Philip: The Final Portrait

by Gyles Brandreth

  Elizabeth II is living history – and more besides. The Queen and her family have something that even the greatest celebrities of the age do not have. The Queen was a beautiful princess who married a handsome prince. Their children and grandchildren are princes and princesses too. They live in palaces and castles. These people are the stuff of fairy tale.

  Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, David Beckham may have fame, fortune, and talent, may even, eventually, join the ranks of the great immortals (they are heroic figures: perhaps the image of Marilyn will outlive the name of Helen of Troy?), but they are not royal. Elizabeth was born a princess. Philip was born a prince. It is wholly absurd, of course, but that makes them different. And, somehow, extra-special.

  To a few, Prince Philip was more than a man. To members of the Yaohnanen tribe living on the island of Tanna in Vanuatu in the South Pacific, he was a divine being – the pale-skinned son of one of their mountain spirits who had travelled across the seas to a distant land and married a powerful woman. In the 1950s the Yaohnanen tribal folk observed the respect accorded to Elizabeth II by the island’s colonial administrators and concluded that her husband must be the pale-skinned son of their legends. The Duke of Edinburgh did not encourage their cult, but when a group of them travelled to England in 2007 he agreed to meet them behind closed doors. He told me that he was ‘embararrased by their attention’, but was ready to respect their tradition. He gave them his photograph, but did not want to be photographed with them or ‘the whole thing will be turned into a media circus’.

  To me, Prince Philip was no god, but he was a fascinating man, who became more interesting (and surprising) the better I got to know him. His interests were so varied, ranging from the scientific to the spiritual, from pharmacology and farming to poetry and painting (‘I prefer oils. Charles does the watercolours.’) He was interested in history and acutely aware of his own heritage, but to the very end of his days he was ready to explore the new and the experimental. At Sandringham he installed some of the first solar panels in the country. In London he drove around first in an electric-powered van and then in a gas-powered taxi, years before such green initiatives were fashionable. One year, when he was in his late eighties, he took his staff to the Fat Duck restaurant at Bray for a Christmas outing to check out Heston Blumenthal’s experimental menu. He was intrigued – and amused – by the notion of a Christmas dinner of snail porridge and egg-and-bacon ice cream. As a rule, he was a modest eater and, while he enjoyed a beer and an occasional gin and tonic, he was not a heavy drinker. He was remarkably self-disciplined. He kept himself fit. He remained as active as possible to the end of his days. No other prince has ever lived so long a life.

  I am a royalist. I believe that the ever-evolving institution of the monarchy has served the United Kingdom well and can – and will – continue to do so. I believe, too, that the Queen, over more than six decades, has fulfilled her destiny with considerable skill and matchless dedication. And I reckon that the Duke of Edinburgh played the bizarre hand that life dealt him pretty flawlessly. His commitment to his role as the Queen’s consort and his staying power were extraordinary.

  As I say, my first thought was simply to write a biography of the Duke of Edinburgh. But there was a particular moment when I realised that it would be wrong to write about him in isolation. It was on a November evening several years ago when I accompanied the Queen and the Duke to the Royal Variety Performance at the Dominion Theatre in London’s West End.

  I remember the evening well. One of the highlights of the entertainment was an excerpt from The Full Monty, the stage version of the film about a group of unemployed steel-workers who decide to form a male striptease troupe, like the Chippendales. Prince Philip looked at the programme and mused, ‘The Full Monty? Will it be a tribute to Field Marshal Montgomery and the Battle of El-Alamein, do you think?’ I told him what The Full Monty was about. He shook his head in disbelief. ‘At the end of their big routine,’ I explained, ‘all their kit comes off.’ I looked anxiously in the direction of the Queen. ‘Don’t worry,’ smiled the Duke. ‘She’s been to Papua New Guinea. She’s seen it all before.’

