by Kitty Kelley
After their four-day state visit to Portugal, the royal couple returned to England, where the Queen made a rare public display of affection. She rewarded her husband for his service to the Commonwealth by issuing a proclamation that granted him the title and titular dignity of a Prince of the United Kingdom and Northern Ireland. She declared that henceforth he would be known as the Prince Philip* Duke of Edinburgh. She no longer wanted him treated as a mere adjunct or royal accessory. Except for sharing her sacrosanct red boxes and her weekly meetings with the Prime Minister, she made her husband a full partner in her monarchy. She even insisted that when Philip attended royal functions alone, he was to get the complete first verse of the National Anthem, no longer the abbreviated version.
Feeling ennobled, Philip delivered a self-serving speech a few days later, to justify the four months he had spent away from his wife and children. “I believe there are some things for which it is worthwhile making personal sacrifices, and I believe that the British Commonwealth is one of those things, and I, for one, am prepared to sacrifice a good deal if by doing so, I can advance its well-being by even a small degree…. I might have got home for Christmas, but I could not have entertained nearly 1,400 people in the Queen’s yacht from Australia, New Zealand, and those remote communities at twenty-six lunches, dinners, and receptions, and thereby strengthened, I hope, the close links which exist between the Crown and the people of the Commonwealth.”
Those close links were severely strained by the Suez invasion, which had so damaged Britain’s reputation for morality in international politics that the Queen was forced to help pick up the pieces. She made four state visits during 1957 to Portugal, France, Denmark, and Canada. In October her new Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, urged a visit to the United States to try to repair the damage she had allowed her country to wreak on that alliance. “A visit by the Queen is worth one hundred diplomats,” said the Prime Minister, who was eager to mend relations between the two countries. And he wanted to persuade the Americans to share their nuclear weapons technology.
The Queen was not eager to add yet another state visit to her schedule until the Prime Minister shrewdly showed her a cartoon that had appeared in America after it became known that England had duped the United States by conspiring with France and Israel in the Suez invasion. The cartoon showed President Eisenhower sitting at his desk in the Oval Office. The former Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Europe during World War II had said he always regarded England as “an old and trusted friend.” Now, obviously distraught, he was holding his head in his hands. The cutline read “Great Britain Is No Longer Great.”
The Queen did not hesitate. She agreed at once to make the five-day visit to America, with stops in Jamestown, Virginia; Washington, D.C.; and New York City, where she promised to address the UN General Assembly. She left England, in the words of historian Elizabeth Longford, “like a dove from a battered ark.”
Queen Elizabeth and Philip arrived in the United States on Columbus Day, trailed by a press contingent of two thousand reporters and photographers who were not allowed to talk to her. Their instructions from the Palace included a “recommended” dress code. For women: no black dresses, gloves a must, and a curtsy would be nice. For men: a shirt, a tie, and a deferential bow from the neck. The Palace distributed press releases at every stop but ruled out personal interviews.
“How many people,” asked Philip, “go to President Eisenhower’s press conferences?”
“Up to three hundred,” said the Newsweek correspondent.
The Duke of Edinburgh shook his head. “If we did the same thing, we’d get about two.”
British reporters disagreed. “No dictator ever muzzled the press quite so tightly as the Queen of England muzzles hers today on every aspect of royalty,” wrote Anne Edwards in the Daily Mail.
“We had our orders from Charlie Campbell at the British Embassy,” said Warren Rogers of the Associated Press. “No direct questions to the Queen, no talking to the Queen, don’t even look the Queen in the eye. So at the embassy’s press reception, I talked to Philip, who held forth on a briefing he’d just received from the head of the Atomic Energy Commission. He was so full of himself, he sounded as though he could launch Sputnik I and II with his hands tied behind his back. The U.S. was smarting from getting beaten the previous week in the space race by the Russians, who had launched the first earth satellites. So Philip’s inanities on the subject were of timely interest, and I quoted him verbatim. We both got in trouble: he looked like an idiot for saying the things he said, and I caught hell from the [British] embassy for letting him say them. ‘You should have protected him from himself,’ I was told.
