by Kitty Kelley
The Queen held so tightly to her royal prerogatives that she would not even let her husband enter the Wedgwood blue room in Buckingham Palace during her weekly audiences with the Prime Minister.
“Before… whatever we did, it was together,” Philip said of his marriage before the accession. “I suppose I naturally filled the principal position.”
No longer. The strong, dominant, take-charge husband was suddenly unmanned. He was no longer on an equal footing with his wife. Constitutionally he had no status, except what he received from the Queen.
“I remember attending a dinner for only ten people,” said Evelyn Prebensen, the daughter of the dean of the Diplomatic Corps. “And even then poor Philip could not sit down if the Queen was still standing. She was very much the monarch in the early years and insisted on her royal prerogatives. If Philip came into the room after she did, he had to bow to her and say, ‘I’m sorry, Your Majesty.’ ”
His friends watched helplessly as Philip sank into depression after Elizabeth’s accession.
“You could feel it all underneath,” ex-King Peter of Yugoslavia told his wife after the King’s funeral. “I don’t know how long he can last… bottled up like that.”
“He used to say, ‘I’m neither one thing nor the other. I’m nothing,’ ” recalled Michael Parker’s wife, Eileen.
Philip, who had aspired to be an admiral, recognized that his career in the navy was sunk. He locked himself in his room and spent hours shut away by himself, confiding only in his eldest sister, Margarita.
“You can imagine what’s going to happen now,” he said with foreboding.
The day after the King’s funeral, the Mountbattens entertained their German relatives at Broadlands, where Uncle Dickie boasted that the House of Windsor no longer reigned. With a Champagne flute in hand, he proposed a toast to the new House of Mountbatten. He boasted that the blood of Battenberg had risen from obscurity on the banks of the Rhine to the highest throne on earth. His cousin Prince Ernst August of Hanover reported the conversation to Queen Mary, who was outraged. As someone who studied genealogy like a miner assaying gold, she knew that Philip’s family descended from the House of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glucksburg-Beck. She ticked off his royal antecedents like a child reciting the alphabet.
“Philip’s name is not Mountbatten,” she said. “If he has any name at all, it is Glucksburg.”*
She summoned Churchill and reminded him that her husband, King George V, had decreed in 1917 that the House of Windsor was to be the royal family’s name forever, and she said no amount of posturing by that “ambitious upstart” Dickie Mountbatten could change the royal edict. The Prime Minister listened respectfully and marveled at how effectively the elderly Queen had buried her German roots to become an icon of Great Britain. She told him she had always despised Hitler because his German accent was so horrible. “He never could speak the language properly,” she said.
Churchill called a cabinet meeting to discuss Mountbatten’s claim. The cabinet ministers, mindful of the two world wars England fought against the hated Huns, insisted that the new Queen make a public announcement: she must affirm herself a Windsor and proclaim that all her descendants would bear the Windsor surname. Churchill and his ministers felt that anything less would cause political insurrection, so suspicious were they of Mountbatten’s dynastic ambitions and liberal politics.† The Queen was duly informed. Churchill told her that “the feeling of the government reinforced by public opinion was that Her Majesty should drop the Mountbatten name and reign under your father’s name of Windsor.” Philip argued strenuously for the House of Mountbatten and Windsor and, failing that, pleaded for the House of Windsor and Edinburgh. But she relied on her Prime Minister and his advisers, which thoroughly humiliated her husband.
“I’m just a bloody amoeba,” he was heard to cry. “That’s all.”
Many years later Martin Charteris said, “I’ve always taken that to mean Philip [figured he] was just there to deposit semen.”
The Queen even deprived her husband of that function. Having let it be known the year before that she had wanted to have another child, she now changed her mind. But she was angry when she read newspaper reports hinting at her pregnancy. During a meeting with Churchill and members of his cabinet to discuss the name change, she said sharply, “I expect these rumors to stop!” The next day the Prime Minister was quoted as saying, “She may not be pregnant, but she is certainly regnant.”
