by A. N. Wilson
Many of those who have known Prince Philip personally have commented upon his sensitivity, which is a quality which plainly exists side by side with the abrasiveness.
Gyles Brandreth wrote, ‘in May 1999, talking to the Duke about Diana, I said to him, “The public view of you, for what it is worth, is of a grouchy old man, unsympathetic to his daughter-in-law but I happen to know, not from you, but I know it, that when things were difficult, you wrote to Diana – kind letters, concerned, fatherly, caring letters from pa, explaining how you knew, first hand, the difficulties involved in marrying into the royal family”. He smiled at me. “The impression the public has got is unfair,” I said. He shrugged, “I’ve just got to live with it,” he said.’45
Those who wish to know about Prince Philip’s extraordinary upbringing are recommended to read Hugo Vickers’s biography of the Prince’s mother, Alice, Princess Andrew of Greece (2000), a book written with the Prince’s full permission. Prince Philip’s parents were, to put it mildly, ill-matched. His father was an impoverished royal playboy who ran away from marriage with a woman who suffered from severe mental illness. Alice’s delusions took lurid form, and before being incarcerated in Dr Ludwig Binswanger’s sanatorium in Switzerland, she had revealed her belief that she had had a carnal relationship with Christ.
In 1937 the family underwent an appalling tragedy when a plane-load of their relations flew to London from Darmstadt for a wedding. Flying in dense fog, the plane hit a chimney over a brickworks near Ostend and burst into flames. In one instant, the bridegroom, Ludwig of Hesse-Darmstadt, had lost almost his entire family, including Prince Philip’s sister Cecile, aged twenty-six, and her two boys, Ludwig (six) and Alexander (four), who were to have been pages at the wedding of their Uncle Ludwig to Margaret Geddes. Prince Philip was told of the tragedy while he was at school at Gordonstoun and never forgot the ‘profound shock’.46 The dreadful funeral took place in Germany, attended by Philip’s three surviving sisters and their husbands. Kaiser Wilhelm II in his Dutch exile sent a representative; Reichsmarschall Göring was there in person.
One of the strange consequences of the tragedy was that Alice in her heartbreak recovered her wits. When war broke out, she insisted on returning to Athens, where she lived in a flat, chain-smoking and praying, accompanied by her cats and, more heroically on her part, by the family of a Jewish property developer named Haimaki Cohen. At great risk to herself, she concealed their existence from the Gestapo, and saved their lives. She never spoke of this episode and it only came to light when Freddy Cohen, one of Haimaki’s sons, told friends after the war, and the story emerged in Basil Boothroyd’s biography of Prince Philip. In her later years, living at Buckingham Palace, Alice dressed as a nun, and was fervent in her Greek Orthodox piety. She was buried on the Mount of Olives in the Russian Orthodox convent, and in April 1993 she was given a posthumous award in Israel as one who had been ‘Righteous Among the Nations’. Prince Philip, in a skullcap, collected the medal at Yad Vashem, the Holocaust remembrance centre in Jerusalem.47
Prince Philip’s childhood and early life were, therefore, troubled, and he learnt early on to deal with disaster by breeziness. To Hugo Vickers, his mother’s biographer, he said, ‘I was at school in England and suddenly my family had gone. My father was in the South of France and my mother was just ill. I had to get on with it.’48
A key figure in Prince Philip’s upbringing, as in that of Prince Charles, was the brother of Princess Alice, Prince Louis – ‘Uncle Dickie’ – known as Lord Mountbatten. The Battenbergs – poor relations of the Hesse-Darmstadts, into whose family Queen Victoria had married her daughter Princess Alice – were renamed the Mountbattens at the time of the First World War. Philip’s grandfather had been the First Sea Lord who on 4 August 1914 had sent the signal: ‘Admiralty to All Ships. Commence hostilities against Germany.’49 But he had always spoken with a German accent, and he was, as a bargain-basement German princeling in charge of the British Navy, in an impossible position. He resigned as First Sea Lord and became Lord Milford Haven. The King himself, George V, whose family had been known as Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, renamed the Royal Family the Windsors, prompting one of the German Emperor’s better jokes: ‘Now, I suppose, we shall have performances of the Merry Wives of Saxe-Coburg’.
