by Kitty Kelley
Cobina Sr. kept writing to the young Prince long after her daughter had discarded him to marry Beaudette, an heir to an automobile fortune. The resilient Prince, still serving in the Royal Navy, resumed correspondence with his cousin Princess Elizabeth of England. But for the rest of his life, he, like his father, would be susceptible to the charms of actresses.
“At that time, most girls had someone they wrote to at sea or at the front,” recalled Elizabeth’s governess, Marion (“Crawfie”) Crawford. “I think at the start she liked to be able to say that she, too, was sending off an occasional parcel and writing letters to a man who was fighting for his country.”
One day Crawfie noticed Philip’s photograph on the Princess’s mantelpiece.
“Is that altogether wise?” Crawfie asked. “A number of people come and go. You know what that will lead to. People will begin all sorts of gossip about you.”
“Oh, dear, I suppose they will,” the Princess replied.
The picture disappeared a few days later. In its place was another one of Philip with a bushy blond mustache and beard covering half his face.
“There you are, Crawfie,” said the Princess. “I defy anyone to recognize who that is. He’s completely incognito in that one.”
Rumors started anyway, and soon the backstairs gossip ended up in a newspaper item that it was Prince Philip of Greece whose photograph graced the bedroom of Princess Elizabeth. Uncle Dickie was delighted.
“Dear Philip” and “Dear Lilibet” letters crisscrossed from Windsor Castle to destroyers in the Mediterranean, the Straits of Bonifacio, Algiers, Malta, Suez, Ceylon, and Australia. The midshipman, who had formally renounced his claim to the Greek throne, was promoted in 1942 from the rank of sublieutenant to lieutenant. The next year Philip returned to England and did not go back to sea for four months. During that time he was invited to Windsor Castle for Christmas. Years later he said he accepted the invitation “only because I’d nowhere particular to go.” He told risqué jokes to Queen Mary, who pronounced him “a very bright young man.” He regaled King George VI with reports of German aircraft dive-bombing his ship off Sicily and bragged about dodging mines and torpedoes, accentuating his part in helping win a great victory. “It was a highly entertaining account,” the King said later. Knowing that Philip had been cited for valor, the King had listened attentively, but there was something about the brash young man with his loud laugh and blunt manner that irritated him. As an overprotective father, he could not envision his beloved Lilibet marrying any man, and certainly not one as rough as Philip. Even worse, he wasn’t rich and didn’t dress like a gentleman. “His wardrobe is ghastly,” said the King. “Simply ghastly.”
Lord Mountbatten’s valet, John Dean, agreed. “Prince Philip did not seem to have much in the way of civilian clothing,” he recalled. “His civilian wardrobe was, in fact, scantier than that of many a bank clerk…. I think he had to manage more or less on his naval pay. He did not bring much with him when he came to London, sometimes only a razor…. He did not have his own hairbrushes…. Either he was not too well looked after in the navy, or he was careless, for often he did not have a clean shirt. At night, after he had gone to bed, I washed his shirt and socks and had them ready for him in the morning. I also did his mending.”
Philip’s father, sixty-two years old, died in 1944 in the arms of his rich mistress. He had not seen his wife or son for five years. Penniless, Prince Andrew left his only son an estate that consisted of a battered suitcase filled with two moth-eaten suits, a worn leather frame, and a set of ivory shaving brushes. Philip did not get around to collecting his meager inheritance until 1946. Then he had the suits altered to fit him so he would have civilian clothes to wear when not in uniform. But the shiny gabardine hand-me-downs did not impress His Majesty, who counted a man without tweeds or plus fours as a man without breeding. Elizabeth had insisted that her father invite Philip to join them for a grouse shoot at Windsor, but the King balked because Philip did not own plus fours. Philip didn’t know what they were. The King explained that the trousers were so called because they were four inches longer than ordinary knickerbockers—the baggy knee pants that golfers wore.
“Then he can wear a pair of yours,” Elizabeth said to her father.