After the row about renaming the House of Windsor, Queen Elizabeth II, the fourth sovereign of that dynasty, dutifully announced on April 9, 1952, that unlike every other wife in the realm, she would not carry her husband’s name.
“It was very hurting to Prince Philip that the one thing he felt he brought to his marriage, which was his name, was no longer possible,” said Patricia, Countess Mountbatten. “But Churchill was an old, very experienced man, and [Elizabeth] was a very young and new Queen, and, understandably, she felt… it wasn’t her place to stand up to him and say, ‘I don’t want to do this.’ ”
Philip’s position was uncomfortable. When a man ascends to the throne and becomes King, his wife automatically becomes his Queen Consort and is crowned with him. Not so when a woman ascends and becomes Queen. There are no rules defining the position of her husband. The husband of Mary, Queen of Scots, became King Consort as did the husband of Mary I. Queen Victoria honored her husband with the title Prince Consort. Elizabeth declined to do the same for Philip.
She tried to mollify her husband by elevating his position within the realm. She declared that “His Royal Highness, Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, henceforth and on all occasions… shall have, hold and enjoy Place, Pre-Eminence and Precedence next to Her Majesty.” This declaration of rank put Philip ahead of everyone in the kingdom, including someone who had once been King (the Duke of Windsor) and someone who would become King one day—Prince Charles.
The Queen then promoted her husband from lieutenant to Admiral, which entitled him to wear the uniform and receive full honors as Admiral of the Royal Navy.* She also elevated him to the highest rank in each of the other military services, making him Field Marshal of the Army, Marshal of the Royal Air Force, and Captain General of the Royal Marines. Despite these honors—sudden and unearned—Philip had no authority: he was only background music for the melody. During the painful adjustment to his wife’s accession, he learned what his father-in-law, King George VI, had meant when he said: “Being a consort is much more difficult than being a sovereign. It’s perhaps the most difficult job in the world.”
Days after moving from Clarence House to Buckingham Palace, Philip had an attack of jaundice, a liver disease his friends attributed to stress and depression. Engorged with bile, he was confined to bed for three weeks. His valet, John Dean, served him his meals—”all boiled and bland”—and the Queen visited him three times a day.
“The Duke’s complexion went a sickly yellow, and he was very disgusted and depressed when told what he had got,” said his valet. “I paid great attention to him all the time he was ill, doing my utmost to meet his every wish, because I felt so sorry for him in that gloomy room.”
Prince Philip recovered his health gradually but continued to feel diminished in his marriage. A few months later he rallied for the coronation because his wife had put him in charge of the ceremony, but the bleakness of being the Queen’s Consort nearly capsized him.
“People forget what it was like when the Queen was twenty-six and I was thirty, when she succeeded [to the throne],” he told the writer Fiametta Rocco. “Well… that’s when things started….”
SEVEN
The black armbands disappeared three months after the King’s death, and for the next year the coronation of the Queen seemed to dominate the country’s newsrooms, barrooms, boardrooms, and drawing rooms. The event was set for Tuesday, June 2, 1953, at 10:30 A.M., and until that moment, everything revolved around regalia.
The coronation, which was to be England’s reward
for prevailing in the war, resonated with the memory of sacrifice and the hope of rebirth. The hyperbolic British press wrote reams about the advent of “the New Elizabethan era” and compared the country’s advances under Elizabeth I with the wonders that would occur under Elizabeth II. Then she herself spoke up to dampen the extravagant effusions.
“Frankly,” she said, “I do not myself feel at all like my Tudor forebear, who was blessed with neither husband nor children, who ruled as a despot and was never able to leave her shores.”
In distancing herself from her predecessor, Elizabeth II wrapped herself softly in marriage and motherhood. Forty-five years later she would be respected as a dutiful monarch and the most traveled in British history, but lacking as a wife and mother. Elizabeth I, though, would still be admired for the skill, intelligence, and fortitude with which she guided her country.
