by Kitty Kelley
The Duke and Duchess of Windsor, who had visited Hitler in Germany, were also excluded from the invitation list. Although the exiled Duke was Elizabeth’s favorite uncle, he had embarrassed the royal family earlier in the year by selling his memoirs and publishing A King’s Story. The Queen suggested to the Foreign Office that the Duke and Duchess might consider scheduling a trip to America during November, which would preclude their attending the wedding. The Foreign Office delivered the suggestion, but the Duke replied that he and the Duchess did not want to be away at that time. The Palace insisted. Further, it instructed him that, if asked, he was to deny that he and the Duchess had not been invited to the royal wedding. In the end they went to America, where they pointedly did not listen to the ceremony.
After the Queen vetted the invitation list, she addressed the issue of Philip’s mother, whom she considered “pleasant but odd… definitely odd.” The plump, winsome Queen with her baby blue feather boas and rippling giggles contrasted sharply with the gaunt, somber Greek Princess in her stark religious garb. The two women never had established a rapport, although they shared similar traits of courage and conviction. During the war, both demonstrated bravery: the Queen by accompanying her husband from Windsor Castle to Buckingham Palace every day to risk being bombed like her subjects, and Princess Andrew by hiding a Jewish family in her Athens home during the German occupation of Greece. Years after her death, the Princess was cited for valor by the state of Israel. But the Queen, unaware of Princess Andrew’s heroism in 1947, viewed her as eccentric and overly religious.
Concerned about appearances at the royal wedding, the Queen sweetly asked Philip if he thought his mother would be wearing her nun’s habit. As mother of the bride, the Queen said she herself would be wearing a dress of apricot-and-golden brocade, gracefully draped and trailing. Philip understood immediately that his mother’s dour gray robe, white wimple, cord, and rosary beads would have to be closeted for the occasion. So on the wedding day Princess Andrew sat with the royal family in Westminster Abbey, wearing a hat and a simple silk dress, which the Queen later pronounced “very pretty and most appropriate.”
On the morning of his wedding, Philip expressed his apprehension about marrying a woman who was destined to become an institution. “We had breakfast together,” recalled a relative, “and he said, ‘I don’t know whether I’m being very brave or very foolish.’ ”
King George VI and his Queen had turned their own wedding into a spectacle, so they knew better than anyone the importance of producing a grand ceremony for their subjects. They understood how to rouse the people with a fanfare of silver trumpets and golden coaches. They recognized that such a ritual of imperial monarchy would distract people from the misery of their humdrum lives and unite the Commonwealth in celebration. Everyone would feel joyously invested in the royal family, which, in turn, would strengthen the monarchy’s emotional hold on its subjects.
The power of such pageantry was not lost on Winston Churchill, who described the impending nuptials in 1947 as “a flash of colour on the hard road that we travel.” The New York Times noted the need for “a welcome occasion for gaiety in grim England, beset in peace with troubles almost as burdensome as those of war.” The next day a little girl in Brooklyn broke her piggy bank to send the Princess a turkey as a wedding present “because she lives in England and they have nothing to eat in England.”
With only four months in which to stage a wedding extravaganza, the King and Queen concentrated on the costumes—the heralds in medieval scarlet-and-gold livery, the cavalry in shining helmets topped with plumes, the glistening swords, the sparkling medals, the crimson sashes, the gleaming breastplates. All were removed from prewar storage bins, where they had been sitting since 1939. Once again, clothes dominated the royal family’s discussions as ration coupons were collected from cabinet members to insure that Princess Elizabeth had a proper trousseau and a stunning wedding gown. She told her couturier, Norman Hartnell, that she wanted to walk down the aisle in something unique and magnificent. She swore him to secrecy and threatened to go to another couturier if descriptions of her bridal gown were leaked to the public before the wedding. The royal designer insisted his workers sign secrecy oaths and whitewash the workroom windows, which were curtained with thick white muslin so no one could look in. Hartnell, who said he was inspired by Botticelli’s “Primavera,” envisioned Elizabeth in acres of ivory satin and tulle embroidered with ten thousand seed pearls and small crystals, which required two months of work by ten embroiderers and twenty-five needlewomen.