“At first, I was sympathetic to Philip and felt sorry for the guy having to drag along in his wife’s wake. Not being a royalist, I certainly didn’t expect to be impressed by the Queen of England, but after covering the royal tour for thirteen days and nights in Canada and America, I found him to be a pompous ass—and fell in love with her. She was so pretty and shy, so demure. I remember her walking down a cascade of white granite steps outside the U.S. Capitol—there must’ve been a thousand steps—and she never looked down once. I couldn’t believe it. I thought for sure she’d fall on her face, but I guess they teach you how to walk down steps without looking at your feet in Queen School. Along with that funny little wave.”
Americans were entranced by the royal visit. The Chicago Tribune hailed the Queen as “a charming little lady,” and the Louisville Courier-Journal described her as an English rose “with a little of the morning dew still on the petal.” Waiters and cabdrivers gathered at street corners to cheer her limousine, and the doorkeeper of the House of Representatives was so excited to see her that he hollered, “Howdee-do, ma’am.” Women were captivated when she attended her first football game and appeared bewildered by men’s passion for the sport. She didn’t understand the concept of downs, or why the two teams huddled. “Why do they gather that way?” she asked. “Why are the goalposts behind the lines at the ends of the field? Why does one man leave the huddle first?” Pointing to the scoreboard, she asked what the numbers meant, and as the game dragged on, she inquired, plaintively but sweetly, “What is the duration of the game?”
Warren Rogers, the Associated Press reporter, who filed several stories a day during the state visit,* encountered further static from the British Embassy press office when he reported that Her Majesty and Gina Lollobrigida shared the same corsetiere. “The brassieres made for Gina were designed to maximize,” recalled Rogers, “but those for the Queen, who had the same kind of prominent bosom, were designed to minimize. I wrote that this was the difference between movie stars and royalty. But I was taken to task by the British press officer for even mentioning the Queen’s Hanoverian bosom. He said in oh, so lofty terms that I had crossed the line, even for a brash American. I had not demonstrated the proper amount of deference. ‘After all,’ he said, ‘the Crown nevah, evah, evah shows cleavage.’ ”
NINE
Royal weddings invigorate the monarchy. With all their pageantry, they pump energy into the ancient rituals. They provide an epic pageant that stirs emotions. The romantic procession of a princess bride in a glass coach drawn by prancing horses to an enchanted life of happily ever after has no equal outside fairy tales. The crash of military drums, the blare of trumpets, and the roar of cheering crowds entrance the country like a shower of shooting stars.
Swept up in the excitement, people unite to celebrate. And, not incidentally, businesses prosper as couturiers design hats and gowns; hotels book guests; restaurants cater parties; concessionaires produce gewgaws; and tourists spend freehandedly. Next to a coronation, nothing enchants the British like a royal wedding, and by 1960 the monarchy needed one.
Reverence for the Crown had slipped since the coronation, and traditional deference had been displaced by a new press curiosity. While still submissive to the Palace, British reporters were finally disclosing how much it cost taxpayers to maintain roya
lty. The 1959 bill for upkeep of the royal yacht, Britannia, the two airplanes in the Queen’s Flight, Prince Philip’s two Westland helicopters, the royal train, and the Queen’s four royal Rolls-Royces exceeded $1 million.
Reporters, far from being aggressive, were at least becoming more vigorous in covering the royal family. They still considered the sixty-year-old Queen Mother above reproach, so they rarely wrote a negative word about her, but they singed the Queen a few times for her lackluster style, her hidebound courtiers, her shaky marriage, and her absent (translation: philandering) husband.*
“What this family needs next year is a wedding,” the Queen Mother told her older daughter during the royal family’s 1959 Christmas holidays. She had consulted the court calendars to find the right time to announce Princess Margaret’s engagement. She had decided to give her younger daughter a full-blown wedding with all the royal flourishes. She knew that such a state occasion would revitalize the monarchy, but the Queen resisted. She feared that an extravagant wedding would only bring more criticism for spending taxpayers’ money, and she did not want any more criticism. Still, she would never oppose her mother—directly.†
The Queen Mother said Princess Margaret’s engagement announcement would not interfere with the national celebration planned for the birth of the Queen’s third child, expected in February. Ten years had passed since Princess Anne was born, and for the Queen, her current pregnancy would underscore the stability of her marriage and commitment to her family. Significantly, the birth was timed to coincide with changing the name of the House of Windsor to the House of Mountbatten-Windsor. The Queen had proposed the change the previous year and suggested the announcement to include her husband’s name be made shortly before the arrival of their third baby.
