Heading the list of potential candidates were two young Grenadier Guardsmen, both born in 1919, who were the heirs to the dukedoms of Rutland and Grafton. Each became a good friend of the Princess, but neither caught her fancy and both married other girls during the course of 1946. The Duke of Rutland’s marriage lasted just ten years. The Duke of Grafton47 (a direct descendant of one of Charles II’s illegitimate children) was more fortunate. His marriage survived (and thrived), and his wife, Fortune Smith (daughter of Captain Eric Smith MC), became one of Elizabeth’s closest companions: Lady of the Bedchamber to the Queen from 1953 to 1966, Mistress of the Robes from 1967. When I was travelling with the Queen’s party on one of her regional tours in 2001, we overheard someone in the crowd asking if the Duchess of Grafton, seated next to the Queen in the royal limousine, was the Queen’s sister. This really delighted the Duchess. ‘I do feel like her sister,’ she said to me, proudly.
The Duke of Grafton died, aged ninety-two, in April 2011. The Queen attended his memorial service at St George’s Chapel, Windsor, and mourned a friend she had known for seventy years. In February 1945, when Lilibet was confined to bed at Windsor Castle, she wrote to her cousin, Diana: ‘On the second day of mumps and a long letter from Hugh which made me feel much better. He gave a very amusing description of tiger shooting with Nepalese generals. It is awful to think he has been out in India for over a year, nearly eighteen months.’ The separations of war made building relationships difficult in a way that is not so easy for us to understand today – and the war took its toll, too. In October 1944 Lilibet wrote to Diana from Balmoral Castle in Scotland: ‘It’s awful how all the particularly charming people seem to get killed. People who had a wonderful future before them. One sometimes gets rather despairing about one’s friends as one hears about more casualties, but I do hope the war will be over very shortly. We are coming south next week, which we are not looking forward to wildly. It is so peaceful up here and the thought of coming down back to bombs and sirens, and complete blackout, is not a very pleasant one. However, I expect we shall get accustomed to it again.’
Another young Guards officer of the same generation who did survive the war, and became one of Elizabeth’s closest friends, was Henry, Lord Porchester. Known simply as ‘Porchey’, he was born in 1924, the grandson of the 5th Earl of Carnarvon, who had been a distinguished racehorse breeder (and co-discoverer of the tomb of Tutenkhamun in 1922), and the son of the 6th Earl, who, following the family tradition, bred the 1930 Derby winner, Blenheim. Shortly before he died – on 11 September 2001, the day of the al-Qaeda attacks on the United States – I asked Lord Carnarvon (who became the 7th Earl on his father’s death in 1987) how he first came to meet Princess Elizabeth. ‘My father knew the King and I think the King thought I might be the right kind of chap to accompany the Princess to the races. I’m glad he did. We hit it off at once.’ And ever after. From October 1945 – when he accompanied her to Newmarket – until the end of his life, Elizabeth and Porchey were regular racing companions, and special friends.
Horse breeding has long been an interest of the British Royal Family. A royal stud was established at Hampton Court back in the sixteenth century. In the late nineteenth century Elizabeth’s great-grandfather, Edward VII, as Prince of Wales, established a royal stud at Sandringham. In 1962 Elizabeth II, encouraged by Porchey, took on the Polhampton Lodge Stud in Hampshire to breed royal racehorses. In 1969 Porchey was officially appointed Her Majesty’s racing manager. Porchey and Elizabeth shared a passion for horses, for racing, for breeding. ‘We’ve learnt a lot together,’ he told me, ‘and from one another. And we’ve had a great deal of fun.’
I asked Porchey’s son, Geordie, now the 8th Earl of Carnarvon (who was born in 1956 and is also one of the Queen’s godchildren), what he felt the Queen gained from her relationship with his father. ‘The Queen is completely at ease in the world of horses,’ he said. ‘It’s a world she knows and loves. It’s quite separate from the rest of the universe she inhabits. When she’s in it, she is wholly absorbed by it. And I suppose my father was the centre of that part of her life. The Queen has a long and successful history as an owner and breeder. She knows the background of the stallions, she knows all the good bloodlines. My father had a photographic memory – he could remember the names of all the descendants of the great horses with no difficulty at all. The Queen and he could talk about horses for hours. They had a shared interest that was all-consuming – and a shared sense of humour. When my father and the Queen were together, there were always a lot of laughs. The Queen is more comfortable around men, anyway. She is easy with them, more chatty. And I think their relationship was special because they knew each other so well. They were happy together. You could tell. When he died, quite unexpectedly, the Queen came to his funeral. She very rarely goes to funerals, as you know.’