  During the interval, in the mezzanine bar, drinks were served and the Queen and her husband did what they had done countless times before: they worked the room. He took one end, she took the other, and, for half an hour, the royal couple mingled, shaking hands with smiling strangers, nodding, chatting, then moving on. I stood at the edge of the crowd, watching Her Majesty and His Royal Highness as they went about their business. What they were doing, they did well. Not surprisingly. They had had a lifetime of practice. To a seasoned royal-watcher, the scene was entirely predictable. And then came the moment that took me by surprise. I witnessed it quite by chance. I happened to be looking in the right direction, that’s all, when I saw Philip catch Elizabeth’s eye across the crowded room. He simply smiled at her and gently raised his glass. She smiled back and, almost imperceptibly, raised hers. And the moment was over.

  But in that moment I sensed that I was seeing something I had not known about before. These two were allies engaged in a mutual conspiracy that sustained them over more than seventy years.

  I realised, there and then, that I wanted to know more. This couple was famous – world famous, so famous, and famous for so long – and yet, in many ways, what did we know of them? Who were they? What were they really like? What I saw that night, in that moment in the bar at the Dominion Theatre, seemed at odds with so much that I had heard about them before. I had heard that they led very separate lives. Could it be true? I had heard that Philip had other women. Could that be true? Was this ever a love story? Was it still? What was the truth about Philip and Elizabeth? Who were these people? What was their secret? Could I crack the code? Could I unravel the enigma? I decided to try. And this is the result of my endeavour: a final portrait of Prince Philip, but a portrait of Elizabeth, too, and a portrait of a partnership that has been part of our lives for as long as almost any of us can remember.

  PHILIP

  Chapter One

  ‘Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.’

  William Shakespeare (1564–1616), Henry IV Part II

  In 1953, the Queen’s Coronation year, a book was published called Manifest Destiny. It was a handsome volume designed as a celebration of the unique genius of the Mountbatten family. When invited by an equerry to sign a copy of the book, the Duke of Edinburgh obliged, adding, above his signature on the title page, two words: ‘Manifest Bunkum!’

  Prince Philip was wary of biographers, particularly those who came bearing purple prose and vivid imaginations. If his story had to be told he would prefer it to be done without exaggeration or speculation. If we could stick to the facts, and present them simply, chronologically, and accurately, he would be obliged.

  I shall do my best. It will not be easy. In talking about his early life, Prince Philip did not give a lot away. And, perversely, with a shrug of his shoulders, and a quizzical raised eyebrow, he liked to dismiss what, to us, seems a quite extraordinary start in life – lurid, disturbing, amazing: a grandfather assassinated, a father imprisoned, a peripatetic childhood with, from the age of nine, both parents absent, one in an asylum, the other with his mistress at Monte Carlo – as, somehow, almost normal, certainly unremarkable.

  Royals are different from us: they have more relations. Prince Philip could claim kinship with the whole compass of European royalty: kings, emperors, kaisers, tsars. Include his sisters and his cousins and his aunts (princesses, admirals, grand duchesses) and it was the cast of a comic opera. (They even had the costumes.) Look at the story of the extended family over a century and a half and you have the plot of a comic opera as well: unlikely and confusing.

  To understand Prince Philip you need to know his family. To keep things simple, and as a reminder that almost all the people who feature in the pages that follow are related one to another, let us begin with Queen Victoria. We know where we are with her.

  Queen Victoria
had nine children. Her third child, and second daughter, was Princess Alice, who, in 1862, at Osborne House on the Isle of Wight, married Prince Louis of Hesse-Darmstadt, later Grand Duke Louis IV of Hesse and by Rhine, one of the pocket principalities that made up much of Germany before unification. (We really are in comic opera country.2) Alice and Louis had seven children, including a future Princess of Prussia, who lived to see the Coronation of Elizabeth II in 1953, and the last Tsarina of Russia, who was less fortunate. They named their eldest Victoria and she became a favourite grandchild of the great Queen Empress.

  In April 1884, as she turned twenty-one, in Darmstadt, in the presence of Queen Victoria, Victoria of Hesse married her cousin, Louis of Battenberg, son of Prince Alexander of Hesse and grandson of Grand Duke Louis II of Hesse – or, possibly, in fact, grandson of the Grand Duchess’s charismatic chamberlain, Baron Augustus Senarclens von Grancy. (There were rumours … There so often are.)