The King grudgingly agreed. He still retained reservations about the young man who never wore pajamas or bedroom slippers, had no formal clothes, and was unembarrassed by his scuffed shoes. The King felt that Prince Philip had been reared as a commoner, not as a royal.
The King’s private secretary, Sir Alan (Tommy) Lascelles, dismissed Philip as a hooligan. “He was rough, ill-mannered, uneducated, and would probably not be faithful,” he said, according to writer Philip Ziegler.
The monarch marked a man by what he wore and could not understand his lack of interest in buttons and bows. While Philip was always courteous and deferential to “Uncle Bertie and Aunt Elizabeth,” he was still too assertive and familiar to suit the King. As far as the Queen was concerned, Philip made himself too much at home; she rebuked him several times for ordering the servants around. Neither she nor her husband realized then that their gawky seventeen-year-old daughter had marked the young man for marriage.
“I realized they were courting long before it got in the newspapers,” said Charles Mellis, who for twelve years was chef on the royal train. “I saw something of the way they laughed, teased, and looked at each other while traveling together. And I shall never forget the time I heard the Queen Mother call out to them, ‘Now, you two, stop kicking each other under the table and behave properly.’ ”
Princess Margaret teased her sister unmercifully about having a crush on Philip, but the King and Queen seemed oblivious. They noticed that Elizabeth was growing up in 1944 when they attended a small dinner dance given by the Duchess of Kent. There they saw Philip dancing almost every dance with their elder daughter and being photographed helping her with her fur coat. But they never considered the prospect of marriage until shortly after Elizabeth’s eighteenth birthday, when Uncle Dickie nudged his cousin King George of Greece to broach the subject with her father. King George VI turned on Mountbatten, saying he “was moving too fast.” Later, in a letter to his mother, Queen Mary, he wrote:
We both think she is far too young for that now. She has never met any young men of her own age…. I like Philip. He is intelligent, has a good sense of humour and thinks about things in the right way…. We are going to tell George that P. had better not think any more about it at present.
Philip’s plotting uncle was not to be discouraged. He seized the promise implied by “at present” and began campaigning to get Philip to switch his citizenship and religion so he would be perfectly situated for a royal marriage later. With British troops engaged on the side of the Greek government in the civil war, Mountbatten was told that making Philip a British subject might be misinterpreted and indicate British support for the Greek royalists or, conversely, be misconstrued as a sign that Britain regarded the royalist cause as lost and was giving Philip some sort of sanctuary. So the issue had to be postponed until the Greek general election and plebiscite on the monarchy had been held in March 1946.
Mindful of the animosity toward his own German roots, Mountbatten worried about Philip’s guttural surname—Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glucksburg—and his ties to his sisters and their German husbands, who supported Hitler’s Third Reich. Philip was especially close to his brother-in-law, Berthold, the Margrave of Baden. Mountbatten also fretted about Prince Philip of Hesse, for whom Philip had been named. That German relation was Hitler’s personal messenger and functioned so effectively for the Führer that he was awarded an honorary generalship in the Storm Troopers. Until his death in 1943, another of Philip’s uncles—Prince Christopher of Hesse—was the head of the secret phone-tapping service in Göring’s research office; this unit eventually became the Gestapo, the Nazi’s secret state police.
Mountbatten was determined to put as much distance as possible between Philip
and his German roots. The wily uncle knew how crucial it was for his nephew to be accepted by the British establishment, so he wrote to the British Commissioner of Oaths, saying that Philip had lived most of his life in England and joined the Royal Navy before the war with the intention of making it his life’s career. “He has been brought up as an Englishman who rides well, shoots well, and plays all games such as football with more than usual ability,” wrote Mountbatten.
He then wrote to Philip, saying that he was proceeding “full steam ahead” on the naturalization process so that Philip would be “totally acceptable” to pursue his romance with Princess Elizabeth. Philip pleaded with his uncle to slow down.
“Please, I beg of you,” he wrote, “not too much advice in an affair of the heart or I shall be forced to do the wooing by proxy.”
