My Husband and I

by Ingrid Seward

  ‘Well, I can’t stand up much longer,’ joked the duke. Having attended 22,219 engagements in his own right since 1952, not including those attended with the Queen, one could understand his sentiment.

  He is patron or president of more than 780 organisations and, although he will no longer play an active role in attending engagements, he will continue to be associated with various societies, regiments and charities. He calls himself the world’s most experienced unveiler of plaques. Unlike the Queen, whose only speeches written by her are her Christmas addresses, Prince Philip has written all his own speeches which, over the years, run into thousands, particularly on the subject of conservation and his own philosophy of life. Several books of his collected writings have been published on subjects as diverse as ornithology, carriage driving, the environmental revolution, science and religion.

  At midnight on 31 December 1999, the peoples of the world welcomed the arrival of the new millennium with some of the most spectacular celebrations ever seen. It came with a general feeling that a better and brighter future lay ahead. In London, attention was focused around Big Ben as the country awaited the first stroke of midnight and a fireworks display called the ‘River of Fire’ lit up several miles of the Thames. The Millennium Dome, largely funded by the National Lottery and the largest single roof structure in the world, was a centrepiece of the government’s planned celebrations.

  The Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh joined Prime Minister Tony Blair and other notables at the opening of the Dome, now renamed the O2 Arena, where on the stroke of midnight the Duke was seen to plant a kiss on the Queen’s cheek. Such a display of public affection was almost as rare an event as the coming of the millennium itself. The Queen then joined hands with Tony Blair and his wife Cherie and the duke to sing the traditional New Year’s song ‘Auld Lang Syne’.

  The twenty-first century ushered in a new era for the Queen and Prince Philip as old age began to creep up on them. Following the tribulations of the 1990s, the first decade of the new century proved to be one of better times and increasing popularity for the royal family. There was sadness in early 2002 when Princess Margaret, who had been in bad health for some time, and the Queen Mother, at the age of 101, died within two months of each other. The Queen had always been very close to her sister and had been in the habit of telephoning her mother every day. In the days when there was a switchboard, the Buckingham Palace operator loved it when she put them through, saying, ‘Your Majesty, Her Majesty, Your Majesty.’

  With their children leading independent lives with their own families, the Queen and Prince Philip became more dependent on one another than ever before. They are a unit, isolated from the world around them by their royal status, and they have only each other, especially now that so many of those who had been with them in younger years are no longer alive.

  Despite the deaths of her mother and her sister earlier in the year, both the Queen and Prince Philip embarked upon a large-scale series of engagements to commemorate the Queen’s Golden Jubilee in 2002. The royal couple travelled more than 40,000 miles, visiting many Commonwealth countries, including Australia and Canada, as well as undertaking an extensive tour of all corners of the United Kingdom. It was to prove the last time they went on an extended long-distance tour. Despite having known him for a longer period, relations with her prime minister had not grown more comfortable. When discussing the celebrations with the Queen, Tony Blair made a faux pas when he referred to ‘the Golden Jubilee’. The Queen corrected him with a sharp: ‘No, Mr Blair; my Golden Jubilee.’

  Ten years later, the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee was an even more spectacular event and demonstrated throughout the land the esteem, love and respect the population held for their monarch. Thousands of street parties were held up and down the country, with Morecambe in Lancashire claiming the record for the largest event with one of more than one-and-a-half miles long.

  The showpiece event was the Diamond Jubilee Pageant on 3 June, when more than a million people lined the banks of the Thames, standing in the pouring rain, to witness the biggest spectacle on the river for more than 300 years. A thousand vessels completed a seven-mile-long voyage down the river to Tower Bridge. The Queen and her family, on the royal barge the Spirit of Chartwell, were cheered on by those lining the banks. Prince Philip endured the rain, standing in uncomplaining fortitude despite great pain from a bladder infection for which he was hospitalised soon after.

