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He need not have worried. Though he remained much more uneasy about the Attlee governments of 1945 and 1950 than his father had been about the MacDonald ones of 1924 and 1929, there was little in reality that the Labour Cabinet wished or dared to do to discomfort him. Indeed, the new Prime Minister went out of his way to provide reassurance. At Attlee’s first audience, George VI expressed disquiet at the news that Hugh Dalton, the renegade son of George V’s old tutor Canon Dalton, might be made Foreign Secretary. The Labour premier immediately bowed to the King’s wishes, or at least allowed the Palace to think he was doing so. Ernest Bevin became Foreign Secretary, and Dalton was sent to the Treasury instead. Thereafter, Attlee treated the Sovereign with perfect correctness, and there turned out to be as little republicanism in the Labour Party after the Second World War as there had been before it. Soon, what some saw as the incongruity of a King-Emperor presiding over a social revolution – and over the granting of self-rule to the Indian sub-continent, jewel in the imperial crown – became accepted as natural and even valuable. Whereas, in the reign of George V, Buckingham Palace had stood at the pinnacle of a confident Establishment unshaken by the arrival of a Labour Government, in the late 1940s the Royal Family managed to avoid any outward appearance of discomfiture, as the Establishment took some knocks.
Indeed, George VI’s passivity arguably became even more of an asset after the war than during it. On the one hand the Royal Family could be seen as a typically British piece of camouflage, disguising and making acceptable the Government’s radicalism; on the other, its existence stood as a guarantee that pragmatic caution would prevail, and radicalism kept within bounds. Thus, when Labour took major industries into public ownership (but compensated owners generously) or made adjustments to the powers of the House of Lords (but only modest ones), both left and right thanked God for the Monarchy.
For Elizabeth, peace brought to an end her brief, token excursion into ATS ‘normality’. It also produced an increase in the number of her solo engagements. She was nineteen, Honorary Colonel, occasional Counsellor of State, and a performer of royal duties: cast, it was increasingly clear, in the mould of her father and grandfather, though more self-assured than George VI, and cleverer than both of them. Was there ever a moment, in her early adulthood, when she questioned what she did, or wondered, in the prevailing atmosphere of equality, and fashion for the abandoning of pomp and circumstance, whether it was worth it? If she ever indulged in such a dissident speculation, she kept her thoughts to herself. There was no visible hint of rebellion, or suggestion that her own values and those of her parents and mentors ever clashed. She was now the almost certain future Queen, who, if she did succeed, would become the third monarch of the century who had not been born to such a fate but had had it thrust upon them. As the position became clearer with the passage of time, she accepted it, knowing that the possibility of an alternative did not exist.
She did as she was told in an enclosed world where loyal and experienced advice could be taken for granted. She became used to the ritual of the royal speech, consisting of a few platitudes crafted by courtiers skilled at the job. Her itineraries just after the war reflected the priorities of Buckingham Palace, and also of the Government. Thus, in the summer of 1945, she opened a new library of the Royal College of Nursing, presented prizes and certificates to students of the Royal Free Hospital School of Medicine for Women, inspected the Fifth Battalion and Training Battalion of the Grenadier Guards, and addressed (in her recently acquired capacity of Sea Ranger Commodore) three thousand Welsh Girl Guides. She also accompanied her parents on a visit to Ulster, travelling by air for the first time, in a flight from Northolt to Long Kesh.
Some apparently promising requests, however, were refused. Lascelles turned down, on her behalf, an invitation to become the first woman ever to be awarded an honorary degree by Cambridge University – despite pressure from the Chancellor, Lord Baldwin.
Occasionally, the proposals of Labour politicians were considered excessive. In 1947, Lascelles rejected a request from Hugh Gaitskell, the Minister of Fuel and Power, for her to attend ‘The Miner Comes to Town’ exhibition at Marble Arch which had recently been opened by the Prime Minister, on the grounds that she was too busy.
Generally, her visits expressed support for an officially approved, but non-controversial, good cause – though sometimes what the Palace saw as non-controversial turned out to be political dynamite. This was true of a tour of Northern Ireland without her parents in March 1946, for what was described as ‘the most ambitious mission undertaken by the young Heir Presumptive’. The tour gave the Princess her first experience of being used, not as a symbol above domestic politics, but as a blatant political tool by one faction.
