My Husband and I

by Ingrid Seward

  Her position in Scotland is slightly different, as there the Queen vows to uphold the constitution of the Church of Scotland (a Presbyterian national church), but holds no leadership position. Nevertheless, she appoints the Lord High Commissioner to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland as her personal representative, with a ceremonial role. The Queen on occasion has filled the role personally, as when she opened the General Assembly in 1977 and 2002 (her Silver and Golden Jubilee years).

  The Queen’s relationship with the Church of England was symbolised at the Coronation in 1953 when Her Majesty was anointed by Archbishop of Canterbury Geoffrey Fisher. He asked her: ‘Will you to the utmost of your power maintain the Laws of God and the true profession of the Gospel? Will you to the utmost of your power maintain in the United Kingdom the Protestant Reformed Religion established by law? Will you maintain and preserve inviolably the settlement of the Church of England, and the doctrine, worship, discipline and government thereof, as by law established in England? And will you preserve unto the Bishops and Clergy of England, and to the Churches there committed to their charge, all such rights and privileges, as by law do or shall appertain to them or any of them?’ To which the Queen responded: ‘All this I promise to do.’

  Then, with the Sword of State carried before her, she went up to the altar and made her solemn oath. Laying her right hand upon the Bible, she knelt and declared: ‘The things which I have here before promised, I will perform and keep. So help me God.’ Then she kissed the Bible and signed the oath. The ceremony continued as these words were spoken to her: ‘Our gracious Queen: To keep your Majesty ever mindful of the Law and the Gospel of God as the Rule for the whole life and government of Christian princes, we present you with this Book, the most valuable thing that this world affords. Here is Wisdom; this is the Royal Law; these are the lively Oracles of God.’

  The sovereign is ‘Queen of England by the Grace of God’. In history, it was used to imply that the monarch has a God-given divine right to rule. ‘Dieu et Mon Droit’ is incorporated into the royal coat of arms and has been used as the motto of English monarchs since it was adopted by Henry V. The belief in medieval Europe was not that victory in battle automatically went to the side with the better army but, as with personal trial by combat, to the side that God viewed with favour. While of course this is no longer the case, the Queen is very much aware of the religious symbolism behind her role and takes her vows – as monarch and wife – with great seriousness.

  For most of her reign, the Queen has appointed archbishops, bishops and deans of the Church of England, who then swear an oath of allegiance and pay homage to Her Majesty. In spiritual and practical matters, the Church of England is led by 108 bishops and managed by a General Synod, which is elected every five years. In 1970, the Queen became the first sovereign to inaugurate and address the General Synod in person at Church House in the precincts of Westminster Abbey. Since then, she has inaugurated and addressed the opening session of the General Synod every five years after diocesan elections.

  In November 2015, in her address to the Synod, the Queen highlighted how she saw the role of the church when she said: ‘St Paul reminds us that all Christians, as ambassadors for Christ, are entrusted with the ministry of reconciliation. Spreading God’s word and the onerous but rewarding task of peace-making and conflict resolution are important parts of that ministry. So too is the Church of England’s vocation to work in partnership with those of other faiths and none, to serve the common good in this land. To this end, I was pleased that one of the first events that Prince Philip and I attended in 2012 to mark my Diamond Jubilee was a gathering of leaders of all faiths, at Lambeth Palace.’

  The Queen enjoys the music in church and Christmas carols. As part of the Queen’s ninetieth birthday celebrations, the BBC broadcast a radio programme featuring her favourite music. Two Christian hymns made it into the list of her top ten tunes, namely ‘Praise My Soul the King of Heaven’ and ‘The Lord is My Shepherd’. They were featured alongside music from Oklahoma and Annie Get Your Gun.

  The choir of St George’s Chapel at Windsor is world famous. Its primary function is to sing the daily services, the Opus Dei, and it has a large repertoire of music drawn from all ages and traditions. The ‘Jubilate Deo’ was written by Benjamin Britten in 1961 for St George’s Chapel at the request of Prince Philip. He also put up money for an organ scholarship at St George’s College, although his interest in religion has not always been so apparent.

