Before the war Philip visited his sisters and their husbands in Germany. After the war he was again in regular touch. The fear of anti-German sentiment meant that they were not invited to Philip and Elizabeth’s wedding in 1947 – about which they were unhappy and not wholly understanding – but they were very much on parade at Elizabeth II’s Coronation. Within weeks of the Accession, Margarita reported to Uncle Dickie that the sisters had firmly ‘fixed that in Philip’s mind!!’ Philip saw them when he could and corresponded with them regularly. He paid private visits to them in Germany and regularly invited them to visit Britain, to stay with him and the Queen in Scotland. In 1965, twenty years after the end of the war, the Queen and Prince Philip paid their first official state visit to Germany and the ten-day programme allowed time for a number of unofficial excursions: Philip took Elizabeth to Wolfsgarten, the Hesse-Darmstadt family heartland; to Salem for a weekend with Dolla; to Langenburg to visit Margarita. They kept in touch. They were his family. To the end of his days, he kept in touch with nephews and nieces and a multitude of German cousins. ‘You have a life outside the United Kingdom that nobody really knows about,’ I once said to him. ‘I have a family,’ he said, ‘like anybody else.’
Well, not quite like anybody else. To begin with, Philip’s mother was an unusual lady. She died in 1969, aged eighty-four. More than once, in response to letters of condolence, Philip described her life as one ‘of wars, revolutions, separations and tragedies’. She was a survivor. She had many strengths: she was intelligent, thoughtful, kind-hearted, honest, honourable, determined. She could also be infuriatingly wilful and contrary. She had visionary qualities and a spiritual dimension that was always sincere, if occasionally difficult to pin down. There was evidently much of her in her only son. In the 1930s her mental breakdown and her separation from her husband destroyed her family life, but she recovered and soldiered on. During and after the war she lived in Greece, relatively modestly, travelling, when it became possible, and travelling widely – to Britain, to Germany, to Sweden, around Europe, even to India and the Middle East. Philip saw as much of his mother as their unusual lives allowed. For example, in the summer of 1966, visiting Sophie in Germany, Alice was taken ill, with liver and heart problems, and admitted to a hospital in Munich. Philip paid the hospital bills and, then, eight weeks later, returning to Balmoral from the Commonwealth Games in Jamaica and hearing that his mother was not well enough to travel and anxious to get home, immediately flew from Scotland to Germany, collected his mother, and flew her on to Athens, where he spent the night to settle her in, and then flew immediately back to Scotland. Again, early in 1967, travelling to and from Australia on official business, he visited her in Athens, this time bringing some new carpet with him for her flat.
Later that year the fall-out from the ‘Colonels’ Coup’ of 21 April – which led, effectively, to the end of the Greek monarchy – and Alice’s own failing health forced her to accept her son and daughter-in-law’s invitation to come to live at Buckingham Palace. She had been reluctant to leave the country she regarded as home for the land of her birth, but when she was told the invitation had come from ‘Lilibet personally’, she said, ‘We go this afternoon.’
According to Stephen Barry, another royal servant who disobliged his former employers by publishing a volume of reminiscences,105 the Palace staff found the Duke’s mother, in her grey nun’s habit, ‘strange but likeable’. She was, said Barry, ‘eccentric and deaf, and smoked like a chimney. If we could tell when the Queen was coming by the pattering of the corgis’ feet, we always knew when Princess Andrew was about from the clouds of smoke that followed her. And the coughing. The poor lady coughed incessantly as she lit another cigarette. Not surprisingly, she was often in hospital with bronchitis.’
Alice died at Buckingham Palace, in her sleep, on 5 December 1969, aged eighty-four. Her granddaughter, Princess Anne, who had just turned nineteen, asked to see her and later told Princess Alice’s biographer, Hugo Vickers, ‘I am glad I did that. She looked very peaceful. All the lines in her face had gone and for the first time I could see the resemblance to the de László portrait.’ Philip de László’s handsome portraits of Prince Philip’s parents, painted when Edward VII was King and they were still in their twenties, used to hang in Philip’s study at Buckingham Palace. Philip almost never spoke of his parents in public, but he guarded their memory and, in my experience, brooked no criticism of them, of any kind. He was fiercely loyal. They were his family.
‘We are a family,’ the Duke repeated to me, somewhat exasperated when I was quizzing him about his relationships with his children and their partners. ‘We are a family,’ he said. ‘What do you expect?’ You expect ups and downs, good times and bad – that’s the truth. And we all know it. The Queen and Prince Philip had a family life that was complex and sometimes complicated. That is true of most of us. Need more be said?’ The Queen is weary, as Prince Philip was – ‘thoroughly fed up’ was his phrase – of the media’s apparently insatiable appetite for the meanest morsel of tittle-tattle about their own and their children’s and their grandchildren’s private lives, not only because much of what gets published is simply inaccurate, but also because, as individuals, the Queen and the Duke belonged to a more discreet generation. There are some things you just don’t talk about.
