Prince Andrew was mostly absent from his son’s life as well, living as a “boulevardier” in Monte Carlo with a mistress, and subsisting on a small annuity, while beneficent relatives and friends paid Philip’s school fees. He left Cheam in 1933 to spend one year at Salem, a boarding school in Germany run by a progressive Jewish educator named Kurt Hahn. After the Nazis briefly detained Hahn, he fled in 1934 to the North Sea coast of Scotland and founded Gordonstoun School, where Philip soon enrolled.
Once in the United Kingdom, Philip came under the wing of his relatives there, chiefly his Battenberg grandmother, the Dowager Marchioness of Milford Haven, who lived in a grace-and-favor apartment in Kensington Palace, and his mother’s younger brother, Louis “Dickie” Mountbatten, later the first Earl Mountbatten of Burma, who assiduously cultivated his royal relatives.
Six feet tall, with intense blue eyes, chiseled features, and blond hair, Philip was an Adonis as well as athletic and engaging, exuding confidence and a touch of impudence. He was a resourceful and energetic self-starter, yet he was also something of a loner, with a scratchy defensiveness that sprang from emotional deprivation. “Prince Philip is a more sensitive person than you would appreciate,” said his first cousin Patricia Mountbatten, Dickie’s older daughter. “He had a tough childhood, and his life constrained him into a hard exterior in order to survive.”
As cousins, Philip and young Elizabeth had crossed paths twice, first at a family wedding in 1934 and then at the coronation of King George VI in 1937. But it wasn’t until July 22, 1939, when the King and Queen took their daughters to the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth, that the 13-year-old princess spent any time with 18-year-old Philip, who was a cadet in training at the school.
At the behest of Dickie Mountbatten, an officer in the Royal Navy, Philip was invited to have lunch and tea with the royal family. Marion “Crawfie” Crawford, Princess Elizabeth’s governess, observed the sparks, later writing that Lilibet, as she was called, “never took her eyes off him,” although he “did not pay her any special attention”—no surprise, since he was already a man of the world, and she only on the cusp of adolescence. While everything else in the life of Lilibet was laid out for her, she made the most important decision on her own. “She never looked at anyone else,” said Elizabeth’s cousin Margaret Rhodes.
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During the war years, Philip came to visit his cousins occasionally at Windsor Castle, and he and the princess corresponded when he was at sea, serving with the Royal Navy in the Mediterranean and the Pacific. Friends and relatives detected a flutter of romance between Philip and Elizabeth by December 1943, when he was on leave at Windsor for Christmas and watched Elizabeth, then 17, perform in the “Aladdin” pantomime. The King was quite taken by Philip, telling his mother the young man was “intelligent, has a good sense of humour and thinks about things in the right way.” But both the King and Queen thought that Lilibet was too young to consider a serious suitor.
Philip visited Balmoral, the royal family’s estate in the Scottish Highlands, in the summer of 1944, and he wrote Queen Elizabeth about how he savored “the simple enjoyment of family pleasures and amusements and the feeling that I am welcome to share them.” That December, while Philip was away on active duty, his father died of cardiac arrest at age 62 in the room where he lived at the Hotel Metropole, in Monte Carlo. All he left his 23-year-old son were some trunks containing clothing, an ivory shaving brush, cuff links, and a signet ring that Philip would wear for the rest of his life.
While Philip was completing his deployment in the Far East, Lilibet enjoyed the freedom of the postwar period. At a party given by the Grenfell family at their Belgravia home in February 1946 to celebrate the peace, the princess impressed Laura Grenfell as “absolutely natural . . . she opens with a very easy and cosy joke or remark. . . . She had everyone in fits talking about a sentry who lost his hat while presenting arms.” Elizabeth “danced every dance. . . . Thoroughly enjoying herself” as the “Guardsmen in uniform queued up.”
Philip finally returned to London in March 1946. He took up residence at the Mountbatten home on Chester Street, where he relied on his uncle’s butler to keep his threadbare wardrobe in good order. He was a frequent visitor to Buckingham Palace, roaring into the side entrance in a black MG sports car to join Lilibet in her sitting room for dinner, with Crawfie acting as duenna. Lilibet’s younger sister, Margaret, was invariably on hand as well, and Philip included her in their high jinks, playing ball and tearing around the long corridors. Crawfie was taken with Philip’s breezy charm and shirtsleeve informality—a stark contrast to the fusty courtiers surrounding the monarch.