  Looking back to the time in 1962 when the Rt Revd Robin Woods was appointed Dean of Windsor, Prince Philip said: ‘I was dragged into religious things by being invited to become involved in the reorganisation of St George’s, Windsor. Theological dialogue was really forced on me. I never had any great difficulty in being an ordinary Christian.’ Through his father, who was Bishop of Litchfield and as Lord High Almoner had a royal connection, Woods was invited to hold a service for the royal family at Queen Victoria’s Chapel in Windsor Great Park.

  Together, the Queen and Prince Philip soon formed a close relationship with Dean Woods. They invited him to come up to the castle for discussions at the weekends, which was very flattering for the dean. On one occasion, he was working in his garden behind the chapel when the Queen’s page was sent to tell him that the Queen wanted to see him in a hurry. The dean said he would need a few minutes to change into his clerical garb, but he was told to come at once and not to worry about his outfit as the Queen was herself in riding clothes. From then on, their meetings became more informal. However, what the Queen discussed with her chaplain at their weekly get-togethers is not public knowledge.

  St George’s Chapel is exempt from the jurisdiction of the local bishop and is under the direct control of the monarch. So Woods got the job when the Queen made a personal request for him to become Dean of St George’s after hearing him preach. It was at a time when the chapel services were poorly attended. Woods said: ‘When I took the job it was made clear that I would be expected to turn everything upside down.’ Prince Philip, with his abundance of organisation skills, worked with Woods to raise funds to set up a residential conference centre called St George’s House. It opened in 1966, providing a centre where influential people from all walks of life could meet to explore and communicate their views and analysis of contemporary issues against a religious background.

  Prince Philip spoke at the first assembly held at St George’s House about ‘The Role of the Church in Society Today’. This was the first of many discussion groups where Philip expounded his views on religion and the natural world. Philip believed that, as the house was hidden away within the castle walls, it was particularly suitable to attract people in positions of leadership within government, industry, commerce and the churches as a place for discreet discussions of mutual and national interest. Here the Queen and Prince Philip are as one, and every so often indications emerged that she was privately very environmentally conscious and, like her husband, especially concerned about global warming.

  One such indication surfaced in November 2014, at a private lunch at Buckingham Palace attended by Dame Julia Slingo, the Met Office’s chief scientist, when it was reported the Queen had talked about unprecedented flooding at Balmoral that summer and ‘wondered if it was caused by climate change’. This echoes an account reported by Sir Richard Branson of the Queen and Barack Obama ‘animatedly’ discussing global warming over dinner.

  Indeed, her concern goes back a long way, at least to the 1990s. In October 1997, she seriously contemplated including a passage on global warming in her speech to a Commonwealth prime ministers’ conference. Experts on the issue were discreetly sounded out on what it might be ‘helpful’ for her to say, and ministerial aides were told to ‘expect something green from the Queen’. In the event, the intervention was toned down to an oblique reference to ‘environmental challenges, which especially affect the smaller states’. For Prince Philip, however, conservation has almost become a religion, with his passionate
concern for the future of the planet being something he has passed on to his children and grandchildren.

  Prince Philip’s faith continued to deepen, compared with his attitude in the early 1960s. His correspondence with the Rt Revd Michael Mann, who was Dean of Windsor between 1976 and 1989 (‘the best job in the Church of England,’ as he described it), has been made public in a book entitled A Windsor Correspondence. Mann, who died in 2011 aged eighty-seven, rose to become Domestic Chaplain to the Queen after serving as a soldier in the Second World War and then being told, while working for the Colonial Office in Nigeria, that he only had six months to live. Fortunately, the diagnosis was incorrect. In overseeing the wellbeing of St George’s Chapel, he was admired for the adroit way he handled its finances. He also proved a lively preacher, seldom speaking for longer than seven minutes, believing that if a preacher could not make his points in this time he never would.