During the wedding, two sewing women were to be stationed in the Abbey in case the dress needed stitching. The bride’s tulle veil was fifteen yards long and contained one hundred miles of thread. So Elizabeth was given an additional clothing allotment of one hundred coupons, plus twenty-three extra coupons for each of her eight bridesmaids. She also received from various well-wishers three hundred eighty-six pairs of nylon stockings—a most precious commodity for young women living through England’s postwar reconstruction.
Expense was not considered when Elizabeth selected her trousseau. For her wedding night she chose a nightgown and robe set from Joske’s department store in San Antonio, Texas, that cost $300, twice as much as most Americans earned in a month. The pale ivory Georgette gown had forty yards of silk with satin roses embroidered across the bodice; the brocade robe was patterned with tiny lords and ladies bowing in minuet, all hand stitched. The head of the store’s gift-wrap department scrubbed up like a surgeon before she touched the precious parcel.
At the wedding, the Archbishop of Canterbury declared that the ceremony for Princess Elizabeth was “exactly the same as it would be for any cottager who might be married this afternoon in some small country church in a remote village in the Dales: the same prayers are offered; the same blessings are given.” The differences: the twelve wedding cakes at the royal reception, including one nine feet high that Philip cut with his sword, each slice containing a week’s sugar rations for the average family; 2,666 wedding presents, including a Thoroughbred horse, a mink coat, a twenty-two-karat gold coffee service, a television set, a fifty-four-carat pink diamond said to be the only one of its kind in the world, and a plantation and hunting lodge in Kenya.
Led by a procession of eighteen horse-drawn carriages, the royal guests included six kings, six queens, seven princesses, one princess regent, one prince regent, one Indian rajah, one crown prince, one crown princess, seven counts, six countesses, eleven viscounts, fourteen dukes, and eleven duchesses, who accounted for most of the sixty-seven diamond tiaras worn.
“The jewelry at that wedding was staggering,” recalled the Danish Ambassador’s daughter, who attended with her father. “I was breathless and gaping at the stupendous display. It was prewar dimension. Everyone had gone to the bank to get their jewels out of the vault. Diamond tiaras looked like beanies, and the former Duchess of Rutland had her entire head wrapped in diamonds. She said it was her grandmother’s belt. A woman wearing a turban made of pearls the size of cherries passed another lady weighted down with bunches of cabochon emeralds cascading down her shoulders like grapes on a vine. The Indians wore breastplates of rubies and diamonds and wrapped their arms from wrist to shoulder in sapphires.”
Overnight, the impecunious bridegroom, who was earning eight guineas a week as a navy lieutenant, became a nobleman with rank, title, and position, entitling him to layers of shining gold epaulets. He acquired a valet, a social secretary, and an equerry, plus a royal residence at Clarence House with £50,000 (about $100,000) for refurbishments, and a castle (Sunninghill Park) for country weekends. Before the couple could move into the castle, the Crown property on the edge of Windsor Great Park went up in flames—the first of many unexplained fires to haunt the House of Windsor.
“Oh, Crawfie, how could it have happened?” Elizabeth wrote to her former governess. “Do you really think someone did it on purpose? I can’t believe it. People are always so kind to us….”
The morning before the wedding, Philip knelt before the King, who unsheathed his sword and, tapping each shoulder, knighted his future son-in-law with the Order of the Garter. Within the British honors system, the cornflower blue sash and eight-pointed star of the Garter is recognized as the highest accolade* a monarch can bestow. In a letter to his mother, the King said he had given the honor to Elizabeth eight days earlier so that she would have precedence over her husband.
