Philip: The Final Portrait

by Gyles Brandreth

  Eventually Penny Romsey’s marriage foundered – but no one suggested that the Duke of Edinburgh was to blame. In September 2005 Penny’s father-in-law, John Brabourne died, aged eighty, and her husband succeeded to the family title as 8th Baron Brabourne. In August 2010 Penny Brabourne gathered together the staff at Broadlands to tell them her husband had flown the nest – and moved to the Bahamas to start a new life with a new companion. Lady Brabourne promised to stay put and manage the family estate. She was not going to leave Broadlands; apart from anything else, her daughter was buried in the grounds. Her husband, it seems, had one of those crises that afflict some men as they turn sixty, not long after a parent dies. In due course he came back from the Bahamas, without his mistress. Then he and his mistress appeared together in London, apparently reconciled. ‘It was all rather confusing,’ said his mother, ‘and sad.’ Penny Brabourne, however, showed her mettle and stuck to her last. In 2011, in the absence of her husband, she took over the four-hundred-year-old office of High Steward of Romsey. In 2014 Norton Brabourne returned to live in a converted barn on the family estate. In June 2017, when Patricia Mountbatten died, he succeeded as the new Earl Mountbatten of Burma and attended his mother’s funeral with his stoical wife, now the new Countess Mountbatten at his side.

  The Queen and Prince Philip were saddened by the failure of Norton and Penny’s marriage. Philip was Norton’s godfather, as well as Penny’s carriage-driving companion. But as the Duke of Edinburgh put it to me once, ‘All families have their ups and downs. That’s life.’

  The Queen is not much interested in gossip, nor swayed by it. She remained on good terms with her brother-in-law, Tony Snowdon, despite the collapse of his marriage to Princess Margaret and lurid reports of the vagaries of his private life – including the suicide of one of his mistresses and the birth of at least one illegitimate child. ‘The Queen and Prince Philip have always been marvellous,’ Lord Snowdon told me, ‘understanding in every way and not in the least judgemental.’ To prove his point, he showed me notes and Christmas cards sent to him from them and always signed ‘with love’. When he died in 2017, almost forty years after his divorce from Princess Margaret, both the Queen and Prince Philip attended his memorial service at St. Margaret’s, Westminster.

  And the Queen maintains her friendship with the Abercorns, too, regardless of the stories about Philip and Sacha. In 1999 James Abercorn became a Knight of the Garter. In June 2011, as Prince Philip turned ninety, the Duke of Abercorn accompanied the Duke of Edinburgh and the Queen in their carriage to Royal Ascot. In October 2012 the Queen appointed James Abercorn Chancellor of the Order of the Garter.100 (Sacha Abercorn’s younger sister, Natalia Ayesha, known as Tally, was married to Gerald, 6th Duke of Westminster, who, as we have seen, became a Knight of the Garter in 2003, notwithstanding the stories about him.)

  In 2004, when the earlier version of this book was serialised, my account of the friendship between the Duke of Edinburgh and the Duchess of Abercorn became front-page news. Sacha later wrote to me from Baronscourt: ‘In their usual manner, the media proceeded to quote things out of context, misconstrue meanings and traffic in innuendo.’ On the day of the serialisation, she telephoned me from Northern Ireland to say, ‘It’s fine.’ The call was a kindness on her part because I felt uncomfortable that what I had written had prompted headlines around the world. I said I hoped that it was not going to cause her terrible problems vis-à-vis the Queen and Prince Philip. ‘No,’ she said. ‘We have had a call from Balmoral. They are due to come over here next week. They’re still coming.’

  The Queen’s press secretary at the time, Penny Russell-Smith, wrote to me from Buckingham Palace: ‘The tabloids have predictably focussed on the Duchess of Abercorn’s comments on her friendship with Prince Philip. These days, few columnists seem to believe in platonic friendship!’

  Now that Prince Philip is dead, it is possible that some secret scandal will be revealed, but I doubt it. I believe in the story told by the Countess of Westmoreland’s daughter of the girl who ‘swore that when in her teens she used to lie in the same bed with Prince Philip, a bolster between them. They would talk for hours. She was much in love with him. He would not transgress the bolster.’ I believe the testimony of the Duchess of Abercorn.

