Philip: The Final Portrait

by Gyles Brandreth

  Hahn was an intellectual. He had read Greats at Oxford. He had studied at the universities of Berlin, Heidelberg, Freiburg, and Göttingen. He believed in books. He also believed in the power of ‘the great outdoors’. He said, ‘My best schoolmaster is the Moray Firth.’ As a teenager Philip learnt to sail in its chilly, challenging waters. ‘I was wet, cold, miserable, probably sick, and often scared stiff, but I would not have missed the experience for anything,’ he said. ‘In any case the discomfort was far outweighed by the moments of intense happiness and excitement. Poets and authors down the centuries have tried to describe those moments but their descriptions, however brilliant, will never compare with one’s own experience.’

  Prince Philip’s experience of Gordonstoun would inform the rest of his life. In 1938, when he left the school – as Guardian, Gordonstoun’s equivalent of head boy – Hahn gave him a glowing final report: ‘Prince Philip is universally trusted, liked and respected. He has the greatest sense of service of all the boys in the school.’ Hahn described the seventeen-year-old as ‘a born leader’, a boy of ‘intelligence and spirit’, ‘often naughty, never nasty’, with ‘a natural power of command’, a ‘sense of humour and a rapid understanding of human nature’, but suggested Philip would ‘need the exacting demands of great service to do justice to himself’. When he was engaged he had the ‘power of meticulous application’; at other times he showed a ‘determination not to exert himself more than was necessary to avoid trouble’. Hahn concluded that Philip would ‘make his mark in any profession where he will have to prove himself in a free trial of strength’.

  Philip was not especially academic and, at Gordonstoun, while he played Donalbain in the school production of Macbeth, his enthusiasms were, on the whole, more sporting than artistic. (At this point, reading my text, Prince Philip wrote to me: ‘I don’t see the connection between not being academic and taking part in a school play. I was just a very bad actor. I did at least pass the Civil Service Exams to enter the Navy!!’)

  Having passed the necessary exams, on 1 May 1939, six weeks short of his eighteenth birthday, Prince Philip of Greece joined the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth and set himself on course for a career in the Royal Navy. He told me that, left entirely to his own devices, ‘I’d have gone into the air force without a doubt.’ Flying was one of the great unremarked-on passions of his life. He made his first flight, from White Waltham in Berkshire, in a Chipmunk, on 12 November 1952; his last, in a BAe 146, flying from Carlisle to Islay, on 11 August 1997. Over forty-five years he clocked up a total of 5,986 hours of flying in fifty-nine types of aircraft, including nine helicopters. (An RAF pilot might clock up no more than 8,000 hours in a full career.)

  That Philip was persuaded to opt for the navy rather than the air force in 1938 is hardly surprising. As he explained to me, there was something of a family tradition: ‘I was following my grandfather [Louis of Battenberg] and two uncles [Georgie Milford Haven and Dickie Mountbatten]. My Danish grandfather had been in the Danish navy and my uncle George (of Greece) served in the Greek navy.’

  Who were the key influences on the young Prince Philip?

  ‘Beyond my parents?’

  ‘Yes. You didn’t see a great deal of them after you were ten.’

  ‘You can be influenced by people you don’t see every day.’

  ‘Who else?’

  ‘Kurt Hahn was one, certainly.’

  ‘And your uncle, Georgie Milford Haven, and the industrialist Harold Wernher – people with whose families you spent part of your holidays?’

  ‘Yes, inevitably. I also spent time with my sisters and their husbands. I saw more of my third sister’s husband (George Donatus of Hesse) as I usually spent most of my holidays with them in Darmstadt or at Wolfsgarten’ – their idyllic country house: an old hunting lodge built around a courtyard in a woodland setting, apparently remote, but, in fact, not far from Frankfurt.

  ‘You enjoyed your holidays?’ I asked the Prince, trying to coax a few recollections from him.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘I did. I know you are determined to make a meal out the so-called “deprivations” of my childhood, but I am afraid I can’t help you there.’