It was a mission to underline the Union, something which a visit from British royalty, personifying United Kingdom ties, achieved more eloquently than anything. The result was a welcome both vehement and purposeful. This was a Protestant tour and the groups and institutions she met and addressed reflected it. Sometimes the message remained implicit. At Dungannon High School 1,200 girls sang ‘Come back to Ulster, dear Princess’ to the tune of ‘Come back to Erin’. On other occasions, it was crudely and disagreeably partisan. At Enniskillen, the Royal Ulster Constabulary put on a display that included an illegal still, camouflaged with peat and foliage. The producers of illicit ‘poteen’ were acted by local workers, heavily made up with rouge, and wearing paddy-hats and green three-cornered scarves. An almost hysterical atmosphere of loyalism lasted until the Princess’s departure from Belfast on 21 March, when a mob of schoolchildren broke flag-bedecked stands and ran to the edge of the quay. As her cruiser left the harbour, the whole crowd sang ‘Will ye no’ come back again?’ and ‘Auld Lang Syne’.
In Northern Ireland, enthusiasm was a symptom of sectarian anxiety. Elsewhere and on other occasions, the excitement the Heiress caused is less easily explicable, especially so soon after the election of a Government committed to dispossessing the better off. At the beginning of 1946, support for socialism was at its zenith: Gallup put Labour twenty per cent ahead in the polls, as the Cabinet prepared to introduce its most radical measures.
Yet, such popularity – and apparent popular support for levelling down – was not accompanied by any decline in pro-royal sentiment. In April, a gigantic crowd came to watch the bands of the Royal Horse and Grenadier Guards playing on the East Terrace of Windsor Castle, to mark Princess Elizabeth’s twentieth birthday. The Times estimated it at 40,000, a figure three times as large as for any such event in the 1930s.
Perhaps the austerity and restrictions, as great after the war as during it, sparked a reaction. Such gatherings, and the carnival mood that infused them, may have been a form of escape, a release from drabness. But there was also a deep personal interest in the Princess: in her beauty, her clothes, her shy smile, and, increasingly, her prospects.
When and whom would she marry? The assumption was that she would do so soon; this, after all, had been the point of her education. ‘That the Heiress to the Throne would stay unmarried’, as Crawfie archly but accurately put it, ‘was unthinkable’.
The matter had been discussed in the popular papers since the 1930s. The difficulty lay in finding a suitable consort, at a time when suitability still entailed reasons of state. No heir to the throne had ever contracted a marriage for reasons that did not take dynastic considerations into account. However, conventions were changing. Although Edward VIII had been refused permission to marry the woman of his choice, the marriage of George VI had been a non-arranged, romantic and successful one. It was now accepted that a husband could not be forced upon the Princess. It was also accepted, however, that she could not be allowed unrestricted freedom, and that the range of possible suitors was limited to the diaspora of European royalty, few of whom were now in reigning families, and to the upper ranks of the British aristocracy. Though the Princess was well known, she did not know many people. Moreover, her small circle of friends, acquaintances and sufficiently distant relatives included hardly any young men who would be acceptable as a consort, or who would presume to such a role. That she was desirable, there was no question: but to pay court to the Heiress to the world’s premier Monarchy required an exceptional degree of passion, confidence or gall.
Perhaps she sensed these difficulties, for in practice they never arose. There were minor flirtations, and stories of heirs to great titles who took liberties and were frozen out for ever. But there was never a phase of boyfriends, of falling in and out of love, of trial and error. From early in her adolescence she took a friendly and romantic interest in one man, and there is no evidence that she ever seriously considered anybody else. ‘She fell in love with him,’ says one former courtier.
According to another, it was a matter of coming contentedly to terms with what had to be. ‘There really was no one else she could possibly marry but Prince Philip.’
Yet if Philip was, in a sense, hand-picked, it was not the Princess’s parents, or the Court, who did the picking.
Prince Philip of Greece, nearly five years older than the Princess, had several commanding advantages: he was royal, on first acquaintance extremely personable and, though not British, he gave an excellent impression of being so. The British Royal Family had known him since he was a small child, when he had taken tea at Buckingham Palace with Queen Mary, who reported him ‘a nice little boy with very blue eyes’.
He had been in the company of Princess Elizabeth at several pre-war family gatherings, including the wedding of the Duke and Duchess of Kent in 1934, and the Coronation three years later. Even before the Coronation, Philip’s name had been linked in the press with that of the Princess, as one of a tiny list of hypothetical bridegrooms.
The first significant encounter, however, took place on 22 July 1939, during the short interlude between the Canada-America trip and the outbreak of war, in the course of a Royal Family visit to the Royal Naval College, Dartmouth. According to Crawfie, the introduction took place in the nursery of the house of the Captain of the College. Philip, who had recently been admitted as a cadet, was taken in to see the princesses, who were playing with a clockwork train. Allegedly, the new friendship was sealed with ginger crackers and lemonade, and by a game of tennis.
