Royal Sisters

by Anne Edwards

  Crawfie also wrote that on one visit “Philip removed from the door the old card with ‘Nursery’ on it, and substituted another marked ‘Maggie’s Playroom.’ ... It was always a threesome, unless I took a hand and did something about it by removing Margaret on some pretext or other.... [She] was fond of Philip in an entirely sisterly fashion, and he was very good for her. He stood no nonsense. She was then at adolescence’s most tiresome stage, apt at times to be comically regal and overgracious, and Philip wasn’t having any. She would dilly-dally outside the lift, keeping everyone waiting, until Philip, losing patience, would give her a good push that settled the question of precedence [which she held over Philip] quite simply.”

  Other Household members were quick to observe that Philip did not object to Margaret’s inclusion and that he and the younger sister “were a spirited matched pair.” Margaret turned her sister’s meetings with Philip into lively encounters, and the handsome Lieutenant enthusiastically accepted her challenges and fell in with her madcap games. Lilibet, more inhibited and reserved, ran and moved ponderously and always seemed “to be pulling up the rear.”

  Philip appears to have made the backward transition from worldly bachelor to the naïveté of teenage games and courtship. However, he had a penchant for boyish stunts, riding a bicycle no-hands or with his feet up, hurtling into gates and fences. He had quickly adapted to the atmosphere of youth created by the sisters when they were together and seemed honestly to be having a good time. His naturalness in this post-nursery atmosphere and his ability to put Lilibet at ease contributed to her affection for him. She was convinced he liked her for herself, and she was infatuated. And why not?

  Philip was tall and strong and golden and handsome. He made her feel protected, attractive without sexual risk. Sex was not a subject that Crawfie included in her curriculum, nor was it a topic of conversation between Lilibet and her parents. Like most sheltered girls of this period, she believed sex had to do with marriage and having children. The expectations for her to marry and produce an heir while still fairly young, the short list of candidates for her to choose from and her strong attraction to Philip made it easy to understand how marriage to him presented a pleasurable answer for her to a centuries-old royal dilemma.

  None of Philip’s former, more sophisticated companions were available for his amusement. Alexandra was married to ex-King Peter of Yugoslavia and was a recent mother. And although her wartime marriage to a second husband was not going well, Hélène Foufounis now had two infant children, a boy and a girl, to whom Philip was godfather.

  Shortly after Philip’s reunion with Lilibet at Buck House, he and John Elphinstone, who had returned safely from Colditz along with George Lascelles and Churchill’s young relatives, joined the family for a weekend at Royal Lodge. Alexandra and Peter occupied a house (given to them for their use by the King) that opened, as did Royal Lodge, on to Windsor Great Park. While out walking through its secluded paths, they came upon Margaret and Elphinstone approaching from a wooded lane. Lilibet and Philip lagged behind.

  “Another time,” Alexandra noted, “the royal corgis darted through the bracken and when we looked around expecting to see Uncle Bertie and Aunt Elizabeth,* it was Philip and Lilibet, walking alone. They were so lost in conversation that we decided not to bother them, so we just waved and went on.... [After that] we used to see them holding hands, disengaging themselves until we came closer and they could see it was only us. Few people wander [in Windsor Great Park] and it was an idyllic setting.”

  “I only hope Philip isn’t just flirting with her,” Alexandra once told Marina. “He’s so casual that he flirts without realizing it.”

  Marina said soberly, “I think his flirting days are over. He would be the one to be hurt now if it is all just a flirtation or if it is not to be.”

  If, indeed, it was not to be, Philip’s future was extremely dark. Outside of his Naval salary he was penniless, and if he did not obtain British citizenship within a year, when his wartime service ended, he would be disqualified from continuing on in the Navy as a career officer. Another civil war raged in Greece, and the internal situation was so unsettled that the British naturalization of a member of the Greek Royal House was likely to be misinterpreted. He had not attended University and had no degree. If his hope to win Lilibet failed, the ambitious Mountbatten’s interest in him would swiftly fade. Philip’s future could well have been like that of so many of his exiled relatives—a marriage to a rich woman who could support him in continuing regal style. “Women,” Alexandra said, “flung themselves aggressively at Philip.”

