But now another royal relation – and one who also had a wife, four daughters and a young son – was facing execution. It was a matter the King could not ignore. Andrea, like the murdered Tsar, was also a first cousin; his father, George I of Greece, was the brother of George and Nicholas’s mothers. There were other connections. As we have seen, Andrea’s wife was the daughter of the former First Sea Lord, the first Marquis of Milford Haven. Alice was a first cousin once removed of George V himself.
As part of the Greek royal family and an officer of the Greek army, Andrea had to accept a large part of the responsibility for the final disaster that seemed set to befall him and his family. During the hostilities with Turkey in 1921, he was a major-general with command of a division stationed in Asia Minor. His troops, he declared, were ‘riff-raff’, his officers useless, the high command incapable. His assessment was accurate but hardly diplomatic. Nor was it the height of military professionalism to disobey the clear and direct order to advance and instead ask to be relieved of his command. When Smyrna fell and the royal family were again ousted – a regular occurrence since they had first been invited onto the throne of Greece in 1863 – Andrea provided the new military rulers with a made-to-measure scapegoat with his actions the year before. He was arrested, tried and sentenced by a jury of junior officers who, said Princess Alice, ‘had previously decided that he must be shot’.
George V had been prepared to leave the Romanovs to their fate, but the idea of allowing another batch of close relations to fall to the executioner’s blade or bullet clearly proved too much to stomach, even for a monarch as imperious as this. Following appeals by Princess Alice through her younger brother, Louis, the future Earl Mountbatten of Burma, the King personally ordered that his incautious relation was for saving.
Commander Gerald Talbot, Britain’s former naval attaché in Athens, now employed as a secret agent in Geneva, was duly dispatched, in disguise and travelling under false papers, to open negotiations with Pangalos. Things did not go well until the cruiser HMS Calypso sailed in, her guns raised, to help concentrate the military government’s thoughts. Which it did: while Andrea’s fellow officers were duly being executed, he was driven to the harbour by Pangalos himself and put aboard the Calypso, where his wife was waiting for him.
The warship then steamed to Corfu to pick up eighteen-month-old Philip and his four sisters. The family seemed quite philosophical about being exiled, ‘for they frequently are’, as the Calypso’s captain, Herbert Buchanan-Wollaston, observed. Philip’s sister, Princess Sophie, eight at the time, was not so sanguine. She later recalled her abiding memory of leaving Mon Repos was the smell of smoke from the grates in every fireplace. Alice had ordered her daughters to burn everything: letters, papers and documents and leave nothing behind.
‘It was a terrible business, absolute chaos,’ she later recalled. The crossing to Brindisi in Italy was a rough one and the family, along with their Greek lady-in-waiting, French governess and English nanny, were all seasick.
Once ashore they took the train from Brindisi to Rome and then to Paris. Philip spent much of the journey crawling around on the floor, blackening himself from head to toe and even licking the windowpanes. His mother tried to restrain him, but Nanny Roose – ‘A divine person, much nicer than all the other nannies, we adored her,’ Princess Sophie recalled – kindly advised, ‘Leave him alone.’ From Paris, the family took the boat train across the English Channel and arrived in London, where they were given temporary shelter in Kensington Palace by Alice’s mother, the Dowager Countess of Milford Haven.
Thus, Philip left Greece for good at the age of eighteen months. He never lived there again and never learned to speak Greek, although as a young man he signed his name ‘Philip of Greece’. In reply to his official biographer Basil Boothroyd’s question about spending his childhood in the unsettled and unhappy circumstances of exile, Prince Philip dismissed it: ‘I don’t think it necessarily was particularly unhappy. It wasn’t all that unsettled.’
As far as he was concerned, he lacked for nothing and accepted his nomadic existence as completely normal, and his parents soon set up home on the outskirts of Paris. He had a strong family unit in the shape of four adoring sisters. Later, when he went to school in England and his sisters were married, he spent the long summer holidays with them in various German castles, often with his father. As a result, Philip saw much more of his father than anyone would suppose. Until the age of nine, when he was sent to school in England and his father closed the house in Paris and his mother was committed to a hospital in Switzerland after suffering a nervous breakdown, he never felt particularly different.
