Philip: The Final Portrait

by Gyles Brandreth

  Margrethe, the Queen of Denmark – who is another direct descendant of Queen Victoria – said to me, ‘I think people in your country undervalue Prince Philip because he makes what is a very difficult job look so easy. He does it so well people don’t realise what a complicated and difficult job it is. It has not been easy for my husband being Prince Consort and it has not been easy for Prince Philip. Philip does have one advantage. He comes from a royal family. He has always understood what monarchy is about.’ Margrethe’s husband was a Frenchman, an aristocrat, and former diplomat. Philip was the grandson and nephew of kings. All his life he had had royalty all around him. He never questioned his place at the Queen’s side, one step behind her. He never complained about that. From start to finish, he took it ‘as read’. At her Coronation the Queen stood at the altar, laid her hand on the Holy Bible, and swore, ‘The things which I have here before promised, I will perform and keep. So help me God.’ And Philip knelt before his sovereign, and with his hands in hers, vowed to become her ‘liege man of life and limb, and of earthly worship … So help me God.’ Today, in a largely Godless country where the hereditary principle – for more than a thousand years, central to our governance – survives only in the case of the Royal Family, the ritual of the Coronation will seem to many archaic and absurd, the words used an almost meaningless mumbo-jumbo from a bygone age. In June 1953 Elizabeth and Philip understood what they were saying and meant every word. Uncle David would not have done, which is why Elizabeth did not want him there. She kissed the Bible and signed the Coronation oath. Philip promised her ‘faith and truth’. For neither of them was any of this a hollow ritual.

  When Philip had completed his homage, he stood up, touched the Queen’s crown, and kissed her left cheek. Next to pay homage were the Dukes of Gloucester and Kent, followed by England’s premier baron, Mowbray, Segrave and Stourton, whose titles dated back to 1283 (when Edward I was King) and whose appearance provided some unexpected light relief. The Archbishop recalled: ‘He came down from his homage all over the place, bunching up his robe and, as the Queen said, with moth balls and pieces of ermine all over the place.’ When the homage was over, the trumpets sounded and the congregation – 7,500 strong – called out, ‘God Save Queen Elizabeth, Long Live Queen Elizabeth, May the Queen Live for ever.’

  As the choir sang a valedictory Te Deum, the Queen stepped down from her throne. In St Edward’s Chapel she changed her velvet robes once more – the ceremony had involved a lot of dressing and undressing – and swapped the historic St Edward’s Crown for the slightly lighter, but undeniably fancier, Imperial State Crown, studded with many of the most precious stones on earth – including the Black Prince’s ruby, Elizabeth I’s pearl earrings, and Charles II’s sapphire. Bearing the crown jewels, carrying the sceptre in her right hand and the orb in her left, while the congregation sang the national anthem, Elizabeth II processed through the Abbey to the West Door, where the Gold State Coach again awaited her. She clambered aboard, accompanied by Philip, and, drawn by eight grey horses, the coach – a proper fairy-tale affair, over-the-top, baroque, and bedazzling, with door panels painted by Cipriani in the 1760s – took them, slowly and steadily, on a circuitous seven-mile route back to Buckingham Palace. They were cheered, long and loud, by hundreds of thousands of the Queen’s subjects, many of whom had camped out for several nights, in the cold and wet, to secure a good view of the passing parade. They were escorted by twenty-seven further carriages, twenty-nine military bands, and thirteen thousand troops. The Chairman of the Coronation Commission reckoned it ‘not a bad show’.

  Back at the Palace, in the Green Drawing Room, Cecil Beaton was waiting to take the official photographs. ‘In came the Queen,’ he recorded in his diary, ‘cool, smiling, sovereign of the situation.’ (She looked so perfect thanks, in part, to Oscar Wilde’s daughter-in-law. Thelma Holland, married to Wilde’s younger son, Vyvyan, was, for several years, the young Queen’s beautician. She was responsible for the Queen’s make-up on Coronation Day.) Beaton is a useful witness because he has a photographer’s eye and an artist’s sensibility. ‘The Queen looked extremely minute under her robes and Crown, her nose and hands chilled and her eyes tired. “Yes,” in reply to my question, “the Crown does get rather heavy.” She had been wearing it now for nearly three hours.’ Beaton’s description of Philip rings especially true: ‘The Duke of Edinburgh stood by making wry jokes, his lips pursed in a smile that put the fear of God into me. I believe he doesn’t like or approve of me. This is a pity because, although I’m not one for “Navy-type” jokes, and obviously have nothing in common with him, I admire him enormously, and think he is absolutely first-rate at this job of making things comparatively lively and putting people at their ease. Perhaps he was disappointed that his friend, Baron, was not doing this job today; whatever the reason he was definitely adopting a rather ragging attitude towards the proceedings.’