Coronation fever rose in 1953, and the holiday mood swept over London and into the farthest reaches of the British Isles and dominions. British housewives carried brown ration books that controlled their butter, cheese, margarine, meat, and sugar. But now sugar restrictions were lifted, and people who had been deprived of cake, candy, and cookies for fourteen years indulged in sweets. Tea was derationed, and so were eggs. Wartime preoccupation with rifles, gas masks, and helmets stopped as everyone discussed jeweled swords, tiaras, and coronets. In honor of what was trumpeted as the New Elizabethan era, London turned itself into a gigantic merry-go-round of triumphal arches and twinkling lights. Purple flags and gold pennants with elaborate designs of crowns and scepters decorated the main streets. Shields and medallions adorned office buildings, and lampposts on major thoroughfares were painted a giddy combination of yellow, lavender, black, white, and red. Festive streamers and bunting festooned the seven-mile coronation route the Queen would take after her crowning. Exotic flowers flown in from Australia filled the gigantic boxes in front of Parliament, and two thousand square feet of new carpeting was laid in Westminster Abbey to accommodate the 7,700 guests the Queen had invited to witness her enthronement.
Recognizing the global interest in this event, the British Broadcasting Corporation suggested televising the coronation, but the Queen’s courtiers said no. They said they did not want television cameras recording an event that they felt should be seen only by the aristocracy. They argued that it would be a commercial intrusion on a sacred ritual.
“I don’t see why the BBC should have a better view of my monarch being crowned than me,” said Prime Minister Churchill.
“Quite right,” said the Queen’s private secretary, Sir Alan Lascelles.
The Queen was consulted and was expected to concur. Instead she started asking technical questions about transmitting the ceremony to the far corners of the earth, how many microphones would be required, how the sound system would work, and where the cameras would be placed in the Abbey.
“But… but… the great and blinding light,” protested Lascelles.
And the Archbishop of Canterbury chimed in, “It would be unfair to expose you… to this searching method of photography, without the chance of correcting an error, for perhaps two hours on end.”
The Queen listened but disagreed. “I have to be seen to be believed,” she said.
Days later she sent her husband to the Prime Minister’s office with her decision: The BBC would be allowed to televise the coronation, but with one restriction: no close-ups. The Queen’s democratic gesture astonished the conservative Prime Minister, but he recovered and presented her views to his cabinet.
“Her Majesty believes all her subjects should have the opportunity of seeing the coronation,” he said.
His ministers argued and tried to reverse her decision, but Churchill said there were no options.
“After all, it was the Queen who was being crowned,” he said later, “and not the cabinet.”
The Queen’s decision enabled the world to watch seven and a half hours of continuous live reporting. The television audience was the largest ever at the time—three hundred million. Later, when she visited the BBC to view her coronation coverage, she was delighted by what she saw. “She enjoyed it so much,” said Peter Dimmock, the BBC coronation producer, “that she knighted George Barnes, who was director of television at the time. She knighted [him] on the spot in Limegrove, where she watched the recording.”
“Allowing television cameras into the sacred precincts of Westminster Abbey was a key decision of her reign,” said writer John Pearson. ‘’It meant that the coronation… would be unique in the annals of the monarchy, the first time in history a sovereign had been crowned with millions of close and fascinated witnesses to the strange and powerful event….”
No other country has a coronation so steeped in mystique and majesty, laden with history, and imbued with religion. The occasion is celebrated with a festive holiday that includes songs, fireworks, and street fairs. Vendors hawk royally embossed gewgaws such as tea strainers, egg timers, pocket combs, and napkin rings. The commercial hoopla precedes a high church ceremony that combines the solemnity of a Papal installation with the impact of a presidential inauguration. All that plus the romance of a crown, orb, scepter, and gilded coach.