He was not. In those days, many wealthy mothers were deprived of the chance to look after their children and often retired neurotic and depressed to be ‘ill’ in their bedrooms for years. At that time, almost everyone that could afford a private education for their children sent them away to boarding school, particularly boys. Parents who lived abroad seldom saw their offspring, except for the long summer holidays, and did not play a hands-on role in bringing them up. Children can be so adaptable, accepting what happens to them as the norm and yet still idealise the remote figures of their parents. Philip seems to have been no different, but his move to an English school was going to open up a whole new path in his life.
Chapter 3
GROWING TOGETHER APART
As King George V grew older, he became increasingly alarmed at his son and heir’s behaviour. The Prince of Wales exchanged one married mistress for another and eventually took up with the most undesirable one of all – Mrs Wallis Simpson, an American divorcee. His wilful reluctance to find himself an appropriate girlfriend who would make a suitable wife inevitably focused attention on the heir presumptive, the young Princess Elizabeth. But, in the regal manner, nobody in any of the royal households broke the code of discretion and referred to the looming crisis. ‘Maybe the general hope was that if nothing was said the whole business would blow over,’ the princess’s governess, Marion Crawford, said.
Given the increasing possibility that the princess would eventually ascend to the throne, Queen Mary believed it was vital that Elizabeth should study genealogy to understand that comedy of bloodlines descended from Queen Victoria, which provided Europe with its royal houses. She insisted that history, too, was important, as was poetry (‘wonderful memory training’) and a knowledge of the geography of the British Empire. But maths?
‘Was arithmetic really more valuable,’ the Queen wanted to know, ‘than history?’ Money is not a subject of practical concern to the royal family, so Elizabeth, the Queen observed with telling foresight, would probably never have to do her own household accounts. Crawfie took note. ‘Queen Mary’s practical suggestions were most welcome and I revised the schoolroom schedule for Princess Elizabeth accordingly.’
Whether the Duchess of York ever knew about this, and if she did, whether she cared, is not recorded. The answer in both cases is probably not. The Yorks, so determinedly bourgeois in all other things, simply did not consider a full and rounded education a matter of any great importance for their children’s welfare. ‘No one ever had employers who interfered so little,’ the governess noted. Fortunately, the princess was able to learn by experience. Before she was ten years old she was present at the celebration of her grandparents’ Silver Jubilee in 1935 and the weddings of her uncles George Duke of Kent and Henry of Gloucester, at which she was a bridesmaid.
Of far greater concern to the Yorks was the Prince of Wales’s affair with Wallis Simpson. It was a liaison scored with the hallmark of catastrophe – for the country, for the crown and most particularly for the Yorks themselves. When George V died on 20 January 1936 (by the hand of his doctor, it transpired, who killed him with a lethal injection of cocaine to ensure that the announcement of his death would make the next morning’s edition of The Times and not the less respectable evening papers), it meant that the princess’s Uncle David was now King Edward VIII. His hold on the cr
own, however, was less than Wallis Simpson’s hold on him and later that year he would let go of his birthright ‘for the woman I love’.
The Duke of York, or Bertie as he was known, afflicted with a bad stammer and frail of health, did not want to shoulder the responsibility of kingship. He did not believe he was up to it. He had not been trained for it, he complained. A number of senior government advisers agreed and, when it became clear that a new king was going to have to be found, there was a serious suggestion, recorded in 1947 ‘by gracious permission of His Majesty the King’, by Dermot Morrah, Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, that the crown should go to his younger brother, the sexually adventurous Duke of Kent.
‘This is absolutely desperate,’ Bertie cried to his cousin, the future Earl Mountbatten of Burma. ‘I’ve never even seen a State paper.’ (Another cousin, Nicholas II, expressed the same sentiments in noticeably similar words when the imperial crown of Russia came to him: ‘What’s going to happen to me? I’m not prepared to be a czar. I never wanted to become one. I know nothing of the business of ruling. I have no idea of even how to talk to the ministers.’) The only real solution to the crisis threatening to engulf the House of Windsor was to pass the crown to the next in line, however reluctant he might be to accept it. Some order had to be made of the chaos David’s ill-considered affair had caused.