Princess Anne once said that Porchey was the one person in the world who could telephone the Queen and always be put through at once. In seven months, between 11 September 2001 and 30 March 2002, the Queen lost three key figures in her life: Porchey, her sister, and her mother.48 With Porchey and Queen Elizabeth, she shared a passion – and, according to the psychiatrist Anthony Clare, having a passion is one of the secrets of achieving happiness. Prince Philip is a serious equestrian with a passion for carriage driving, but he has never shared his wife’s commitment to the turf or her passion for horse breeding. He left that to Porchey.
On 8 May 1945, VE Day, Prince Philip was on board HMS Whelp in the Far East and Princess Elizabeth was at Buckingham Palace with her parents. Dressed in her ATS uniform, she joined the King, the Queen, Princess Margaret, and the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, on the Palace balcony, and waved to the cheering multitude below.
Later in the day, the King and Queen, a little reluctantly, allowed their daughters to go down into the streets and join the throng. According to the Vicomtesse de Bellaigue, who, with Crawfie and a Guards major, were the Princesses’ chaperones for the expedition, ‘The King drew the line about Piccadilly Circus, which was to be avoided.’ Porchey, who was also among the party, recalled, ‘We went down Birdcage Walk, up Whitehall, up Piccadilly, into the Ritz Hotel and back to Hyde Park Corner down to the Palace. Everyone was very jolly, linking arms in the streets, and singing “Run, Rabbit Run”, “Hang Out the Washing on the Siegfried Line”, “Roll out the Barrel”, that sort of thing …’ The Comtesse de Bellaigue said, ‘I shall never forget running wildly down St James’s Street, with a puffing Major of the Grenadiers, to keep pace with the Princesses. When we reached the Palace they shouted like the other people, “We want the King”, “We want the Queen”. On the whole we were not recognised. However, a Dutch serviceman, who attached himself to the end of our file of arm-in-arm people (the Princesses being in the centre of the file) realised who the Princesses were. He withdrew discreetly and just said, “It was a great honour. I shall never forget this evening.” All our group got back to the Palace through a garden gate. The Queen was anxiously waiting for us. Her Majesty provided us with sandwiches she made herself.’
By the time the Princesses took to the streets again, thirteen weeks later, for a similar expedition on VJ Day, 15 August 1945, Churchill was no longer Prime Minister. With victory in Europe achieved, the Labour Party, under Clement Attlee, reckoned the time had come to end the wartime coalition. Churchill had no choice but to dissolve Parliament and call a general election. Polling began on 5 July, with the voting and counting period specially extended to allow the troops overseas to vote. When the result was announced on 26 July, it was a landslide victory for Labour. Churchill’s Conservatives lost 160 seats. Attlee’s Labour Party gained 230. The age of nationalisation was upon us: the Welfare State was about to be born: King George VI was a monarch with misgivings.
The King was instinctively conservative, wary of change, and apprehensive about the pace and degree of his new government’s socialist agenda. He appears to have done rather well at keeping his personal feelings under wraps. He
rbert Morrison, chief architect of Labour’s election victory, and second-in-command in the new administration, said the King ‘accepted calmly and willingly the changes of political outlook and of personality in the kind of minister he had known throughout his reign’. Morrison found the monarch ‘fair in his observations’ and ‘meticulously observant in his constitutional position’. Princess Elizabeth learnt much from her father’s example.
Privately, the King said (to his brother, the Duke of Gloucester) that he found the new government ‘difficult to talk to’ and his new Prime Minister ‘positively mute’.49 Churchill, of course, was positively verbose (and elaborately solicitous when it came to his dealings with any monarch), but the King had been wary of him, too, back in 1940. In due course – in fact, quite quickly – George VI and Clement Attlee came to understand, respect, and even value each other. Michael Foot, who became an MP in 1945 and, later, leader of the Labour Party, knew Attlee well. ‘Clem was not an emotional man,’ he told me. ‘He was not given to public shows of feeling. The only time – ever – that I saw tears in his eyes and sensed a crack in his voice was when he spoke of the death of George VI.’