Philip’s background, therefore, as a young naval officer with no money when he had married Princess Elizabeth, had been uncertain. No wonder he had seemed to some observers to be over-assertive, not to say bullying, in his demeanour towards her.
Lord Mountbatten had achieved his kingmaking ambition. The Battenbergs, who, two generations earlier, had been almost derisory ‘poor relations’, were now to father the future Kings and Queens of England.
What were they to be called? Philip’s surname, when he was Prince Philip of Greece, was Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg. The British Royal Family could scarcely be expected to adopt this mouthful as its totally inappropriate name. When he became a naturalized British subject, he did so simply as Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten. There was talk, both at the time of his marriage and at the time of Prince Charles’s birth, of the children adopting the surname Mountbatten, but this was hotly contested, by Queen Mary, by the court, and by the Cabinet, prompting Prince Philip, in his fury, to exclaim that he was regarded as nothing but a ‘bloody AMOEBA’.50 By 1960, when Prince Andrew was born, the issue was raised once more. The Lord Chancellor proposed that the dynastic name of the family remained Windsor, but the name of any ‘deroyalized’ grandson etc. of the Queen and Prince Philip could be ‘Mountbatten-Windsor’. It seemed as if the Queen had no desire to change the family name, and that this impulse came from her husband, and, of course, the irrepressible ‘Uncle Dickie’.
When Harold Macmillan visited Sandringham in 1960, after Christmas, he bumped into the Duke of Gloucester, the Queen’s uncle, ‘greatly disturbed’. ‘Thank goodness you’ve come, Prime Minister. The Queen’s in a terrible state; there’s a fellow called Jones in the billiard room who wants to marry her sister, and Prince Philip’s in the library wanting to change the family name to Mountbatten.’51 One source close to the Royal Family said it was the only occasion he had seen the Queen in tears.
The trivial matter of a surname, like the royal obsession with orders, medals and decorations, was a sign, of course, that they had no power. By the end of the reign, no one probably minds what surname is adopted by the Queen’s grandchildren. When people think of the Duke of Edinburgh, they do not think of him as an amoeba. They remember his jokes, and they recall that unbending faithful public servant standing in his uniform, upright in the rain.
4
DEFENDER OF THE FAITH
‘I die a Christian according to the profession of the
Church of England, as I found it left me by my father.’
CHARLES I ON THE SCAFFOLD, 30 JANUARY 1649
The most richly enjoyable biography of any modern Archbishop of Canterbury must be Humphrey Carpenter’s Robert Runcie: The Reluctant Archbishop. Carpenter was a man of stupendous charm. His father was Bishop of Oxford, who lived in the village of Cuddesdon, just outside Oxford. Bob Runcie, during Carpenter’s boyhood, was Principal of the theological college which was just over the road from the Bishop’s Palace. So, the two men were good friends. Both were ebullient and amusing gossips, who could keep any table in a roar with indiscreet talk. Both were highly intelligent. When it was suggested that Humphrey Carpenter should be Runcie’s biographer, the retired Archbishop agreed with alacrity.
What Carpenter did was to tape-record hours and hours of Runcie’s conversation. Unlike many Archbishops, Runcie was a man of the world. He had served with distinction in the 3rd Battalion of the Scots Guards, and fought on the Normandy beaches in 1944. He had a wide social circle, and he was not in the least parsonical. ‘I got the same story from everyone,’ Carpenter wrote, ‘that he was charming, witty, a good mimic, and had an eye for the girls; and that no one would have guessed he would land up in the church.’52 Land u
p, however, he did, and he was a popular, and indeed distinguished, Archbishop of Canterbury. As someone who had been in the Oxford University Conservatives with Margaret Roberts, he was well qualified to stand up to her when he had become Archbishop and she was Prime Minister Thatcher. The pair differed sharply over social questions (the excellent paper Faith in the City appeared under his watch, a document arguing for better investment in Britain’s inner cities, but which Thatcher regarded as Communist). He it was who conducted the Service of Thanksgiving in St Paul’s Cathedral to celebrate the British victory in the Falkland Islands, and insisted upon remembering – much to Thatcher’s near-apoplectic rage – the Argentinians who had been killed. The woman who had spent the Second World War selling pudding-rice and cheap tea to the good people of Grantham felt entitled to regard the Guards Officer Runcie as a ‘wet’.