  The following day, after a spectacular Diamond Jubilee concert in front of Buckingham Palace, Prince Charles made a moving speech paying tribute to his mother. He said: ‘So as a nation this is our opportunity to thank you and my father for always being there for us. For inspiring us with your selfless duty and service, and for making us proud to be British. The only sad thing about this evening is that my father cannot be here because unfortunately he has been taken unwell. Ladies and gentlemen, if we shout loud enough he might just hear us in hospital.’ A huge cheer then went up from the crowd. It was probably fair to say that perhaps Prince Philip had had some misgivings about the elaborate and extensive celebrations in any case. At a press party at Windsor Castle to celebrate the jubilee, I had the opportunity of having a few words with Prince Philip. I asked him which event he was most looking forward to. ‘When it’s all over,’ he said and turned on his heel and walked off.

  On family matters, the Queen and Prince Philip at last had much to be satisfied with. The wedding of Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles took place in a civil ceremony at Windsor Guildhall on 9 April 2005. The ceremony, conducted in the presence of the couple’s families, was followed by a Church of England Service of Prayer and Dedication at St George’s Chapel, which incorporated an act of penitence. The Queen and Prince Philip did not attend the civil wedding ceremony, but were present at the Service of Prayer and Dedication and held a reception for the couple in Windsor Castle afterwards.

  In the years following the wedding of their grandson Prince William to Catherine Middleton, on 29 April 2011 at Westminster Abbey, the Queen and Prince Philip welcomed two more great-grandchildren into their family (George, on 22 July 2013, and Charlotte on 2 May 2015), thus ensuring the direct line of succession of the House of Windsor for generations to come. On 4 September 2017, it was announced that the couple were expecting a third child.

  An indication of the possible relaxing of the strict formality that has governed the Queen’s life occurred at the opening of the Olympic Games in London in 2012, directed by Danny Boyle. The Queen was seen in her first acting role, with James Bond actor Daniel Craig, in Buckingham Palace. In a short film, Her Majesty was seen to leave the palace gardens in a helicopter with James Bond, before appearing to parachute into the opening ceremony of the games. This rather undignified stunt, which was kept secret from the press, could not have taken place without the approval of Prince Philip, who was extremely dubious about it. At an Irish State banquet at Windsor Castle two years later, the Queen joked: ‘It took someone of Irish descent, Danny Boyle, to get me to jump from a helicopter.’

  Another reason for satisfaction for both the Queen and Prince Philip was the result of the Scottish independence referendum in 2014. Scotland has always been a favourite place for the royal couple. It was at Balmoral where, as Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten, Philip had proposed to Princess Elizabeth. Their happiest family holidays were spent cruising round the Western Isles in the royal yacht Britannia. They are proud to dress in tartan kilts and have often been seen at highland games watching with obvious enjoyment. The Queen is roused each day by her personal piper playing the bagpipes as he walks round underneath her room, and she favours Scottish reels over all other types of dancing.

  After Prime Minister David Cameron had telephoned the Queen to inform her that the Scottish people had voted by a comfortable majority to remain part of the United Kingdom, he told former Mayor of New York Michael Bloomberg that the Queen ‘purred down the line’. Cameron’s conversation was accidentally picked up by Sky News microphones as
they walked through an office in the businessman’s media empire. This was a serious breach of the convention that the prime minister never discloses anything that is said in conversation between himself and the Queen. Cameron was duly mortified when it was made public.

  For all that the recent years have lacked the upsets of the 1990s, this wasn’t the only difficult or embarrassing moment in recent years. The subject of Princess Diana would not fade away. Early in the morning of 18 February 2008, an unusually large queue formed for tickets to the public gallery in Court Room 73 of the Royal Courts of Justice, because the inquest into the death of Diana was due to hear from its most eagerly anticipated witness. So great was the demand from both the public and the world’s press for access to the court that an annexe was set up in a marquee in the courtyard to house the overflow.