As far as the adult, non-nursery world was concerned, however, the first important meeting took place at a tea party on board the royal yacht Victoria and Albert. This had been arranged – engineered might conceivably be a better word – by Lord Mountbatten, the King’s cousin and Philip’s uncle. ‘Philip came back aboard V & A for tea and was a great success with the children,’ Mountbatten wrote in his diary.
There are also filmic and photographic records of the day. One amateur snap shows the Greek cadet and the much smaller princess together alone, apart from the watching photographer, playing croquet in the Captain’s garden. A still picture from a contemporary newsreal encapsulates the whole drama, as if it were a tableau: the child-like, solemn Princess Elizabeth, looking much younger than thirteen in a sea of adult faces, her parents and sister, Philip, laughing at some private joke, Mountbatten, also smiling, at his shoulder.
‘It is hard to believe,’ suggests Mountbatten’s official biographer, discussing his subject’s attitude towards the 1939 Dartmouth meeting, that ‘no thought crossed his mind that an admirable husband for the future Queen Elizabeth might be readily available’.
In view of Mountbatten’s character, his personal and dynastic ambition, his taste for intrigue, it is more than hard. We may take it for granted that one did. It is possible that such a thought had also occurred to the King and Queen. They were aware, after all, of the need to find a son-in-law before very long, and a foreign prince training for the British Navy was an obvious possibility. In Philip’s case, however, there were some worrying features.
Indeed, the Prince’s origins and early life raised the question of what ‘royal’ meant, if it was to be treated as a qualification. Should it be defined in terms of bloodlines, or did it relate to real-world wealth, reputation, and constitutional significance? By the first criterion, Philip was unquestionably royal, in one sense more so than Princess Elizabeth, for he had royalty on both sides of his family, instead of just one. He also happened to be related to the Princess several times over. His most important relationship was through his mother, Princess Alice of Battenberg, who was sister to Lord Mountbatten, mentor and cousin to George VI. But there were also other strands. He was even a fourth cousin once removed through collateral descendants of George III.
Moreover, he was not just descended from royalty, he had been born into a reigning Royal Family, the grandson and nephew of Greek kings.
On the other hand, by the second criterion, the current standing of his dynasty, Philip scored badly, or not at all. His birth took place at the Greek royal residence of Mon Repos on the Ionian island of Corfu in June 1921. This did not remain his home for long. Within eighteen months, following the passing of a death sentence by a Greek revolutionary court on his father, Prince Andrew, he and all his family became refugees. A few years later, Philip’s mother recorded her thanks to George V for his personal intervention, ‘realizing the deadly peril’ her husband was in, to ensure that a warship got him ‘out of the clutches of the military dictators and brought him and his family away from Greece’ on the day after the trial.
The exile of Andrew, his wife, four daughters and baby son, turned out effectively to be permanent. Dispossessed, impoverished and in the case of Prince Andrew embittered, they settled in a house provided by Philip’s aunt, Marie Bonaparte, at St. Cloud, on the outskirts of Paris.
It was to be a shambolic, meagre existence, built on fading dreams and painful memories. Philip’s birthplace in Corfu had been lacking in amenities: in the early 1920s, there was no electricity, gas, running hot water or proper heating.
But it had been grand in style, and magnificent in location. By contrast, the villa in St. Cloud was humiliatingly unpretentious, ‘a very simple country house,’ according to one of Philip’s sisters.
Cut off from the friendships and rivalries that mattered to him, Prince Andrew, the former commander of armies, immersed himself in the writing of a book appropriately called Towards Disaster, about the military endeavours, and their failure, for which he had stood trial. His wife, with five children to care for, suffered a nervous breakdown, and turned to religion. The couple separated in 1930, Andrew eventually moving to Monte Carlo, where he died in December 1944.
Against this troubled background, Philip began a cultural shift. Later, there was the question of whether ‘Philip the Greek’ was ever Greek at all; although born a Greek citizen, the son of a Greek prince, there were no ‘ethnic’ Greeks in his recent ancestry. In some ways this helped, but it also laid him open to a more damning charge. The description of him as a ‘blond Viking’, partly on the basis of his Danish ancestry, became a way of avoiding the fact, embarrassing in the 1940s, that his strongest family links were with Germany. All his four sisters married Germans and reverted to a German identity.
