by Kitty Kelley
Elizabeth’s only ally within the royal family was her grandmother Queen Mary, whose arranged marriage to King George V had grown into a loving union that had produced five children. So when Prince Philip was ridiculed in her presence, she was not receptive. She frowned when he was derided as a product of “a crank school with theories of complete social equality where the boys were taught to mix with all and sundry.” Queen Mary said nothing and stared straight ahead.
“What sort of background would this be for a son-in-law to the King?” she was asked.
“Useful,” she said curtly.
The cautious King consulted his courtiers about the possibility of his daughter’s marrying Philip of Greece, and the courtiers reported back the results of a Sunday Pictorial magazine poll, showing that 40 percent of Britain’s class-conscious readers did not favor the marriage because Philip was “a foreigner.”
A century earlier, when Prince Albert came to England as Queen Victoria’s husband, the courtiers called him “that German.” They called his aides “German spies.” Now, more than one hundred years later, the courtiers exhibited a similar xenophobia. They called Philip “Phil the Greek.”
Philip labeled himself as Scandinavian, “particularly Danish,” he told an interviewer. “We spoke English at home… but then the conversation would go into French. Then it went into German on occasion because we had German cousins. If you couldn’t think of a word in one language, you tended to go off in another.”
The daughter of the Duchess of Marlborough remembered her brothers mocking Philip behind his back for not being an aristocrat. “He did not know the country life,” she said. “He came from the other side of the tracks, which attracted Elizabeth. That and the fact that he was dead glamorous, absolutely drop dead glamorous. Although he was never quite digested into the British establishment, he decided in time to become just as pretentious, dull, and stuffy as the rest of us, while pushing his own personality uphill.”
Elizabeth stood fast against her father’s disapproval. She argued that she hadn’t asked to be born and that if she, as an accident of birth, had to spend her life doing her duty as Queen, the least he could do was let her marry the man she loved. “After all, you married Mummy,” she said. “And she wasn’t even royalty. Philip is.” The King sighed and said he felt Elizabeth was too young to get married. The Princess invoked Queen Victoria. “She was only twenty years old when she married Prince Albert, and look how happy that marriage was.”
The King was not persuaded. As a father, he fretted about Philip’s commitment to fidelity. He had been apprised of some of the young lieutenant’s shore leaves with his navy buddy Michael Parker and their visits to brothels in Alexandria; he did not like the sound of Philip’s continuing relationship with his childhood friend Helene Foufounis Cordet, and he heartily disapproved of Philip’s midnight crawls through London’s West End with his cousin David Milford Haven. But the King was growing anxious over his daughter’s increasing willfulness and determination to marry Philip. She knew that because she was heir presumptive, her marriage required her father’s approval as well as that of the government and the Commonwealth. Yet she alarmed her father when she intimated that if he did not give her permission to marry Philip, she would follow the footsteps of her uncle, the Duke of Windsor, who abdicated to marry the person he loved.
The Princess’s apparent willingness to put love before duty was noted even by the U.S. Ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, Lewis Douglas, a close friend of the royal family. He informed the State Department in a 1947 memo:
… it was learned that Princess Elizabeth had determined to marry [Prince Philip] and declared that if objections were raised she would not hesitate to follow the example of her uncle, King Edward VIII, and abdicate. She has a firm character.
More than forty years later, one of the King’s former aides quaked at the mention of the 1936 abdication by the Duke of Windsor, which is still considered a sacrilege within royal circles. “The Princess did not threaten to do that… exactly,” the aide said in an effort to “clarify” the record. “She only indicated that she could understand the romance behind her uncle’s rationale. That’s a far cry from declaring her intention to abdicate.”
In public, Elizabeth could no longer hide her feelings. Her adoration of Philip was so obvious that rumors began circulating, prompting the foreign press to report that the couple were “informally engaged.” The British press did not dare to make such a conjecture. Still, nervous about world opinion, the King told the Palace to officially deny the report. Five such denials were issued in the fall of 1945.
