Several days before the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh marked their 70th wedding anniversary with dinner for family and close friends at Windsor Castle in November 2017, they attended a considerably smaller private gathering in London. At 96, Philip had retired from public life and was dividing his time between Windsor Castle and Wood Farm at Sandringham. He hadn’t been expected at the intimate dinner with his 91-year-old wife but decided at the last minute to attend.
By anyone else’s standards, the guest list was grand, including King Harald V of Norway and Queen Sonja, King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands and Queen Maxima. But the atmosphere was cosy and light-hearted. At the end of the dinner, the Queen got into her limousine, bound for Buckingham Palace, and the duke climbed into his car for Windsor Castle. Suddenly a window in Philip’s car rolled down and he shouted to his wife: “GOODBYE!” She rolled down hers and responded with equal vigour: “GOODBYE!”
Such moments are seldom glimpsed by those outside the Queen and Duke of Edinburgh’s circle. The enduring public image was typified during her Diamond Jubilee weekend in 2012, when they stood on the deck of the royal barge for nearly four hours in the rain. Then aged 86 and 90, they showed fortitude as well as gratitude to the 1.2 million people along the Thames.
It was everything that symbolised the royal couple. They were tough, stoic, duty-bound, a team. Yet if the Queen was constant and calm, Philip was a spritz of vinegar with his irreverent and sometimes caustic comments. He always said that “supporting the Queen” was his primary purpose as her consort, and he held true to this for nearly seven extraordinary decades.
Princess Elizabeth could have chosen from what her friend Lady Anne Glenconner called “a whole battalion of lively young men”, English aristocrats with vast landholdings and wealth. But at the unlikely age of 13, she fell in love when she first spent an afternoon with 18-year-old Prince Philip of Greece. He was a naval officer in training and her third cousin. He had very little money but he was strikingly handsome, confident, intelligent, breezy and energetic.
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Despite a protective shell formed during a rootless childhood when he was neglected for long periods by his divorced parents, “Philip had a capacity for love which was waiting to be unlocked”, said their mutual cousin, Patricia Mountbatten. Elizabeth “would not have been a difficult person to love”, she added. “She was beautiful, amusing and gay. She was fun to take dancing or go to theatre.” Her curly brown hair framed her porcelain complexion, with cheeks that the photographer Cecil Beaton described as “sugar-pink”, vivid blue eyes, an ample mouth that widened into a dazzling smile, and an infectious laugh.
They were married on November 20, 1947, and spent their honeymoon at Birkhall, the 18th-century lodge on Balmoral. “Philip is an angel,” Elizabeth wrote to her mother, “he is so kind and thoughtful.” He wrote to his mother-in-law that “my ambition is to weld the two of us into a new combined existence that will not only be able to withstand the shocks directed at us but will also have a positive existence for the good”.
To a remarkable degree, that wish came true. They only had a few years together before she assumed the burdens of the crown at 25. Their time in Malta from 1949 to 1951 was the closest she ever came to an ordinary existence — socialising with officers’ wives, going to the hair salon, even carrying her own cash, although shopkeepers noted that “she was slow in handling money”.
It was Philip who broke the news to his wife in 1952 that her father had died at the age of 56 and she was the Queen. In the beginning, Philip was viewed with suspicion by the old-style courtiers around his wife. He was excluded from the substance of the Queen’s official life, with no access to state papers in her daily boxes. But he carved out a significant role for himself as a patron of more than 800 different charities and advocate for causes from wildlife conservation to youth fitness.
If her advisers brought a question to her on a matter outside her head of state role, she asked them first to find out what Philip thought. Her approach to problems was to look at the big picture, while Philip drilled down and got to the heart of an issue — what one of her advisers called “a defence staff rigour”. Her advisers knew that if her husband was happy with a solution, she probably would be as well. Philip saw the potential of television and encouraged the Queen to use it, even tutoring her on how to read from an autocue for her first televised speech in 1957.
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On their trips around Britain and overseas, they perfected a choreography of turns and cues that appeared effortless. When the Queen needed a boost, he was there with a humorous aside: “Don’t look so sad, sausage.”
Yet they were not, according to their cousin Lady Pamela Hicks, “sweet old Darby and Joan by any means. They were both very strong characters.” Sometimes the Queen even went to unusual lengths to avoid confrontations with her prickly husband. Tony Parnell, for 30 years the foreman of her home at Sandringham, recalled a time when Philip’s dressing room badly needed to be repainted. “On Her Majesty’s instruction,” he said, “we had to match the dirty paintwork so he wouldn’t know. I don’t think he ever knew.”
In 2013 they celebrated their 66th wedding anniversary in typically low-key fashion at the London home of the Queen’s cousin, Lady Elizabeth Anson. She used solar-powered Queen statuettes to hold the place cards for the guests, marking the Queen’s seat with a toy bobble-head corgi. Surrounded by their oldest friends and extended family, the royal couple, aged 87 and 92, laughed like newlyweds.
Sally Bedell Smith is author of Elizabeth the Queen, published by Penguin