The King made it his business to work harmoniously with his Prime Minister. The relationship prospered. In November 1951 he honoured Attlee with the Order of Merit. In July 1945, however, he was simply appalled by Attlee’s triumph and Churchill’s defeat. ‘I was shocked at the result,’ he told Churchill, ‘& thought it most ungrateful to you personally after all your hard work for the people.’ With a heart ‘too full’, he wrote at length (and by hand) to say ‘how very sad I am that you are no longer my Prime Minister’, concluding:
For myself personally, I regret what has happened more than perhaps anyone else. I shall miss your counsel to me more than I can say. But please remember that as a friend I hope we shall be able to meet at intervals.
Believe me,
I am,
Your very sincerely and gratefully,
GRI50
The King’s world was changing.
With the war in Japan at an end, Philip and HMS Whelp came home. In January 1946, in Portsmouth, as the destroyer’s first lieutenant, Philip’s immediate post-war duty was to preside over her decommissioning. His next postings – to Pwllheli in north Wales and Corsham, near Bath, in Wiltshire – were land-based and less romantic, but, he would insist, no less rewarding. He used to speak with particular pride of his time at the Corsham naval training establishment, HMS Royal Arthur. It was a school for petty officers and, by all accounts, Philip was an innovative, imaginative, and effective instructor. ‘We had some new ideas,’ he said. ‘It was satisfying work.’
Away from his naval base, he still had no home to call his own. When I first went to meet Countess Mountbatten and Lord Brabourne, they showed me their first visitors’ book – from 1946, the year they were married – and there, marking his visit over the weekend of 20–22 December, was Philip’s signature and, next to it, in the address column, he had written: ‘No fixed abode!’
He had a base with his grandmother at Kensington Palace; he stayed with his cousin, Princess Marina, and her family, at Coppins; regularly, at weekends, when the Mountbattens were away at Broadlands, he cadged a bed for the night at 16 Chester Street, their London house. According to the Mountbattens’ butler, John Dean, the Mountbatten household servants all adored him: ‘He was so considerate, so anxious to avoid giving trouble to people who, after all, were paid to look after the family, that we all thought the world of him and looked forward to his visits.’
Dean later went to work for Prince Philip as his valet and, eventually, ‘did a Crawfie’, publishing a memoir of his happy years as the Prince’s trouser-presser. From start to finish, the Prince remained a hero to his valet. Dean noticed how, immediately after the war, Philip seemed to have very few clothes and what he had wasn’t in the best nick. Philip would come up to town, in his black MG, with just his razor in his pocket. Overnight, Dean would wash and iron the young Prince’s only shirt and darn his threadbare socks for him. ‘He was very easy to look after, and never asked for things like that to be done for him, but I liked him so much that I did it anyway.’
Philip worked hard. He played hard. He drove hard. In April 1946 he managed to borrow an army vehicle, to drive across war-torn Europe, to Salem, to attend his youngest sister Sophie’s second wedding. ‘Tiny’, as she was known, left with five young children when her husband, Prince Christoph of Hesse, was killed in Italy in 1943, was marrying Prince George Wilhelm of Hanover, now headmaster of Salem, the school founded by Prince Max of Baden and Kurt Hahn, where Philip had briefly been a pupil before moving to Hahn’s Scottish outpost, Gordonstoun, in 1934. After years of separation, Philip was reunited with his sisters. He was reunited with his mother, too. Alice travelled to London to stay with her own mother at Kensington Palace and to see her son again: it was the first time they had been together for five years. ‘She is full of energy & good sense,’ Alice’s mother reported of her daughter, ‘& she and Philip get on well together.’
