In the United Kingdom, as I write, there are two ‘republican movements’ (self-styled) who have taken to the worldwide web to demand DNA testing to establish the true paternity of, not one, but two of the Queen’s children. Not content with suggesting that Porchey fathered Prince Andrew, they also allege that the Queen’s youngest child, Prince Edward, born in 1964, was the product of the union between Her Majesty and the Deputy Master of her Household, Patrick, 7th Baron Plunket.
Patrick Plunket was a delightful individual, good-looking and good-humoured, born in 1923, so only three years older than the Queen, and more like a brother than a lover. His parents were ‘characters’86 and great friends of Elizabeth’s parents, dating back to the days when they were still the Yorks. In 1938, when Patrick was not yet fifteen, they were both killed in a plane crash on their way to a party William Randolph Hearst was giving in their honour in California.
Educated at Eton and Cambridge, Patrick joined the Irish Guards, rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel and became an equerry to George VI in 1948. He had charm and taste (he was a trustee of the Wallace Collection and the National Art Collections Fund), and, as the Queen’s Deputy Master of the Household from 1954 until his early death from cancer in 1975, masterminded the Queen’s official entertaining with style and devotion. Martin Charteris told me, ‘Patrick Plunket’s death was a real loss to the Queen, a personal loss. He was a lifelong courtier, but he wasn’t a stuffed shirt. He was great fun. He had a wonderful flair for entertaining, of course, but he was also very good at human relations. He was very easy with the Queen and she was very relaxed with him. He treated her almost as an equal, certainly as a friend. If you wanted to say something awkward or difficult to Her Majesty, you could do it through Patrick. When he died a bright light went out in her life.’ The Queen mourned the loss of Patrick Plunket: he was a true friend, but he was not the father of Prince Edward. Lord Plunket was a confirmed bachelor: in many ways, that was part of his attraction.
Given her nature and her upbringing, you would expect the Queen to be wholly faithful to her marriage vows. Her role models, after all, were her mother and father and her grandparents, George V and Queen Mary. Yes, there were stories about George V when he was a young Duke of York, but what did they amount to? ‘I say, May,’ the Duke told his fiancée, Mary of Teck, in the spring of 1893, ‘we can’t get married after all. I hear I have a got a wife and three children …’ The alleged ‘wife’ was an American living in Plymouth. ‘Why there, I wonder?’ pondered the Prince. At first he found the rumour ‘really very amusing’, but it rumbled on and gathered momentum. When, eventually, it appeared in print, the year was 1910, the Duke of York was King, and the charge was specific. E.F. Mylius, in an article headed ‘Sanctified Bigamy’, published in a republican paper in Paris and sent to every British MP, alleged that in 1890, in Malta, the future king had married an admiral’s daughter who bore him several children: ‘Our very Christian King and Defender of the Faith has a plurality of wives just like any Mohammedan Sultan.’ His Majesty found this less amusing and decided to nail the lie. The Crown instigated libel proceedings and Mylius was sentenced to twelve months’ imprisonment. George V’s second son, the eventual George VI, as a young Duke of York, was briefly led astray by his elder brother, the Prince of Wales, but, as husbands, George V and George VI were continent and loyal, and, as wives, Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth were, without doubt, above reproach. Lilibet, as a child and adolescent, had a stable and happy home life and the example of parents who were as devoted and loving to their children as they were to each other.
The black sheep of the family, of course, was the Duke of Windsor: his love life as Prince of Wales had been chequered; his married life, living in exile with a double divorcee, was not a bed of roses. Elizabeth II is not judgemental – Prince Philip told me that his wife’s most notable virtue is her tolerance – but she is observant. Her younger sister’s love life may have been more colourful than her own – it was certainly more varied and adventurous – but the Queen will have noticed that Princess Margaret’s romantic relationships, and her marriage to Tony Snowdon, while they brought her undoubted ‘highs’, did not provide her with lasting happiness.