  Mountbatten’s aspirations had added to Philip’s natural arrogance. He took being Royal seriously. Although he worked diligently at his post, and during the war had been proud to have learned how to stoke a ship’s boiler, he did not engage in easy friendship with his fellow officers—Lieutenant Michael Parker being an exception. In the winter of 1945, he was assigned to a new base where “he used to write his letters at a local hotel and address them boldly ’to HRH Princess Elizabeth, Buckingham Palace.’ There was none of the subterfuge for him of letters addressed to an intermediary. And he simply gave them to the night porter to mail [who, it seems, was more discreet than Philip].”

  “Just before dawn on December 3, 1944,” Alexandra recorded while Philip was in Australia, “[his father] got out of bed and donned his dressing gown, seated himself on his armchair and quietly died [in Monte Carlo].” Prince Andrew had been living on credit and had no private funds. The Greek Consul General paid for the body to be shipped back to Greece where the exiled Prince was buried in the family cemetery at Tatoi, near Athens. Shortly after his sparsely attended burial, Princess Andrew and Princess Nicholas were forced by the Communist revolutionary committee to leave Greece. King George had seen that the sisters-in-law traveled safely to England where Princess Nicholas moved in with her daughter Marina and her three children, and Princess Andrew with her elderly mother, the Dowager Marchioness of Milford Haven, at Kensington Palace in what one visitor described as “surprisingly threadbare circumstances.”

  Kensington Palace is not a palace in the recognized sense. It is a complex of many apartments—some grand, some not-so-grand, others fairly humble. The palace is owned by the Crown and all the accommodations are grace-and-favour. Through the years it has serviced well over a hundred Royal personages, and the staff quarters and cottages housed equally as many retired members of the Royal Household. In the 1930s and 1940s insiders referred to the palace as the “auntheap,” a bit of “a royal rest home”; and there was quite a lot of backbiting among the residents.

  The Dowager Marchioness of Milford Haven’s neighbor, Princess Alice, Countess of Athlone (Queen Mary’s sister-in-law), observed that Philip’s grandmother “looked like a rag bag, just scraping her hair back anyhow, a cigarette always dangling in her shaking hand ... her heavy smoking [giving] her a harsh, coarse voice.

  “Philip and his friend, [his cousin] the young Marquis [David] of Milford Haven, often climbed in over the Palace roofs and through a skylight so they would not disturb the[ir] sleeping grandmother. If they came in through the front door they knew from bitter experience that the creaking floorboards would make too much noise for them to escape discovery. One night a patrolling policeman saw the royal cat burglar on the roof and ordered him to climb down. Philip refused—and defied the officer to come and catch him,” after which he disappeared into his grandmother’s apartment through a skylight.

  In February 1946, Philip, on leave from the Royal Navy, went down to Monte Carlo to collect the meager possessions left behind by his father.

  What he found were three suitcases containing a few “suits motheaten ... and many sad souvenirs [a Grecian lucky medallion, a signet ring, a battered leather frame containing a picture of his sisters and himself, and an old ivory handled shaving brush].”

  “He took it philosophically,” another friend commented. “Sentiment made him keep and wear [the best] of his father’s old su
its ... to have the ivory handled shaving brush freshly bristled so that he might use it every day.” Lilibet’s photograph replaced the one in the leather frame and for a time he wore the signet ring.

  From Monte Carlo he went by train to Paris where he stayed at the Travellers Club on the Champs Élysées. One of the first people he called was Hélène, who had recently moved there and was working as a shop girl at Lenthéric while her mother took care of her infant children in London. Her short second marriage had been unhappy, and although her husband was living in Paris, they were separated. Philip invited her for tea at the Ritz and arrived for their appointment on a woman’s bicycle “far too small for him,” lent to him by “the secretary of a naval friend....

  “After tea, we decided to race each other from the Place de la Concorde to the Rue Pierre Charron, off the Champs Élysées, me in the metro, he on his two wheeler.... When I got out at the other end,” Hélène wrote, “he wasn’t there. At last I caught sight of him coming down the Champs Élysées, pedalling like mad, his knees practically under his chin [enjoying himself] immensely.” They agreed to meet for lunch the next day and thereafter saw each other every few days during his six-week stay.

