Philip: The Final Portrait

by Gyles Brandreth

  It was a compromise – and kindly meant – but it did not amount to much. Essentially, the Queen’s descendants, if non-royal, could be called Mountbatten-Windsor. Dickie, delighted to find the door even slightly ajar, did his best to push it further open. In 1973 Princess Anne married Captain Mark Phillips. In June that year Mountbatten wrote to Prince Charles: ‘When Anne marries in November, her marriage certificate will be the first opportunity to settle the Mountbatten-Windsor name for good … if you can make quite sure … that her surname is entered as Mountbatten-Windsor it will end all arguments. I hope you can fix this.’ It seems he did, for – though clearly contrary to the stipulations of the Queen’s declaration of 1960 – it was as a Mountbatten-Windsor that Princess Anne was married.

  In fact, the first properly named Mountbatten-Windsor did not appear on the scene until more than fifty years after the Queen’s Coronation. Lady Louise Alice Elizabeth Mary Mountbatten-Windsor, the daughter of the Earl and Countess of Wessex, was born on 10 November 2003 – and her Christian names nicely reflect both the Windsor and the Mountbatten heritage. Princess Louise (1848–1939) was the sixth child of Victoria and Albert; Princess Louise of Hesse-Cassel (1817–98) married Christian IX of Denmark and was grandmother to Prince Andrea, Prince Philip’s father. Prince Philip’s mother was Alice; the Queen’s mother was Elizabeth; the Earl of Wessex’s great-grandmother was Queen Mary; the Countess of Wessex’s mother is Mary Rhys-Jones. The Mountbatten family’s delight at the arrival of the first unquestioned ‘Mountbatten-Windsor’ may have been a little dampened by the Buckingham Palace spokesman who, having announced the new royal baby’s full name, added, ‘She will, however, be generally known by the more easily remembered title of Lady Louise Windsor.’

  Dickie Mountbatten himself was obsessed with the issue of the Mountbatten name. ‘His vanity, though child-like, was monstrous,’ wrote his biographer, Philip Ziegler, ‘his ambition unbridled.’78 I think Philip always had the measure of his uncle. He loved him, liked him, respected him, admired him – and was grateful to him. But (in my experience at least) Prince Philip spoke with equal affection – and gratitude – and almost as frequently – of his other maternal uncle, George Milford Haven. Dickie was a great achiever (and a great operator), but at times he had to be taken with a pinch of salt. Philip always understood that. Elizabeth understood it, too. They knew Mountbatten’s strengths and his weaknesses and his foibles – and were enormously fond of him. In 1974, five years before he was murdered by the IRA, they took him on a cruise aboard the Royal Yacht. He was seventy-four, and delighted to be in Britannia once more, ‘but what moved me most of all,’ he wrote in his diary, ‘is the increasing kindness of Lilibet and Philip who treat me more and more as a really intimate member of their immediate family.’ They understood him and he, perhaps, understood them, too. When the cruise was over, Mountbatten wrote to Philip: ‘You sometimes seemed rather disappointed, perhaps frustrated would be a better word, but I feel you underestimate your effect on the UK, and especially the Commonwealth. I hear more and more praise and appreciation from people in all walks of life.’

  For Philip, in 1952, frustration and disappointment were already the order of the day. His children were not to inherit his name. He was not happy about that. He was obliged to move house. He was not happy about that. He was treated as something of an extraneous nuisance by both the court and the Prime Minister – and there was very little he could do about that. Mike Parker said to me, ‘There were a lot more of them than there were of us.’ At Clarence House, Philip and Elizabeth had essentially shared a secretariat, and Philip was head of the household. It was his domain. At Buckingham Palace, it was very different. Elizabeth was Queen. The Palace was the sovereign’s domain. Naturally, she inherited her father’s Household (huge and hidebound), to which she added Martin Charteris (more flexible and fun, but still relatively inexperienced), leaving Philip pretty isolated, with just Parker and Boy Browning. ‘You can imagine,’ Countess Mountbatten said to me, ‘Bobo MacDonald sitting by the bathtub’ – and ‘Tommy Lascelles sitting in judgement,’ chipped in Lord Brabourne – ‘it can’t have been easy.’