Until Philip was adult, he really belonged to no nation, except the freemasonry of Romanov, Habsburg and Saxe-Coburg-Gotha descendants, which conferred an entry ticket to the great houses and palaces of Europe. It was the benign interest of his mother’s relatives, and perhaps a family appreciation that England was the most hopeful place for an uprooted royal to seek his fortune, that pushed him in a British direction. From early childhood, there were frequent English trips, especially to see Philip’s Battenberg grandmother, the Marchioness of Milford Haven, herself the eldest grandchild of Queen Victoria and sister of the last Tsarina. Sophie (‘Tiny’), youngest of Philip’s sisters, recalls annual visits by the children to the Marchioness in the 1920s. She remembers sunbathing on the roof at Kensington Palace, where the old lady had an apartment, meetings with members of the British Royal Family, and most influential of all, being regaled with stories of their Europe-wide connections, which contrasted so dramatically with the life they lived in St. Cloud. These expeditions served as a reminder, and a tonic: if the children had any doubt about their social standing, the Marchioness removed them.
At about the time of his parents’ separation, Philip left the American school in St. Cloud at which he had been a pupil, and was sent to Cheam, an English preparatory establishment in Surrey; and from there to Salem, in Baden, a school owned by one of his German brothers-in-law and run by the legendary Kurt Hahn. But for Hitler, the rest of his education might have been German. In 1934, however, Hahn moved to Scotland to escape the Nazis, setting up a new school, Gordonstoun. Philip became a pupil and, as a result, in the words of the Countess of Airlie, was ‘brought up to all intents and purposes an Englishman,’
except that few Englishmen ever had to suffer the rigours and eccentricities of the Hahn–Gordonstoun form of educational progressiveness.
‘I don’t think anybody thinks I had a father,’ Philip allegedly once complained. ‘Most people think that Dickie’s my father anyway.’
Philip had been much affected by the breakdown of his parents’ marriage, and retained a great sympathy for Prince Andrew. ‘He really loved his father,’ says one close associate. ‘He had a big image of him which persisted, and his death was a great shock to him.’
After 1930, however, he saw much more of his mother, Princess Alice, and was closer to her, despite all her difficulties – which were extreme. In addition to the psychological problems which developed during Philip’s childhood, she was congenitally deaf. Later, she used to say that she could not communicate with her children until they were old enough to speak, when she became able to read their lips.
But the presentation of her as a demented recluse was false. Friends recall her, except when ill, as forceful, intelligent and amusing. Despite her marital and other difficulties, she was responsible for translating her husband’s book from Greek into English. Conceivably, as one friend of Philip puts it, her eventual decision to found a Greek Orthodox monastic order, and become a nun in it, ‘was a very clever solution to the problem of how she fitted into the world,’ as an elderly royal widow without money, but with an interest in good causes.
Nevertheless, Philip’s early life, with an absent father and often psychologically absent mother, was by any standards disturbed and unstable. Much of it, especially when his mother had to go into a sanatorium, was spent migrating between schools and foster-homes provided by relatives. There was a confusion: uncertainty, neglect, and the feeling of being special mixed together. The only son, as well as the youngest child, Philip was a particular focus of family attention, especially to his four sisters who adored, petted and mothered him. However, within the space of a few months in 1931–2 all of them solved the problem of a disintegrating home by marrying German princes, scattering what was left of his family across Europe.
There were fixed points: Salem, for summer holidays, was one. When Philip was at school in Britain, his Uncle George, Marquess of Milford Haven and son of the dowager Marchioness, provided another, becoming his guardian in school vacations, and helping with fees. Although George was his main benefactor, Philip was also a frequent visitor at the house of his other uncle, Lord Mountbatten. ‘He was around with us a lot from about 1934,’ says Patricia.
Another refuge was Gordonstoun where Philip became a model pupil – athletic, outgoing, enterprising, effortlessly displaying precisely those attributes which it had been Hahn’s vision to produce.
Yet the standard portrayal of Philip in his teens as a kind of Boys’ Own Paper hero misses something out. There was a picaresque quality, the sense of the adventurer who lives by his wits, and for whom what one early writer called ‘the lean upbringing of expatriate royalty,’
had provided as keen a training as any continental theory. Philip’s cousin Alexandra, Queen of Yugoslavia (and a fellow expatriate), recalled him on holiday with her family in Venice, a year before the Dartmouth meeting, as a genial sponger, living in a style not uncommon among displaced princelings, and giving the impression of ‘a huge hungry dog, perhaps a friendly collie who had never had a basket of his own’.