  Beaton was homosexual, and camp in manner, and his favourite royal sitter on Coronation Day – on any day, come to that – was Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, always the queens’ favourite Queen. He found her in ‘rollicking spirits’ and so immediately warm and helpful towards him that, at once, all his ‘anxieties and fears’ were dispelled: ‘The Queen Mother, by being so basically human and understanding, gives out to us a feeling of reassurance. The great mother figure and nannie to us all, through the warmth of her sympathy bathes us and wraps us in a counterpane by the fireside. Suddenly I had this wonderful accomplice – someone who would help me through everything. All at once, and because of her, I was enjoying my work. Prince Charles and Princess Anne were buzzing about in the wildest excitement and would not keep still for a moment. The Queen Mother anchored them in her arms, put her head down to kiss Prince Charles’s hair, and made a terrific picture.’

  Prince Charles would endorse every word of Beaton’s description of his grandmother. In the Abbey, Charles, not yet five years old, in white silk shirt and shorts, had watched the Coronation from the Royal Box, perched between his aunt and his grandmother. His other grandmother, Princess Alice, was near by, ‘a contrast to the grandeur’, Beaton noted, ‘in the ash-grey draperies of a nun’.

  For Alice, it was a wonderful experience, moving and exciting. She ordered a special, brand-new nun’s habit for the occasion. (She was an interesting mix: she craved the simple life, but travelled widely; mostly she lived modestly, but sometimes she was immoderately extravagant; she advocated self-discipline, but she smoked like a chimney.) For the Queen Widow (as Beaton called the Queen Mother) it was a more poignant occasion. At the Palace she was ‘dimpled and chuckling, with eyes as bright as any of her jewels’: at the Abbey, in her expression ‘we read sadness combined with pride’. Martin Charteris told me that he believed that the Queen Mother was jealous of her daughter. ‘Queen Elizabeth was not yet fifty-two when the King died,’ he reminded me. ‘She was accustomed to being centre-stage, the focus of attention, universally loved. She was still loved, of course, and admired, but she was no longer the star of the show and I don’t think she found that easy. In the early days of the new Queen’s reign, there was an awkwardness about precedence, with the Queen not wanting to go in front of her mother and Queen Elizabeth, of course, accustomed to going first.’

  I want to quote one last time from Beaton’s diary, for two reasons: to illustrate Elizabeth’s sense of humour (which is rarely seen in public) and to suggest something about the Queen Mother’s attitude to her son-in-law. Beaton had not expected to be asked to take the Coronation pictures. Because Baron, ‘a most unexpected friend of Prince Philip’s’, had been taking all the recent royal photographs, Beaton assumed that Baron would get this special assignment, too. He didn’t, and when, in early May 1953, Beaton learnt that the job was going to be his, after all, the news came ‘as an enormous relief’:

  ‘The same night that this message was relayed to me, at a ball at the American Embassy, I saw the Queen for a brief moment and thanked her. “No, I’m very glad you’re
going to take them,” she said, “but, by the time we get through to the photographs, we’ll have circles down to here” (she pointed halfway down her cheeks), “then the Crown comes down to here” (to the eye), “then the court train comes bundling up here, and I’m out to here” (sticks stomach out). “There are layers upon layers: skirt and mantle and trains.” She spoke like a young high-spirited girl.

  ‘I also had a short opportunity to thank the Queen Mother for what I am sure must have been her help in bringing about this “coup” for me. She laughed knowingly with one finger high in the air.’

  I can picture her. She could be very naughty. And worse, perhaps. Famously, Sir John Wheeler-Bennett, the official biographer of George VI, remarked of her that there was ‘a small drop of arsenic in the centre of that marshmallow’. Philip was the Chairman of the Coronation Commission. He might have preferred to have the official Coronation photographs taken by his friend Baron, but, if so, he was thwarted. Beaton secured the assignment, not only because he was an exceptional photographer who wooed Queen Elizabeth with flattery and flowers,81 but also because Baron was Philip’s man and Philip was someone Queen Elizabeth did not entirely trust. When first he had appeared on the scene, she had had her misgivings about him – encouraged by her brother David and his set – but, according to several of Philip’s friends, her doubts and reservations about her son-in-law persisted until the end of her very long life.

