The Duchess of Devonshire once asked Denis Thatcher, another husband of a great woman, how he had endured for so long his often thankless role. Denis replied: “Love and loyalty, my dear!” The Duke of Edinburgh was too unsentimental to use such words, but he fulfilled his extraordinary duty with even greater distinction. A natural loner, Prince Philip nevertheless provided the monarch with companionship, support, counsel and, when necessary, solace such as she could seek nowhere else.
Critics branded him a grumpy old curmudgeon; a bully; a cold fish. They forget the supremely glamorous young naval officer that 27-year-old Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten was when, in July 1947, his engagement was announced to Princess Elizabeth, heir to the throne of an empire that still spanned the world.
He proved the best royal consort Britain is likely to have, possessed of courage, intelligence, wit, dignity and — most of the time — discipline. Although he was sometimes accused of gaffes and indiscretions, they were never about things that mattered.
He remained in spirit the naval officer of his youth — bold, direct, impatient, occasionally coarse. He was trained to the fulfilment of duty, and to bearing adversity without parading emotion. He rejected with disgust the 21st century’s enthusiasm for letting it all hang out.
Through 73 years of marriage he got on with the job of being the Queen’s husband. It is only necessary to see what troubles other outsiders have encountered on marrying into the royal family — for in 1947 he was, indeed, an outsider — to appreciate his achievement.
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Almost no man or woman is equally successful in fulfilling a public role, acting as a husband or wife and being a parent. Philip received some share of the blame for the difficulties of his children, and their marriage break-ups. The Prince of Wales, especially, has never concealed a sense of grievance about his upbringing.
But we, the Queen’s subjects, have almost as much cause to be grateful to Philip as to his wife for sustaining Britain’s monarchy from the mid-20th century, when television was still in its cradle, into the 21st-century internet age. The couple lived through extraordinary experiences and suffered their share of sorrows. They rubbed shoulders with giants on the world stage, of whom Winston Churchill was only the foremost.
Few people stop to consider whether the duke’s lifetime of service made him happy. He was part of our national fixtures and fittings for so long that we came to take him for granted. But it is an interesting question: whether he ever regretted his marital career choice. He was occasionally heard to confide: “My trouble is that I’ve never properly belonged anywhere.”
Prince Philip of Greece and Denmark was born on June 10, 1921, into the deeply unpopular Greek royal family, which had been borrowed from German and Danish stock. His parents were exiled from their adopted country, Greece, and so Philip, incredibly for a great-great-grandson of Queen Victoria, was born on a kitchen table in Corfu. Then his parents separated, and from the age of eight he was virtually an orphan.
His father, Prince Andrew, led a sad and dissolute life in Monte Carlo, having been condemned to death in absentia by a Greek revolutionary court; his mother, Princess Alice, was immured in a Swiss sanatorium, suffering from “paranoid schizophrenia” and religious delusions. Philip did not see her again until he was 15. He did not even receive a birthday card from her.
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His school fees, first at Cheam preparatory school in Berkshire and then at the famously rugged Gordonstoun in Scotland, were largely paid for by Sir Harold Wernher, one of the richest men in Britain, who was related by marriage to Philip’s Mountbatten cousins.
At school he was seldom visited by any of his relations. In the holidays he was parcelled out around the palaces and country houses of the family. His four sisters had all married German princelings, so his summers were usually spent at their colossal piles. In England the Mountbattens and Wernhers took him in.
Those who are born royal share a sense of remoteness from lesser mortals, a sense that they are so different from the rest of us that the usual rules of behaviour do not apply to them, a delusion that sometimes harms them. The Duke of Edinburgh, by contrast, never forgot his troubled, rackety childhood. It created a toughness that armoured him against the slings and arrows of adversity, but perhaps also imbued him with an exaggerated faith in the virtue of rigid upper lips.
Contrary to the allegations of his critics, when the four royal children were in their nursery, Philip spent more time with them than did their mother. Later, however, and especially when the Prince and Princess of Wales were competing to lay bare their souls, the duke is reported to have said: “Why can’t they just shut up and get on with it, the way we did?” At which some of the Queen’s subjects — especially we oldies — gave a cheer.
He was much the most intelligent of the last century’s British royals, the first since Prince Albert to read voraciously — especially history. A couple of years ago I received a stern letter from his private secretary saying HRH had instructed him to point out that in one of my books about the Second World War I mentioned the duke visiting a hotel in Ireland in 1939. The true date was 1946. Whew. Even in extreme old age he did not miss much.
