Philip: The Final Portrait

by Gyles Brandreth

  I go along with Colville’s judgement. In many ways, Prince Philip was remarkably good-humoured and long-suffering. He put up with Bobo; he shrugged off his press coverage; he endured more than six decades of footling royal flummery and thousands of hours of mind-numbing small talk with strangers and civic dignitaries. But he was ‘a shade querulous’. He would grumble. He could be difficult. His impatience sometimes showed. And, though he denied it, he was always contradictory. He liked to be his own man.

  On 1 December 1947 Queen Elizabeth wrote to him from Buckingham Palace – ‘the first time I have written to you as my son in law’. This letter, running to several pages, she signed ‘with much love, dearest Philip, ever your devoted Mama’. It is full of warmth and encouragement: ‘I do hope that you won’t find public life too trying; for the people are demanding when they like you, but you will have the comfort of knowing that you are giving so much towards the happiness and stability of the country.’ The letter also contains a telling observation: ‘I remember at Balmoral last year, you told me that you had always played a lone hand, and had had to fight your own battles …’ To an extent, for the rest of his life Prince Philip continued to play ‘a lone hand’ – notwithstanding his public advocacy of team games. Within a fortnight of his wedding, his new mother-in-law told him, ‘You will now have a great chance for individual leadership, as well as “married couple” leadership which is so important as well. As a family we do try to work as a team, but each going their own way, and I am sure you will make very valuable contributions towards the common pool.’

  In 1947 Princess Elizabeth was twenty-one and, though self-possessed, still quite shy. I asked her cousin, Margaret Rhodes, what she made of Philip when she first got to know him in the 1940s. ‘I used to dread sitting next to him,’ she told me, pulling a rather anxious face. ‘He’d be so contradictory. You’d say something just to say something, and he’d jump down your throat. “Why do you say that? What do you mean?” Quite frightening, until you got used to it. I think he’s always had that debunking element in him. It was just his way.’

  ‘Was he like that with Elizabeth?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes,’ said Mrs Rhodes, ‘he was like that with the Queen. He’d say, “Why the bloody hell? What the bloody hell?” I think she did sometimes find it very disconcerting.’

  Patricia Mountbatten – whose manner was more robust than that of Mrs Rhodes: she was her father’s daughter – told me that while, in her experience, the Queen did not respond to her husband’s intemperate outbursts in kind, she enjoyed it when others did. ‘I remember a big party at Balmoral,’ said Countess Mountbatten, ‘a shooting party, when, at dinner, Philip and I had a right old ding-dong about South Africa. It was a terrific argument and the Queen kept encouraging me. “That’s right, Patricia,” she said. “You go at him, nobody ever goes at him.”’

  When the Duke was critical of his wife, berating her for paying attention to the dogs when she should be listening to him, or wondering out loud why she was spending so much time on the telephone, or telling her she was wearing the wrong clothes for a shooting expedition, the Queen was quite capable of answering back, saying to him, ‘Oh, do shut up.’ According to family and friends, over the years she became bolder with him, and he gentler with her.

  Why was Prince Philip contradictory and querulous? His cousin, Patricia Mountbatten, said, ‘He has a very similar character to my father. He’s a dynamo. He wants action. He wants to get things done. He likes getting his own way and it’s frustrating for him when he doesn’t.’

  ‘And life at court was very, very frustrating for him at first,’ according to Patricia’s husband, Lord Brabourne. ‘It was very stuffy. Lascelles was impossible. They were absolutely bloody to him. They patronised him. They treated him as an outsider. It wasn’t much fun. He laughed it off, of course, but it must have hurt. I’m not sure that Princess Elizabeth noticed it. She probably didn’t see it. In a way, marriage hardly changed her life at all. She was able to carry on much as before. In getting married, she didn’t sacrifice anything. His life changed completely. He gave up everything.’

  According to Lord Brabourne and the Mountbatten girls (Philip’s first cousins), and according to Mike Parker and other male friends of Philip’s at the time, as a young man Philip was funny, charming, wilful, dynamic, and occasionally impatient. As a bridegroom, Pamela Mountbatten said, he was ‘so dashing that it made you realise why every girl in England seemed to think she was in love with him’. Of course, not every girl in England was. His best man’s girlfriend, Robin Dalton, described him to me as ‘a cold fish’. When I asked Princess Elizabeth’s childhood friend Sonia Berry what she made of the young Prince Philip, her back stiffened and she answered crisply, ‘No comment.’