  Louis was nearing thirty and, though thoroughly German (Queen Victoria called him Ludwig), a rising star in the British Royal Navy. He had connections, but he was also able and intelligent: conscientious yet outgoing, ambitious yet popular. There were rumours about him, too. In his bachelor days he had a self-confessed eye for the girls,3 and he was noted for his virility, energy, charm, and fondness for uniforms. Like his younger son, Louis Mountbatten, and, to a degree, his younger grandson, Prince Philip, Louis of Battenberg enjoyed dressing up. He had a variety of uniforms and an array of medals and, in public and in private, he relished parading in both. He also had an extravagant tattoo of a rampant dragon emblazoned across his chest and trailing down his legs. He lived life to the full.

  Queen Victoria liked Louis and she loved her granddaughter and, consequently, she insisted that their first child be born not in one of their homes (they had two: one, of course, in Darmstadt; the other just outside Chichester in Sussex) but in one of hers. Princess Victoria of Hesse gave birth to the first of her four children in the Tapestry Room at Windsor Castle on 25 February 1885. The Queen recorded the event in her diary: ‘Woke before 7. Hearing that Victoria had a bad night, I got up & went over to see her. She was very suffering. I had some breakfast, & then went back remaining with dear Victoria on & off, till at length, at 20m to 5 in the afternoon, the child, a little girl, was born. The relief was great for poor Victoria had had such a long hard time, which always makes me anxious. How strange and indeed affecting, it was, to see her lying in the same room, & in the same bed, in which she herself was born. Good Ludwig was most helpful & attentive, hardly leaving Victoria for a moment. The Baby is very small, thin & dark. I held it for a few moments in my arms.’

  Princess Victoria’s mother, Princess Alice, had died of diphtheria, aged only thirty-five, in 1878. The new baby was named after her. This Princess Alice was eventually to become Princess Andrew of Greece, mother of Prince Philip, and a most unusual woman: striking, strange, and, in her own way, heroic.

  Princess Victoria was a pretty child and a handsome woman: reserved but direct, straightforward, unspoilt, and, by several accounts, somewhat masculine in her manner. Her daughter Alice was simply beautiful: a gorgeous baby, a lovely girl, a fine woman. The Prince of Wales is said to have declared, ‘No throne in Europe is too good for her.’

  She did, however, have one defect. She was hard of hearing. When she was four, her mother reported to Queen Victoria, ‘The child has grown very much since you last saw her, is very lively & quick with her fingers, but decidedly backward of speech, using all sorts of self-invented words & pronouncing others very indistinctly, so that strangers find it difficult to understand her.’

  Alice was taken to ear specialists in Darmstadt and London: there was nothing to be done4 and, for better or worse, her family decided to make no special concessions to her problem. Although, over time, she became a skilful lip-reader (in several languages) and, it seems, the degree of hearing loss varied at different stages in her life, the disability took its toll, making her more isolated than she might otherwise have been and making others, who did not know her well, regard her as, somehow, a bit odd.

  There would be echoes of his mother’s childhood in Prince Philip’s own. Her parents loved her dearly, but they left her, frequently for weeks at a time, sometimes for months, in the care of nannies and governesses and assorted family members. When I asked Prince Philip how he felt about his mother’s upbringing, he simply shrugged his shoulders and said, ‘It was the way it was.’ Little Alice spent her peripatetic childhood in Darmstadt, at Sennicotts (the house the Battenbergs rented near Chichester), in Malta (where the Mediterranean fleet was stationed), in London (at different times in Pimlico, Victoria, and Knightsbridge), at Walton-on-Thames, at Sandgate, near Folkestone, and in the various residences of her great-grandmother: at Windsor, at Balmoral, at Osborne House on the Isle of Wight, in the Royal Yacht Victoria & Albert, and on the French Riviera, where the Queen-Empress would take her spring holiday.

  Despite her deafness, Alice was a bright child, likeable and liked, and mature for her age, in manner and appearance. ‘She is eleven,’ one of her great-aunts commented in 1896, ‘but as big as a girl of fourteen.’ By 1900 the Battenberg family was complete. Alice had one younger sister, Louise (1889–1965), who would one day become Queen of Sweden,5 and two younger brothers, destined to follow their father into the British navy: Georgie (1892–1938) and Louis (1900–79), known as Dick or Dickie almost from birth. He was the last great-grandson born in Queen Victoria’s lifetime.