The Emperor Napoleon – whose younger brother Lucien was the forebear of Princess Marie Bonaparte, who married Prince Philip’s father’s elder brother, ‘Big’ Prince George of Greece – used to say that if you truly want to know a person you should think of the world as it was when that person was twenty. When Philip and Elizabeth were twenty the world was not as it is now. Couples had their problems, families had their feuds, but, on the whole, and as a rule, they were not much discussed at home, and never broadcast abroad. You simply did not wash your domestic dirty linen in public. Now we let it all hang out. The Duke of Edinburgh complained to me more than once that ‘the media have turned us into a soap opera’. Well, like it or not, this is the age of the soap opera. Flick through the popular magazines and newspapers of the 1940s – the decade in which Philip and Elizabeth each turned twenty – and you will read about war, history, travel, fashion, home-making, hobbies. Flick through the most popular publications of today and you will read, almost exclusively, about celebrity, sex, and ‘relationships’. We are gripped by ‘relationships’.
Within the Queen and Prince Philip’s immediate family there was only one relationship that presented them with real difficulty: their relationship with their eldest son, Prince Charles. As I mentioned in the introduction, once, when talking with the Duke of Edinburgh about him being somehow at odds with Prince Charles, I began to say that I found it strange because the two of them seemed to me to be remarkably similar – similar in mannerisms, similar in interests. The Duke interrupted me. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘but with one great difference. He’s a Romantic – and I’m a pragmatist. That means we do see things differently.’ He paused and shrugged, and said, with a slightly despairing laugh, ‘And because I don’t see things as a Romantic would, I’m unfeeling.’
Prince Philip was pragmatic and unsentimental, but, in my experience, far from unfeeling. At times in his life, Prince Charles has begged to differ. He still recalls – still talks about – the mortifying day when his father came to Gordonstoun, to see his son, just turned seventeen, play the title role in the school production of Macbeth – and laughed. ‘It was the “Scottish play”,’ remembers Charles. ‘I had to lie on a huge, fur rug and have a nightmare. My parents came and watched, along with other parents. I lay there and thrashed about and all I could hear was my father and “ha, ha, ha.” I went up to him afterwards and said, “Why did you laugh?” and he said, “It sounds like The Goons.”’
You could fill a book with tales from the Prince of Wales of hurtful moments from his childhood – and, to an extent, he already has. In the early 1990s Charles cooperated with the broadcaster Jonathan Dimbleby to produce a television film and biogra
phy that made plain that Charles was profoundly unhappy about his childhood. Then in his forties, going grey and with a pained expression, he let the world know that, as he was growing up, he felt that he was ‘emotionally estranged’ from both his parents, craving ‘the affection and appreciation’ from them that they were either ‘unable or unwilling’ to offer. His stories of small slights that left their scars are many and similar. When, as a little boy, he forgot to call his detective ‘Mr’ and simply used his surname, as he heard his parents do all the time, he was made to apologise. When he left a door open and a footman went to close it, Philip stopped the footman, barking, ‘Leave it alone, man. The boy’s got hands.’ When, one winter on the Sandringham estate, young Charles was throwing snowballs at a police officer, Philip called to the policeman, ‘Don’t just stand there, throw some back!’ When, again at Sandringham, Charles came back from playing in the grounds one afternoon, having lost a dog lead, his mother sent him straight out again, instructing him not to return until he had found what he had lost, reminding him, ‘Dog leads cost money.’ When, this time in London, young Charles was seen sticking his tongue out at the crowd watching him drive down the Mall, his father gave him a spanking.
Talking to Jonathan Dimbleby (and, before him, to those of his friends and family who cared to listen), Charles gave the impression that he regarded his father as a bully and a tyrant and his mother as distant and ungiving. As a little boy at Buckingham Palace he passed his mother’s study one day and asked her to come and play with him. Gently closing the door against him, she said, ‘If only I could.’ When his parents returned from their post-Coronation tour and Charles, aged five, was taken in Britannia to the port of Tobruk to greet them, the little boy attempted to join the line of dignitaries waiting to shake Her Majesty by the hand. ‘No, not you, dear,’ were the mother’s first words to her son after five months of separation.
Charles felt neglected at home and abandoned at school. The Queen, educated at home, and, though Head of State herself, brought up traditionally to accept the father as the natural head of the family, was content to be led by her husband in the matter of her own children’s education. ‘The Queen and I,’ said Philip in 1956, when Charles was seven, rising eight, ‘want Charles to go to school with other boys of his generation and learn to live with other children, and to absorb from childhood the discipline imposed by education with others.’ In September 1957, two months before his ninth birthday, Charles was sent to his first boarding school, Cheam, in Hampshire. The school had changed its location since Philip had been a pupil a quarter of a century earlier, but its spirit remained the same. Charles later reflected that his first weeks at Cheam had been the loneliest of his life. Five years later, in 1962, again following in his father’s footsteps, Charles moved on to Gordonstoun, on the Moray Firth in Scotland. His new school’s spartan regime was not to his taste. ‘It’s absolute hell,’ Charles wrote home. ‘It’s near Balmoral,’ his father told him. ‘There’s always the Factor there. You can go and stay with him.106 And your grandmother goes up there to fish. You can go and see her.’