Despite his misgivings, the Prime Minister agreed to present the matter to his cabinet. The traditional monarchists objected when he broached the subject, but the Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, pushed for the Queen’s position, saying how important it was to her that her husband’s name be validated. The Bishop of Carlisle cooperated by announcing that he did not like to think of any child born in wedlock being deprived of the father’s family name. “Why should Her Majesty be different from any other married woman in the realm?” the Prime Minister asked his cabinet.
“Why indeed,” snorted one Tory minister, who suspected the ambitions of “that Battenberg buggerer” (that is, Louis Mountbatten) had more to do with the name change than the Queen’s personal wishes.
The Deputy Prime Minister reported back to the Queen that several ministers suspected the strong hand of her unpopular husband. The Deputy then wrote a confidential memo to the Prime Minister about his meeting, saying: “The Queen stressed that Prince Philip did not know of the present decision, on which she had absolutely set her heart.”
So the Prime Minister went back to his cabinet and argued strenuously for the name change. The meeting was so acrimonious that papers dealing with the issue were not routinely released in 1990 under the thirty-year rule. The subject referred to within the cabinet as “the Queen’s Affair” was so sensitive that the government ordered all pertinent documents be kept sealed for an additional twenty years.
After months of discussion, the Macmillan* cabinet finally acceded to the Queen, and the new name was intricately fashioned by lawyers to accommodate her wishes without sacrificing historical continuity. The hyphenated hybrid was confusing, but at least it gave the Queen and Prince Philip, not to mention “Uncle Dickie,” some small measure of satisfaction. On February 8, 1960, eleven days before the birth of Prince Andrew,† Her Majesty announced:
While I and my children will continue to be styled and known as the House and Family of Windsor, my descendants, other than descendants enjoying the style, title or attributes of Royal Highness and the titular dignity of Prince or Princess and the female descendants who marry, and their descendants shall bear the name Mountbatten-Windsor.
The reaction was immediate and scathing. “Only fifteen years after the second world war against Germany,” fumed a columnist for the Mirror, “we are abruptly informed that the name of Mountbatten, formerly Battenberg, is to be joined willy-nilly with the name of Windsor.”
Lord Beaverbrook, who owned the Daily Express, the Sunday Express, and the Evening Standard, blamed Mountbatten for pushing the Queen into a hyphenated name. “Small wonder that Lord Mountbatten, whose devotion to his heritage is little short of fanatical, has for many years nursed a secret ambition that one day, the name of the ruling house of Britain might be Mountbatten,” he wrote. “The Queen could never see the name of Windsor, chosen by her grandfather, abandoned by the royal house. On the other hand, she sympathizes with her husband’s feelings and more particularly with the overtures of his uncle.”
The pompous Mountbatten was unperturbed. He was too busy celebrating. “My greatest happiness,” he wrote in a letter to a friend, “is that in the future royal children will be styled by the surname Mountbatten-Windsor.”
In January 1960 Lord Mountbatten had staged an elaborate wedding for his younger daughter, Lady Pamela, to interior decorator David Nightingale Hicks. Mountbatten invited all the crowned heads of Europe to make sure his daughter’s wedding was as colorful and splendid as a royal wedding, prompting the press to describe him as “almost royal.” Future Prime Minister Harold Wilson described him as “the Shop Steward of Royalty,” but his future son-in-law said that Mountbatten was insecure about his status. “The trouble with Dickie,” said David Hicks, “was that in spite of his brilliant achievements, he never really knew who he was. He wasn’t a member of the aristocracy; he had royal blood, but he wasn’t fully accepted in the royal family, so he held a peculiar position that somehow left him very insecure.”