After Philip proposed to Elizabeth, he applied for naturalization as Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten, RN. First he took his uncle’s advice, then his name. Years later Philip discounted his uncle’s influence. “I wasn’t madly in favour [of the name],” he told a biographer in 1971, “but in the end I was persuaded, and anyway I couldn’t think of a better alternative…. Contrary to public impression, Uncle Dickie didn’t have that much to do with the course of my life.”
Having given up his royal title, Philip next renounced the Greek Orthodox Church to join the Church of England. On December 16, 1946, The New York Times reported on the front page that “only politics, which has blighted so many royal romances, is delaying the announcement of the engagement of Princess Elizabeth, heiress to the British throne, and Prince Philip of Greece.” Again the Palace issued a denial.
The King was beside himself. Becoming increasingly irritable and bad tempered, he drank heavily from the whiskey decanter that he insisted be placed next to his plate at every dinner. His war-weary country, though, was still scraping by on rations for food and fuel. Besides these shortages, Britain was beset by another problem: with millions of military being demobilized, the ranks of the unemployed swelled. And with Winston Churchill banished in defeat, the King was forced to deal with a new Prime Minister in Clement Attlee and a Labor government that the conservative monarch considered “far too socialist.” (When someone told Churchill that Attlee was a modest man, Churchill agreed: “He has every reason to be modest.”)
The King wrote gloomily in 1946, “Food, clothes and fuel are the main topics of conversation with us all.” He grew impatient with everyone, especially his cousin Dickie Mountbatten, who strutted like a peacock after the new Labor government appointed him Viceroy of India, where he was to oversee that nation’s progress to independence. The Queen complained that Dickie was “showing off his medals again” and getting more coverage on Movietone News* than the King. Years later she would ridicule Mountbatten’s two-column entry in Who’s Who as overblown and characteristically pompous. She became especially annoyed when he insisted on having his own honors list so he could bestow knighthoods in India just as the King did in England. She expressed her objection to Prime Minister Attlee, who agreed with her. “No one in a century has had such powers,” Attlee said, “but he insisted as a precondition to accepting the job.” As irritated as the King was, he felt that his biggest problem was not Mountbatten but his nephew Philip and the problems he posed as consort to the future Queen of England.
His beloved daughter was balking at having to leave her secret fiancé at home to accompany her family on a ten-week tour of South Africa, which would include her twenty-first birthday. But the King insisted. The trip had been planned for four months to thank the South Africans for throwing out their Prime Minister and supporting Great Britain during the war. The King believed that the wounds splitting South Africa could be healed by the balm of royalty. As the first monarch to travel with his family, he wanted Elizabeth by his side as he opened the Union Parliament in Cape Town. Expecting a royal reception from the Africans, he decreed a ration-busting wardrobe for himself and his family, consisting of pearls and diamonds, cloths of gold, and endless yards of silk and satin, which required weeks of fittings and interminable work by dozens of seamstresses. The ordinary Briton received an annual clothing ration of 48 to 66 coupons. But the royal family r
eceived 160 extra coupons a year. For their South Africa wardrobe, they were issued 4,329 coupons. The New York Times described the result as “the most sumptuous wardrobe ever worn by British royalty.”
On her twenty-first birthday Elizabeth was to make a coming-of-age speech in which she, as the future monarch, dedicated herself to her countrymen. The speech was broadcast around the world. Dutifully she rehearsed it, but each time, she said, the solemn words made her cry:
I declare before you that my whole life, whether it be long or short, shall be devoted to your service and the service of our great Imperial Commonwealth to which we all belong.* But I shall not have strength to carry out this resolution unless you join in it with me, as I now invite you to do; I know that your support will be unfailingly given. God bless all of you who are willing to share it.