  Margaret Rhodes said that Philip ‘mellowed a lot’ in his later years. He must have done. When I first became involved in the work of the National Playing Fields Association in the 1970s, I was warned that Prince Philip was a ‘hands-on’ president, but not always easy. He could be abrupt, I was told. In my experience he was sometimes demanding and occasionally testy, but he was never rude.

  Yes, he was challenging: he automatically questioned everything. Whatever you said, he countered it immediately. And he could certainly be wilful as well as contrary. I recall an event at Buckingham Palace at which an equerry was introducing children who had won a poetry-writing competition into the presence of the Prince and the Queen. The equerry made a point of asking the assembled guests not to applaud each child individually. As each child’s name was read out, the Duke of Edinburgh made a point of leading the applause.

  Yes, he could be impatient. ‘Why hasn’t this happened?’ he would ask, eyebrow raised. ‘What are we waiting for? Let’s get on with it, for heaven’s sake.’ With those he knew like me, he would indicate his disapproval with a grimace or a sigh and a weary shake of the head, but, on the whole, with the general public, and with those he met undertaking his array of public duties, he was surprisingly equable: easy-going, unaffected, and good-humoured. I would see him looking grouchy now and again (and keep my distance), but I only once saw him positively bad-tempered. He expected to find a folder of papers in their usual place on the desk in his study at Buckingham Palace. A footman had moved the papers. Philip gave him short shrift. I blanched. The footman retreated, chastened and abashed. Lord Brabourne said to me of Philip in his seventies, ‘He’s naughty now. He shouts at people sometimes.’ Gina Kennard said to me, ‘Let’s face it, he can be really quite bad-tempered.’

  Jock Colville’s assessment of the mood and manner of the royal couple in 1947 is borne out by other witnesses: the bride was very happy; the groom, happy but a touch querulous. Philip still did not have a home to call his own. The plan had been for the newly-weds to have a country home at Sunninghill Park in Windsor Great Park and a London home at Clarence House, next to St James’s Palace, overlooking the Mall – where Prince Charles and the Duchess of Cornwall live today.

  Unfortunately, the substantial house at Sunninghill Park burnt to the ground before the Edinburghs could move in, and Clarence House was in need of substantial refurbishment and repair.64 Eventually, they rented a comparatively small country house, Windlesham Moor, in Berkshire (just two floors: four reception rooms, five bedrooms, plus staff quarters) and, in May 1949, eighteen months after their wedding, moved into their London home, a handsomely restored Clarence House. (The restoration cost £78,000, rather more than the £50,000 voted for the work, somewhat grudgingly, by Parliament.) Meanwhile, for their London base, they perched briefly at Clock House in Kensington Palace (the home of the Earl and Countess of Athlone, who were on a three-month trip to South Africa) and then spent a year living with the King and Queen at Buckingham Palace. For Lilibet, the Palace was ‘home from home’. For Philip, given a bedroom and sitting room of his own alongside his wife’s established apartments, the arrangement was less satisfactory. Queen Elizabeth told him to think of it as ‘Hotel Buckingham’. He did.

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bsp; There was one area in which Philip, however, was able to do exactly as he pleased: the appointment of his first equerry-in-waiting. He chose his friend, contemporary, and fellow naval officer Mike Parker. ‘I was honoured,’ Parker told me, ‘and I felt I could do the job. Philip and I were mates and I felt I could be a useful ally to him at court. The King was fine, very friendly, very helpful, but the traditional courtiers weren’t always so easy. I had been planning to return to Australia, but my wife, Eileen, who was Scottish, didn’t want to leave the UK, so it worked out all round.’ Parker was Philip’s right-hand man – equerry, ADC, secretary, friend – for ten years, until 1957, when the ‘scandal’ of his divorce from Eileen obliged him to resign.