  It was not easy. In most households in Britain in the early 1950s, the husband and father was the dominant figure. He was the head of the household, the breadwinner, the law-maker; he ruled the roost, he was the cock of the walk. For Philip, it was not like that. ‘It was bloody difficult for him,’ said Mike Parker. ‘In the navy, he was in command of his own ship – literally. At Clarence House, it was very much his show. When we got to Buckingham Palace, all that changed.’ ‘It was an unsettling time for him,’ said Martin Charteris. ‘He had no defined role, while the Queen’s role was clearly defined and she assumed it with an extraordinary and immediate confidence and ease. For the rest of us, it was wonderful to behold, but I can see that he might have found it somewhat disconcerting.’

  According to Elizabeth Longford, soon after her Accession the Queen told a friend, ‘I no longer feel anxious or worried. I don’t know what it is – but I have lost all my timidity somehow becoming the Sovereign and having to receive the Prime Minister.’ She was now leading a life from which her husband was necessarily – constitutionally – excluded. When the Prime Minister went to the Palace for his weekly audience with the sovereign, the old man and the young Queen would sit together, alone, sometimes for up to an hour. ‘What do you talk about?’ Jock Colville asked Churchill. ‘Oh, mostly racing,’ answered Churchill, with a twinkle. And polo, apparently. And the state of the world, of course.

  The Queen was – and is – supplied daily with a mass of ‘state papers’: Cabinet minutes, Foreign Office telegrams, documents, briefs, drafts – boxes of ‘secret’ documents relating to all manner of United Kingdom, Commonwealth, and international affairs. Philip never had access to any of these. When I told him that, as a Lord Commissioner of the Treasury, I used to sign mandates that were then sent to Her Majesty for counter-signature, he was bemused. ‘I had no idea she did that,’ he said. ‘I’ve no idea what goes on.’

  In 2012, at the conclusion of her Diamond Jubilee year, the Queen went to 10 Downing Street to attend a meeting of the British Cabinet. Her father, George VI, had attended gatherings of the War Cabinet during the Second World War, but on 18 December 2012 Elizabeth II became the first monarch to attend a normal Cabinet meeting since George III in 1781. (George I chaired the Cabinet personally until 1717.) The Duke of Edinburgh did not accompany her. His absence caused some press speculation. Was the ninety-one-year-old Duke unwell? No, not at all. He was undertaking his own official engagements elsewhere. He was not privy to attend the Cabinet meeting because constitutional matters are entirely the sovereign’s preserve.

  The Duke of Edinburgh did not complain about this. He accepted it as a matter of fact. ‘When the Queen became Queen, I was told “Keep out” and that was that.’

  ‘So, what did you do?’ I asked him.

  ‘I tried to find useful things to do,’ he said. ‘I did my best. I introduced a Footman Training Programme. The old boys here [at Buckingham Palace] hadn’t had anything quite like it before. They expected the footmen just to keep on coming. We had an Organisation and Methods Review. I tried to make improvements – without unhinging things.’

  The Organisation and Methods Review involved the Duke and Mike Parker treading on a number of toes. ‘Some of the old guard weren’t too happy,’ Parker told me. ‘We met with a fair bit of resistance. But I think we made a few improvements, dragged some of them into the twentieth century. We explored the whole Palace. We didn’t find a wicked fairy in a turret with a spinning wheel, but we did discover the wine cellar. It’s deep underground and goes on for miles and miles. There were some great old vintages and menus dating back to the early days of Queen Victoria.’

  When I suggested to Prince Philip that he was an instinctive moderniser, and always had been, he interrupted me: ‘No, no, not for the sake of modernising, not for the sake of buggering about with things in some so
rt of Blairite way. Not at all.’

  Back in December 1949 his mother-in-law had written him a very friendly and loving letter in which she had said, among other things, ‘I sometimes wonder if you think Papa & I are rather olde worlde about some things – I expect you do.’ He wrote to Queen Elizabeth by reply, denying it. ‘I don’t really think that my own ideas are sufficiently clear to be able to stigmatize anybody least of all yourself,’ he said. ‘Perhaps my education and life so far have caused me to think differently and therefore hold different views but I hope that they are sufficiently open-minded not to be “modern” for modernity’s sake. If and when we disagree I assure you that I listen to and digest your views as those of an exceptionally intelligent and enlightened person and try to reconcile them with my own. It seems to me that the best way to form an opinion is to rub views with other people.’