  His Royal Highness did at least concede that working out exactly where he should go for his holidays was sometimes a challenge, not because he was not welcome wherever he went, but because his father, although largely absent, liked to be involved in the plans relating to his son. For example, in late July 1934, Philip’s grandmother, Victoria, was with Philip at Wolfsgarten, but, as she explained in a letter to her son, Georgie, in England, she was not quite sure what to do with her grandson next: ‘Philip may go there (Hemmelmark) with us & back to England with me via Hamburg & Southampton but we can settle nothing about his movements until having discussed them with Andrea, who after a delay of 4 weeks turns up this evening, we suppose en route for a cure in Marienbad. I hope it is not too inconvenient to leave you without definite news of Philip’s movements, but it has been unavoidable.’

  Andrea was interested in his son, and proud of his son, but not very hands-on – or reliable – when it came to his care of him.

  If Wordsworth is right and the child is father of the man, what effect was Prince Philip’s childhood likely to have had on his personality as an adult? As you can imagine, the man himself was not one to indulge in this kind of speculation. The Duke of Edinburgh acknowledged that he had read the writings of Freud and Jung and when I told him that I would be intrigued to know what a practising psychoanalyst like his aunt Marie Bonaparte – his uncle Big George’s wife – could tell us about the impact of his upbringing on his later behaviour, he replied, with a raised eyebrow, ‘You don’t surprise me.’

  Marie Bonaparte (1882–1962) is a fascinating figure. Born at St Cloud, a Catholic, and brought up in Paris, she married Prince George of Greece in 1907. Their relationship was not conventional. They had two children, Peter and Marie, born in 1908 and 1910, but when Prince George died in 1957, a few months before their golden wedding anniversary, Marie said, ‘I bent over his cold forehead and kissed it. Not his lips, which he had always refused me.’

  She was wealthy, glamorous, passionate, intelligent, restless. Her lovers included Aristide Briand, famously depicted by Toulouse-Lautrec and ten times Prime Minister of France. Her enthusiasms included sex, her pet chows, and Dr Sigmund Freud. In 1925 she entered analysis with Freud in Vienna and trained as a psychoanalyst. She went on to become a pivotal figure in the French Psychoanalytical Society and the international psychoanalytical community. She was fascinated by criminal psychopathology and published a gripping account of a woman who had murdered her pregnant daughter-in-law, Le Cas de Madame Lefebvre, as well as an acclaimed study of Edgar Allan Poe, whom she described as ‘one of the darkest minds there has ever been’, and the first full study of female sexuality, La Sexualité Féminine. She experimented with early forms of genital surgery and underwent an unusual procedure to alter the position of her clitoris. She was sympathetic to the view of Freud’s mentor, Jean-Martin Charcot, that when looking for the root cause of nervous disorders, ‘c’est toujours la chose génitale, toujours, toujours’. It was to her that Freud posed his celebrated question, ‘What does a woman want?’

  ‘A good question,’ the Duke of Edinburgh said to me, laughing. ‘And one to which I think we still don’t have the answer.’

  Marie Bonaparte became one of Freud’s closest friends. She lavished gifts on him. In the aftermath of the Nazi Anschluss, she used her connections and her considerable financial resources to help secure his – and his family’s – safe passage from Vienna to London in 1938. According to Freud’s son, Martin, ‘She had most of father’s chief characteristics – his courage, his sincerity, his essential goodness and kindliness and his inflexible devotion to scientific truth.’ She became a close friend, too, of Freud’s daughter, Anna Freud, the pioneer of child psychoanalysis, and maintained a lifelong affectionate interest in her husband’s nephew, Prince Philip. Wh
at would Marie Bonaparte and the classic Freudians have made of Philip’s childhood?

  ‘Do we really need to know?’ asked the Duke of Edinburgh.

  ‘It’s not essential,’ I replied, ‘but it might be interesting.’

  In search of an authoritative answer to my question I travelled to 20 Maresfield Gardens in Hampstead – the Freud family’s London home, now the home of the Freud Museum – to meet Dr Brett Kahr, noted Freudian psychologist, Senior Research Fellow in Psychotherapy at the Winnicott Clinic of Psychotherapy, and a student of the life and work of Marie Bonaparte. He said at once, ‘I am not allowed to talk about a person I have never met, but if you want to know what Princess Marie Bonaparte might have made of Prince Philip’s childhood history I am happy to speculate.’