When the news was broken to Bertie by his mother that the uncrowned Edward VIII had done the unthinkable and abdicated the throne in December and passed his responsibilities to him, he recalled, ‘I broke down and sobbed like a child.’ The Queen was highly embarrassed by this display of weakness in yet another of her sons. ‘Really!’ she was heard to complain in the middle of the crisis. ‘This might be Rumania.’
The Duchess of York had not been quite the support she might have been as events moved towards their denouement. As the abdication approached, she retired to bed ill. Faced with a situation from which there was no retreat, however, the new Queen Consort showed her mettle. She had not wanted to be Queen, but when the role was thrust upon her she assumed its mantle with grace and natural poise. When the news came through, Margaret turned to her sister in the nursery at 145 Piccadilly and asked, ‘Does that mean you will have to be the next Queen?’
‘Yes, some day,’ the ten-year-old Elizabeth gravely replied.
Back came the riposte: ‘Poor you.’
There was a dark personal side to this apparently blossoming public face. Bertie, now transmogrified into George VI, had always been prone to tantrums, known to his family as ‘gnashes’. The confusion and fear engendered by this dramatic change in his position and by the later worries caused by the war only served to exacerbate his unsteady and sometimes violent temperament. His father had been subject to similar temper fits. His married life was less than blissful, and King and Queen sometimes found it so difficult to communicate that they had to write letters to each other instead.
Late in his life, Edward VIII, then Duke of Windsor, told James Pope-Hennessy: ‘Off the record, my father had a most horrible temper. He was foully rude to my mother. Why, I’ve seen her leave the table because he was so rude to her, and we children would all follow her out.’ He then added, ‘Not when staff are present, of course.’ But staff have a way of finding out about such things. George V’s behaviour was well-discussed in the servants’ quarters, although scenes of such private unhappiness and frustration were never played out in public.
As far as it was possible to contain them, such outbursts were not allowed to intrude up onto the nursery floor. ‘We want our children to have a happy childhood which they can always look back on,’ Queen Elizabeth would insist. But the happy family idyll had been damaged. The family were forced to move out of 145 Piccadilly and into Buckingham Palace, a cold, impersonal building with endless corridors which could take a whole morning to navigate. Couldn’t they build a tunnel back to Piccadilly, Elizabeth wistfully suggested? But this new world, with its domestic upsets and feuds and subtleties of status and inexorable duty, could not be locked out. Bath time with their parents, always such a ritual, had to be cancelled because the King and Queen, who before had spent most of their evenings at home, were now out almost every night at official functions.
Princess Margaret, then six, and the older Elizabeth could not but be aware of the tensions and the strain events had caused their father, of the way their mother, once so relaxed and easy-going, now looked drawn and older. There had also been a change in Elizabeth’s own status. As a little girl, she had been taught to curtsey to her grandparents whenever she visited them. The aura of majesty had now fallen on her parents and she was instructed by Crawfie that henceforth they had to curtsey to Papa and Mummy.
‘Margaret too?’ Elizabeth asked.
‘Margaret also,’ was the answer. ‘And try not to topple over.’
The King and his Queen Consort quickly put a stop to that. The princess was not in any doubt about what her position was, though – and hadn’t been for some years. Elizabeth, Crawfie insisted, was a ‘special’ child: neat, courteous, conscientious, unusually well behaved and ‘very shy’. She was aware from the earliest age, however, of just where she stood in the pecking order. Her parents wanted their daughter to feel herself a ‘member of the community’ but, as Crawfie remarked, ‘just how difficult this is to achieve, if you live in a palace, is hard to explain. A glass curtain seems to come down between you and the outer world, between the hard realities of life and those who dwell in a court.’
When she played in Hamilton Gardens, crowds of people would often gather to peer at her through the railings, as if they were contemplating some exotic creature at the zoo. When she went for walks through Hyde Park, she was often recognised. ‘Ignore them,’ her nurse, Clara Knight, known as ‘Allah’, ordered, following her own advice and striding purposefully past the gaping onlookers, looking neither to the left nor right. With Allah as her trainer, Elizabeth’s ability to completely disregard the stares of the inquisitive soon became second nature. But she knew why they were looking.