  That said, the question remains: what lay at the root of these passionate platonic friendships of Prince Philip’s, these unconsummated amitiés amoureuses? Countess Mountbatten – Philip’s first cousin and Penny Brabourne’s mother-in-law – would say it was the old ‘Mountbatten energy’, that Philip was like his Uncle Dickie: a dynamo who needed the occasional confidential companionship of a sparky, larky girl who was flattering, intelligent, and fun. A respected Freudian analyst (like his Uncle George’s wife, Princess Marie Bonaparte, or my friend Brett Kahr) would say that he was recreating what he had – and loved and lost – in early childhood: the company of adoring girls, devoted playmates like his four elder sisters or the Foufounis girls. A wise young woman, born in 1981, would say that these friendships are what kept him young. Jessica Hay used to go out with Nicholas Knatchbull, the Romseys’ only son, and, when she was still a teenager, she stayed at Broadlands for a weekend shoot. ‘The Queen’s a fantastic shot,’ she recalled. ‘She shot more partridge than anyone else that day. At one point my trousers got caught as I climbed over a stile and I got stuck. Everyone had gone but Philip. He came back and helped me. Then he said, “What am I going to get in return?” He’s got a twinkle in his eye. He knows he won’t get the younger women, but I think the flirting keeps him young.’ At dinner Jessica sat next to Philip. ‘I wouldn’t call the royals affectionate,’ she said, ‘but they are very thoughtful towards one another. At dinner Prince Philip would always check that the Queen was all right, although you still got the sense that she is the one in control of their relationship.’

  The Duke of Edinburgh spent a lifetime being talked about and being misunderstood. He knew it. ‘I’ve just go to live with it,’ he said to me, ‘It happens to a lot of people.’ It happened to Charles Dodgson – the Victorian writer Lewis Carroll, creator of Alice in Wonderland. Dodgson had many girlfriends: children and young women who were his playmates, his special friends. In 1893 his sister, Mary, wrote to him about the gossip that was attached to these relationships. On 21 September that year he replied to her, ‘You need not be shocked at my being spoken against. Anybody who is spoken about at all, is sure to be spoken against by somebody: and any action, however innocent in itself, is liable, and not at all unlikely, to be blamed by somebody. If you limit your actions in life to things that nobody can possibly find fault with, you will not do much!’ (I am surprised he did not run to a double exclamation mark.) Lewis Carroll told his sister that as a result of his experience he was convinced ‘that the opinion of “people” in general is absolutely worthless as a test of right and wrong’. He said that, for him, there were only two tests when ‘having some particular girl-friend as a guest’: did he have her family’s ‘full approval for what I do’? And did he ‘feel it to be entirely innocent and right in the sight of God’? Lewis Carroll told his sister his conscience was clear. The Duke of Edinburgh’s conscience was clear, also.

  And how about the Queen? How did she feel about all this in the dark watches of the night? She could not say, fully, freely, as Robert Browning said in his poem ‘By the Fireside’: ‘We stood there with never a third.’ But Robert Browning was a sentimentalist, which the Queen is not. She knew her husband. She loved, admired him, and accepted him as he was. She is also Sovereign of the Order of the Garter. Honi soit qui mal y pense.

  Chapter Twelve

  ‘Children begin by loving their parents. After a time, they judge them. Rarely, if ever, do they forgive them.’

  Oscar Wilde (1856–1900), A Woman of No Importance

  Dr Johnson was characteristically clear-cut in his advice to those about to embark on matrimony. ‘Now that you are going to marry,’ he said, ‘do not expect more from life than life can afford.’ H
is definition of the family was to the point, as well: ‘A family is a little kingdom, torn into factions and exposed to revolutions.’

  Princess Elizabeth, in fact, was brought up within a family unit that was small, close-knit, loving, and giving – ‘us four’ as George VI put it. Elizabeth was an adorable child: she was adored by both her grandfathers, and adored them in return. George V died, aged seventy, in 1936, when Elizabeth was ten; ‘Grandfather Strathmore’, the 14th Earl, died eight years later, in 1944, aged eighty-nine. ‘Grandma Strathmore’ died suddenly, in the summer of 1938, aged sixty-five. Her daughter, Queen Elizabeth, wrote to the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain:

  ‘I have been dreading this moment ever since I was a little girl and now that it has come, one can hardly believe it. She was a true “Rock of Defence” for us, her children, & Thank God, her influence and wonderful example will remain with us all our lives.

  ‘She had a good perspective of life – everything was given its true importance. She had a young spirit, great courage and unending sympathy whenever and wherever it was needed, & such a heavenly sense of humour. We all used to laugh together and have such fun.’

  George VI died in February 1952, aged only fifty-six, followed to the family mausoleum within fourteen months by his mother, Queen Mary, aged eighty-five, formidable and forbidding in appearance, frail and in pain at the end, heartbroken by her second son’s early death. In the year of her Coronation, the new young Queen, at the age of twenty-six, was left with just two of her immediate family: her mother, then aged only fifty-two, and her sister, aged twenty-two. Happily, both lived on for almost half a century more.