Philip also made a post-war pilgrimage, in 1946, to Monte Carlo – accompanied by Mike Parker – to meet up with his late father’s lady friend, the Comtesse de La Bigne, and collect a few of Prince Andrea’s personal effects: some books, some pictures, some clothes, a pair of hairbrushes, his ivory-handled shaving brush, his signet ring. Andrea left his son very little because he had very little to leave – other than debts. (The debts were not finally cleared until 1947, and then only thanks to help from Dickie and Edwina Mountbatten, and Nada Milford Haven’s brother-in-law, Sir Harold Wernher.)
Philip arranged to meet the Comtesse at the Café de Paris – founded in 1868 and, to this day, described on its website as ‘the mother of all meeting places’. Mike Parker told me, ‘We got there first, ordered cocktails and waited. Then she arrived. It was like a scene from a film. We realised it must be her at once. She made a proper entrance. She was elegant. She wore blue glasses, I remember. Very striking. She seemed totally at home. She and Philip hit it off at once.’
Andrea had been laid to rest in the Russian Orthodox church in Nice. In 1946 his body was taken by Greek cruiser to Athens and buried in the gardens of the royal palace at Tatoï. He had been the son of King George I of Greece. In September 1946, following a plebiscite, George I’s grandson, Andrea’s nephew, George II, was restored to the Greek throne. His renewed reign was short-lived. In April 1947 he suffered a sudden stroke and died, unexpectedly, aged fifty-six. His younger brother, Paul (husband of the formidable Princess Frederika of Hanover), succeeded him.
King Paul was Prince Philip’s first cousin. Prince Philip was a great-great-grandson of Queen Victoria. If Princess Elizabeth was to follow the custom, long established, of British monarchs-in-waiting marrying into European royalty, there was a certain inevitability about her match with Prince Philip. That is certainly how his immediate family all felt – in Greece, in Germany, in England. He acknowledged the fact himself. ‘After all,’ he said, ‘if you spend ten minutes thinking about it – and a lot of these people spent a great deal more thinking about it – how many obviously eligible young men, other than people living in this country, were available?’
One of ‘these people’ thinking about it, long and hard, over several years, was undoubtedly Lord Louis Mountbatten. Thus far, I have tried to tell the story of the royal romance without too much reference to Uncle Dickie, simply because that is the way the Duke of Edinburgh would have preferred it. In every other published account of the lead-up to the royal engagement of July 1947, Mountbatten stands centre stage. I think the principals saw it differently. To them the off-stage murmurings and machinations of others were neither here nor there. This affair was their affair and nobody else’s – right from the start. They were cousins – though, happily, not first cousins. Their families knew one another. They met. They fell in love – she, quite quickly; he, over time. They thought about it; they talked about it; eventually they decided to make their live
s together, for better or worse. It is as simple as that.
That Dickie Mountbatten was anxious to encourage the union is not in question, but his eagerness to be involved may have been more of a hindrance than a help. On more than one occasion Philip had to urge his uncle to moderate his enthusiasm. In September 1945 he wrote to him: ‘Please, I beg you, not too much advice in an affair of the heart, or I shall be forced to do the wooing by proxy.’ In January 1947, as the prospect of the engagement grew closer, Philip wrote to Dickie about the impact his uncle’s attitude might have on Lilibet: ‘I am not being rude, but it is apparent that you like the idea of being the General Manager of this little show and I am rather afraid that she might not take to the idea as docilely as I do. It is true that I know what is good for me, but don’t forget that she has not had you as Uncle loco parentis, counsellor and friend as long as I have …’
Mountbatten was a well-intentioned control freak. He was also a loving uncle, rightly proud of his impressive young nephew, and understandably excited by the possibility of being in loco parentis to the next Prince Consort. Indeed, as the engagement appeared ever more likely, he began looking into the precedent and encouraged his sister Alice to help him with his research. Mountbatten revelled in royalty; he was ambitious for his kith and kin; he was fascinated by genealogy; he was an instinctive match-maker. According to his biographer, Philip Ziegler, some time in the early 1930s he prepared for his cousin David, then Prince of Wales, a list of eighteen unmarried European princesses, ranging from the thirty-three-year-old Alexandra of Hohenlohe-Langenburg to Princess Thyra of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, who was a mere fifteen. He knew his Almanack de Gotha. He knew there was no more glittering match for the son he never had than the Heiress Presumptive to the British throne.
Philip: The Final Portrait Page 20