The summer of 1938 was an especially waif-like moment. George Milford Haven had died the previous April, leaving Prince Philip, as Philip Ziegler puts it, ‘stateless, nameless and not far from penniless’
and particularly in need of open-handed friends. Luckily, more substantial help was available. The death of one benefactor cleared the way for another, of incomparably greater influence. Observing Philip’s predicament, George’s younger brother Louis – ‘Uncle Dickie’ – stepped in, and took over what remained of the job of bringing his nephew up. It was a generous undertaking, but also, in view of the young man’s obvious talents, a well judged one. Lord Mountbatten was a prominent naval officer and it had, in any case, already been planned that the best place for a déraciné young prince with a taste for travel, and no home base, was the British Navy. Hence, on 1 May 1939, Philip joined Dartmouth College as a Special Entry Cadet.
When Prince Philip and Princess Elizabeth met in July, he was an unknown young man barely two months into training. What did he make of his world-famous distant cousin, with her home in Buckingham Palace? Did he distinguish between the celebrity and the child-like person? It would be surprising if she did not have an impact, because of who she was: but it would also be surprising if, at this stage, Philip’s interest was romantic. Handsome and confident eighteen-year-old young men are not often greatly attracted by thirteen-year-old little girls scarcely out of short socks. According to Queen Alexandra, the previous summer the Greek prince had shown himself a girl-crazy party-goer on the Venetian social scene. ‘Blondes, brunettes and red head charmers,’ she recalled, ‘Philip gallantly and I think quite impartially squired them all.’
Hélène Cordet, a cabaret singer who had been a childhood friend (and who was later dubbed by the French press as ‘the mystery blonde’ and ‘the one who will not be invited to the wedding’) had a similar view of him.
Other accounts also show him as a happy-go-lucky enjoyer of female company, and player of the field. Yet Princess Elizabeth was pretty, royal, and obviously a catch. The thoughts that must have passed through his uncle’s mind, may also have passed through his own. At the time, however, there were other pressing things to consider. War was imminent, with everything that such a prospect offered to a prize-winning naval cadet, with excellent connections.
If the British Royal Family had a good war, Philip in a more conventional sense, had a highly distinguished one. After a period of escorting contingents of troops from Australia to the Middle East, he was involved in several engagements in the Mediterranean. During the battle of Matapan against the Italian fleet, he controlled the searchlights of his ship, and was mentioned in dispatches. ‘Thanks to his alertness and appreciation of the situation,’ reported his Captain, ‘we were able to sink in five minutes two eight-inch-gun Italian cruisers.’
Philip spent much of 1941 with the British Fleet in the East Mediterranean. In the spring, Greek resistance to the Germans crumbled, and on 23 April, King George of Greece and his Government were evacuated to Crete. The same day, Princess Elizabeth wrote to Winston Churchill thanking him for a bunch of roses he and his wife had sent her for her fifteenth birthday two days earlier. In her letter, she offered her sympathy, in view of the ‘very worrying time’ he had lately been having.
Perhaps she had Philip’s recent dangers and exploits, and those of his royal house, partly in mind.
Such an officer was likely to be rapidly promoted in wartime, especially if he had ambition. In Philip’s case, the energy and drive he had shown at Gordonstoun and Dartmouth, together with a view of his own long-term future which received ample encouragement from his Uncle Dickie, helped to push him forward. Mike Parker, a fellow officer who had also been a fellow cadet and later became his equerry, recalls thinking of the Prince as a dedicated professional and as a man heading for the very top: somebody who already ‘had mapped out a course to which he was going to stick . . . a plan already in his mind that had probably been set before he left’.
In October 1942, Philip was made First Lieutenant and second-in-command of a destroyer, at twenty-one one of the youngest officers to hold such a post.
His adventures continued. The following July, while courtiers in Buckingham Palace exchanged learned memoranda about the date of Princess Elizabeth’s coming-of-age and its constitutional significance, Prince Philip was aboard HMS Wallace off the coast of Sicily, helping to provide cover for the Allied attack and possibly bombarding one of his brothers-in-law, on the German side, in the process. In July 1944, his ship was sent to the Pacific, where he remained until after the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and until the final surrender of Japan.
Wherein I spake of most disastrous chances,
Of moving accidents by flood and field,
Of hair-breadth ’scapes, i’ the imminent deadly breach . . .
My story being done,
She gave me for my pains a world of sighs.
It is hard to think of an experience of war further removed than that of the Heiress Presumptive, in her castellated schoolroom.
At first, Philip’s busy war provided little scope for contact with the British Royal Family. Shore leaves were brief, makeshift and hectic. Parker felt that it was a bond between him and Prince Philip that both of them were ‘orphans’ (Parker was Australian), with a problem about where to stay.