  Elizabeth II had a good relationship with her mother – ‘loving and normal’ is how Margaret Rhodes described it to me. Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother was blessed with many of the virtues she recognised in her own mother: a good perspective of life, a young spirit, a heavenly sense of humour. Elizabeth II loved her mother, respected her, liked her. Yes, the Queen did occasionally shake her head when contemplating her mother’s insouciant extravagance. At the time of her death, Queen Elizabeth’s overdraft at Coutts was reported to be in the region of £4 million. She was supposed to have said at a dinner party once, ‘Golly, I could do with £100,000, couldn’t you? Had such an awful afternoon today with my bank manager scolding me about my overdraft.’ Yes, the Queen might, now and again, express an envy of her mother’s extraordinary capacity for avoiding all unpleasantness, but, fundamentally, mother and daughter were good friends, on the same wavelength, with mutual interests (especially horses), comfortable in each other’s company, each looking forward to their regular, easy, uncomplicated chats on the telephone. Prince Philip said to me once, eyebrows raised in amazement, ‘They’re always on the phone!’

  The Queen recognised her mother’s special star quality and had no desire to compete with her. Queen Elizabeth recognised her daughter as an exemplary sovereign and was always careful to show due deference. On the occasions when she momentarily forgot herself – stepping through a doorway ahead of the Queen, for example – she was always quick to apologise. Margaret Rhodes’s description of the Queen coming by to have a drink with Queen Elizabeth on a Sunday morning after church would be the envy of many a mother and daughter. ‘There was mutual respect and deep affection,’ said Mrs Rhodes, ‘but, most of all, they just got on really, really well.’

  Mrs Rhodes’s description of the Queen’s relationship with Princess Margaret is less dewy-eyed. ‘The Queen was sometimes infuriated by Margaret, inevitably,’ she told me. ‘She found her behaviour exasperating at times, of course she did. But Margaret was her sister and she loved her.’

  From all the people I have spoken with who are close to the Queen – courtiers, friends, and family members – I get the impression of someone who, though conservative by upbringing and conventional in her own life, is not judgemental when it comes to others. She looks for the best in people and hopes for the best from them and for them. When things go wrong, she prays (on her knees, with her hands folded together) that they will go better. She is sure of the values, principles, and beliefs that have guided her life, but she is neither prescriptive nor dogmatic with regard to the lives of others. She may be Queen, but she does not lay down the law. She is reluctant to interfere in the private lives of members of her family, although she has done, now and again, in the case of her children, as we shall see. She was sorry to be depicted, as she felt she was, in a series of articles published in the Daily Telegraph before her Golden Jubilee,101 as someone who is emotionally inhibited, buttoned-up, psychologically repressed, awkward when it comes to being loving and giving. She may not express her emotions in the manner of the Prince William and Prince Harry generation, but that does not means she is unfeeling.

  The Queen was profoundly fond of her younger sister, for all Princess Margaret’s waywardness. The Queen really loves Margaret’s two children, David and Sarah, and sometimes seems more at ease in their company than she does in the company of one or two of her own offspring. In the 1950s, when Margaret Rose wanted to marry her father’s equerry, Peter Townsend, the Queen was not unsympathetic. It was just a very difficult situation. When, in 1960, Princess Margaret married the photographer Tony Armstrong-Jones, the Queen hoped they would live happily ever after. That they didn’t was, from the Queen’s point of view, a matter for sadness, not recrimination. Again, it was not easy. Divorce is commonplace nowadays (almost routine in the case of the Queen’s children), but a generation ago, things were different. The Duke of Windsor had married a divorcee in 1937, but it was not until thirty years later that someone in line to the throne (albeit eighteenth in line) was divorced themselves. In 1967 George, 7th Earl of Harewood, aged forty-four, became the first of George V’s direct descendants to be divorced. His wife sued him on the grounds of his adultery with an Australian violinist, which he acknowledged. He wanted to marry his mistress (also a divorcee, and the mother of his son – oh yes: what a mess!) and to do so, under the terms of the Royal Marriages Act, required the sovereign’s consent. The Queen sighed a sad sigh and, having taken advice from the Privy Council, granted it. Lord Harewood sighed a different sort of sigh and slipped discreetly out of the country (to the United States) to marry for the second time.102