Who were Prince Philip’s role models? What is the pattern – the template – within his immediate family? His royal grandfather, King George I of Greece, had a good marriage, but apparently allowed himself some light romantic relaxation during his annual holiday (without the Queen) in the French spa town of Aix-les-Bains. Philip’s uncle, King Constantine I of Greece (King George’s eldest son), had a less happy marriage, holiday dalliances similar to those his father enjoyed, and, at the climax of the Balkan war in 1912–13, caused consternation at home and a scandal at court by conducting an almost open affair during his wife Sophie’s sixth and final pregnancy. Philip’s father, Constantine’s younger brother, Andrea, was not a philanderer, but he was attractive to women, and, as we have seen, following his separation from Princess Alice in the 1930s, eventually settled with a lady friend in the south of France. As a young man Prince Philip’s maternal grandfather, Louis of Battenberg, was a self-confessed Lothario. His memoirs of his bachelor days included a page marked ‘NOT FOR MY DAUGHTERS’. So lively was his love life, and so notorious, that Queen Victoria, fearing that he might have been contemplating marriage with her youngest daughter, Princess Beatrice, instructed the Admiralty to send him abroad – and keep him there. In due course, of course, he made a good marriage to Queen Victoria’s granddaughter, Princess Victoria, and had four children: Princess Alice, Prince Philip’s mother, Princess Louise, Prince Philip’s aunt, and George and Louis, Prince Philip’s uncles.
Georgie, 2nd Marquess of Milford Haven, and his wife, Nada de Torby, were a charismatic couple. In the 1930s Georgie acted as Philip’s guardian. Philip stayed with Georgie and Nada during the school holidays. They were two people of considerable personal charm, but their marriage was not conventional. Nada had a reputation as a bisexual and Georgie as a collector of pornography. Louis Mountbatten, ‘Dickie’, and his wife, Edwina Ashley, were a charismatic couple, too – and charming also. And glamorous, rich, restless, and achieving as well. In its imperfect way, their marriage was a good one, though, again, not unduly constrained by the letter of their wedding vows.
‘Edwina and I spent all our married lives getting into other people’s beds,’ Mountbatten once confessed to a friend. Philip Ziegler, Mountbatten’s official biographer, while accepting that Edwina was, in every sense, ‘a goer’, doubts that Mountbatten was promiscuous. He conducted two protracted love affairs outside his marriage, but, according to Ziegler, ‘though he liked to imagine himself a sexual athlete, he seems in fact only to have had slight enthusiasm for the sport’. Mountbatten’s daughter, Patricia, told me she concurred with Ziegler’s conclusion that her father ‘loved the company of women, sought their affection and had an almost irresistible urge to use them as confidantes’, but that his real energy – his colossal life force – was channelled into his working life: ‘If asked to choose between seduction by the most desirable of houris and a conversation about service matters with a person of influence, he would unfailingly have chosen the latter. Never would he have sacrificed his career for lust.’87
In May 1945, as the Second World War reached its climax in Europe, Mountbatten was Allied Supreme Commander, South-East Asia. The professional challenges he faced were formidable. On 8 May he confided to his daughter, Patricia, ‘I do feel the need of opening my heart to a woman and not another man when I’m worried.’ Now and again, though not very seriously, he had contemplated a divorce, simply to give Edwina her freedom (he was extraordinarily understanding and tolerant of his wife’s passionate commitment to other men), but, that spring, when Edwina’s current lover suddenly announced his engagement to another woman, it seems the Mountbattens decided to make a concerted effort to clear the air and come to a mutual understanding. On 7 May, Dickie wrote to Edwina: ‘I am so glad that you felt as happy as I did a
bout our new-found relationship. I have always wanted to have you as my principal confidante and friend, but as long as A. was yours – it made it literally impossible for me. I hope you don’t mind about my mentioning about my girl-friends – it was only to show you that they have never meant to me what A. meant to you, and so can never come between us, provided you no longer make difficulties about my seeing them, within reason, as you were apt to do in the old days!!’