During a month-long stay at Balmoral late in the summer of 1946, Philip proposed to Elizabeth, and she accepted on the spot, without even consulting her parents. Her father consented on the condition that they keep their engagement a secret until it could be announced after her 21st birthday, the following April. Like the princess, Philip didn’t believe in public displays of affection, which made it easy to mask his feelings. But he revealed them privately in a touching letter to Queen Elizabeth in which he wondered if he deserved “all the good things which have happened to me,” especially “to have fallen in love completely and unreservedly.”
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Palace courtiers and aristocratic friends and relatives of the royal family viewed Philip suspiciously as a penniless interloper. They were irked that he seemed to lack proper deference toward his elders. But mostly they viewed him as a foreigner, specifically a “German” or, in their less gracious moments, a “Hun,” a term of deep disparagement after the bloody conflict so recently ended. Even though his mother had been born in Windsor Castle, and he had been educated in England and served admirably in the British Navy, Philip had a distinctly Continental flavor, and he lacked the clubby proclivities of the Old Etonians. What’s more, the Danish royal family that had ruled in Greece was in fact predominantly German, as was his maternal grandfather, Prince Louis of Battenberg.
None of the criticisms of Philip’s German blood or cheeky attitude was of any concern to Princess Elizabeth. A man of ideas and appealing complexity, he was a breath of fresh air to the heiress presumptive. It was clear that he would not be easy, but he would certainly not be boring. He shared her commitment to duty and service, but he also had an irreverence that could help lighten her official burdens at the end of a tiring day. His life had been as unfettered as hers had been structured, and he was unencumbered by the properties and competing responsibilities of a landed British aristocrat. According to their mutual cousin, Patricia Mountbatten, the princess also saw that, behind his protective shell, “Philip had a capacity for love which was waiting to be unlocked, and Elizabeth unlocked it.”
The princess “would not have been a difficult person to love,” said Patricia Mountbatten. “She was beautiful, amusing and gay. She was fun to take dancing or to the theater.” In the seven years since their first meeting, Lilibet (which is what Philip now called her, along with “darling”) had indeed become a beauty, her appeal enhanced by being petite. She did not have classical features but rather what Time magazine described as “pin-up” charm: big bosom (taking after her mother), narrow shoulders, a small waist, and shapely legs. Her curly brown hair framed her porcelain complexion, with cheeks that the photographer Cecil Beaton described as “sugar-pink,” vivid blue eyes, an ample mouth that widened into a dazzling smile, and an infectious laugh. “She sort of expands when she laughs,” said Margaret Rhodes. “She laughs with her whole face.”
The press caught wind of the cousins’ romance as early as October 1946, at the wedding of Patricia Mountbatten to Lord Brabourne at Romsey Abbey. Philip was an usher, and when the royal family arrived, he escorted them from their car. The princess turned as she removed her fur coat, and the cameras caught them gazing at each other lovingly. But no official confirmation followed, and the couple kept up
an active social life. Elizabeth’s guardsmen friends served as her escorts to restaurants and fashionable clubs, and Philip would take Elizabeth and Margaret out to a party or a play. But he was only one among many young men to dance with the heiress presumptive.
He had been working as an instructor at the Naval Staff College, in Greenwich, and with the help of Dickie Mountbatten had secured his British citizenship in February 1947, giving up his title as H.R.H. Prince Philip of Greece. Since he had no surname, Philip decided on Mountbatten, the English version of his mother’s Battenberg.
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The long-delayed engagement announcement came on July 9, 1947, followed by the happy couple’s introduction at a Buckingham Palace garden party the next day. Philip’s mother retrieved a tiara from a bank vault, and he used some of the diamonds to design an engagement ring created by Philip Antrobus, Ltd., a London jeweler. Several months later Philip was confirmed in the Church of England by the Archbishop of Canterbury.