At first Mountbatten had been dismayed that his daughter wanted to marry a commoner whom he considered far beneath her rank and station. For his own pride, Mountbatten wanted her to make a more illustrious marriage like her sister’s. In 1946 he had persuaded his older daughter, Patricia, his acknowledged favorite* and the one for whom he had secured his title,† to marry John Knatchbull, a strapping aristocrat who was Baron Brabourne. Mountbatten was proud to claim this man as his son-in-law; he was not at all pleased with the prospect of an impecunious interior decorator.
“David’s effeminate profession, plus his sexual preferences, bothered Lord Mountbatten,” said his former secretary John Barratt. “But he recognized that Pammy was already thirty years old and on the cusp of spinsterhood. She had never been proposed to before, so he tried to accept the situation and make the best of it.”
Mountbatten’s biographer, Philip Ziegler, agreed that Hicks† was not Mountbatten’s idea of the perfect son-in-law. “An interior decorator,” wrote Ziegler, “was not what he would have chosen as a recruit for his family.”
“The English aristocracy are so two-faced about sexuality,” said the writer Gwen Robyns. “It was absolutely hypocritical for Mountbatten, supposedly an old queen himself, or at least bisexual, to object to David Hicks. David never lied about himself or his boyfriends. He’s always been quite open, and Pammy’s very accepting of the men in his life.
“I came to know Pammy and David quite well when I worked with him on a book about decorating,” said the writer. “I dined with them many times, and there was always a beautiful young boy in attendance. I met several of David’s boyfriends, and even interviewed them when I was writing his biography.* I do remember asking Pammy once how she could put up with all the men. And she said, ‘Gwen, if you had parents like mine, you can put up with anything. Besides, David is a very good father and he’s very nice to me. He runs the house, he orders the food, and he picks out all my clothes.’
“David told me that he was on the verge of bankruptcy in 1959,” continued the writer. “A friend told him the only solution was to marry an heiress, but David didn’t know any heiresses, so his friend invited him to a party to meet a few. That night David was taking his mother to the movies—he was
living with his mother at the time. He left her in the car for a few minutes while he ran in to his friend’s party to scout heiresses. Enter Lady Pamela Mountbatten. David didn’t waste a second.
“ ‘I saw an estate of five million pounds walk through the door in white peep-toe shoes and the worst white pocketbook you’ve ever seen,’ he told me. ‘I immediately took her in my arms to dance and whispered, ‘How many babies do you want?’ Naturally, Pammy, who had never been courted before and was in danger of never getting married, was enchanted. She told me she went home and told her mother, who was pleased for her but rather puzzled.
“ ‘That’s wonderful, darling,’ said Edwina, an heiress who inherited generations of heirlooms and never purchased furniture in her life. ‘But what’s an interior designer?’ ”
After conferring with the Queen’s courtiers, Lord Mountbatten chose January 13, 1960, for his daughter’s wedding because that was the only date that was convenient for the royal family. “Despite the snow and slush of a winter blizzard, he insisted on a January wedding because he wanted to have the royal family there,” said Barratt, “and most of them attended, except for the Queen, who was in confinement at Sandringham for the birth of her third child.”
Mountbatten took charge of his daughter’s wedding like an impresario staging a theatrical production. He selected her royal bridesmaids—Princess Anne, the Queen’s ten-year-old daughter; Princess Clarissa of Hesse; and Princess Frederica of Hanover. He summoned Owen Hyde-Clark of the House of Worth to design her wedding dress and promptly put his daughter on a diet so that she would look sleek and slim on her wedding day. He relegated the incidental details to his future son-in-law, the decorator, who was eager to please his future father-in-law. Hicks decreed that everything should be white—”all white, all white”—from the mink cuffs on the bridal gown to the bridesmaids’ coronets of hyacinth petals.