Was Prince Philip like his uncle? Or his father? Or his grandfather? ‘Men,’ says my wife, ‘they’re all the same’, but, in truth, they are different, aren’t they? Some men find fidelity impossible; others find it hugely rewarding. Margaret Thatcher told me that President Reagan once told her that his single-minded devotion to his wife, Nancy, had given him ‘strength and freedom’.88 President Clinton’s marriage, by contrast, seems to have enjoyed strength and freedom of a different sort. Some men of distinction, leading public lives, seem to me to take extraordinary risks with their own reputations – and with their marriages. Clinton is a spectacular example: he risked impeachment for lust. John Major is another. When Major’s illicit affair with a fellow MP was revealed, he said he had ‘long feared’ it would be made public and it was ‘the one event in my life of which I am most ashamed’. Lord Jenkins of Hillhead, another high-achieving politician, another happily married man, told me that he had enjoyed a number of affairs while holding office, adding, emphatically, and with the broadest of grins, ‘I’ve done nothing of which I’m ashamed.’
Otherwise-decent men do have affairs and sustain successful marriages. Some years ago, for a national newspaper, I was sent to interview the 11th Duke of Devonshire, born in 1920, so belonging to exactly the same generation as the Duke of Edinburgh. Andrew Cavendish was a quintessential English gentleman: effortlessly courteous, urbane, tolerant, good-humoured, self-deprecating, gently eccentric. For sixty-three years, until his death in 2004, he was married to Debo, the youngest of the celebrated Mitford sisters. ‘She is on the bossy side,’ he told me, ‘but I like that in a girl.’ He acknowledged a weakness for ‘fast women and slow horses’. The degree of his soft spot for the ladies was exposed in 1985 when three blank cheques were stolen from his house in Mayfair. At the trial following the theft, his former butler gave evidence about the Duke’s habit of handing out cheques to ladies who came to call. When the judge asked him if the ladies were young, middle-aged, or elderly, the Duke was forced to admit that they tended to be young, and that he was on holiday with one of them at the time that the robbery occurred. The Duchess was apparently unperturbed by this revelation. The Duke confessed to me that he feared it might cost him the Garter. It didn’t. He was appointed a Knight of the Garter in 1996, aged seventy-six. He told me the honour gave him ‘real joy every hour of every day’: ‘I know I don’t deserve it, but it is our oldest order of chivalry and I take the idea of English chivalry seriously. It’s important.’ He also told me, ‘English girls are the loveliest in the world and an Englishman should marry an Englishwoman, without a doubt. As to a dalliance? Well, the French have their strengths and the Italians are very agreeable, but if you want my advice stick to Englishwomen. They know the rules.’ It seems that John Major (a Knight of the Garter since 2005) had the misfortune to have a dalliance with an Englishwoman who did not know the rules and the 6th Duke of Westminster (a Knight of the Garter since 2003) had his extramarital liaisons with Lithuanian and Russian prostitutes.
As Andrew Devonshire reminded me, the Order of the Garter is the most senior and the oldest British Order of Chivalry, founded by Edward III in 1348. The origin of the emblem of the Order, a blue and gold garter worn just below the Knight’s left knee, is obscure. Tradition says it was inspired by an incident which occurred while the young King, fresh from his triumph against the French at Crécy and celebrating the capture of Calais, danced at court with Joan, Countess of Salisbury. As King and Countess danced, the lady’s garter fell to the floor: the King retrieved the garter and tied it to his own leg. The courtiers watching the scene were apparently amused, but the King admonished them with the words, ‘Honi soit qui mal y pense’ – ‘Shame on him who thinks evil of this.’ The phrase has been the motto of the Order ever since.89 The Duke of Edinburgh had been a Knight of the Garter since 1947. Was he yet another member of the Order whose girlfriends knew the rules? Or should we be ashamed of thinking evil and giving time and attention to the innuendoes about his private life?
Prince Philip was careful never to dignify tittle-tattle with comment of any kind. When the journalist from the Sunday broadsheet suggested to him that he might have a raft of illegitimate children and have enjoyed a liaison with the President of France, he sat impassively, gazing steadfastly into the middle distance, incensed but silent. Privately, he would say, ‘How could I? I’ve had a detective in my company, night and day, since 1947.’ He liked to point out that he was accompanied everywhere he went, that his face was not entirely unknown, and that, over six decades and on three continents, reporters had been trying to dig up some dirt on him that would stick but, thus far, had managed to come up with ‘bugger all’!