Charles did indeed seek comfort and companionship from family retainers. He was close to the nannies of his early childhood, Helen Lightbody and Mabel Anderson, and to his governess, Catherine Peebles, known as ‘Mipsy’. She recalled how sensitive and tentative Charles was as a small boy: ‘If you raised your voice to him, he would draw back into his shell, and for a time you would be able to do nothing with him.’ But, as his father knew, his chief comforter was Queen Elizabeth. She was a doting grandmother who always gave her favourite grandson an understanding shoulder to cry on and a warm bosom to embrace.
Queen Elizabeth was explicitly against Charles being sent to Gordonstoun. ‘It is miles & miles away,’ she wrote to her daughter in May 1961, ‘& he might as well be at school abroad … He would be terribly cut off and lonely up in the far North.’ Prince Charles agreed with Grannie. She wanted her grandson to go to Eton. ‘All your friends’ sons are at Eton,’ she told her daughter, ‘& it is so important to be able to grow up with people you will be with later in life. And so nice, & so important when boys are growing up, that you & Philip can see him during school days, & keep him in touch with what is happening.’ She apologised for interfering, ‘but I have been thinking & worrying about it all’.
In due course Prince Charles sent his own sons to Eton. He did not consider Gordonstoun for a moment. Prince Philip sent his sons to Gordonstoun. He did not consider Eton for a moment. Charles resented his father because of this and he adored his grandmother because of the way she championed and cosseted him. In 2002 his distress at her death was pitiful to behold. He was bereft and felt no need to disguise the fact. ‘She was quite simply the most magical grandmother you could possibly have and I was utterly devoted to her,’ he said. ‘For me, she meant everything, and I have dreaded, dreaded this moment.’
Back in 1962, when asked how Prince Charles was getting on at Gordonstoun, Prince Philip replied, ‘Well, at least he hasn’t run away yet.’ In fact, Charles stayed the course and did rather well. He may have regarded it as ‘a prison sentence – like Colditz with kilts’, but he ended up as Guardian, or head boy, as his father had done before him (and Prince Edward would later do) and secured two A levels (Grade B in History, Grade C in French), becoming the first heir to the throne in British history to secure a university place on the strength of academic credentials alone. Later, while recalling the bullying to which he was subjected at Gordonstoun and the rigours of its spartan regime, he would come to acknowledge that the school had developed his ‘will power’ and helped his self-discipline, ‘not in the sense of making you bath in cold water, but in the Latin sense, of giving shape and form to your life’. The philosophy of Kurt Hahn that helped form Prince Philip, helped form Prince Charles, too. The values that inspired the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award Scheme and the Outward Bound Trust are not dissimilar to those that underpin the work of the Prince’s Trust.
Prince Philip acknowledged many of his son’s achievements, but not uncritically. He left it to the Queen to sing the Prince of Wales’s praises and, over the years, Her Majesty has gone out of her way to praise her eldest son in public and to thank him – sincerely, and from the heart – both for the support he has given her and for the range of good works he undertakes, with imagination and dedication, on behalf of the wider community. Privately, she has been more critical. She used to grumble about Charles’s extravagance. The Queen keeps her breakfast cereals fresher longer by storing them in Tupperware containers. The Prince of Wales does not. He has a style and taste and panache – and way with money – that reflect his maternal grandmother rather than his parents. He entertains, and entertains royally. The Queen is reported to have said, ‘The amount of kit and staff he takes about – it’s obscene.’ I think he thinks that’s part of the point of being Prince of Wales. At a party at Highgrove, I thanked him for his superb hospitality and congratulated him on the wonderful way it was all done: the silver, the crystal, the lighting, the flowers – especially the flowers. ‘They came from the garden,’ he said. ‘It’s a joy to behold,’ I murmured. ‘Isn’t it?’ he said, beaming. ‘I’m so glad you like it. I want you to like it. I’m so lucky to have all these lovely things around me. I simply want to share them. I want everyone to love my garden. It is a joy, isn’t it? Such a joy.’ That simply is not the way his parents ever talked.
The Queen, of course, does not talk to the press. The Duke of Edinburgh did. Indeed, I made the point to him once that he started it all, that he was the first senior member of the Royal Family to give any kind of extended interview. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I made a conscious decision to talk to the media – but not about me, only about what I’m doing, what I’m supporting.’ That Prince Charles should voluntarily talk to a broadcaster and journalist about family matters, about his private life, and let the journalist have access to his diaries and private correspondence, seemed to his parents sheer foolishness. The Queen and the Duke
were appalled by the Dimbleby book. They could not see how their son’s indiscretions – or special pleading on his own behalf – could serve his cause, or that of the Royal Family, in any way. They were also hurt by their son’s public complaints about the quality of their parenting. They had meant well, they had done their best, and their recollection of Charles’s childhood was rather different from his own. They recalled fun and games, bath times, story-telling, picnics and bonfires, laughter not tears. Prince Philip remembers taking Charles and Anne, regularly during the summer holidays, cruising in his twelve-metre yacht Bloodhound and believes that these were ‘good times, happy days’.
Philip: The Final Portrait Page 41