Philip knew how upset the King and Queen were about the article that had appeared in The New York Times entitled “Marriage à la Mode” and asserting that the most likely candidate for the hand of Princess Elizabeth was Prince Philip of Greece. The story had been officially denied by the Palace. But factory workers in England, depressed by six years of war, were starved for romance. When their future Queen made her first public appearance after the unconditional surrender of Germany in 1945, the crowds startled her with their boisterous shouts: “Where’s Philip?” “How’s Philip?” “Are you going to marry Philip?”
“It was horrible,” she later told her sister.
“Poor Lilibet,” said Margaret. “Nothing of your own. Not even your love affair.”
FIVE
By 1945 the House of Windsor had been remodeled. The Windsors had repainted their dark German foundation with bright British colors and fashioned the exterior with an attractive new facade. The false front concealed the family flaws and allowed the renovated German house to look decidedly English—so English that by the end of World War II, the dynasty designed by dodgery was never more popular. Having removed itself from politics and no longer in danger of being damaged by factional disputes, the institution stood as a model of respectability. The monarchy, personified by the royal family, symbolized duty, decorum, and decency.
After the Allies crushed Nazi Germany, Britons discarded their courageous wartime leader Prime Minister Churchill, but they embraced their shy little monarch. On the day Germany surrendered, crowds surrounded Buckingham Palace, cheering and shouting for their beloved King and Queen. The royal family, which embodied Britain’s sense of high moral purpose, had become the center of life in the United Kingdom. As the royal couple stepped out onto the balcony to wave, a voice in the throng shouted: “Thank God for a good King!” Deeply moved, George VI stepped forward and stammered: “Th-th-thank God for a g-g-good people!”
With the war finally over, the King wanted to make up for lost time with his family, especially with his elder daughter. He planned picnics at Sandringham and shoots, hunts, and deer stalks at Balmoral so she could take part in his favorite pursuits. Elizabeth enjoyed spending time with her father, but the nineteen-year-old heir presumptive, who had been confined to Windsor Castle for six years, longed to sample the swing music of London nightclubs.
The dutiful daughter was growing up. She had her own lady-in-waiting, her own bedroom suite, and her own chauffeur-driven Daimler. She had never gone to school or visited a foreign country and had yet to draw her own bath, prepare a meal, or pay a bill; but she was selecting her own clothes. While her future subjects were still restricted to clothing coupons and wearing skirts made of curtains and trousers cut down from overcoats, she had her own couturier and was ordering strapless satin evening gowns.
“I’d like a car of my own, too,” she told a friend, “but there’s so damn much family talk about which make I must have that I don’t think I’ll ever get one.”
Everything pertaining to Elizabeth was subject to intense discussion. Her father was not a man of initiative. Afraid of putting the wrong foot forward, he worried constantly about appearances and what people might think. He did not feel secure about making a decision until he had consulted all his courtiers. His wife, who rarely worried about anything, could not always make up her mind about what was best for their older daughter. So whether it was a car, a fur coat, or a new horse for Elizabeth, it was never a casual decision for her parents.
“They wanted the best for her,” recalled Crawfie, her governess, “and it is never easy for parents to decide what that best is.”
The only topic the King and Queen quickly reached agreement on was Philip of Greece. They felt their daughter was far too interested in the navy lieutenant, but only because she had not met any other men. So they started organizing tea dances, dinner parties, theater outings, and formal balls so she could meet the eligible sons of the aristocracy. They also invited the single military officers stationed near Windsor Castle. Elizabeth pronounced the chinless aristocrats as “pompous, stuffy, and boring,” and her sister dismissed the officers as afflicted with “bad teeth, thick lips, and foul-smelling breath.” Her parents’ diversionary tactic was not lost on her grandmother Queen Mary, who referred to the cluster of young officers suddenly popping up at the Palace as “the Body Guard.” Queen Mary’s lady-in-waiting thought the King was simply an overpossessive father who could not face the prospect of his elder daughter’s falling in love. “He’s desperate,” she said.