Finally, against his better judgment, the King relented. He agreed to allow his daughter to marry Philip, provided Philip, who changed his name, his nationality, and his religion, was deemed acceptable by the British establishment. His uncle quickly introduced him to Britain’s most powerful press lords, who agreed that his relationship to Queen Victoria (he, like Elizabeth, was a great-great-grandchild) and his service in the Royal Navy qualified him as suitable. Still, the King declined to announce the engagement. He ordered absolute secrecy about any future plans until after the tour of South Africa, hoping against hope that Elizabeth might change her mind. He instructed the Palace to keep denying the rumors swarming around the couple, and he demanded total discretion from Philip. He forbade him to be seen with Elizabeth in public until after the royal family returned in 1947. He had told Philip that he could not see the family off at Waterloo Station, and he could not go aboard their ship at Portsmouth to say good-bye. The King would not allow his future son-in-law to attend the bon voyage luncheon at Buckingham Palace with the royal household staff or to be at the pier to welcome the royal family home ten weeks later. He did say Philip could write his fiancée during the trip, and he allowed him to attend his engagement party with the royal family and Lord and Lady Mountbatten at their London home on Chester Street two nights before departure. There the two families secretly celebrated the announcement, which would not be made official for several months. That night the King drank heavily.
Aboard ship, the Queen took comfort in the kindness of Surgeon Rear Admiral Henry “Chippy” White, who accompanied the royal family to South Africa, where he retired the following year. “Chippy White, whose son was my uncle, was knighted for his service to the King,” said Hugh Bygott-Webb, “but I don’t think that KCVO [Knight Commander of the Victorian Order] included his affair with the King’s wife. Now, I have no absolute proof of this love affair with the Queen, who later became the Queen Mother, but their romance, accompanied by love letters, has been assumed within the family for years and years. The letters remain in the family and always will.”
In photographs taken during the South African tour, the Queen beamed while her daughter Elizabeth looked bored and distracted, except during the celebration of her twenty-first birthday on April 21, 1947, in Cape Town. Feted with salutes all day and a grand ball and fireworks in the evening, Elizabeth spent the morning opening birthday presents of extravagant proportions: a platinum brooch in the shape of a flame lily set with three hundred diamonds and paid for with one week’s pocket money collected from forty-two thousand Rhodesian schoolchildren; a pair of diamond flower-petal earrings from the members of the royal households, who barely made £1,000 ($2,000) a year; a diamond-studded badge of the Grenadier Guards, her favorite regiment, of which she was the Colonel; and from her parents a twin pair of Cartier ivy-leaf brooches covered with two thousand pavé diamonds surrounded by two five-carat diamonds in the center. The state gifts from South Africa, worth more than $1 million at the time, were equally lavish: the King received a gold box full of diamonds to put on his Garter star, and the Queen was given an engraved twenty-two-karat gold tea service. Princess Margaret received a necklace of seventeen graduated diamonds, and Elizabeth was given a silver chest containing twenty-one graduated brilliant-cut diamonds, some weighing ten carats, interspersed with baguettes.
Laden with jewels, the royal family returned to England in May 1947. But the King still wouldn’t announce his daughter’s engagement. He excluded Philip’s name from the Royal Ascot house party at Windsor Castle, but on July 8 Philip, who was teaching at the Royal Navy Petty Officers School at Kingsmoor, phoned the King. He asked permission to go to Buckingham Palace that evening to give Elizabeth a three-carat diamond engagement ring that had belonged to his mother.* The King consented and graciously invited his future son-in-law for dinner. Philip drove his sporty MG ninety-eight miles from Wiltshire to London. Two days later the engagement was announced by the same Palace spokesman who had been denying it for two years.
“We got engaged,” said Elizabeth’s dresser, Margaret “BoBo” MacDonald, on the day the betrothal was announced. So close was she to Elizabeth that she frequently talked of herself and her future sovereign as a single person. The Scotswoman, who had been with Elizabeth since she was born, would accompany her on her honeymoon and serve her morning coffee every day until BoBo died in 1993, forty-seven years later.
The wedding was set for November 20, 1947, but again over the King’s objections. Citing the coal shortage and the country’s economic collapse, he suggested a quiet ceremony at St. George’s Chapel in Windsor to minimize the expense of pomp and ceremony. But Elizabeth and her mother insisted on a big wedding. The King tried to stall the inevitable by suggesting June of the next year, when, he said, the weather would be warmer. Elizabeth said she didn’t care if it snowed: she was getting married in November.