  On this day, there was not a spare seat in any section of the court because it was the day that Mohamed Al-Fayed, the billionaire owner of Harrods in Knightsbridge and Fulham Football Club, was due to give his evidence at the inquest into the cause of the deaths of his son, Dodi Fayed, and Diana some ten years earlier in Paris. By then the inquest had been running for some five months before the Coroner Lord Justice Scott Baker.

  For years after the accident, Al-Fayed had publicly stated his belief that the deaths had been orchestrated by a group of which Prince Philip was the chief conspirator. Because of his criticism of the royal family, Harrods department store had been stripped of its coveted Royal Warrants as purveyors of goods to the Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh and the Prince of Wales.

  While Al-Fayed’s testimony was expected to be controversial, it had not been anticipated that his evidence would be some of the most sensational ever heard in the long history of the law courts. For his day in court, Al-Fayed arrived with four hefty security guards who were required to wait outside the courtroom. He was dressed in a checked suit and a blue-and-green checked silk open-necked shirt; this outlandish attire was in sharp contrast to the dark suit, white shirt and smart tie he habitually wore when going about the business of Harrods.

  Having sworn in the name of Allah to tell the truth, Al-Fayed first read a prepared statement in which he alleged that Princess Diana had told him that Prince Philip and Prince Charles wanted to get rid of her. He also claimed that Diana told him she was pregnant and was about to announce her engagement to be married to Dodi. He said that Prince Philip and Prince Charles plotted to assassinate Diana so that Charles could marry Camilla Parker Bowles, whom he described as Prince Charles’s ‘crocodile wife’. He stated that Prince Philip would never accept that his son Dodi could have anything to do with Prince William, the future King of England.

  Then Mr Ian Burnett QC, counsel for the coroner, asked: ‘All this stems from your belief that Prince Philip is not only a racist but a Nazi as well?’

  Al-Fayed replied: ‘That’s right. It is time to send him back to Germany where he came from. If you want to know his original name, it ends with Frankenstein.’

  He started waving about a photograph taken in 1937 at the funeral of Prince Philip’s sister Cecile. Philip’s favourite sister had died in an air crash in thick fog over Ostend, along with her husband the hereditary Grand Duke of Hesse and their children, while en route to London for the wedding of Prince Louis of Hesse. In this photograph, sixteen-year-old Prince Philip is seen walking through the street of Darmstadt, the Hesse family’s home town, which was festooned with swastikas, in the company of his brothers-in-law Prince Christophe of Hesse in SS uniform and Philip of Hesse in his brown SA uniform. Prince Philip’s uncle Lord Louis Mountbatten followed behind in British naval uniform.

  Al-Fayed added: ‘Prince Philip is a person who grew up with the Nazis, brought up by his auntie who married Hitler’s general. This is the man who is in charge of the country, who can do anything, who manipulates.’

  Al-Fayed expanded his theory to include a cover-up by the French police, the British CID and the United States FBI, among others. However, when at the end of the proceedings the coroner gave a detailed summing up of all the evidence, he told the jury that there was ‘not a shred of evidence’ in support of Al-Fayed’s theory that Prince Philip had ordered MI6 to murder Diana, and he questioned Al-Fayed’s credibility as a witness. He explained that he had made the decision not to hear evidence from Prince Philip: ‘In the light of all the evidence we have heard which provided no evidence whatsoever for the suggestion that he was involved in killing his daughter-in-law and Dodi.’ The inquest also shed new light on Prince Philip’s relationship with Princess Diana when it demanded that their correspondence be made available, some of which had already appeared in her butler Paul Burrell’s book. He was not happy about any of it, but there was little he could do. Once revealed, the letters in question showed that he and Diana – at one time at least – had a very good relationship. She addressed him throughout as ‘dearest Pa’ and one of the letters began ‘Dearest Pa, I was particularly touched by your most recent letter which proved to me, if I didn’t already know it, that you really do care.’