  Where to begin? ‘I think Marie would have begun right at the beginning – with Philip’s mother and his birth. Prince Philip was born into a household of women. There was his mother, and his nanny, and probably a wet-nurse, and certainly a lady-in-waiting, and, most significantly, four older sisters. His father was away at the wars. Philip was the only boy, literally a beautiful, blue-eyed boy, born into a household of devoted, doting women. And he is the fifth child, the longed-for son. After four girls, whose ages range from sixteen to seven when Philip is born, here is a boy – and what do boys have that girls do not have? A penis. Into this household of women and girls comes this perfect boy. It is very exciting. There is within the household – in the phrase of Phyllis Greenacre, a Freudian from the 1950s – “penis awe”. It is unspoken, but it is there. And the admiration and devotion of these women, especially the four elder sisters, will have given Philip, as he grew up, what might be termed a certain “phallic swagger”, a sense of self-assurance and self-confidence, a certain cockiness.’

  Will there have been disadvantages to all this feminine attention? ‘Possibly,’ says Brett Kahr – still, of course in the guise of Marie Bonaparte. ‘Children with multiple carers sometimes struggle with depression. And being given lots of different affection from different people – nannies, nurses, sisters, aunts, grandmothers – can leave a child confused as to who is his primary attachment figure. Children with multiple carers, however loving, become sexually promiscuous because they don’t have a model of falling in love with just one person.

  ‘In Prince Philip’s case there is nothing to suggest that Princess Alice was not devoted to her son, but she was a princess who would have expected to share the child-rearing with nannies and, from about the time Philip was nine or ten, she virtually disappeared from his life. No child is immune from a mother disappearing. And, in Philip’s case, his father virtually disappeared, too. A history of broken parental attachments is one of the keys to depression.

  ‘There is some evidence that Prince Andrea was depressed after his departure from Greece. It would hardly be surprising. He was forced into exile and had to give up a career he loved. Unemployment and enforced idleness can lead to depression. The family moves to Paris. The father is depressed and leaves home. The mother suffers a nervous breakdown and is sent to a sanatorium. How does the child Philip feel about this? Children are self-referential. Children are grandiose and think the world revolves around them. A child can have omnipotent infantile fantasies. Prince Philip was just a year old when his family were forced into exile. The military debacle that triggered Prince Andrea’s downfall coincided precisely with Philip’s birth. One wonders whether, subconsciously, Philip saw himself as responsible for the fate that befell his parents.’

  I point out that Philip himself never complained about any aspect of his childhood. ‘It’s simply what happened,’ is what Prince Philip had said to me. ‘The family broke up. My mother was ill, my sisters were married, my father was in the south of France. I just had to get on with it. You do. One does.’

  Brett Kahr nods. ‘Yes, his mother was ill and in a clinic in Switzerland; his father was depressed and on a boat in the south of France; his sisters were married and living in Germany; and Philip was away at school in England and Scotland. From the age of ten he saw his parents only rarely. He saw his sisters in the school holidays, but seeing them and their husbands became increasingly difficult with the rise of Nazi Germany through the 1930s. And in 1936, his sister Cécile and her husband – who, apparently, is his favourite brother-in-law – they are the sister and brother-in-law he sees most during his holidays – these two key figures in his world, and their children, are all killed in an aeroplane accident. And in 1938, what happens? Georgie Milford Haven, his favourite English uncle and his guardian, dies of cancer. Philip is not yet seventeen. By any standards, Philip has known a lot of loss in his young life and one way people deal with loss is with stoicism. To take on board the full throttle of what has happened to you is too painful, so you use your defence mechanisms well. You rationalise your experience. You don’t dwell on it. You don’t discuss it. Stoically, you soldier on.’