  The Queen-Empress died on 22 January 1901. Her funeral took place at Windsor on 2 February. Alice and her parents were there. Sixteen months later, on 26 June 1902, Edward VII was due to be crowned. Alice and her mother were both expected and invited to stay at Buckingham Palace, where the distinguished guest list boasted an array of European royalty,6 including Crown Prince Constantine of Greece and two of his younger brothers, George and Andrew. Prince Andrew (known in the family as Andrea) was twenty, a young officer in the Greek army, tall, blond, and relatively handsome. ‘Interesting’, too: he was short-sighted and wore spectacles. Princess Alice was seventeen and a half: beautiful, intelligent, and hard of hearing. The young people fell in love.

  There was time for romance. Three days before the day set for his Coronation, Edward VII was suddenly taken ill and operated on for peritonitis. The Coronation was postponed, but the royal house party went on. The German princess and the Greek prince lingered at Buckingham Palace for a fortnight more. Love blossomed.

  Andrea was a Greek prince, serving in the Greek army, living in Greece, the fourth son of King George I of Greece, but he was not really Greek at all. (This is, in part, a comic opera, remember.) He was German, Danish, Dutch, and Russian.

  In the late 1820s, when modern Greece managed to shake itself free from Turkish domination, the newly independent kingdom was in want of a monarch. Having nothing home-bred to hand, the Greeks shopped around (literally) for a royal figure of sufficient international standing and authority and shipped in Prince Otto of Bavaria as their first king. He stayed the course for thirty years, but following an unpleasant insurrection in 1862 (not the first), made his excuses and left. The search for a king resumed and, this time round, the lot fell to one Prince William, younger son of King Christian IX of Denmark. He was only seventeen. He changed his name, his nationality, and his destiny. He served as King George I of Greece for fifty years, from 1863 until he was murdered by a lunatic while out for a stroll in the streets of Salonika in the spring of 1913.

  George I of Greece had an elder brother (who became King Frederick VIII of Denmark in 1906) and two younger sisters: Alexandra, married to England’s Edward VII, and Marie, married to Russia’s Tsar Alexander III. George I also married a member of the Russian royal family: the Grand Duchess Olga, a granddaughter of Tsar Nicholas I. Over a period of twenty years the couple had eight children, the youngest-but-one of whom was Andrea: intelligent, humorous, conscientious, committed to Greece (he could speak English, German, Danis
h, Russian, French, but he spoke Greek with his parents) and committed to a career in the Greek army. In her preface to his volume of military memoirs – the aptly titled Towards Disaster – Princess Alice wrote: ‘He took his duties very seriously as he loved his profession, and he wished to earn his promotion like any other officer.’

  The Coronation of Edward VII was rescheduled for 9 August 1902. The courts of Europe reassembled in London. Alice and Andrea met once more. Indeed, their families seemed happy to encourage the match: Alice and her mother travelled to Westminster Abbey in the same carriage as Andrea and his brother, George.

  Fourteen months later (mostly months when they were apart: Andrea’s military duties kept him away), in Darmstadt, on 6 and 7 October 1903, they were married. It was a fairy-tale wedding, complete with carriages and kings, three ceremonies (one civil, two religious), feasting, dancing, laughter, and happy tears. She was eighteen, a beautiful princess, with orange blossom in her hair; he was twenty-one, a dashing prince, decked out in the glorious uniform of a Red Dragoon. They did not live happily ever after.

  It all began well enough. They had a quietly domestic honeymoon in Darmstadt and, early in the new year, set off for Greece. Having spent several winters in Malta as a child, Alice was at least accustomed to a Mediterranean climate, and her new in-laws evidently did everything they could to give the young bride – still a teenager, partially deaf, in a strange country where she did not yet speak the language – a warm welcome and a sense of security. George I appears to have been a wise man: unstuffy, courteous, considerate, capable, honest, and keenly aware of his position as an ‘imported’ monarch. He would advise his sons, ‘Never forget that you are foreigners among the Greeks, and never let them remember it.’