  Princess Elizabeth’s private secretary, Jock Colville, was chosen for her by the King’s, Tommy Lascelles. Born in 1915, educated at Harrow and Trinity College, Cambridge, Colville was a career diplomat who started out (as personable and bright young men from the Foreign Office sometimes do) as an assistant private secretary in Downing Street. He worked for Chamberlain, Churchill, and Attlee in turn, so he knew his way around the corridors of power. He was also wholly at home with the Palace culture. His mother, Lady Cynthia Colville, was a lady-in-waiting to Queen Mary. As a boy he was a Page of Honour to George V. In 1948 he married Lady Margaret Egerton, known as ‘Meg’, daughter of the 4th Earl of Ellesmere, who had been recruited by Princess Elizabeth as one of her first ladies-in-waiting. He was a class act, as smooth and British as Parker was rough and Australian, but they rubbed along well and came to see each other’s strengths.

  Completing the team, as Comptroller and Treasurer to the Edinburgh household, was an older man, Lieutenant General Sir Frederick ‘Boy’ Browning, born 1896, a dashing war hero, considered by Baron to be the handsomest man he ever photographed, married to the novelist Daphne du Maurier, and Chief of Staff to Philip’s uncle, Louis Mountbatten, in his South-East Asia Command. Mountbatten recommended Browning to his nephew unreservedly: ‘Boy has drive, energy, enthusiasm, efficiency and invokes the highest sense of loyalty and affection in his subordinates. His judgement is absolutely sound, and he would sooner die than let his boss down … he is not a “yes man” or even a courtier and never will be. He will fearlessly say what he thinks is right … Frankly, Philip, I do not think you can do better.’

  It was a strong team. It had to be. The Princess and the Duke, aged twenty-one and twenty-six, were about to embark on a curious and exhausting adventure: a relentless, endlessly repetitive roller-coaster ride of royal duties and good works, from which only death or revolution could release them. When I asked Prince Philip if he felt frustrated that his marriage had ultimately curtailed his naval career, he said, ‘In 1947 I thought I was going to have a career in the navy, but it became obvious there was no hope. The Royal Family then was just the King and the Queen and the two Princesses. The only other male member was the Duke of Gloucester. There was no choice. It just happened.’ Philip had joined the family firm: he had to play his part in the family business. ‘You have to make compromises,’ he said to me. ‘That’s life. I accepted it. I tried to make the best of it.’

  For the first four and a quarter years of his marriage, the Duke combined his royal duties with his naval ones. He had plenty of energy, a well-run office, and an enviable ability to successfully juggle the competing demands of the Admiralty and Buckingham Palace. He worked hard; he played hard. In May 1948 Chips Channon observed the Edinburghs dancing the night away at a fancy-dress party at Coppins. They were still going at 5 a.m. – two hours after everyone danced the Hokey Cokey ‘hilariously’. According to Channon, Philip ‘looked worn out’, but he was the success of the ball, ‘wildly gay with his policeman’s hat and handcuffs. He leapt about and jumped into the air as he greeted everybody … His charm is colossal, like all the Mountbattens, and he and Princess Elizabeth seemed supremely happy.’

  Quickly, and seemingly effortlessly, Philip slipped into the role of supportive consort and interested royal visitor. He had the ability to live in the moment, to concentrate intently on the job in hand. He was good at compartmentalising his life, switching from one interest/duty/activity to another in an instant, as required. In a day, he might wear several hats (metaphorically) and several uniforms (literally): he seemed at home in each of them. In the space of sixteen hours he would move from parade ground to business meeting to memorial service to charity lunch to factory tour to award ceremony to state banquet, changing kit four times, appearing up-to-speed throughout, but not letting the agenda or mood of one engagement affect the next. It is a useful skill to acquire – if you aspire to the royal life. (It also, I think, explains something that those who become friendly with royalty sometimes find puzzling. I have a number of ‘show-business friends’ who have enjoyed the company of Prince Philip – or Prince Charles or Prince William or Prince Harry – at charitable events, felt they were getting on famously, even been invited to Windsor Castle or Highgrove House for a meal, and then been disconcerted because the camaraderie of the moment isn’t sustained. The royal is being thoroughly jolly – really friendly, intimate, and confidential – and then, suddenly, he’s gone. It’s 2.45 p.m., the car is waiting, he gets up, he goes: he may not even say goodbye. That’s it – until next time. And, on the whole, you cannot organise next time: the ball is in their court. The royal life provides opportunities for countless brief encounters, many of them happy, some of them intense: it is not conducive to forming and sustaining a wide range of everyday friendships.)