  Her published letters betray none of this – unsurprisingly. According to her editor, William Shawcross, she ‘made it a rule never to talk (let alone write) about her new relations, even to her Strathmore family.’ Shawcross commends her ‘wise discretion’ and tells us that she maintained it for the rest of her life. Certainly, her letters to Philip are consistently affectionate – though she suffered the dilemma faced by many mothers-in-law. She was not quite sure what to call herself. In the 1940s she was signing her letters to Philip ‘Ever your devoted Mama Elizabeth’ and ‘Much love, Mummy or Mama’ and ‘Ever your loving Mum, Elizabeth’. In the 1950s she tried ‘Your loving Mama, Elizabeth’, ‘Your loving m-in-l, E’, and ‘Your loving Mama in law, Elizabeth’. Eventually she settled for ‘Your affec Elizabeth M’ or, most often, a simple ‘Much love, Mama E’.

  When Philip and Elizabeth were married, Queen Elizabeth told her son-in-law, ‘We are so fond of you, and so so glad that you and darling Lilibet are so happy.’ Margaret Rhodes told me that was the essence of it: ‘Queen Elizabeth was happy that her daughter was happy. That’s all she asked. That’s what every mother wants, isn’t it?’ And Prince Philip was a conscientious son-in-law. When George VI died, Philip sent the Queen Mother a ‘comforting & wonderful’ letter full of ‘understanding and sweetness’. When Princess Margaret was married, Prince Philip walked his sister-in-law down the aisle and his mother-in-law thanked him ‘with all my heart’, not only for providing ‘the arm of a strong and loving person’, but also for ‘being so sweet to her during the last years. It must have helped her a lot, for I think she felt terribly lost when her father died.’ Philip was a committed family man, on the whole better at expressing his feelings in action or by letter than in conversation. He wrote thoughtful letters to his mother-in-law; he gave her presents (including two landscapes he had painted himself); he lent her books that he thought would be of interest to her. He always behaved towards her with dutiful affection and punctilious courtesy.

  At around the time of Queen Elizabeth’s one hundredth birthday, I happened to interview Prince Philip (seventy-nine himself at the time) for ITN Radio and tried to nudge him into saying something about his mother-in-law. Apart from insisting that he had no desire to live so long himself, he would not be drawn. I have had no reports of his having ever made any disparaging remarks about her, but several people have told me how, within their hearing, Queen Elizabeth made slighting comments about Philip and referred to him – not entirely humorously – as ‘the Hun’. One of Philip’s close female friends told me that the coolness between Prince Philip and Prince Charles was, in part, a by-product of the unspoken tension between Philip and his mother-in-law. Charles adored his grandmother and Queen Elizabeth was extravagantly, effusively, fond of Charles. There was an intimacy and mutual sympathy between them that Philip did not share. ‘She laughed knowingly with one finger in the air.’ Yes, there was a small drop of arsenic in the centre of that marshmallow.

  On Coronation Day, Cecil Beaton described Princess Margaret at Buckingham Palace, sailing towards him, ‘her purple train being held aloft by four pages’, ‘with pink and white make-up and a sex twinkle of understanding in her regard’. Perhaps Beaton knew her secret. Margaret was twenty-two and in love with a married man sixteen years her senior.

  Group Captain Peter Townsend was born in 1914, at the outset of the First World War, and, in 1940, in the Battle of Britain, became one of the heroes of the Second World War. He was a fighter pilot who led the B Flight of Hurricanes in the celebrated No. 43 Squadron. He was mentioned in dispatches. He won the DFC and Bar. But the war took its toll: he had a nervous breakdown. ‘I knew in my bones that I should never again be the pilot I once had been,’ he confessed in his memoirs. ‘I had gone too far down the hill ever to get to the top again … The more I flew, and there could be no relenting, the more fear, stark, degrading fear, possessed me. Each time I took off, I felt sure it would be the last.’

