The Diamond Queen

by Andrew Marr

  A Sailor Prince

  The one event in Elizabeth’s life in the run-up to the Second World War that ‘everyone knows’ is that, aged thirteen, she clapped eyes on Prince Philip of Greece, a boisterous eighteen-year-old cadet at the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth. It happened in July 1939. She was there with her parents on a two-day visit from the Royal Yacht, the Victoria and Albert. Prince Philip was deputed to look after the girls – by himself, apparently, because of an outbreak of mumps among the other cadets. He played games with them, jumped over tennis nets, wolfed down platefuls of food and generally romped, ending by rowing his boat after the departing Royal Yacht until the King had to bellow at him to go back. There is a telling photograph, the first to show the two of them in the same frame. Elizabeth is looking intently at whatever is being paraded, solemn and rather alone. In the back of the picture, Philip is guffawing at some joke.

  Censorious Crawfie thought Philip had showed off rather too much, but Elizabeth was delighted and she never took her eyes off him. Friends say she never has since. She began a correspondence with the Prince, which continued through the coming war, as he served with the navy in the Mediterranean and Far East. She put his photograph up in her bedroom. When she was chided for giving succour to gossips, she swapped it for one of Philip in a big, bushy beard, which she hoped disguised him, a not entirely effective stratagem. So for her it seems to have been love at first sight. It wasn’t quite, because the two had met before, at a royal wedding, and at the 1937 Coronation; but unmemorable encounters between children barely count. True love, the classic coup de foudre, is rare enough to make the Queen a lucky woman.

  To start with, it did not seem that way to everyone at the Palace. Philip was relatively poor and came from a scattered family, rescued by the Royal Navy after Greek republicans turned on his father, Prince Andrew of Greece, an army officer, in the wake of a disastrous war against Kemal Ataturk’s resurgent nationalist Turks. But Philip was no stranger to the British Royals. His mother had been born at Windsor Castle and he was related to Princess Elizabeth through multiple cousin connections, reaching back to Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, who were great-great-grandparents of them both. His family was Danish, if anything, but really one of those royal hyphenated ones, purveyors of monarchs and princess wives to half of monarchical Europe.

  The Greek connection had happened because after the country became independent of the Ottoman Empire in 1830 the ‘protecting powers’ of Britain, France and Russia insisted Greece be headed by an imported monarch. This was meant to limit the chance of civil war. The first choice proved no good. Then in 1862 a teenage prince from Copenhagen, Philip’s grandfather, was selected as King George I. Though he proved popular and assiduous, assassination, a poisonous monkey-bite and various political revolts made Greek kingship a chancy business. The family, with strong German roots, tried to sit on the fence during the First World War. Philip’s father, Andrew, was a dedicated soldier who had done his best in the war against Turkey which followed the botched Versailles peace. He had become one of the scapegoats for a humiliating national failure of 1921, promptly followed by a coup, another unhappy Greek tradition.

  Prince Andrew might well have been executed by firing squad. Others similarly accused were. However, the Queen’s trusty ‘Grandpa England’, George V, intervened, perhaps feeling guilty about his non-intervention after the fall of Tsar Nicholas. A British agent fixed things so that, in return for accepting exile, Andrew and his family would be allowed to escape. This they duly did from Corfu, where the bulk of the family had been living, by British destroyer. The infant Prince Philip slept in an orange-box as he went into exile with his parents and four older sisters. The family made their way to Rome, London and eventually to Paris, where they settled at a family-owned home, surrounded by other Greek exiles and the prince’s brothers. During the 1920s they enjoyed a relatively settled and comfortable family life there, but eventually Prince Philip’s parents separated. His mother, Princess Alice, became mentally ill, possibly with bipolar disorder, and certainly suffering from a form of religious mania, and was treated by Freudians, forcibly removed from her family and ending up in a Swiss clinic. She was therefore effectively separated from her son for much of his childhood, including the crucial years between the ages of ten and fifteen. She later became a nun in the Greek Orthodox Church and an intensely spiritual and almost saintly individual who nursed the injured and took great risks to save Jews in Athens during the war.