  In 1948, with the Edinburghs living at Buckingham Palace, Philip could walk to work, and did. He started the year with a desk job at the Admiralty, as an operations officer ‘pushing ships around’. Later in the year he went on a Staff Course at the Royal Naval College, Greenwich, and chose to spend the week in Greenwich, coming home to Lilibet at weekends. Spending nights, and weeks, and sometimes months, apart from your spouse is the lot of married servicemen and women. It may be unsatisfactory, it may cause tensions and difficulties in a relationship, but it is not unusual: in the navy especially, it is the way things are. In the years to come, the time Elizabeth and Philip would spend apart would give rise to comment. To them it was simply an inevitable fact of life.

  Understanding the lives of other people is not easy if their way of life is very different from your own. I have spent my married life sharing a bedroom – and a bed – with my wife. If we started to sleep in separate rooms, I would be dismayed: I would see it as the beginning of the end. The truth is it might be more comfortable and convenient sometimes to sleep apart, but we don’t – we never have. Why? Because we are middle-class, and comfortably married middle-class couples of our generation always share the same bedroom. That’s the way it is. Among the upper classes, especially three or four generations ago, it was different. Men and women led much more separate lives, they lived in larger houses, they had separate (if adjacent or adjoining) bedrooms. That’s just the way it was. When Elizabeth and Philip moved into Clarence House they had separate but communicating bedrooms. It was what they – and their staff – would have expected. In his memoir the Duke’s valet, John Dean, described the arrangement as though it was the most natural thing in the world. Of an evening, John would be assisting Philip in his bedroom, while Bobo would be tending to Elizabeth in hers, and the royal couple ‘would joke happily through the left-open door’.

  In July 1982 an intruder – a thirty-one-year-old schizophrenic named Michael Fagan – found his way into Buckingham Palace and disturbed the Queen, alone, asleep in bed. This alarming incident prompted a double dose of outrage from the tabloid press: why was the Palace’s security so lamentable and where was Prince Philip? Why was he not on hand to come to his wife’s rescue? Indeed, the ‘revelation’ that the Queen and her husband did not appear to share a bedroom caused more comment in certain quarters than the fact that a lunatic could wander off the street into the sovereign’s bedroom without let or hindrance. The Queen, who, at the time, handled the intrusion with com
mendable calm, was nevertheless shaken. The popular press had the answer: ‘Give her a cuddle, Philip,’ instructed one newspaper headline. In fact, when sleeping under the same roof, the Queen and Prince Philip usually did share the same bed. It just happened that on the morning of Fagan’s intrusion Philip had a crack-of-dawn start for an out-of-town official engagement and so spent the night in his own quarters.

  Their long-standing friend Gina Kennard told me, ‘At Balmoral that year – after that man got into her bedroom – the Queen began snapping at Philip. She was really quite snappy with him. Which was unusual for her. Not for him, of course. He’s always been a bit snappy. But the man getting into her room was horrid.’ It was. The man had a broken glass ashtray in his hand and was bleeding. The intrusion occurred at around 7.15 a.m. on 9 July. The Queen pressed the alarm button by her bed, but her overnight police guard had gone off duty at 6 a.m. and her footman was out walking the corgis. The intruder simply wandered in, wholly unhindered, drew the curtains and sat on the bed. He wanted to share his troubles with Her Majesty. (Later he told police he had planned to cut his wrists in front of the Queen.) Eventually, when he asked for a cigarette, the Queen managed to manoeuvre him out of the bedroom and the alarm was raised. The incident prompted a review of Palace security, which was, in the words of the intruder himself, ‘diabolical’. This was not Fagan’s first dawn raid on the Palace: on the previous occasion he had stolen a bottle of wine. The Home Secretary at the time was Willie Whitelaw. Ultimately, he was responsible for the Metropolitan Police and the Queen’s security. He offered his resignation. It was declined. Some years later, he told me, his eyes brimming with tears, ‘I felt utterly ashamed, utterly miserable. It was the worst moment of my public life.’