In 1946, when Philip returned to England, Elizabeth invited him to visit the family at Balmoral. She had not seen him for over three years. It had been Christmas of 1943 when he had chased her through the corridors of Windsor Castle, wearing a huge set of clattering false teeth that made her scream with laughter.
“I once or twice spent Christmas at Windsor, because I’d nowhere particular to go,” Philip admitted many years later. “I suppose if I’d just been a casual acquaintance, it would all have been frightfully significant. But if you’re related—I mean, I knew half the people there, they were all relations—it isn’t so extraordinary to be on kind of family relationship terms with somebody. You don’t necessarily have to think about marriage.”
At the time, Elizabeth had delighted in her cousin’s* juvenile antics and practical jokes, especially when he offered her nuts from a can and a toy snake popped out or when he handed her dinner rolls and made what she called “rude intestinal noises.” She had laughed so hard at the time, she couldn’t continue eating. Drawn to Philip’s broad slapstick humor and his handsome good looks, she could hardly wait to see him again. She began asking her governess about love and marriage.
“What, Crawfie,” she asked, “makes a person fall in love?”
“I would try to explain to her the deep common interests that cannot only first draw a man and a woman together immediately, but hold them together for life,” said the governess. “The Princess listened attentively.”
“I guess it really started in earnest at Balmoral [in 1946],” Philip said, recalling the pretty twenty-year-old Princess, who still laughed at his jokes.
“I still recall the occasions when Prince Philip was an honored guest of Princess Lilibet—as we all called her—at those after-the-theater parties when he was on leave from the navy,” recalled René Roussin, the former royal chef. “Then I would be asked—as a special request from the Princess—to send up some lobster patties, of which Prince Philip was especially fond.”
After Philip had spent several days with the royal family at their Scottish castle, the King felt he had overstayed his welcome. “The boy must go south,” he told his favorite equerry, RAF Wing Commander Peter Townsend. So Philip left. He later invited Elizabeth to visit him at the Kensington Palace apartment of his aunt the Marchioness of Milford Haven and the Chester Street home of the Mountbattens. He also took Elizabeth to visit Mountbatten’s older daughter, Patricia, and her new husband, John Brabourne, at their modest cottage in Kent.
“It was an absolutely foreign way of life for her,” recalled Brabourne. “She had never lived that sort of existence, and she was enchanted, though her maid
could not believe it when she saw where we lived.”
Philip also took Elizabeth to Coppins, the home of the Duchess of Kent, in Buckinghamshire, where he had spent many of his shore leaves. The Greek Duchess, known as Marina, who had been imported to marry the homosexual Duke of Kent, was one of Philip’s favorite relatives. After several visits to Coppins, Elizabeth trusted her enough to confide, “Daddy doesn’t want me to see too much of Philip or anyone, so please don’t tell him.” The Duchess never did.
Philip’s cousin Alexandra, who knew about the couple’s secret visits to Coppins, remembered his passion for Cobina Wright Jr. and wondered if he was simply toying with Elizabeth.
“I only hope Philip isn’t just flirting with her,” she told Marina. “He’s so casual that he flirts without realizing it.”
“I think his flirting days are over,” replied the Duchess. “He would be the one to be hurt now if it was all just a flirtation or if it is not to be. One thing I’m sure about, those two would never do anything to hurt each other.”
Reflecting on their courtship many years later, Philip said: “I suppose one thing led to another. I suppose I began to think about it seriously… oh, let me think now, when I got back in 1946 and went to Balmoral. It was probably then that we, that it became, you know, that we began to think about it seriously, and even talk about it….”
After spending time at Balmoral in August 1946, Philip proposed and Elizabeth accepted—secretly. This was the first time she had acted on her own without first consulting her parents. She then caused the first real argument she ever had with them by insisting she wanted to marry the penniless Greek Prince. She knew that the Royal Marriages Act of 1772 specified that descendants of King George II had to get the permission of the monarch to marry and that permission had to be “declared in council” before the marriage could take place. Elizabeth wanted her father’s permission, but he did not want to give it. He confided his discomfort to his equerry, who shared the King’s opinion of the brash young man and agreed that the King should delay making any decision.