  Philip is seen as a rough, no-nonsense man, but has reserves of spiritual interest which may be connected to the example of his unusual and little-known mother. She spent the last part of her life in London living with the rest of the royal family, much loved and admired. His father, meanwhile, wrote a book of war memoirs to defend his reputation and settled down in Cannes with a mistress whose claim to being an aristocrat was perhaps not soundly based. He never returned to his wife, even after her recovery. This being the Riviera in its grandest and most artistic flowering, it cannot have been a bad kind of exile. He too, however, had cut himself off from the son whose company he had once enjoyed. Questioned later in life about this, Philip shrugged it off as something he just had to get on with, but if he has been a defensive and somewhat suspicious adult, it is not ‘psychobabble’ to point to this disrupted childhood.

  Prince Philip found some sense of stability in schools and from his mother’s relatives in Britain, starting with his grandmother Victoria – herself a granddaughter of Queen Victoria. As important, however, were his mother’s brothers, the Battenbergs, now known as the Milford Havens and the Mountbattens after the 1917 revolution of the names. George, Marquess of Milford Haven, was a particular help. Married to Nada, a wildly exotic Russian, he offered the young Philip a genuine haven during school holidays. After starting his education at an experimental American school in Paris, aged nine he went to the prep school Cheam, and after that to a boarding school at Salem in Germany, owned by relatives – unfortunately, just as the Nazis were coming to power. He was a multilingual, cosmopolitan boy, fluent in Greek and French as well as English, and with some German. His royal relatives were scattered all over Europe and he seemed always on the move, from schloss to palace, estate to hotel. But it was the close German connections which caused the most heartache later on.

  All Philip’s sisters married German princes who stuck with their country in the Nazi years, though only two of the brothers-in-law were still alive by 1945. His sister Sophie married Christoph Hesse, who joined the Nazi party and the SS, serving during the war in the Luftwaffe. His sister Cecile married Don Hesse, another prince, who also joined the Nazis. His sister Theodora married the Margrave of Baden, less keen on the Nazis but serving Germany through the war. His oldest sister Margarita married Friedel Hohenlohe-Langenburg, who joined the Nazi party too, and offered to introduce its leaders to British royalty.6 These sibling connections explain the later over-emphatic tone of British newspaper coverage explaining Philip’s ‘essential Englishness’ when he became betrothed to Elizabeth – the result of a campaign of shameless spinning and elbow-grabbing of editors by Mountbatten. The German connection divided him from most of his close family throughout the Second World War and ensured that the groom’s side of the aisle was sparse when he married.

  Philip’s time at the German school in Salem was relatively brief. He watched the steady advance of Nazi ideology in the classrooms and appears to have found it all mildly risible. Salem’s visionary founder, Kurt Hahn, had already fled Germany, but would become a huge influence on Philip when he too left Germany for Britain again. Hahn was one of the great teaching visionaries of early twentieth-century Europe. A brilliant Jewish intellectual who had been private secretary to Imperial Germany’s last Chancellor, Hahn believed Western society had been badly corrupted, most recently by the cruelty and militarism of the First World War. The next generation must be better educated in morals and civic duty, he concluded, and had devised the school accordingly. Though in
itially admiring of Hitler, Hahn became quickly disillusioned. He was briefly imprisoned and eventually had to escape to Britain via Switzerland (the Labour prime minister Ramsay MacDonald intervened on his behalf). In Scotland, Hahn set up another school, Gordonstoun, in the north-east of Scotland, urged on by influential and rich admirers. Prince Philip was one of the earliest pupils.

  Thus one exile moulded another. Hahn thought teenagers had an inner sense of right and wrong, but had to be helped to find it, which could best be done by testing them mentally but also through physical exertion and adventures. Gordonstoun’s mix of cold baths, early runs, relentless outdoor activity and social work was not so different from that of other progressive boarding schools at the time, but it was undeniably tough. Hahn wrote, ‘Education must enable young people to effect what they have recognized to be right, despite hardships, despite dangers, despite inner skepticism, despite boredom, and despite mockery from the world . . .’ and also, ‘It is the sin of the soul to force young people into opinions – indoctrination is of the devil – but it is culpable neglect not to impel young people into experiences.’