  Hélène recalled one evening when he had “a terrific urge” to take a horse-drawn cab. “I thought it a terrific luxury and told him so. I suggested we should walk instead; after all, he only had his naval pay and the price would be double if the [driver] saw his British naval uniform. He insisted so much that in the end I asked him to stand where the coachman couldn’t see him and I went to bargain about the fare.”

  On another occasion they were to meet at twelve-thirty for lunch at Lenthéric, but Hélène’s lunch hour was moved to noon and cut to a half hour so she took her short break to tell him in person. “I was completely ignorant of the rules of the club; [no women allowed]. I blithely walked in unaware that I was committing sacrilege.... I asked a petrified receptionist for Prince Philip. When he arrived he nearly had a fit.

  “ ‘You can’t come in here!’ he said, pushing me out.... We finished up on the pavement arguing about it, and at last his explanation started to sink in, but it doesn’t mean I understood.”

  Without her being aware of its happening, Paris-Match took a photograph of them together, but then decided Philip was not newsworthy enough to print it. (A year later, when it was finally published in France, Hélène was shocked to find herself labeled “The Mystery Blonde—the one who will not be invited to the wedding.”)

  Philip returned to England in June 1946. He must have been under tension. The matter of his citizenship had not progressed one iota and there was a new concern: war-crimes trials with the possibility, however remote, that one of his sisters’ husbands might be involved. In Greece, the fate of the Royal Family hung in the balance. A plebiscite as to King George II’s return had resulted in a 40 percent negative vote and the Communists had tightened their bearish grip. In the circumstances, with British troops precariously supporting the royalist forces, it was feared the naturalization of a Greek Prince might raise political temperatures in both Greece and England. The new Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, who had learned in confidential talks with the King of Philip’s serious romantic interest in Elizabeth, advised him that the time was inopportune for the Heir Presumptive to be considering a Greek Prince as a future husband or for granting Philip British citizenship.

  This did not keep Philip from pressing his case, despite the strong feelings of close members of the Royal Family and the Court that “If there is not to be an engagement, the boy ought not to be around so much.” The King and Queen placed no restrictions on Philip’s visits, but they did discuss with Lilibet the negative aspects and the problems her liaison might cause the Government. Her answer was that she planned to go on seeing Philip. But, of course, she could never have married him without the King’s consent, and Lilibet had a history of obedience to her parents and to her duty.

  Had the King ever demanded that Lilibet give up Philip, which he did not, the likelihood is that she would have complied. And, although it has been said she told her family she would never marry anyone but Philip, one must take into consideration her age at the time. Five or even ten years hence she might have found herself of an entirely different mind on the subject. Also, unlike the Duchess of Windsor, Philip was of Royal blood, and he was not, and never had been, married. Finally, it was too early to know what path Greece would take and whom the war-crimes tribunals might name. Lilibet had time on her side and she and Philip were young enough to wait.

  Crawfie believed she was “deeply and passionately in love,” and that “Margaret knew [that Lilibet would wait it out]. There were no secrets between the sisters. Margaret came to my room one day, and fiddled around as she always did, picking up something and looking at it, and putting it down. Then she came and knelt down on the hearthrug beside me, and asked abruptly:

  “ ‘Crawfie, do you like Philip?’

  “ ‘Very much,’ I said.

  “ ‘But he’s not English. Would it make a difference?’

  “ ‘He’s lived here all his life [technically this was not true],’ I told her.

  “For a long minute she said nothing at all. Then she said, very softly, ‘Poor Lil. Nothing of your own. Not even your love affair!’ ”

  With the end of the war, the King’s country homes, Sandringham and Balmoral, were fully staffed, frugally refurbished and ready for the reestablishment of the Royal Family’s prewar annual stays. Both estates afforded the King a sporting holiday. Shooting was his passion; “he dealt directly with the game-keepers and took charge, personally of each day’s operations.” The family repaired to Sandringham in October when the partridge and pheasant season was in full swing, returning at Christmas and remaining two weeks through the duck season. “Nothing escaped [the King’s] keen, observant eye,” Townsend, who often accompanied him, noted, “especially when the action was fast, as when the cry went up ‘Woodcock!’ and the guns blazed away wildly at this somewhat rare and elusive bird.”