Nothing in the world is as elaborate as the pageantry surrounding a coronation, and nothing better defines the British monarchy. So the Queen was determined to stage the most magnificent crowning in British history. And it cost her government over $6.5 million—about $50 million in 1996 dollars. She felt it was a necessary investment for her impoverished country because the monarchy was, in her view, its most precious possession and the symbol of its historic continuity. Most other monarchies had crumbled under the weight of the two world wars, but the monarchy of Great Britain still dominated the life of the country. As Queen, Elizabeth II would reign over a shrinking kingdom known as the Commonwealth, a group of nations that included Australia, New Zealand, Canada, a few ports in the Caribbean, and some parts of Africa. But even without an empire, her crown still tied the Hong Kong coolie to the Australian Aborigine and the Rhodesian farmer and the Welsh miner. As Winston Churchill said, “The Crown has become the mysterious link—indeed, I may say, the magic link—which unites our loosely bound but strongly interwoven Commonwealth of nations, states and races.” He did not need to add that the Crown also represented the biggest draw for tourist dollars. With at least two hundred thousand overseas visitors expected for a week in London, spending an average of $8 a day, the total amount estimated was $1.6 million every twenty-one hours.
“More money will change hands during coronation week than most English banks handle in an average year,” predicted the Times of London. The newspaper estimated $300 million would be spent at the time, including $28 million for coronation decorations, $280,000 for fireworks on coronation night, and $10 million for the coronation parade.* “The British—after 14 years of war, reconstruction and austerity—just don’t care.”
The left-wing Tribune criticized the expenditure: “It really should be possible to crown a constitutional monarch in a democratic country without giving the impression that Britain has been transformed into Ruritania.” The editorial page of the Chicago Tribune shouted, “Wake up, Fairyland!” And the communist Daily Worker said, predictably, the coronation represented the worst excesses of “luxury and flunkyism.”
Unperturbed, the Queen summoned her personal couturier, Norman Hartnell. She requested ten designs for the lavish white satin gown she wanted to wear. She wanted to emphasize her small waist, so Hartnell designed an underskirt with nine layers of stiffened net to give her the fullness she desired. Then she decided she wanted the emblems of the eleven Commonwealth countries embroidered on the gown and encrusted with semiprecious jewels. So Hartnell refashioned his design to include England’s Tudor rose, Scotland’s thistle, Ireland’s shamrock, the leek of Wales, Canada’s maple leaf, South Africa’s protea, the lotus of India and Ceylon, Pakistan’s wheat, Australia’s wattle, and New Zealand’s fern. Then he hired six young women, who spent
two months embroidering the Queen’s gown. Money was no object to Elizabeth in her role as sovereign, but as the mistress of her own home, she was cheeseparing. Even as she dickered over the details of a gown that would cost her government $1 million, she scrimped on curtains.
“I was at her side while she leafed through a sample book of Bon Marché fabric with pretty designs for draperies,” said William Ellis, former superintendent of Windsor Castle. “The Queen saw the prices and lifted her eyes toward me, lowered her head, and said with regret, ‘They are truly pretty, Mr. Ellis, but I believe they are too expensive for me. It will be necessary to find something better priced.’
“The same thing happened with the lighting,” Ellis recalled. “She refused a great number of excellent lampshades. Reason: too expensive. All of the lampshades that I finally bought for her had to be purchased locally in town and could only cost a few shillings. The Queen is very prudent about money.”
At her other country homes, she regularly inventoried supplies and foodstuffs. “I remember her checking the liquor levels on the whiskey bottles every time she came,” said Norman Barson, her former footman. “And she counted all the hams in the larder, too. Everything was logged. She was very businesslike and could spot if something was missing. She’d want to know why the cigarette box she remembered as full was half-empty, even though she didn’t smoke. Or she’d ask why the gin was empty and where had the angostura bitters gone.”
Absorbed with the mind-numbing details of the coronation, the Queen rehearsed by walking up and down the halls of Buckingham Palace with sheets trailing from her shoulders so she could learn how to walk regally with a sixty-foot train. She sat at her desk and worked on her dispatch boxes wearing the crown of St. Edward to get used to balancing the seven-pound weight on her head. In choosing her coronation stamp, she examined sixty-three designs. And to select her most flattering picture for her official souvenir,* she examined 1,500 photos.