  Hahn would go on to found other schools, as well as the Outward Bound movement. But his influence is most clearly felt in modern Britain through the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award Scheme, which reflects Hahn’s belief in the importance of adventure and the toughening effect of a little adversity. (Hahn was the opposite of the educational experimenters who thought that children would grow to be kinder by being coddled.) He was no kind of locum parent but Hahn seems to have been a big influence in the way the young prince turned out – the Duke of Edinburgh’s lack of self-pity, his belief in practicality, his defiantly rough edges, his well-hidden spiritual side and his interest in nature can be traced back not just to the buffeting of his unusual family life but to the Gordonstoun ethic.

  As he left school, Hahn gave Philip a thoughtful final report, noting his recklessness, sense of service and intelligence. He said he was ‘often naughty, never nasty’. Philip’s debt to Hahn has been passed on in areas such as the plight of inner-city youth and the environment (interests in turn passed on to Charles). The Hahn-influenced Outward Bound rules, for instance, say, ‘A direct and respectful relationship with the natural world refreshes the human spirit and teaches the important ideas of recurring cycles and cause and effect. Students learn to become stewards of the earth and of future generations.’ How many royal speeches of the past half-century have echoed that? Quite a lot.

  Prince Philip himself was tested very toughly: in 1937 another terrible family disaster struck when his sister Cecile and her husband the Grand Duke of Hesse were killed in an air crash. The pair had been flying with their two young sons to a wedding in London when the plane went down over Belgium, killing everyone on board, including the princess’s stillborn fourth child. A lone surviving daughter, who had not been on the flight, died two years later of meningitis. Not long after that, George Milford Haven, who had been so kind to the young prince, died of cancer. Already with a tough protective shell, the double blows must nevertheless have hit the adolescent boy very hard.

  After Gordonstoun, Philip joined the Royal Navy, going through the same training at Dartford that his uncle Mountbatten and Georges V and VI had experienced. He has said that he would have preferred being a fighter pilot in the RAF and there was some family pressure to join the Greek navy, but the British navy was an obvious choice. A recent biography has pointed out that, had Philip followed his heart, there must have been a high chance that he would have been killed in the Battle of Britain. But this was a choice of nationality as much as of fighting service. Philip remained a prince of Greece at a time when, however briefly, its royal family seemed to be coming back into favour. He could, in different circumstances, have hoped to be a king in Athens. The family pull in London, and perhaps the lure of a much bigger and more exciting power, was greater. If there had been any doubt as to the true nationality of this Danish-Greek-German boy who had had a French-American, English and Scottish education, then it was ended by the war, which saw him fight hard for Britain against the forces in which his sisters’ husbands served.

  For he had what people used to call ‘a good war’. Prince Philip was first posted to the Indian Ocean, perhaps to keep him, as a Greek citizen, out of direct action. It was only after the summer of 1940 when Greece entered the conflict that he saw real fighting in the Mediterranean on the battleship HMS Valiant. At the Battle of Cape Matapan, using his searchlight to pick out Italian cruisers, which were duly sunk, Philip was mentioned in despatches. He was posted to a destroyer, becoming the youngest first lieutenant in the Royal Navy and serving in the North Sea. In July 1943 his ship HMS Wallace was involved in the invasion of Sicily and was saved from a night-time bomber attack by a trick Philip dreamed up, leaving a burning fake ‘ship’ as a decoy. Later, he served in the Far East as the Pacific war against Japan entered its final stages and witnessed the Japanese surrender. He was clearly a brave and talented sailor, but told his biographer Gyles Brandreth that he did not believe he would have progressed to the top of the service had he remained in it as a full-time career: ‘Given the way of the British press, I wouldn’t have got very far. Every promotion would have been seen as me being treated as a special case.’7

  By the time the war ended, when Philip was seriously considering proposing to Princess Elizabeth, his character had been sufficiently well catalogued for him to be recognizably the same man he is today, aged ninety. Some things have changed, of course: he was flirtatious and physically boisterous, with a huge enthusiasm for practical jokes and sending up older people. That has gone. But as a naval officer he was considered both ingenious and energetic – and also peppery and abrasive. He was prepared to challenge anyone’s opinion, and an extrovert, very different from his serious and shy future wife. He could be startlingly rude. Yet he was also guarded, sensitive and thoughtful and would give his children the close parenting he himself never had. Thus the sinewy paradox who has spent sixty years walking in the Queen’s shadow, but also at her side.