  Sandringham House, though labyrinthine and containing 365 rooms, more than any other English private estate, is a family home, the place where the Royals and all their close family members gather to celebrate Christmas and Easter. (This usually means as many as forty additional guests, including relatives and members of their household staffs.) Built by King Edward VII when he was Prince of Wales, it stands in twenty thousand acres of parkland and boasts a five-hundred-foot frontage, enormous billiard and ballrooms, a dairy, slaughterhouse, stables, boathouse, extensive greenhouses, a power and fire station, Sandringham Church (considered one of the finest carstone buildings in existence), and numerous “cottages”—the best-known being York House (formerly Bachelors’ Cottage), where King George and Queen Mary lived before Edward VII’s death and where King George VI was born. Despite its unwieldy size, Sandringham had been successfully designed and decorated to establish a homey atmosphere, and even the dining room, with its large Goya panel and Spanish tapestries, had a “clubby” feel to it. The sisters greatly looked forward to their stays, with days filled with ice skating (on a private rink), film viewing (in the estate’s projection room), and riding as well as hunting.

  Balmoral was more a vacation spot, occupied in late summer when deer stalking was in season, and where many dozens of visitors came and went. Despite its size, Balmoral did not have many guest rooms and unexpectedly they were mostly on the ground floor, which contributed to much traffic in the connecting corridors.

  The great house had seen remarkably few improvements since Prince Albert had bought and had it rebuilt in 1848. The white-granite, castellated mansion, designed in the Scottish baronial style, stands on the south bank of the River Dee, backed by the mountains and high valleys of Lochnagar. When the Monarch is in residence the Royal Standard flies from a hundred-foot tower. A solid stone bridge leads directly to the castle gates. Outside, the glow of the façade’s glittering white stone and the lush green of the background give the
castle a brightness. But the interior is formidably dark and dismal, Prince Albert’s heavy Germanic tastes dominating everything. Except for the whitewashed entrance, woodwork and paneling are painted a murky amber. Rugs are a deep-green Stuart tartan, as are many of the upholstery fabrics and drapes. There is “a masculine odour in the corridors, a smell of wood fire, stags’ heads [many shot by Prince Albert and George V], rugs and leather....” All through the Castle there seems to be an “overwhelming array ... of antlers and stags’ heads and even hides hung like tapestries on the walls.”

  Balmoral was basically a hunting lodge, and shooting, deer-stalking and, in the case of the Queen, trout and salmon fishing were the pastimes of each pleasant and energetic day.

  Lilibet and Margaret held conflicting opinions on shooting “and more particularly on stalking which Princess Elizabeth loved,” Townsend remarked. “She was a tireless walker and an excellent shot. Princess Margaret detested stalking. Oddly enough, I found this endearing.”

  Lilibet had taken instantly to the sport, which became one more thing she and her father shared along with horses. (After being allowed to run her hand over the King’s great, undefeated racehorse, Big Game, she confessed that she did not wash her hands for several hours afterward, since she felt “it was such an honour to touch so brilliant an animal.”) She had set out on her first real deer-stalking expedition at Balmoral on September 3, 1945, and she did so with tremendous verve and guts. Rising early, she had dressed in her boots and hunting clothes with great excitement and been outside waiting when the first guns gathered at 8:00 A.M.

  With her that day were her father, her cousin John Elphinstone, his sister, Margaret, her uncle David Bowes-Lyon and five members of the King’s Household. Margaret Elphinstone joined Lilibet for what was to be a “grilling day,” nearly ten hours “on the hill, walking, but [Lilibet] was a strong walker.” The season for grouse had not been good and a proposal was made that, instead of further reducing the stock of grouse, the shooters try to fill the game card with everything which the resources of Balmoral could provide. The two young women, with the aid of a ghillie, climbed to the near top of Lochnagar. Shortly after lunch (cold venison pie and an apple eaten behind a boulder so that the cousins could have privacy from the servant), Lilibet shot the only stag of the day, and the women had to help the ghillie bring it down the mountainside strung between two poles.