Previously Philip had been reduced to the status of a commoner when he was forced to renounce his Greek name, title, nationality, and religion. Now he was rewarded with three exalted British titles—Baron Greenwich, Earl of Merioneth, and Duke of Edinburgh. The title of Prince of the Realm was withheld and would not be conferred until 1957. But before his wedding day Philip was granted the distinction of being addressed as His Royal Highness. This rankled some of the nobility, who still point out that Britain’s dukes not born of royal blood are to be addressed as His Grace, not as His Royal Highness. But the King was determined to ennoble his twenty-six-year-old son-in-law so that his daughter would have the status of a peer’s wife. The King also wanted to make sure that his grandchildren would be born of noble blood. “It is a great deal to give a man all at once,” he said, “but I know Philip understands his new responsibilities.”
On the day of the wedding, the bridegroom, suffering from a cold, swore off cigarettes at the request of the bride and promised never to smoke again. He arrived at the church early with his best man, who later wrote that both of them were so hung over from the previous night’s bachelor party that they had had to steady their nerves with a gin and tonic.
The jokes had been rough and the drinking serious that evening, particularly after Vasco Lazzolo, a portrait painter, who was convinced that Philip was marrying Princess Elizabeth to advance himself, rose unsteadily from his chair to propose a toast. He lifted his brandy glass and glared at the guest of honor. “For what you are doing, I think you are an absolute shit,” he said. He threw his glass into the fireplace and lurched from the room.
“That was quite a party,” recalled Larry Adler many years later, “and Philip certainly didn’t enjoy it as much as the rest of us. He was just too scared. I remember him looking white as a ghost and shaky the whole evening. He was damned frightened. The King had laid down the law to him about a lot of things, from fast cars to other women.
“Philip had had a minor automobile accident shortly after the engagement announcement which made the papers. He was driving fast, skidded, hit a hedge, and banged himself up a bit. This caused excessive press comment at the time and made him look like a reckless, pub-crawling playboy. Naturally, the King was annoyed. Then there was the Helene Cordet affair, which surfaced right before the wedding, when she was described in the French press as the ‘mystery blond divorcée’ whom Philip had visited in Paris the year before. Since then, Helene is always the first name mentioned as one of Philip’s mistresses and the mother of his illegitimate children. Of course, he and Helene claim that they’re merely childhood friends who grew up together in Paris. He gave her away when she married the first time in 1938, and he’s godfather to both her children, so who knows?”
Adler smiles and shrugs when talking about his old friend’s relationship with Helene Cordet, who worked in a Paris dress shop before moving to London to open a nightclub and become a cabaret singer. Her parents, staunch Greek royalists, had helped support Philip’s parents during their exile in France when Philip was growing up. “Mercifully, he spared us the personal details of his relationship with Helene,” said Adler in 1992. “But we made certain assumptions at the time, and whether we were right or wrong, we understood why the King was agitated about his daughter falling in love with a bounder like our old pal. As I told Philip then, be glad your zipper can’t talk.”
Despite his friends’ insinuations, Philip stayed married to Elizabeth, but he conducted discreet affairs with many other women, most of whom were aristocrats or actresses. One mistress reportedly bore his child as a single woman and never divulged the name of the child’s father. Her refusal to name the man whipped up more rumors. By 1989 the stories of Philip’s alleged illegitimate children forced Helene Cordet’s son, Max, to make a public statement.
“I have heard these rumors all my life, but they are ridiculous,” he said. “My father—my real father—[Frenchman Marcel Boisot] lives in Paris and it is silly to say otherwise. This all goes back to my mother’s childhood with Philip. Nothing more to it than that.”
His mother admitted that Philip paid for her son’s tuition at Gordonstoun, but she said it was because she was destitute, not because Philip was her son’s father. By then, though, the rumors, repeated for so many years, carried their own currency.
“I don’t care what Max Boisot says now,” said his classmate James Bellini in 1994. “I went to Cambridge with him and we all thought then that he was one of Philip’s bastards. We talked about it all the time. Before Cambridge, Max attended Gordonstoun, the same school in Scotland that Philip attended and to which he sent his sons, Charles, Andrew, and Edward. And don’t forget, Philip was also godfather to Max, which traditionally is the way royalty stands up for its illegitimate children. This is their way of giving their bastard offspring a tenuous tie to royal circles. Take a close look at the royal godparents of the aristocracy and you’ll see the bastard sons and daughters of the monarchy.”