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It is often remarked that he was brought to Britain, and sent to Dartmouth in 1938, because he was being groomed for marriage to Princess Elizabeth. It is true that there was only a very small pool of credible partners for her, headed by a couple of British dukes’ sons.
By 1947, when the couple became engaged, any royal husband needed to have had a reasonably “good war”. Philip had achieved this, receiving a mention in dispatches for his service at the Battle of Cape Matapan in the Mediterranean in March 1941. Yet the marriage could never have happened had not Elizabeth fallen in love with him: in 1939, then a Dartmouth cadet, he escorted her, aged 13, around the Royal Naval College. Beyond his pay he was almost penniless. He boasted few personal possessions, or even clothes.
His astonishing good looks were such as few women, especially of that generation, could resist. He also possessed energy, wit and a fierce competitiveness that was manifested not only in the navy but later as a yachtsman, pilot, polo player, sporting shot and carriage driver.
In his young days he was an enthusiastic partygoer. King George VI’s private secretary, Tommy Lascelles, who opposed the princess’s marriage, dismissed Philip with characteristic cruelty as “rough, ill-mannered, uneducated — and would probably not be faithful”. After the wedding Lascelles was foremost among the Buckingham Palace courtiers who delighted in heaping snubs on him.
Sir John Wheeler-Bennett, who would become George VI’s biographer, wrote that he had “great shrewdness and charm, but is a German Junker at bottom. Laughs too loudly at bad jokes; talks too loud; airs his opinions too much.”
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The old guard at the Palace would have preferred a consort from a more impressive family background, and so perhaps would George VI. In 1947, however, they could scarcely bring forward a candidate from the ranks of German princelings. If not Philip, then who?
Moreover Princess Elizabeth adored him, and showed no interest in any other man. It is unlikely that she has ever (beyond flashes of exasperation such as every wife experiences) regretted her choice of husband, though not blind to his limitations. More than once over the years she was heard to exclaim: “Oh Philip, do shut up! You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
As for her husband, what persuaded him to embrace the future Queen? To accept perpetual public subordination, then so unfashionable? Elizabeth the dancing partner, the date — if such words are appropriate to any royal courtship — was inseparable from Elizabeth the future Queen, mistress of vast possessions and heiress to the homage of millions. Philip must have determined that the sacrifice of his freedom of choice, acceptance of attendance at the longest fancy-dress party in history, was worth making to become partner of the most famous woman on earth. In that sense, his future chafing about the frustrations of his position were overdone. These were inevitable from the moment that he became engaged to Elizabeth.
Some courtiers were alarmed by the conspicuous strength of character he displayed thereafter, and would have slept more easily had the future Queen chosen somebody more biddable.
Her fiancé became exasperated by the proprietorial attitude adopted by his uncle, Lord Mountbatten, who not merely behaved as if he had contrived the match, but seemed determined to orchestrate the wedding. Philip would have none of this, writing to the old show-off: “I’m not being rude, but it is apparent that you like the idea of being the General Manager of this little show, and I am rather afraid that she [Elizabeth] might not take to the idea as docilely as I do.” Mountbatten in later years exercised more influence on Prince Charles, his great-nephew, than on Philip, who could see him coming.
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The new Duke of Edinburgh, as he became, emphasised his determination to do things in his own way by wearing an old uniform to the royal garden party after his engagement was announced, rather than rush out to acquire a smart new one. It was once said of Philip: “He’s 150 per cent male, and that’s his trouble, really.” Gordonstoun and the navy had formed him. He was practical, imbued with the humour of warships’ mess decks, restless, curious, with a passionate interest in birds and animals.
His close friends of those days were men’s men, headed by the Marquis of Milford Haven and Commander Mike Parker, an Australian who became his private secretary. Both were former naval officers, who often went with him to the weekly meetings of the Thursday Club, at the top of Wheeler’s restaurant in Soho.
The TV series The Crown portrayed girls providing the entertainment at those affairs. I am the last person left alive who once attended a Thursday Club meeting, although not when Philip was present. The alcohol consumed would have floated a frigate, but in truth there was nary a woman in sight. Other members such as the actors Peter Ustinov and James Robertson Justice, the Daily Express editor Arthur Christiansen, the harmonica player Larry Adler, the society photographer Baron and my father, a magazine editor, merely liked to talk and laugh as riotously as did Philip, Parker and David Milford Haven.