  Windsor in Wartime

  The war years were not, the Queen has said privately, a time of great privation or danger for her. While the King and Queen kept returning to Buckingham Palace and lived there through the worst of the Blitz, the princesses themselves lived at Windsor Castle, their whereabouts a national secret. This was sensible. The royal family was a prime German target and if the King was killed Berlin had good reason to hope his exiled brother might be persuaded to return as a puppet monarch. On 13 September 1940, George VI and Queen Elizabeth came close to death when a German bomb hit the Palace. Had the window in the room where they were standing been closed, instead of open, they would have been terribly injured by flying glass; one of the workmen nearby was killed. Showing true phlegm, a policemen observed to the Queen that it had been ‘a magnificent piece of bombing, if I may say so, Ma’am’. (There was a post-war rumour that the attack had been directed by one of Prince Philip’s brothers-in-law, but according to Philip Eade’s biography of Philip there seems no evidence for it.)

  The Queen wrote to her mother-in-law the following day, after visiting the East End, that ‘I really felt as if I was walking in a dead city’.8 Her natural ebullience soon reasserted itself, emerging clearly at the end of a letter to a cousin: ‘I am still just as frightened of bombs & guns going off, as I was at the beginning. I turn bright red, and my heart hammers – in fact I’m a beastly coward, but I do believe that a lot of people are, so I don’t mind! . . . Tinkety tonk old fruit, & down with the Nazis’.9 The Queen took up revolver practice in case it should be necessary to make a final stand against German paratroopers while the King carried a rifle and revolver with him, and practised with them in the grounds of Buckingham Palace.

  For the princesses, life was less interesting. Windsor Castle became the future Queen’s home, as she thinks of it still, but during the war it was a partly packed up and sandbagged home, protected by troops and anti-aircraft g
uns. Its thousand-plus rooms, staff of hundreds and ancient walls, now reinforced with steel and concrete and barbed wire, provided a refuge steeped in gloomy history. Crawford commented that it was a fortress, not a home. The princesses could follow the war on the radio, and socialize, a little, with officers stationed at Windsor, but it cut them off even further from normal life. They were rationed, and had to rush down to an air-raid shelter in the dungeon – Elizabeth protesting initially that she had to dress properly first – but saw little of the reality of the war. The death of the King’s youngest brother the Duke of Kent in an aircraft crash in 1942 was the kind of blow to this family that others all over Britain were having to deal with.

  One of the Queen’s earlier biographers, Robert Lacey, reflected that the war confirmed her already formidable sense of duty: ‘The atmosphere of 1949 did not encourage whimsicality in anybody. So Princess Elizabeth developed from a serious child into a serious girl with no discernable break in continuity, and any tendency to eccentricity or rebellion was stifled . . .’10 Surrounded by grim national news, literally surrounded by the castle’s stony royal history, Elizabeth had no chance to experience the freer, wilder adolescence that, for instance, her mother had enjoyed in the 1920s. Her solemnity and her sense of duty were not created during the war; but those years reinforced and sandbagged that side of her character.

  It was not, of course, all grim. The Windsor enthusiasm for games and dressing up expressed itself in annual Christmas pantomimes, in which both princess dressed and acted (anyone curious about the Queen’s youthful legs can turn to the picture of her costumed as Aladdin). It was this performance that had Prince Philip, invited to stay at Windsor during his leave, roaring with laughter, and perhaps began to fire his serious interest in Elizabeth. The Queen said later that she thought the pantomimes were her father’s way of beginning to prepare the girls for a life of performance, their first time up on a stage: although Margaret enjoyed them hugely, she did not. (Prince Charles, however, did greatly enjoy his early years in school plays, something the Queen found a little perplexing.)