  By 1944 Townsend was no longer flying, but he was still a hero, and when the King expressed the desire to have an RAF officer as an equerry for the first time, he seemed a first-rate choice. He was handsome, agreeable, distinguished, and came from a solid, if middle-class, background. (His brother, Michael, a naval captain, served with Philip in HMS Chequers.) He was also complex, troubled, and deeply religious. The King took to him at once and Townsend was, in turn, immediately sympathetic: ‘The King did not try, or even need, to put me at my ease … the humanity of the man and his striking simplicity came across warmly, unmistakably … sometimes he hesitated in his speech, and then I felt drawn towards him …’ Townsend was said to be the only member of the Household who could successfully soothe the King when he was overwhelmed by one of his ‘gnashes’. He arrived at Buckingham Palace anticipating a three-month attachment. He remained in the King and Queen’s service for nearly ten years. On the day he came for his initial interview, in February 1944, Lilibet and Margaret, then aged seventeen and thirteen, saw the beautiful, brown-haired, blue-eyed hero, who was just twenty-nine, arrive at the Palace, and, as he came into view, so the story goes, Lilibet whispered to her younger sister, ‘Bad luck. He’s married.’

  Townsend married young and unluckily. Rosemary Townsend was attractive, vivacious, and flirtatious. She was also socially aspirational. She liked to flirt with the King. According to Townsend, when he secured the job as equerry, his wife’s immediate reaction was: ‘We’re made.’ In fact, they were undone. Townsend gave his all to the Royal Family: he was devoted to the King, charmed by the Queen, and, before very long, innocently enamoured of the teenage Princess: ‘One day after a picnic lunch with the guns, I stretched out in the heather to doze. Then, vaguely, I was aware that someone was covering me with a coat. I opened one eye to see Princess Margaret’s lovely face, very close, looking into mine. Then I opened the other eye, and saw behind her, the King leaning on his stick, with a certain look, typical of him: kind, half-amused.’

  In 1947, when the Royal Family took their three-month trip to southern Africa, Townsend was in attendance, of necessity leaving Rosemary behind. Rosemary had an affair with a young Guards officer, and then another, with John de László, son of the painter Philip de László, whose portraits of Prince Philip’s parents used to hang in his study at Buckingham Palace. Townsend’s marriage was breaking down and he was falling in love with the second in line to the throne. He was sixteen years older than Margaret and a married man. He should have known better. He should have resisted temptation. But he didn’t. He was besotted: ‘What ultimately made Princess Margaret so attracti
ve and lovable was that behind the dazzling façade, the apparent self-assurance, you could find, if you looked for it, a rare softness and sincerity. She could make you bend double with laughing; she could also touch you deeply. There were dozens of others; their names were in the papers, which vied with each other, frantically and futilely, in their forecasts of the one whom she would marry. Yet I dare say that there was not one among them more touched by the Princess’s joie de vivre than I, for in my present marital predicament, it gave me what I most lacked – joy. More, it created a sympathy between us and I began to sense that, in her life too, there was something lacking.’

  When the King died, Margaret was twenty-one years old and bereft. ‘He was so kind and brave all his life,’ she said, ‘the very heart and centre of our family and no one could have had a more loving and thoughtful father.’ His death left a void and Townsend filled it. Having served as the King’s equerry, he was now appointed Comptroller of the Queen Mother’s Household. At the end of 1952 he secured a divorce from Rosemary on the grounds of her adultery. He was the innocent party; he was the wronged husband; he was now a free man and he wanted to marry the new Queen’s sister. With a sense of timing that, according to their detractors, serves to illustrate Townsend’s naivety and Margaret’s selfishness, in the spring of 1953, with the Coronation not far off, the young Princess told her sister and her mother that she and Townsend were in love and wished to marry. Townsend later recalled: ‘If they were disconcerted as they had every reason to be, they did not flinch, but faced it with perfect calm and, it must be said, considerable charity.’

  Sir Alan Lascelles, the new Queen’s private secretary, who was set to retire after the Coronation, was less understanding. ‘You must be either mad or bad or both,’ he told Townsend when he heard the news. Martin Charteris, then the Queen’s assistant private secretary, said to me, ‘I don’t think he was mad or bad, but he was naive. Incredibly so. He was a commoner and a divorcee. Rightly or wrongly, divorcees were not presented at court, were not invited to garden parties, were not formally introduced to royalty. I don’t think there was ever a serious prospect of a marriage. If the King had still been alive I don’t believe the matter would have arisen. I don’t think Townsend would have dared.’