  When I talked to him sixty years later he took exactly the same line. ‘I’m not interested in change for change’s sake. Far from it. And I think I do listen to people with opinions that are different from my own. In fact, I make a point of it.’

  ‘But you do get impatient,’ I suggested.

  ‘With other people?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘There’s usually a reason,’ he insisted.

  This conversation took place on the morning after His Royal Highness had attended the Royal Variety Performance. During the interval he had been introduced to some of the team involved in putting the show together. ‘But I’ve already met these people,’ he protested irritably. ‘We were introduced when we arrived. Shouldn’t we meet some new people? Let’s use the time we’ve got usefully.’

  On another occasion he said to me, ‘I’m anxious to get things done. That’s all. I’m interested in the efficient use of resources.’

  ‘Weren’t you the first member of the Royal Family to use a helicopter?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘in the run-up to the Coronation.’

  In 1952 he was appointed Chairman of the Coronation Commission. He believed it was ‘a real job’ and he took it seriously. Large numbers of Commonwealth and Colonial troops arrived in the country to take part in the event and were stationed in barracks across the land. The Duke decided to visit them all. He and Mike Parker looked at the logistics and reckoned they should go by helicopter. They borrowed one from the Royal Navy. ‘It was just more practical,’ the Duke explained to me, ‘but it caused a ruckus. I didn’t go through the proper channels. There was a lot of pettifogging bureaucracy.’ Parker was hauled before the Prime Minister and given a severe dressing-down.

  The Coronation when it came – on 2 June 1953 – was more than a logistical triumph. ‘Never has there been such excitement,’ wrote Jock Colville, ‘never has a Monarch received such adulation.’ The country felt on top of the world – literally. The 29,028-foot summit of the world’s tallest mountain had been reached at 11.30 a.m. on 29 May. The news reached London on the morning of the Coronation. The triumphant mountaineers were a New Zealander, Edmund Hillary, and a Nepalese Sherpa, Norgay Tenzing, but the leader of the expedition, John Hunt, was British and the feat was hailed as a British achievement. Everest had been conquered and Elizabeth was to be crowned!

  In London the day itself was dank and overcast, but the mood was universally sunny. Hundreds of thousands of people – happy and curious – braved the drizzle and filled the streets. Millions more – in Britain and around the world – followed the day’s events on television. Never before in human history had so many people witnessed the same events at the same time.

  Inevitably, there were a few republicans with reservations, but, sensibly, they kept their heads down. And the Duke of Windsor stayed away because he was not wanted. Elizabeth felt his presence would be inappropriate. He came to England to attend the funeral of his mother, Queen Mary, on 31 March, but reckoned he had not received a warm welcome. Elizabeth would not pay him the £10,000 annual allowance he had been given by her father. A family dinner was held at Windsor Castle following Queen Mary’s funeral. He was not invited. He wrote to his wife: ‘What a smug, stinking lot my relations are and you’ve never seen such a seedy worn-out bunch of old hags most of them have become.’

  The Duke of Edinburgh was Chairman of the Coronation Commission, but most of the detail was out of his hands. The pageantry was largely in the gift of his Vice Chairman, Bernard Fitzalan-Howard, 16th Duke of Norfolk, hereditary Earl Marshal and Chief Butler of England, a seasoned campaigner whose family titles dated back to 1139 (when Stephen was King) and whose past personal triumphs included the management of the funeral of George V and the Coronation of George VI. Norfolk was a ‘character’. When asked by a peer if his invitation to the Coronation might be prejudiced because of his divorce, he replied, ‘Good God, man, this is a Coronation, not Royal Ascot.’ And when asked if it was true that the peers were hiding sandwiches inside their coronets during the service, he answered, ‘Probably. They’re capable of anything.’ When one of the Coronation rehearsals was running behind schedule, his voice echoed round Westminster Abbey: ‘If the bishops don’t learn to walk in step, we’ll be here all night.’