  The dean encouraged Prince Philip to chair the annual St George’s House Lecture, which was once addressed by the Princess Royal. Their correspondence began when, in 1982, Prince Philip sent Michael Mann a copy of astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle’s lecture on evolution from space, in which he challenged parts of Darwin’s theory of evolution. There followed a lively debate back and forth, with Philip taking a more scientific stance against Mann’s theological viewpoint.

  Philip expressed the view that ‘the point of life is to attempt to make it more tolerable and more civilised for the generations we have every reason to believe will live after us’. The dean saw life as a stepping stone to afterlife. He said: ‘Heaven is not necessarily guaranteed. It will matter how you have lived this life.’ In subsequent correspondence, Philip went on to write about what he described as his hobby-horse – the need to reconcile science and theology. ‘I don’t think the Church can hope to regain the ability to bring the influence of Christian principles to bear on the formation of opinion and intellectual fashion until the conflict between science and theology has been resolved,’ he wrote.

  Mann was opposed to the publication of their correspondence, but Philip consulted the Queen, who encouraged it because it showed Philip in a good light as someone who is interested in religion and philosophy.

  It would have been impossible to live with someone like Prince Philip without being influenced by his thoughts and beliefs, and of course the Queen has been. Prince Philip has an enquiring mind and if he had a motto it would be ‘never give up’. Although the Queen has adopted many of his opinions, she interprets them in a gentler, more understanding way, especially when it comes to their children.

  When Lord Mountbatten was killed by an IRA bomb on 27 August 1979, together with his fourteen-year-old grandson Timothy Knatchbull, Prince Charles was devastated. ‘I have lost someone infinitely special in my life,’ he wrote later, but he never sought comfort from his father. Instead, he turned away from him. When the two of them were due to receive Lord Mountbatten’s body from Lydd airport on its way back from Ireland, Philip was at his worst. He masked his own grief with a brusque and abrupt manner, while Charles retreated into himself.

  It was decided they should eat a light lunch before leaving for the airport and, much to Philip’s irritation, Charles disappeared. He obviously needed to be alone so that he could face whatever lay ahead, but Philip sent Lord Mountbatten’s private secretary, John Barrett, to find him. When Barrett saw the prince standing there, head bowed, shoulders drooping, he didn’t have the heart to disturb him. When Charles eventually returned to the table, his father baited him until his son got up and left the room. Both the guests and staff were embarrassed and found it extremely distressing. The duke was trying to stiffen his son’s backbone, but for a man who is a Christian he was and still can appear to be very cruel. He simply refuses to accept any weakness, though if Prince Charles had instead discussed some theological point about the soul of the man he so loved, Philip would have joined in.

  Over a period of more than thirty years, the Duke of Edinburgh has engaged successive deans of Windsor in wide-ranging philosophical discussions. These have been on the meaning of life, the purpose of man on earth, science and religion, Charles Darwin and the origins of man and, perhaps most important of all to Philip, the relationship between man and nature.

  His querying mind has even taken him to some fairly unusual areas. In earlier times, following discussions with Mountbatten, Philip picked up on his uncle’s interest in UFOs. He took out a subscription to Flying Saucer Review and entered into a correspondence with Timothy Good, a worldwide authority and author of several books on the subject. Philip wrote to him: ‘There are many reasons to believe that they exist. There is so much evidence from reliable witnesses.’

  In July 1986, Philip, as President of the World Wide Fund for Nature, gathered together representatives of the world’s five major religions for the WWF twenty-fifth anniversary conference. At the suggestion of Prince Philip, the conference was held at Assisi, the home of St Francis, patron saint of birds and animals. The idea was to link the secular movement for the conservation of nature with the religious perception of nature as the creation of a supreme being. Philip wrote: ‘Most if not all religions allow for some measure of divine intervention in the creation of the world and in the operation of the natural system. Therefore, if God is in nature, nature itself becomes divine, and from that point it becomes reasonable to argue that reverence for God and nature implies a responsibility not to harm it as a duty to the Creator.’ The conference was a success in that the leaders of the religions involved each issued a declaration regarding the importance of our relationship with the natural world. Philip believes that there is a moral imperative recognised by all the great religions to support conservation.