When she was seven years old, Elizabeth was addressed by the Lord Chamberlain with a cheery, ‘Good morning, little lady.’
‘I’m not a little lady,’ came the imperious reply. ‘I’m Princess Elizabeth!’
This display of regal asperity proved too much for Queen Mary, who promptly marched her granddaughter into the Lord Chamberlain’s office and said, ‘This is Princess Elizabeth, who one day hopes to be a lady.’
But princess she certainly was and, with her uncle gone and the likelihood of her parents producing a son and heir apparent receding with each passing year, a queen she was ever more likely to become. And the impact of that impending burden only hardened her emotional restraint. The death of George V had provoked no outward display of emotion, only the question of whether it was right that she should continue playing with her toy horses (Crawfie said it was). After she was taken to see her grandfather lying in state in Westminster Hall, she remarked: ‘Uncle David was there and he never moved at all. Not even an eyelid. It was wonderful. And everyone was so quiet. As if the King were asleep.’
‘She was reserved and quiet about her feelings,’ Crawfie noted. And it was something the Queen herself would acknowledge in later years, when she remarked: ‘I’ve been trained since childhood never to show emotion in public.’
The girls spent the day looking down the stairwell at the comings and goings of the prime minister and his ministers, and then rushing to the windows to stare at the thousands of people gathered outside. When a letter was delivered addressed to Her Majesty the Queen, Elizabeth turned to Lady Cynthia Asquith. ‘ “That’s Mummy now,” she said, with a tremor in her awestruck voice.’
Whatever awe she felt was offset by her inherent composure and her remarkable sense of responsibility. She was not worldly and has not become so. It was never intended that she should. The practice of keeping her emotions to herself in public acquired the force of habit in private. She does not like being tou
ched. She raises her voice rarely; anger and temperament have no part to play in this lifetime’s exercise in self-control. Instead, she shows her displeasure by icy silence. If that makes her incomplete as a person – and there is an element of the child in her inability to address the sometimes-wayward behaviour of her own family – there is also a regality about her which is both reassuring and intimidating. The aura of majesty comes naturally to her. It was as if she always knew she was destined to be Queen and set about from the earliest age acquiring the necessary skills, always trying hard to do ‘what she felt was expected of her’.
She did not join Margaret in those practical jokes that are such a tradition in the royal family (as long ago as 1860, Lord Clarendon was saying that he never told them his best jokes because pretending to pinch his finger in the door amused them more). When Margaret hid the gardener’s rake or threatened to sound the bell at Windsor which brought out the guard, Elizabeth would hide with embarrassment. Order always had to be maintained. She was, said Crawfie, ‘neat and methodical beyond words. She would sometimes get up in the middle of the night to make sure her shoes were neatly stowed.’
Self-control was essential. At the Coronation of their father in Westminster Abbey, she said of her little sister, ‘I do hope she won’t disgrace us all by falling asleep in the middle.’ And when their parents set sail for the propaganda tour of Canada and the United States just before the outbreak of the Second World War, and Margaret told her that she had her handkerchief ready, Elizabeth sternly warned her, ‘To wave, not to cry.’
Despite this emotional reserve, she was compassionate. During the war the two princesses were moved to the comparative safety of Windsor Castle. They were subjected to the occasional air raid but never to the full force of the Blitz. Even so, Elizabeth took a keen and caring interest in the welfare of those more directly affected by the carnage. When the battleship Royal Oak was torpedoed by a German U-boat that had slipped through the defences of the northern naval base Scapa Flow in October 1939, with the loss of 800 lives, she exclaimed: ‘It can’t be! All those nice sailors.’ That Christmas the deaths were still on her mind, as she remarked: ‘Perhaps we are too happy. I keep thinking of those sailors and what Christmas must have been like in their homes.’ And when she read the name of someone she knew who had died in combat, usually an officer who had been briefly stationed at the castle, she would write to the mother ‘and give her a little picture of how much she had appreciated him at Windsor and what they had talked about,’ said Crawfie. ‘That was entirely her own idea.’ More mundanely but very much in character, she would instruct her more rumbustious sister not to point and laugh at anyone wearing a ‘funny hat’.
My Husband and I Page 4