. Cyril held the tape.
"You'll want it an inch deeper at the back than it looks," Albert said, to nobody in particular, and Cyril understood that this was the whole of the instruction he was going to get.