  The Queen herself attended several of the rehearsals at the Abbey and learnt her moves from the Duchess of Norfolk, who also acted as her stand-in. At Buckingham Palace – where the ballroom was marked out with ropes and posts replicating the Abbey’s floor plan – she put in hours of extra practice on her own. She listened to recordings of her father’s Coronation. She walked the course with sheets pinned to her shoulders representing the robes she would wear. To become accustomed to its weight, she sat at her desk wearing the actual St Edward’s Crown first used at the Coronation of Charles II in 1661. It was heavy – five pounds – and its weight was of significance, symbolising, according to the Archbishop of Canterbury, the burden of the demands that would be made upon her ‘to her life’s end’. (It was because of the weight of the crown that Queen Victoria and Edward VII chose not to wear it at their Coronations.)

  The Archbishop, Dr Geoffrey Fisher, a muscular Christian (at Oxford he was a noted footballer, rugby player, and oarsman), went to great lengths to ensure that the spiritual significance of the Coronation was not obscured by the pomp and pageantry. In the lead-up to the great day, he gave a series of sermons exploring and explaining the Coronation liturgy. He was an experienced teacher (he had been headmaster of Repton) and in Elizabeth, of course, he had a willing pupil. Martin Charteris said to me, ‘People will have their own memories of the Coronation – of the pageantry, the processions, the Queen of Tonga in her open carriage,79 the street parties and what have you – but for the Queen herself, the Coronation was not about celebration, it was about dedication. It was a religious event.’ A few days after the event, the Archbishop looked back on it in awe: ‘The wonder of it, the unforgettable bearing of the Queen, the overwhelming sense of dedication to God, of worship of God, consecration by God and communion with God, embracing everyone in the Abbey.’ And beyond. In the United Kingdom in 1953, the Anglican faith was alive and well – and popular. In London in the early 1950s, more than forty per cent of all adults regularly attended church. Today fewer than three per cent do.

  Westminster Abbey, the setting for Elizabeth’s Coronation, was where William the Conqueror was crowned on Christmas Day in 1066. The essential elements of the ceremony were much as they had been for a thousand years. For the Queen, the most significant part of the service was the Act of Anointing, the moment that brought her, in the Archbishop’s phrase, ‘into the presence of the living God’. It was a moment, both intimate and sacred, that, at her own request, was neither filmed nor televised. As she sat on the Coronation Chair, under a canopy held by four Knights of the Garter, the Archbishop made a sign of the cross on both of her hands, on her breast, and on her head. ‘Be thy head anointed with holy oil,’ he said, ‘as kings, priests and prophets were anointed. And as Solomon was anointed King by Zadok the priest and Nathan the prophet, so be thou anointed, blessed and consecrated Q
ueen over the Peoples, whom the Lord thy God hath given thee to rule and govern.’

  For Philip, the most significant part of the service came a little later. This was, in every sense, the Queen’s day – and, in truth, hers alone. He was there as her attendant lord. Dressed in the uniform of an Admiral of the Fleet,80 he accompanied her to and from the Abbey in the great Gold State Coach. He shared in the waving, not the crowning. This was her Coronation, not theirs. In the Abbey, she processed alone. She took the Coronation oath alone. She alone was anointed with holy oil. She alone was crowned. When the Coronation was done – when St Edward’s Crown had been placed upon her head – the nobility paid homage to their Queen. The first to do so was the Lord Archbishop of Canterbury. Next was the Duke of Edinburgh. He stepped forward and knelt before her. He placed his hands between hers and said, ‘I, Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, do become your liege man of life and limb, and of earthly worship; and faith and truth will I bear unto you, to live and die, against all manner of folks. So help me God.’

  He said it and he meant it. When, once, I asked Prince Philip what his life had been about, he narrowed his eyes and flinched away from the question. I decided to persist. ‘Supporting the Queen,’ I suggested, ‘isn’t that what it’s all been about?’ He looked away – which was unusual for him: normally, he looked directly at you – and said, very slowly and almost inaudibly, ‘Absolutely. Absolutely.’ He may have been disappointed that his naval career was cut short. He may have been angered that he could not give his own name to his own children. He may have been infuriated by the way he was patronised by some of those he met at court. But never – not once – in more than sixty years – did he flinch in the performance of what he saw as his one, essential duty: to support the Queen.