In London, Philip was often put up by the Mountbattens, who had been bombed out of previous homes and were living in a house in Chester Street. Mountbatten’s younger daughter Pamela recalls that she and a camp bed would move from room to room to provide space for her cousin, who would ‘come and go and added glamour and sparkle to every occasion’.
His favours were distributed widely. Queen Alexandra, herself in London at the time, maintained that ‘the fascination of Philip had spread like influenza, I knew, through a whole string of girls’.
But there was no special girlfriend. According to Parker, ‘never once did I ever find him involved with any particular one. It was very much in a crowd formation’.
Other stories about Philip in wartime confirm the impression of a hedonistic, though also cashless, socialite whose uniform, looks, charm and connections opened every door – a character out of Evelyn Waugh or Olivia Manning, who popped up wherever in the world there were enough members of the pre-war upper class to hold a party.
Princess Elizabeth was sometimes in his thoughts. Alexandra met up with him in 1941 in Cape Town, where he was on leave from a troop ship. When she came across him writing a letter, he told her it was to ‘Lilibet’. Alexandra assumed – such were the mental processes of displaced royalty – that he was fishing for invitations.
Perhaps she was right. It was not, however, until the end of 1943 that he was able to accept one of importance. This was to spend Christmas with the Royal Family at Windsor Castle, and to attend the annual Windsor family pantomime.
Philip accepted, with pleasure.
It was a private invitation. However, both the show, and the Prince’s attendance at it, were reported in the press. In November, it was announced that a stage had been erected in a large hall in the ‘country mansion’ where the princesses were staying; that a cast of forty was rehearsing under the joint direction of Princess Elizabeth and a local schoolmaster, who had together written the script; and that twenty-five village school children would provide the chorus, accompanied by a Guards band.
A few days before Christmas, The Times reported that ‘Prince Philip of Greece’ had attended the third of three performances, sitting in the front row. Others in the audience included the King and Queen, various courtiers, royal relatives, and villagers.
According to Lisa Sheridan, Prince Philip was more than just a passive spectator of the seventeen-year-old Elizabeth as she acted, joked, tap-danced and sang a few songs just in front of him. ‘Both in the audience and in the wings he thoroughly entered into the fun, and was welcomed by the princesses as a delightful boy cousin.’
The pantomime was followed by Christmas festivities. On Boxing Day, there was a family meal at the Castle including retainers, Prince Philip and the young Marquess of Milford Haven. ‘After dinner, and some charades,’ Sir Alan Lascelles recorded in his diary, ‘they rolled back the carpet in the crimson drawing-room, turned on the gramophone, and frisked and capered away till near 1 a.m.’
Crawfie maintained it was a turning point: thereafter, Elizabeth took a growing interest in Philip’s activities and whereabouts, and exchanged letters with him. The Heiress to the throne enjoyed the idea of being like other girls, she suggested, with a young man in the services to write to.
IF ELIZABETH only began to think seriously about Philip in December 1943, she was way behind the drifting circuit of European royalty and its hangers on, which had been talking about the supposed relationship, almost as if a marriage was a fait accompli, for two or three years. Of course, Philip’s eligibility as a bachelor prince, together with his semi-Britishness, was likely to make him the subject of conjecture in any case. However, before the end of 1943, the couple had little opportunity to get to know each other. What is curious, therefore, is the firmness of the predictions, and the confidence of the rumours, from quite early in the war.
One of the first to pick up and record the story of an intended marriage, in its definite form, was Chips Channon, befriender of Balkan princelings. He heard it at the beginning of 1941 during a visit to Athens, where the tale seemed to be current among the Greek Royal Family, whose interest had been sharpened by the presence of Prince Philip in their midst, on leave from his ship. After meeting Philip at a cocktail party, Channon noted in his diary, ‘He is to be our Prince Consort, and that is why he is serving in our Navy.’ The alliance between the British and Greek royal houses had supposedly been arranged by the finessing hand of Philip’s uncle, Lord Mountbatten. Philip was handsome and charming, noted Channon, ‘but I deplore such a marriage. He and Princess Elizabeth are too interrelated.’
Such an item was, of course, no more than gossip, a symptom of the decadence and anxieties of the Greek court. Princess Elizabeth was fourteen at the time, and the notion of the British Government or Royal Family fixing a future marriage alliance with the Greek one is preposterous. According to Mountbatten a few years later, it was at about this time that Philip ‘made up his mind and asked me to apply for [British] naturalisation for him’.
Perhaps it was news of this plan, combined with Philip’s evident closeness to his British uncle, that inspired the tale. Nevertheless, the existence of such a lively and, as it turned out accurate, rumour nearly three years before a serious friendship is supposed to have started, puts the Prince’s visit to witness the Princess performing into perspective. Had Mountbatten been involved behind the scenes? It is possible. ‘He was a shrewd operator and intriguer, always going round corners, never straight at it,’ says one former courtier from the 1940s, ‘he was ruthless in his approach to the royals.’