It was a blow to the prince when, in 1951, he relinquished command of a frigate, and faced the end of his seagoing career. His father-in-law, George VI, was only 55. Philip might have expected to remain for decades a naval officer before his wife assumed the throne.
Instead, of course, because of the king’s ill health, Elizabeth’s husband found himself accompanying his wife on a Commonwealth tour, which had scarcely begun when they learnt, in Kenya, of George VI’s death. At that instant Philip became a gilded prisoner in palaces, an accessory to the monarch, with all the frustrations and constraints inseparable from his role.
If he had remained a naval officer, would his high abilities have taken him to the top, as he expected? Not necessarily. Before he hoisted his flag, his impatience and intolerance of fools — few admirals are celebrated for their brains — could well have scuttled him. As it was, he accepted that, once the Queen took the throne, his duties as her public companion made it impossible for him to sustain a naval career.
His wife wrote euphorically to her father soon after the wedding: “Philip is an angel — he is so kind and thoughtful, and living with him and having him around all the time is just perfect.” Though there were rough passages later in their relationship, as in all marriages, the Queen and the throne have profited mightily from the fact that Prince Philip was, above all else, a strong man. Had Princess Elizabeth married a cipher, as some courtiers wished, such a husband could not have provided the support she has needed amid the supreme loneliness that her pomp and circumstance impose.
It is the nature of royalty to be obliged to spend countless hours displaying patience and courtesy towards bores and stuffed shirts. Though Philip attended hundreds of public occasions each year, this aspect of his duty sometimes provoked explosions of wrath. He never forgave a Foreign Office official who obliged him to extend a refuelling stop in Bahrain, during a long flight to Australia, to pay formal calls on a clutch of Gulf potentates. When the diplomat retired, the Queen suggested him for an honour. Philip blew up, denouncing the unfortunate man as “the biggest shit even the Foreign Office has ever produced!”. His victim got an honour anyway, but the prince had a long memory and short fuse for those he branded as knaves.
He also bridled angrily when required to accept that his descendants could not bear his name. Winston Churchill, as prime minister, decreed that Prince Charles, and his subsequent siblings, should be named Windsor, not Mountbatten. “I am nothing but a bloody amoeba,” Philip is said to have protested. “I am the only man in the country not allowed to give his name to his own children.” Only in 1960 was this edict partially reversed, by an order in council authorising the name of Mountbatten-Windsor for the royal children.
He became a punctilious, thoroughly engaged patron of many charities, notably the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award, an inspirational youth achievement programme created in 1956 with the help of Sir John Hunt, leader of the successful 1953 ascent of Everest, which reflected Philip’s eagerness for adventure.
One of the greatest assets that he brought to the monarchy was his passion for science, technology and innovation, such as the Queen’s family had never addressed. He was sometimes mocked by the media for his public urgings for the British to work harder and to embrace modernity. He avowed harsh truths about what was wrong with us, which occasionally ran him into trouble.
He disliked and despised politicians even more than journalists, and sometimes harangued visiting foreign statesmen in a fashion that dismayed their accompanying officials. Lapses into arrogance and boorishness made him enemies, some of them important.
With the passage of time, as old male comrades died or fell away, he most often confided in a handful of close female friends. His life was driven ever more single-mindedly by the commitment to support the Queen in sickness and health, good times and bad. He was also, for many years, an energetic and effective manager of the royal estates, the Queen’s private interests.
If he had been less forceful and articulate, he might have ruffled fewer feathers. But his failings and follies were trivial and transient alongside his accomplishments. He was too intelligent not to have been troubled by the sorrows that have afflicted his children’s lives.
He had to bear a share of responsibility for the failures of communication that have been a curse of the royal family in their toughest times. The Queen has always disliked confronting unwelcome realities, or discussing them with her children. Prince Philip seems to have been unable to help her do so.
Yet to seek from this remarkable, sometimes lonely man born into the early 20th century the qualities of some ideal 21st-century husband and father would have been absurd.
The British people can readily forgive Prince Philip for what he was not. We, as well as his wife, our monarch, have cause to feel much gratitude for what he was.
Which of us would ever have taken the job? Or done it a thousandth part so well?