  Some three years later, Prince Philip co-authored a book with Michael Mann called Survival or Extinction: A Christian Attitude to the Environment. The book arose out of a series of gatherings held at St George’s House to discuss the Christian attitude to nature. The discussions were attended by a broad range of delegates, including schoolmasters, research fellows, company chairmen and Philip’s close friend the Duchess of Abercorn, who is described as a ‘Counsellor in Transpersonal Psychology’. The subjects discussed included the danger to the environment arising from scientific and technological advances and from the explosive growth of the world’s population. The book talks about the sacred relationship of all Christians to the source of all life on earth and the urgent need for humans to face up to what they are doing to the planet. Philip’s religious views are again shown to be tied into nature as the book states: ‘Mankind is a fellow creature in symbiosis with the rest of creation, where he has no right to exploit or destroy, but where his kingly status imposes upon him duties to conserve the order of all Creation, for which he is responsible and answerable to God.’

  Additional to his views on God and nature, Prince Philip has often stressed the importance of the individual in society, writing in his 1984 book Men, Machines and Sacred Cows: ‘It seems to me everything begins with the individual and it is people who decide what sort of communities they are going to live in. It is the people who are going to decide whether it will be humanly tolerable and civilised or whether it will degenerate into a human jungle . . . Our first responsibility is to be concerned about our own behaviour, our own relationships with other people and our own attitude to what is right and wrong.’

  With the Queen and Prince Philip now both into their nineties, their faith continues to play a central part in their lives. For the Queen, her faith is all-important. ‘It’s not just a question of duty for her, it’s very much part of the fabric of her life,’ said a former chaplain at Windsor. ‘She loves matins and the words of the Prayer Book have real meaning for her.’ For Prince Philip, religion has posed many questions for his enquiring mind, as evidenced by his discourses with Michael Mann. Reflecting on those discussions, Mann said Philip could never accept anything until he had chewed it to pieces: ‘When he’s in a corner and he’s lost a point, he does not sto
p like other people would and say, “Yes, well maybe you’re right,” he goes shooting off on something else, but in fact he will come back later and he will have accepted. You know he has been convinced if he’s changed the subject . . . he would find it very difficult to say: “I’m sorry, I’m wrong.” ’

  Their different approaches had stood them in good stead throughout their long marriage, and would help them again as they moved into the latter stages of their lives at the start of a new millennium.

  Chapter 15

  THREESCORE YEARS AND TEN

  The days of our years are threescore years and ten;

  And if by reason of strength they be fourscore years,

  Yet is their strength labour and sorrow;

  For it is soon cut off, and we fly away.

  PSALM 90

  The Queen and Prince Philip have long outlived the biblical expectation of life. Now in their nineties and in the seventieth year of married life, they are in uncharted waters for any royal couple in history. They retain the mental alertness and physical fitness of couples many years younger. In recent years, the Queen and Prince Philip have re-written the record books. The Queen is the longest-reigning British monarch in history as well as the oldest reigning monarch; Prince Philip is the longest-serving consort of a reigning British monarch and the oldest-ever male member of the British royal family.

  On 20 November 2017, the Queen and Prince Philip will celebrate their seventieth (platinum) wedding anniversary. For any couple to reach this landmark is a remarkable achievement. That the Queen and Prince Philip should do so while still working at their public duties is quite extraordinary. It was only in Prince Philip’s ninety-sixth year that Buckingham Palace announced he would retire from royal duties in the autumn of 2017. At a royal lunch shortly after the announcement was made, 88-year-old mathematician Michael Atiyah said to Prince Philip: ‘I’m sorry to hear you’re standing down.’