Another suggests: ‘Dickie seems to have planned it in his own mind, but it was not an arranged marriage.’
It would certainly have been in character for him to have followed up on the 1939 introduction. That, however, is a matter for speculation. What is clear is that in the course of 1944, despite the huge pressures on him, Lord Mountbatten took it upon himself to follow through his match-making initiative with operational resolve.
One effect of the Christmas 1943 get-together, and of its publication in the press, was to fuel the rumours. Prince Philip himself was reticent. Parker knew that Philip had begun to visit the Royal Family when he was in England, but he did not find out the significance of the visits until after the war.
Others had more sensitive antennae. In February 1944, Channon again got the story, this time from a source very close to the throne – his own parents-in-law, Lord and Lady Iveagh, who had just taken tea with the King and Queen. The Windsor party had evidently been a success. ‘I do believe,’ Channon reaffirmed, ‘that a marriage may well be arranged one day between Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip of Greece.’
Meanwhile, in Egypt, where the Greek royal family presided over the Government-in-exile, interest had deepened, and with good reason. Within months, or possibly a few weeks, of the Windsor meeting, Philip had declared his intentions to the Greek king. The diary of Sir Alan Lascelles contains a significant entry for 2 April 1944 in which he records that George VI had told him that Prince Philip of Greece had recently asked his uncle, George of Greece, whether he thought he could be considered as a suitor for the hand of Princess Elizabeth. The proposition had been rejected.
However, it was early days.
In August 1944, the British ambassador, Sir Miles Lampson, recorded meeting Prince Philip, once again on leave, at a ball in Alexandria, in the company of the Greek crown prince and princess. Lampson found him ‘a most attractive youth’. In the course of the evening, the crown princess let slip ‘that Philip would do very well for Princess Elizabeth!’ an idea now of long-standing, and one on which the beleaguered Greek royal family was evidently pinning high hopes.
Philip’s presence in Egypt, however, inspired more than a minor indiscretion from a relative. On 23 August, according to Lampson, Lord Mountbatten, now Supreme Allied Commander in South East Asia, arrived in Cairo by air and proceeded to unfold a most extraordinary cloak-and-dagger tale. The purpose of his mission, Mountbatten explained as they drove to the embassy from the aerodrome, was to arrange for Prince Philip, ‘being a very promising officer in the British Navy,’ to apply for British nationality. Gravely, Mountbatten explained that King George VI had become concerned about the depleted numbers of his close relatives, and believed that, if Philip became properly British, ‘he should be an additional asset to the British Royal Family and a great help to them in carrying out their royal functions’. It was therefore his intention, he continued, to sound out Philip, and then the king of Greece, about his proposition. In the course of the same day, both were sounded, together with the crown prince, and all three agreed. Early that afternoon, a satisfied Mountbatten left by aeroplane for Karachi to resume his Command.
What should we make of this very curious account? Mountbatten’s explanation for his ‘soundings’ is obviously unconvincing – the one thing the British Monarchy did not need was functional help from a young foreign royal, let alone a Greek one, just because he happened to be on the market. The only way that Philip could be ‘an additional asset’ to the Windsors was by marrying into them, and this, as Lascelles’s note the previous April shows, he by now wished to do. It seems much more likely that Mountbatten’s mission was part of a considered plan, aimed at remoulding Philip for the requirements of the position both uncle and nephew wished him to hold. To make such an objective obtainable, Philip needed to be, not so much British, but non-Greek, in view of the unsavoury connections of his own dynasty. In short, the Egyptian whistle-stop visit was an opening move. Such an explanation is consistent with the behaviour of Lord Mountbatten over the next two or three years, as he bent ears and pulled strings in Buckingham Palace, Westminster and Whitehall, at every opportunity. So great, indeed, was Mountbatten’s determination on his nephew’s behalf, that at one point Prince Philip was moved to chide him gently for almost forcing him ‘to do the wooing by proxy’.
The wooing proceeded apace. There were meetings between Philip and Elizabeth at Buckingham Palace, and also at Coppins, the home of the Kents, as the ubiquitous Channon discovered when he inspected the visitors’ book there in October 1944.