The British press reported the engagement as the love match of the century. “This is no arranged marriage,” said the Daily Mail. “The couple is well and truly in love,” said the Daily Telegraph. Skeptical Americans did not try to dispute the matter. “The world, seeing this pretty girl and young navy officer together, will like to think of this as a love match rather than as any union dictated by politics,” declared an editorial in The New York Times.
Arranged marriages were not foreign to Philip. Until 1923 such marriages had been the rule for royalty, not the exception. Love was seldom an option, as he knew from the marriages of his parents, his two Mountbatten uncles, and all of his cousins, including Marina, the impoverished Greek Princess who had been imported to England to straighten out the bisexual Duke of Kent. Ever pragmatic, Philip, too, was marrying for a reason.
“Why do you think I’m getting married?” he asked Cobina Wright. “I’ll tell you: It’s because I’ve never really had a home. From the time I was eight, I’ve always been away at school or in the navy.”
Almost a quarter century later, Philip admitted publicly that his marriage to Elizabeth had been arranged. “There was their excursion to South Africa, and then it was sort of fixed up when they came back,” he told his biographer, Basil Boothroyd, in 1971. “That’s what really happened.” By then he had been married to Elizabeth for twenty-four years, provided a male heir to the throne, and become resigned to his role as Consort. Beyond that, he had learned to be discreet about the life he led with other women.
“This is not to say that he wasn’t fond of Elizabeth when he married her,” said his friend Larry Adler, the American harmonica player who moved to England after being blacklisted as a suspected communist* in America. He belonged to Philip’s male luncheon group known as the Thursday Club. “Was he in love with Elizabeth? No, but he had a great deal of respect for her.”
So much so that when someone suggested Philip was marrying the ugly duckling and that Princess Margaret was far prettier than her sister, he flared. “You wouldn’t say that if you knew them. Elizabeth is sweet and kind,” he said, “just like her mother.”
As soon as the engagement was announced, Uncle Dickie, writing from India, bombarded his nephew with advice about how to arrange the wedding and how the new household should
be run. He offered Broadlands, his home in Hampshire, for the honeymoon, suggesting Philip and Elizabeth use Edwina’s suite. It featured Salvador Dalí paintings and a magnificent four-poster Tudor bed with an ivory satin headboard and “those lurid pink satin sheets.” Philip accepted his uncle’s hospitality, but for only a few days. He said his bride wanted to spend most of the honeymoon at Birkall, the small royal house on the twenty-four thousand acres of Balmoral in Scotland. Then he cautioned his mentor: “I am not being rude but it is apparent you like the idea of being the General Manager of this little show, and I am rather afraid that she might not take to the idea quite so docilely as I do. It is true that I know what is good for me, but don’t forget that she has not had you as Uncle loco parentis, counsellor and friend as long as I have.”
Unperturbed, Mountbatten wrote to Winston Churchill and asked him to take Philip to lunch to impress upon him “how serious it was, marrying the heir to the throne.” Churchill, who was out of office then, agreed to tutor the young man for the sake of the monarchy.
Already Philip had been shut out of the wedding plans. He was permitted to choose his cousin David Milford Haven as best man, but of the 2,500 invitations, Philip was allotted only 2. These he gave to his navy shipmate Michael Parker and to Helene Cordet’s mother. Cobina Wright Sr., the mother of his first lover, appeared on the official guest list as the society columnist for the Hearst newspapers. Beyond that, Philip was not allowed to participate in the wedding planning. This was not simply a marriage ceremony, but an affair of state that would focus world attention on the British monarchy. Consequently the King and Queen told him that his sisters and their German husbands, some of whom had supported Hitler’s Third Reich, could not possibly be included. So they remained in Germany and listened to the service on the radio in Marienburg Castle, south of Hanover. Princess Margarita of Hohenloe-Langenbourg, Princess Theodora, the Margravine of Baden, and Princess Sophie of Hanover telephoned their brother to congratulate him. “We sent him jointly as a present a gold fountain pen with our names engraved upon it,” said Princess Sophie.