Just before his daughter’s wedding, the King gave his future son-in-law a collection of grand titles—Duke of Edinburgh, Earl of Merioneth, and Baron Greenwich—and decreed that he should be addressed as “His Royal Highness.” He would be called the Duke of Edinburgh, although he would continue to be known popularly as Prince Philip and would use his Christian name for his signature.
On November 18, the King and Queen had a celebratory ball at Buckingham Palace that dramatist Noël Coward called a “sensational evening. . . . Everyone looked shiny and happy.” Elizabeth and Philip were “radiant. . . . The whole thing was pictorially, dramatically and spiritually enchanting.” As was his habit, the King led a conga line through the staterooms of the palace, and the festivities ended after midnight. Philip was in charge of distributing gifts to his fiancée’s attendants: silver compacts in the Art Deco style with a gold crown above the bride’s and groom’s entwined initials and a row of five small cabochon sapphires. With typical insouciance, “he dealt them out like playing cards,” recalled Lady Elizabeth Longman, one of the two non-family members among the eight bridesmaids.
The morning of the wedding, two days later, Philip gave up smoking, a habit that had kept his valet, John Dean, “busy refilling the cigarette boxes.” But Philip knew how anguished Elizabeth was by her father’s addiction to cigarettes, so he stopped, according to Dean, “suddenly and apparently without difficulty.” Patricia Brabourne, who was also with her cousin that morning, said that Philip wondered if he was being “very brave or very foolish” by getting married, although not because he doubted his love for Lilibet. Rather, he worried that he would be relinquishing other aspects of his life that were meaningful. “Nothing was going to change for her,” his cousin recalled. “Everything was going to change for him.”
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Outside Westminster Abbey, tens of thousands of spectators gathered in freezing temperatures to welcome the princess and her father in the Irish State Coach. Two thousand guests enjoyed the splendor of the 11:30 A.M. ceremony in the abbey, an event that Winston Churchill called “a flash of colour on the hard road we have to travel.” Elizabeth’s dress, which had been designed by Norman Hartnell, was of pearl-and-crystal-encrusted ivory silk satin, with a 15-foot train held by the two five-year-old pages, Prince William of Gloucester and Prince Michael of Kent, who wore Royal Stewart tartan kilts and silk shirts. Her tulle veil was embroidered with lace and secured by Queen Mary’s diamond tiara, and Philip’s naval uniform glinted with his new Order of the Garter insignia pinned to his jacket. The Archbishop of York, Cyril Garbett, presided, telling the young couple that they should have “patience, a ready sympathy, and forbearance.”
After the hour-long service, the bride and groom led a procession down the nave that included the crowned heads of Norway, Denmark, Romania, Greece, and Holland. Noticeably absent was the King’s brother, former King Edward VIII, now the Duke of Windsor, and his wife, for whom he had abdicated the throne. The estranged Windsors were living in Paris, unwelcome in London except for periodic visits. Although their exile may have seemed harsh, George VI, Queen Elizabeth, and their advisers had seen no alternative. A king and former king living in the same country would have resulted in two rival courts.
While the bells of the abbey pealed, Elizabeth and Philip were driven to Buckingham Palace in the Glass Coach, preceded and followed by two regiments of the Household Cavalry on horseback. It was the most elaborate public display since the war, and the crowds responded with ecstatic cheers.
As a concession to Britain’s hard times, only 150 guests attended the “wedding breakfast,” which was actually luncheon in the Ball Supper Room. The “austerity” menu featured filet de sole Mountbatten, perdreau en casserole, and bombe glacée Princess Elizabeth. The tables were decorated with pink and white carnations, as well as small keepsake bouquets of myrtle and white Balmoral heather at each place setting. The bride and groom cut the wedding cake—four tiers standing nine feet high—with Philip’s Mountbatten sword.
The King didn’t subject himself to the strain of making a speech, celebrating the moment instead with a raised glass of champagne to “the bride.” After being showered with rose petals in the palace forecourt, the newlyweds were transported in an open carriage drawn by four horses—“the bride snugly ensconced in a nest of hot-water bottles”—to Waterloo Station.