  According to Simone Simmons, Diana’s healer, who knew her better than most, there were other letters that were written in quite a different tone. Prince Philip denied this and issued a statement through his office in Buckingham Palace saying so. He regarded the suggestion that he used derogatory terms to describe Diana as a ‘gross misrepresentation of his relations with his daughter-in-law and hurtful to his grandsons’.

  Diana had always acknowledged that Prince Philip’s letters were helpful in the beginning, but as things became more difficult his tone changed. He had said her actions were damaging the royal family – which indeed they were. She also said that he had insisted that both William and Harry were subjected to DNA tests in the light of her affair with James Hewitt becoming public. There is nothing to prove this is correct, only the hearsay of others, but what was certain was that Prince Philip had moved to the top of Diana’s hate list.

  The background to the letters was that while the Queen would listen to Diana’s woes, she would do little about it, hoping the problems would solve themselves. She would then leave it up to Philip to put his persuasive powers to good use and try to reason with her. He confided in his daughter-in-law, writing to her and explaining that he knew first-hand the difficulties of marrying into the royal family. He tried to make her face facts and deal with the problems within her marriage, and not put her head in the sand. He signed them ‘Pa’, and in the beginning was sympathetic.

  The correspondence between them began in earnest just after the Andrew Morton book was published in June 1992. This provoked a summit meeting at Windsor Castle, with Charles and Diana discussing the state of their marriage with the Queen and Prince Philip. Diana believed the only solution was a separation, but the Queen hoped a compromise would be possible, for the sake of the children and the monarchy. When Diana failed to appear at a second meeting, Prince Philip decided to take matters into his own hands.

  He was direct and straight to the point, but not unkind – or at least he didn’t think so. One of his fiercest comments was: ‘Can you honestly look into your heart and say that Charles’s relationship with Camilla had nothing to do with your behaviour towards him in your marriage?’

  Philip also told Diana she had not been a caring wife and that while she was a good mother, she had been too possessive with her sons. Like most insecure people, Diana did not appreciate being told off one bit and furiously showed the letters to several of her friends, including Rosa Monckton and Lucia Flecha de Lima, who helped her construct suitable replies. Another letter, which according to Burrell had her leaping with joy, said: ‘We do not approve of either of you having lovers. Charles was silly to risk everything with Camilla for a man in his position. We never dreamed he might feel like leaving you for her. I cannot imagine anyone in their right mind leaving you for Camilla. Such a prospect never even entered our heads.’

  He also told Diana that jealousy had eaten away at the marriage and that her irratio
nal behaviour after the birth of William had not helped. He added that her husband had made a ‘considerable sacrifice’ by cutting ties with Camilla and that Diana had not ‘appreciated what he had done’. He even went on to suggest Diana’s behaviour had driven Charles into Camilla’s arms. In one letter, he told her being the wife of the heir to the throne ‘involved much more than simply being a hero with the British people’.

  He did, however, start one letter with the words: ‘Phew!!! I thought I might have gone a bit too far with that last letter.’

  Philip also expressed his concern about her bulimia and acknowledged it could have been responsible for some of her behavioural patterns. He tried to play intermediary between Diana and Charles by suggesting to her things they could do together and listing common interests they shared, which is a tried and tested method favoured by marriage guidance counsellors.

  In the end, things became so bad between them, as far as Diana was concerned, that she had revealed to her friend Roberto Devorik her fears that Prince Philip was plotting to have her killed. Devorik repeated this under oath, adding that she once pointed to a picture of Prince Philip in a VIP lounge at an airport and said: ‘He really hates me and wants me to disappear.’ Her other great friend, the American billionaire deal-maker Teddy Forstmann, said: ‘She hated Prince Philip.’ She told me the same thing when I saw her at Kensington Palace shortly before her death. She explained she had warned her boys: ‘Never, never shout at anyone the way Prince Philip does.’ Without doubt, having such details of the private lives of the royal family brought out in public – not to mention such outlandish accusations made against Prince Philip – was one of the more extraordinary episodes from the royal marriage.