Needless to say, Runcie spoke wittily, fascinatingly and indiscreetly into Carpenter’s tape recorder, upon all manner of subjects. This was the man who had married Prince Charles to Lady Diana Spencer and said in his sermon, ‘here is the stuff of which fairy tales are made’. This was the man who spoke at the eightieth birthday of Elizabeth the Queen Mother at St Paul’s: ‘She has occupied the centre of the stage since 1923 without suffering the fate which so frequently befalls the fashionable personality who is played out after 10 years or so in the public eye’.53
After Humphrey Carpenter’s book appeared, there were howls of protest, loudest of all from Runcie’s wife Lindy, but also from the Archbishop himself. He claimed that Carpenter had broken some confidentiality agreement and that he should not have quoted so much of his talk. Since it had all been recorded he could scarcely claim that he was being quoted ‘out of context’, but the whole thing made a fascinating episode. Now that the years have passed – Carpenter himself died very young, in 2005, and Runcie has been dead since 2000 – it is possible to wonder whether Runcie did not on some level intend his words to have a wider currency. True, Carpenter betrayed Runcie’s trust by printing bits of their conversations which the Archbishop would prefer to have kept secret. On the other hand, Runcie had known his biographer from childhood onwards, and he knew that Carpenter was scarcely a by-word for discretion.
In particular, Runcie had been embarrassed by the publication of his thoughts about Prince Charles and Diana. Clearly, he had been in a position of trust with the pair, and he revealed that, when the marriage was becoming rocky, Charles had asked Runcie to have a chat with Diana. As Runcie happily blabbed, ‘Diana felt she had a special relationship with me, because I took her brother Charlie’s wedding, and baptised his children as well as hers. And I became and remain a friend of Frances Shand-Kydd her mother, who is rather an underestimated person. So I’m, in a way, associated with that camp.’
About Prince Charles, Runcie was less than flattering. ‘It would help if he loved the Church of England a bit more… He’d go in with the Spectator gang on “the lovely language of the Prayer Book”’, but then ‘he wants to be exploring Hinduism with people in inner cities… I think he’d given up on the Church of England before I arrived.’54
Whereas the Charles and Diana described by Runcie are instantly recognizable as the people we know from their own self-promotions, and from the many books and articles about them, his words about the Queen are much more interesting.
Any Archbishop of Canterbury sees a lot of the monarch. And here is what Runcie said:
The person I do admire is the Queen. She’s the only person who has the ability to rise above it. I don’t fully understand her, but that’s part of her secret. At moments of either high drama or pressure on me – it may have been indirectly, like the papal visit or the coal miners’ strike, she always went out of her way to encourage – it may have been indirectly, by an invitation to do something; it may have been by a chance word. But I’ve always felt that she regarded it as part of her responsibility, though he was never to be regarded as a member of the court or a private chaplain, to encourage the Archbishop of Canterbury, and to listen to what he had to say – to ask him his opinion about things. Now, I never managed to strike that sort of relationship with the Prince of Wales.55
Archbishop Runcie, who was a percipient man about human beings, admitted that he did not understand the Queen. She is indeed a mysterious person. It is difficult to think of anyone who has spent so much time in public life, and who remains so mysterious. In the case of Prime Ministers, Presidents, Popes, famous actors, singers and celebrities, ‘personality’ of one kind or another comes through whether they want it to or not. With the Queen, very little emerges which is personal. Those who see much of her – courtiers and, sometimes, her family – speak of her warmth, or her sense of humour, or her gift for mimicry. These are not often on public display. Her great personal kindness is always mentioned. Almost the only real passion which has been revealed in public is her love of horses, and her demeanour at the races is often totally unrestrained, making the moments when photographers catch her excitement, disappointment or triumph, as a favourite horse does or does not win a race, all the more distinct.