While Philip had been intimate with many women before his marriage, his relationship with Helene Cordet was never the passionate love affair that was alleged. She publicly denied having a romance with Philip, but her coy denials seemed calculated toward publicity to launch her career as a London cabaret singer. She later cashed in on her relationship with Philip by writing a book entitled Born Bewildered. She intimated that she had not been invited to the royal wedding because she was the “mystery blonde” he had been romancing in Paris. Helene was not invited because she was divorced, and at that time, divorced persons were not allowed in royal circles.
Years later, Helene’s granddaughter told her to stick to the story of the affair with the Queen’s husband. “Don’t keep denying that you and Philip had more than a friendship going,” said her granddaughter. “I like people thinking I’m royal and Philip is my grandfather.”
Elizabeth, a virgin when she married, was the pampered, protected daughter of Puritan parents, whereas Philip, the son of separated parents, was reared by relatives who had been exposed to an atmosphere of decadence and amorality. Elizabeth had grown up with the comforting scent of Palace beeswax and fresh roses, while Philip was accustomed to the itinerant smell of mothballs from borrowed clothes in storage bins and battered suitcases hastily packed and unpacked. The twenty-six-year-old bridegroom, who had traveled through Europe, Australia, and the Middle East, was marrying a twenty-one-year-old woman who had never been outside Great Britain until the royal family tour of South Africa. Poorly educated, she had never attended school and received hourly tutorials only in British history and heraldry. She had studied Walter Bagehot’s writings on the monarchy and had mastered the hereditary peerage with all its complex titles of antiquities. She spoke excellent French* but barely understood mathematics and science and knew little about the natural world beyond dogs and horses. She disliked poetry, except for the rhymes of Rudyard Kipling and Alfred, Lord Tennyson. The only poem she ever memorized was the childish verses of “They’re Changing Guard at Buckingham Palace” by A. A. Milne.
“I was never able to imbue her with enthusiasm for modern verse,” said her governess, Marion Crawford. “ ‘Oh, do stop!’ she would say while I was reading from the works of some modern poet. ‘I don’t understand a word of it. What is the man trying to say?’ ”
Outside the Palace, Elizabeth felt self-conscious about the gaps in her education. She once asked if Dante was a horse, because she had never heard of the medieval poet.
“No, no, he isn’t a horse,” was the reply.
“Is he a jockey, then?”
she asked.
She blushed when told that Dante Alighieri was the Italian classicist who wrote The Divine Comedy, a masterpiece of world literature. Horses were what she knew best.
Elizabeth’s husband-to-be was neither a prodigy nor a scholar, but he at least had accumulated twelve years of formal schooling, plus several years of naval training, and he never experienced her hesitation in talking to people. With confidence bordering on arrogance, he could walk into a room without introduction, breezily announce himself, and approach the prettiest girl to say, “Well, this is a much more attractive audience than the one I’ve just left.” Philip chatted with anyone about anything, while Elizabeth worried constantly about what to say. “If only I could do it as well as my mother does it,” she said.
Receiving lines made her uncomfortable as she tried to manufacture small talk. Faced with a moment of silence, she once said, “Well… I can’t think of anything more to say about that.”
Confiding in a friend, she said, “Believe it or not, I lie in my bath before dinner, and think, Oh, who am I going to sit by and what are they going to talk about? I’m absolutely terrified of sitting next to people in case they talk about things I have never heard of.”
A few years later Philip, too, would acknowledge his ignorance. “I regret to say that all my degrees are honorary ones,” he told students at the University of Delhi in India. Later he addressed the subject with students at the University of Wales. “My generation, although reasonably well schooled, is probably the worst educated of this age. The war cut short any chance there was of acquiring a higher education. I’m part of this lost generation trying to make up for what it missed between 1939 and 1945.”