The problem from the start was not the Prince’s courtship, but the British Government, concerned about its wartime Balkan diplomacy, and the hesitation of the Princess’s parents. Despite Mountbatten’s bold claim to Lampson in August that the British King was behind the naturalization initiative, nearly six months elapsed before Buckingham Palace made even tentative inquiries at the Home Office on Philip’s behalf. ‘The King asked me recently what steps would have to be taken to enable Prince Philip of Greece (Louis Mountbatten’s nephew) to become a British subject,’ Sir Alan Lascelles wrote to the relevant official in March 1945. The King, he explained, did not want the matter dealt with officially yet: he only wished to know ‘how it could be most easily and expeditiously handled’ at an appropriate time.
In August, Lascelles went to see the Permanent Secretary at the Home Office, at the King’s behest, observing crustily, ‘I suspect there may be a matrimonial nigger in the woodpile.’
The question of Philip’s naturalization, however, only became a matter for political discussion at the highest level in October 1945, by which time Greek politics, and the Greek royal family’s embroilment, had become even more tangled. The Prime Minister, Foreign Secretary and Home Secretary now considered the proposal put to them by the Palace but, faced with the prospect of stirring a hornet’s nest, postponed a decision. The danger, it was explained to the King, was that such a step would be interpreted in Greece as support for the Greek royalists. Alternatively, given the feverish nature of politics in the Balkan peninsula, it might be taken ‘as a sign that the future prospects of the Greek Monarchy are admitted to be dark,’ and that Greek royals were scurrying for safety abroad. In view of these competing risks, Attlee suggested that the question should be left until after elections and a plebiscite had been held in Greece the following year.
When Prince Philip returned from the Far East early in 1946, the problem acquired a new urgency. Philip’s undemanding peacetime job, as a member of staff of a naval training establishment in North Wales, provided ample opportunity for frequent visits to Buckingham Palace, where his charm worked, not only on Princess Elizabeth, but on Crawfie, who found him a breath of fresh air in the stuffy Court, ‘a forthright and completely natural young man, given to say what he thought’. Above all, he could talk to Elizabeth as no outsider had ever dared to do before. Soon, she was taking more trouble over her appearance, and began to play the hit record ‘People Will Say We’re in Love,’ from the musical Oklahoma! incessantly on the gramophone.
In May, in an atmosphere of continuing uncertainty, Philip went to Salem for the second marriage of his sister Tiny, whom he had not seen for nine years, and whose first husband had been killed in the war. He told her about his relationship with Princess Elizabeth. ‘He was thinking about getting engaged,’ Tiny recalls. ‘Uncle Dickie was being helpful.’
There was as yet no engagement, official or unofficial. The real reason for Philip’s request for naturalization was coyly avoided in official memoranda – though the involvement of senior members of the Government indicated that it was known or suspected. Publicly, a pretence had to be kept up. If the Prince and Princess were present at the same party, they did not dance together, as a precaution.
However, there were clues which led to leaks. The addition of Philip’s name to the guest list for Balmoral in 1946, when it had not been included on the advance list, aroused much below-stairs interest at the Palace.
A pattern developed which became the norm with royal betrothals: stories in the foreign press, picked up by British popular newspapers, followed by Palace denials whose cautious nature fuelled speculation. In September 1946, after a year of mounting gossip, Sir Alan Lascelles took the novel step of repudiating reports of an engagement, but without commenting on the future possibility of one. The story finally broke, not in words but – and it was another significant precedent – on celluloid: a newsreel shot of an exchange of tender glances at the wedding of Lord Mountbatten’s daughter Patricia to Lord Brabourne, as Philip, an usher, helped Elizabeth, a bridesmaid, with her fur wrap.
A Greek plebiscite took place on 1 September 1946, restoring the Greek Monarchy: the restoration of George II, however, so far from reducing the political embarrassment of an alliance with the Greek dynasty, increased it, by highlighting King George’s legacy of authoritarian rule.
In the meantime, the issue of Philip’s national status, even his eligibility, as a foreigner, for a peacetime commission in the Royal Navy, remained unresolved. At first, he was told he could stay in the Navy;
then the Admiralty had second thoughts, and ruled that his retention depended on his naturalization.
Matters ground to a virtual halt. The obstacle continued to be the attitude of the Government but also, it had become clear, the coolness of the Court. Faced with a Kafka-like civil service, a hesitant British King, and his dubious set of advisers, Uncle Dickie decided to harass the Palace.
It did the trick. The Palace’s patience snapped. Following one particularly vigorous piece of Mountbatten lobbying, Lascelles informed the King somewhat testily that Dickie had telephoned him yet again on the subject of Prince Philip’s naturalization, and that he had suggested that, as Prince Philip’s uncle and guardian, there was no reason why he should not take up the matter himself, without reference to the Monarch.