Mike Parker told me, ‘Philip has been one hundred per cent faithful to the Queen. No ifs, no buts. Take it from me, I know.’ Lord Charteris said, ‘I am aware what people say, and have said for years, but I know of no evidence of any kind, no evidence at all, and, if there were any, I rather think I would.’ Geoff Williams, Prince Philip’s former pilot, who accompanied his boss to fairly faraway places, put it even more succinctly: ‘I have no information that would make two lines in the Sun.’ And yet the murmuring went on. ‘When I see the tabloids,’ Prince Philip once sighed to Patricia Mountbatten, ‘I think I might as well have done it.’
Well, did he or didn’t he?
Countess Mountbatten was in no doubt. ‘He has been completely faithful to the Queen,’ she said to me, ‘I’m sure of it, completely and utterly sure.’ Just as her father, Lord Mountbatten, would never – in his biographer’s phrase – ‘sacrifice his career for lust’, so her cousin, Prince Philip, would never betray the Queen for a mere roll in the hay. ‘Supporting the Queen has been his life,’ Countess Mountbatten reminded me emphatically. ‘He wouldn’t endanger his reputation or betray her trust. How could she retaliate? He simply would not allow himself to humiliate her in that way. He wouldn’t risk it. He wouldn’t want to. He is bound to the Queen by duty – and by love.’ But when I raised the issue with Margaret Rhodes, the Queen’s cousin and childhood friend, she was less certain. ‘I don’t know,’ she said to me, brow furrowed, staring into her coffee cup, ‘I just don’t know.’ Now that the Duke of Edinburgh is dead, will there be posthumous ‘revelations’? Possibly, but I doubt if anything of substance will be proven.
Buckingham Palace first put the matter of the royal marriage into the public domain in February 1957, with Commander Colville’s question-begging official statement flatly denying ‘any rift between the Queen and the Duke’. As we have seen, what prompted the unfortunate statement was the torrent of speculation unleashed by the Baltimore Sun’s story that London was awash with ‘whispers’ that ‘the Duke of Edinburgh had more than a passing interest in an unnamed woman and was meeting her regularly in the apartment of a court photographer’. The ‘court photographer’, of course, was Baron, Philip’s friend, who would, in fact, have been with the Duke, and Mike Parker and company, in Britannia on the 1956–7 world tour, as ‘official photographer’, had he not gone into hospital for a hip operation at the beginning of September 1956 and died unexpectedly on the operating table, aged only forty-nine.90 Almost all the lurid ‘stories’ about Philip, from the late 1940s through the 1950s, revolve in some way around Baron and his ‘set’.
Baron Henry Stirling Nahum – known to all as ‘Baron’: ‘Lordly by name and lordly by nature,’ said one obituary – was born in 1907. His family were Italian Jews from Tripoli who settled in Manchester and made a success in the Lancashire cotton trade. Baron, and his twin brother, Jack, came t
o London at the turn of the 1930s and cut a dash: Baron as a society photographer, Jack as a barrister. According to Robin Dalton, the film producer, who knew Baron well (‘he was one of my dearest friends; he gave me away at my wedding; was godfather to my daughter; we spoke every day on the telephone until his death’), his success was due to ‘his talent, his unique and lovable personality, and his connections’: ‘In the late 1920s he and Dickie Mountbatten had both been madly in love with a fascinating Frenchwoman, Yola Letellier,91 and had met at her fete in Paris. They remained friends. In time Uncle Dickie introduced Baron to his nephew Philip – I think it was when Baron was taking pictures of the Mountbattens at Broadlands – and then Philip introduced Baron to David [Milford Haven] and me. David and I were living together in a flat in the Kings Road. It cost £8 per week. We paid half each.’
Robin Dalton, in her Incidental Memoir, remembers clearly that Baron ‘was reputed to be at the centre of a very disreputable world indeed’. ‘With me,’ she says, ‘he was a loving and gentle friend,’ but, she admits, ‘one heard lurid tales of orgies.’ Robin and Baron became proper friends when ‘David had gone skiing for two weeks and asked Baron to look after me’. Meeting ‘Baron’s set’ (or ‘Baron’s Court’ as it was sometimes known) opened up what Robin Dalton calls ‘avenues of enjoyment: painters, writers, photographers – skimming the surface, I now realise, of a murkier world underneath of which I remained largely innocent’.
Philip: The Final Portrait Page 36