  The Queen loved her sister. And she liked Tony Snowdon. And Lord Snowdon – talented and engaging and an almost pathological ‘charmer’ – went out of his way to be solicitous to both the Queen and his mother-in-law, Queen Elizabeth. When the Snowdon marriage began to deteriorate, as early as the mid-1960s, the Queen was dismayed, and concerned, especially for the Snowdon children, but there was little or nothing she could do, except hope and pray – which, we can be sure, she did. The Snowdons had relationships beyond their marriage and rows within it. By 1976 the position was untenable and separation unavoidable. The Queen was saddened by what had happened, but when her press secretary declared, ‘There has been no pressure from the Queen on either Princess Margaret or Lord Snowdon to take any particular course’, he was speaking nothing but the truth. The Queen would have liked her sister to have had a happier, more fulfilled, less complicated life. In the 1970s and early 1980s she read in the newspapers – you couldn’t not – about her sister’s relationship with young Roddy Llewellyn – a sandy-haired charmer (a gentleman gardener and garden designer) eighteen years Princess Margaret’s junior – and, no doubt, felt that the publicity was not very good for the Royal Family and that the romance would, all too probably, end in tears.

  It did, after seven years. Roddy moved on and married someone else, very happily; Margaret lived on, but ended her life without a partner – though not without friends. I did not know her, but I know and knew both Roddy Llewellyn and Tony Snowdon, both of them delightful: gifted, engaging, playful, funny. (Kenneth Williams heard Roddy tell a story over dinner at my house and recorded in his diary that he had never heard a story better told.) Princess Margaret did not treat her body as a temple: she smoked and drank and paid the price. She wa
s spoilt; she could be self-indulgent; the stories of her rudeness and bad behaviour are too many not to have had some truth to them. However, from all I have heard of her, from her husband, from her lover, from her friend Angela Huth, among others, it is clear that, at her best, she was great fun: witty, giving, thoughtful, musical, and gay. She was loyal to the Queen, proud of her country, and did her duty, as and when required. Several said to me that she never quite recovered from the death of her father in 1952.

  From the 1940s onwards Lilibet was concerned for Margaret, but her attitude was sympathetic. She was sometimes despairing, but never ‘holier than thou’. Sarah Bradford, in her biography, quotes the Queen as referring to ‘my sister’s guttersnipe life’. Those who know the Queen well tell me this does not sound like the Queen they know. It simply is not her kind of turn of phrase.

  While the drama of the disintegrating Snowdon marriage unfolded, the Duke of Edinburgh stayed out of the way – figuratively speaking, and, often, literally, too. ‘I don’t go looking for trouble,’ is how he put it to me. In terms of education, upbringing, experience, attitude, temperament, and physique, Prince Philip and Lord Snowdon could not be more different, but each seems to have made it his business to be on relatively good terms with the other. (Up until his death, Lord Snowdon had a small, framed, solo portrait of the Duke standing on his desk.) Doubtless, like the Queen, Philip had reservations about the somewhat rackety nature of the extramarital adventures of his in-laws (and the attendant publicity), but was there anything very helpful he could do in the matter? Not really. Besides, he had his own sisters and mother to think about.

  Throughout their lives Prince Philip maintained a fond and active interest in his sisters and their families. Cécile, the third of his four sisters, her husband, and their three children, all died in or after the tragic air crash of 1937. Sophie, known as ‘Tiny’, the youngest of the four, lived on into the twenty-first century, dying at the age of eighty-seven, in November 2001. She was widowed in 1943, and left with the title of Princess but no very princely income, and the challenge of bringing up five small children on her own. In 1946, aged thirty-two, ‘pretty little widow Tiny’ (as Queen Mary called her) married Prince George Wilhelm of Hanover,103 aged thirty-three, headmaster of Salem School (reckoned a sound appointment by Kurt Hahn), and went on to have three more children. Theodora, known as ‘Dolla’, Philip’s second sister, had married Berthold, Margrave of Baden,104 in 1931, and had three children. Berthold died, aged fifty-seven, in 1963. Dolla died six years later, in 1969, aged sixty-three. (Philip was on an official tour of Canada and the United States at the time and, as duty comes first, decided he could not return for her funeral. Prince Charles, recently invested as Prince of Wales, was dispatched to Salem to represent him.) Dolla’s health had been poor for several years. Even before her husband’s death, when she was still in her fifties, Alice described Dolla (in letters to Philip) looking ‘old & haggard’, with a bad heart, ‘arteries narrowing’, walking with a stick. Philip’s eldest sister, Margarita, born in 1905, married Prince Gottfried of Hohenlohe-Langenburg, known as ‘Friedel’ Hohenlohe, another German princeling and descendant of Queen Victoria, in 1931. They had four sons and two daughters and a handsome home at Langenburg, one of seven Hohenlohe castles that now feature on the ‘Castle Trail’ promoted by the Rhine Valley Tourist Board. Friedel died in 1960, aged sixty-three, and not long after, Margarita suffered a further loss, when, in January 1963, an extensive fire at Langenburg destroyed much of the castle and all of her personal possessions. She died in 1981, aged seventy-six.