They spent a week at Broadlands, the Mountbatten estate in Hampshire, and two weeks in snowbound seclusion at Birkhall, an early-18th-century white stone lodge on the Balmoral estate, set in the woods on the banks of the river Muick. With its Victorian décor and memories of childhood summers before her parents became King and Queen, Elizabeth could relax in a place she considered home. Dressed in army boots and a sleeveless leather jacket lined with wool, she went deerstalking with her husband, feeling “like a female Russian commando leader followed by her faithful cut-throats, all armed to the teeth with rifles,” she wrote to Margaret Rhodes.
She also sent her parents tender letters thanking them for all they had given her, and the example they had set. “I only hope that I can bring up my children in the happy atmosphere of love and fairness which Margaret and I have grown up in,” she wrote, adding that she and her new husband “behave as though we had belonged to each other for years! Philip is an angel—he is so kind and thoughtful.” Philip revealed his carefully cloaked emotions when he wrote to his mother-in-law, “Cherish Lilibet? I wonder if that word is enough to express what is in me.” He declared that his new wife was “the only ‘thing’ in this world which is absolutely real to me and my ambition is to weld the two of us into a new combined existence that will not only be able to withstand the shocks directed at us but will also have a positive existence for the good.”
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The honeymooners were back in London in time for the 52nd birthday of King George VI, on December 14, ready to begin their new life. They chose to live in Clarence House, the 19th-century residence adjacent to St. James’s Palace, just down the Mall from her parents. But the house needed extensive renovations, so they moved temporarily into an apartment in Buckingham Palace. Philip had a paper-pushing job at the Admiralty, to which he would walk on weekdays. Elizabeth was kept busy by her private secretary, John “Jock” Colville.
By May 1948, Elizabeth was four months pregnant, and behind closed doors was suffering from nausea. Even so, she and Philip kept up an active social life. They went to the races at Epsom and Ascot and joined friends at restaurants, nightclubs, and dances. For a costume party at Coppins, the home of the Duchess of Kent, Elizabeth dressed “in black lace, with a large comb and mantilla, as an Infanta,” wrote diarist Chips Channon, and “danced every dance until nearly 5 A.M.” Philip “was wildly gay,” Channon observed, in a “policeman’s hat and hand-cuffs. He leapt about and jumped into the air as he greeted everybody.”
When they were with friends such as Rupert and
Camilla Nevill and John and Patricia Brabourne, the royal couple showed an easy affection toward each other. During a visit to the Brabournes in Kent, John said to Philip, “I never realized what lovely skin she has.” “Yes,” Philip replied, “she’s like that all over.”
In the early evening of November 14, 1948, word went out that Princess Elizabeth had gone into labor in her second-floor bedroom at Buckingham Palace, where a hospital suite had been prepared for the baby’s arrival. Philip passed the time playing squash with three courtiers. Senior members of the household gathered in the Equerry’s Room, a ground-floor drawing room that was equipped with a well-stocked bar, and shortly afterward were told that Elizabeth had given birth to a seven-pound-six-ounce son at 9:14. They set to work writing “Prince” on telegrams and calling the Home Office, Prime Minister Clement Attlee, and Winston Churchill, the leader of the opposition. “I knew she’d do it!” exclaimed Commander Richard Colville, press secretary to the King, exultant over the arrival of a male heir. “She’d never let us down.”
Sir John Weir, one of the official physicians to the royal family, confided to Queen Elizabeth’s private secretary, Major Thomas Harvey, that he’d “never been so pleased to see a male organ in all his life.” Queen Elizabeth was “beaming with happiness,” and George VI was “simply delighted by the success of everything.” Philip, still dressed in sneakers and sports clothes, joined his wife as her anesthesia wore off, presented her with a bouquet of roses and carnations, and gave her a kiss.
Elizabeth and Philip named their son Charles Philip Arthur George. “I had no idea that one could be kept so busy in bed—there seems to be something happening all the time!,” Elizabeth wrote to her cousin Lady Mary Cambridge two weeks after giving birth. “I still find it hard to believe that I really have a baby of my own!” The new mother was particularly taken with her son’s “fine, long fingers—quite unlike mine and certainly unlike his father’s,” as she described them in a letter to her former music teacher, Mabel Lander. For nearly two months the princess breast-fed her son, until she fell ill with measles—one of several childhood diseases she had missed by being tutored at home rather than going to school with classmates—and Charles had to be sent away temporarily so that he wouldn’t catch the illness.
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