There is one deeply personal characteristic, however, which in most human beings is private and hidden, but which in the case of the Queen has always been part of her public persona. That is her piety. And not only her piety, but the seriousness with which she regards her role as Supreme Governor of the Church of England.
In the first Christmas after her father’s death, the Queen continued his tradition of making a broadcast to the Commonwealth. In those days, it was a radio broadcast, but it was done live from Sandringham, the Norfolk house where, since the reign of King Edward VII, the Royal Family have spent Christmas.
In her message, she paid tribute to her late father, and asked people to remember her at the time of her Coronation the following June.
Each Christmas, at this time, my beloved father broadcast a message to his people in all parts of the world. Today I am doing this to you, who are now my people.
As he used to do, I am speaking to you from my own home, where I am spending Christmas with my family; and let me say at once how I hope that your children are enjoying themselves as much as mine are on a day which is especially the children’s festival, kept in honour of the Child born at Bethlehem nearly two thousand years ago…
But we belong, you and I, to a far larger family. We belong, all of us, to the British Commonwealth and Empire, that immense union of nations, with their homes set in all the four corners of the earth. Like our own families, it can be a great power for good – a force which I believe can be of immeasurable benefit to all humanity.
My father, and my grandfather before him, worked all their lives to unite our peoples ever more closely, and to maintain its ideals which were so near to their hearts. I shall strive to carry on their work.
Already you have given me strength to do so. For, since my accession ten months ago, your loyalty and affection have been an immense support and encouragement. I want to take this Christmas Day, my first opportunity, to thank you with all my heart.
Many grave problems and difficulties confront us all, but with a new faith in the old and splendid beliefs given us by our forefathers, and the strength to venture beyond the safeties of the past, I know we shall be worthy of our duty.
On this broad foundation let us set out to build a truer knowledge of ourselves and our fellowmen, to work for tolerance and understanding among the nations and to use the tremendous forces of science and learning for the betterment of man’s lot upon this earth.
If we can do these three things with courage, with generosity and with humility, then surely we shall achieve that ‘Peace on earth, Goodwill toward men’ which is the eternal message of Christmas, and the desire of us all.
At my Coronation next June, I shall dedicate myself anew to your service. I shall do so in the presence of a great congregation, drawn from every part of the Commonwealth and Empire, while millions outside Westminster Abbey will hear the promises and the prayers
being offered up within its walls, and see much of the ancient ceremony in which Kings and Queens before me have taken part through century upon century.
You will be keeping it as a holiday; but I want to ask you all, whatever your religion may be, to pray for me on that day – to pray that God may give me wisdom and strength to carry out the solemn promises I shall be making, and that I may faithfully serve Him and you, all the days of my life.
Six months later, on 2 June 1953, the Queen was crowned at Westminster Abbey. It was the first time that the ceremony was televised. (The choice of date had been a difficult one, since this was the first date of the Epsom meeting, and it was not known whether it would be possible to hold the Derby the next day, or whether the whole meeting should be pushed back a week – matters of urgency, not only to the Jockey Club, which decides such things, but also to the new monarch.) The Queen did not, as is sometimes stated, lead the cry for every aspect of the ceremony to be televised, but she did, when the strength of public desire for it became known, accede to the notion that the cameras should be allowed into the Abbey and that the ceremony should be broadcast live. The Archbishop of Canterbury and the Cabinet were both opposed to this, and it was the Queen who overrode them. Overnight, the number of TV licence-holders rose from 1.5 million to three million.56
The anointing has been part of the Coronation Ceremony since Saxon times. When the choir sang Handel’s Zadok the Priest (‘As Solomon was anointed by Zadok the priest and Nathan the prophet, so be thou anointed, blessed and consecrated Queen over the peoples whom the Lord thy God hath given thee to govern’), there can be no question that the young woman at the heart of the rite took the words extremely seriously. She is a consecrated person, an anointed monarch. In her way, a sort of priest. She regards her life as one of dedication, just as much as if she had become a nun or a member of the clergy.