  People who knew Prince Andrea in the 1930s have described him alternately as ‘melancholy’ and ‘as funny as all-get-out’. ‘There is a touch of manic depression in most of us,’ says Brett Kahr. I think there is little doubt that Princess Alice, in the late 1920s and early 1930s, suffered from quite severe bipolar disorder. Princess Marie Bonaparte took a personal and practical interest in Alice’s condition. She kept in touch with Prince Philip through the years as well. As a boy, according to Kurt Hahn, Philip ‘felt deeply both joy and sadness, and the way he looked and the way he moved indicated what he felt’. As a man Philip could be urbane and engaging one day and sullen and crabby the next. How does Brett Kahr believe that Marie would have characterised the mature Prince Philip’s mood swings? ‘She would have believed that everything springs from our childhood experience. Philip was born into a household of adoring women – that’s indisputable. Prince Philip suffered from the trauma of parental loss – that’s indisputable, too. Marie Bonaparte would not have been surprised, therefore, to find in the adult Philip a man who could, by turns, be charming and swaggering, and then dour, sour-faced, proto-serious.’

  Before leaving Brett Kahr and the spirit of Marie Bonaparte (and the actual ashes of Sigmund Freud, now resting at Maresfield Gardens in an ancient urn given to Freud by the Princess), I thought I would risk one final question: ‘Is a man with phallic swagger prone to promiscuity?’ Brett Kahr’s answer surprised me: ‘Not necessarily. He will be confident with women because he is confident in himself. Phallic swagger might help if you were planning to woo and wed the next Queen of England – the most sought-after, least attainable girl in the world – but it would not of itself make you a serial philanderer. I know nothing of Prince Philip’s private life, but I’ve heard the stories. He likes the company of attractive, younger women, of his own class and kind. That much we know. I wonder if these women are his attempt to replicate the family of sisters who adored him so? Could he simply be looking for playful friendships? That is possible. Or could he be looking for something more? That is also possible. Prince Andrea spent much of the 1930s in the south of France with his mistress. If Prince Philip had knowledge of his father’s marital infidelity during his own teenage psychosexual development, that might have been a model for him and had an effect on his own behaviour later in life. Or not. Who knows? Perhaps you do?’

  LILIBET

  Chapter Three

  ‘All things bright and beautiful, / All creatures great and small,

  All things wise and wonderful, / The Lord God made them all.

  … The rich man in his castle, / The poor man at his gate,

  God made them high or lowly, / And ordered their estate.’

  Mrs C.F. Alexander (1818–95)

  Queen Victoria’s father was Edward, Duke of Kent, fourth of the six sons of George III, ‘mad King George’. Edward was the baldest member of the family. The playwright, Richard Sheridan, liked to say this was because grass does not grow upon deserts. Edward responded to the sally rather well. ‘If Sheridan means that I haven’t genius,’ he said, ‘I
can tell him that such a gift would have been of small value to a Prince, whose business it is to keep quiet. I am luckier in having, like my country, a sound constitution.’

  In fact, Edward had a poor constitution and succumbed to a fever in the cruel winter of 1819, and died on 23 January 1820, when his baby daughter, Victoria, his only child, was barely eight months old. Before the madness took hold of him, George III led a calm and continent domestic life, married to Queen Charlotte, one-time Princess Sophia Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz. George’s sons did not follow their father’s example. Extravagance, self-indulgence, promiscuity, and adultery characterised their personal lives.

  Edward had abandoned his French mistress to marry a German princess in the hope of producing an heir. As a young widow with two small children, Princess Victoria of Saxe-Coburg was, recognisably, a sound breeder. When she married Edward and became Duchess of Kent, she spoke not a word of English, but she produced a vigorous child for him in baby Victoria.

  Little Victoria – she never reached five feet in height – was blessed with both a sound constitution and a certain genius. She lived more than eighty-one years, from 24 May 1819 to 22 January 1901. She came to the throne aged eighteen and reigned longer than any other English monarch. She gave her name to a century, and its achievements and constraints, its values and aspirations, and was Britain’s first and only Queen-Empress. She was small and round (at nineteen she weighed 125 pounds), but she cast a long shadow. Whenever Queen Elizabeth II appears on the balcony of Buckingham Palace she looks out over the Victoria Memorial. The Queen has much in common with her great-great-grandmother, not least her longevity, sense of duty, acceptance of destiny, and sometimes complicated relationship with her eldest son. Prince Philip, while an admirer of the Prince Consort, did not like to take the comparison very far. ‘Queen Victoria was an executive monarch,’ he said to me, somewhat brusquely, when I raised the subject. ‘Prince Albert was the Queen’s secretary. He could do things. It’s very different now.’