Philip: The Final Portrait

by Gyles Brandreth

  The Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh helped their children adjust to this changing world quite effectively by sending them away to boarding school. Philip was as royal as they come, but he was nothing like an English aristocrat. He was an outsider; a European; in many ways, an iconoclast. Philip chose Gordonstoun – Kurt Hahn’s Gordonstoun – for his sons – not Eton or Harrow. Anne went to Benenden, a girls’ school in Kent, because Gordonstoun was not yet coeducational. (Both Anne’s children, Peter and Zara, born in 1977 and 1981, went to Gordonstoun and then to Exeter University.) As a child, educated at home, Princess Elizabeth did not mix and mingle – let alone live and play – with the middle classes. At Benenden, Princess Anne did. At Gordonstoun and Benenden the royal children met middle-class children, with middle-class values, and shared the middle-class experience.

  Mark Phillips was from solidly middle-class stock, thoroughly respectable, if a little unexciting. When I met him I liked him. He seemed on the shy side and sparing with the small talk – but what do I know about dressage? In royal circles he was reckoned dull and a bit dim, and Prince Charles is credited with giving him the nickname ‘Fog’. Four months after their marriage, however, Anne’s new husband came into his own. One night in March 1974, as they were being driven along the Mall on their way back to Buckingham Palace after a charity film show, an armed man yanked open their car door and attempted to abduct the Princess. Shots were fired. The assailant pulled Anne frantically by one arm while she held tight to Mark with the other. Eventually, police arrived in sufficient numbers to subdue the attacker, who turned out to have a history of mental illness. The world was rightly impressed by the Princess’s cool under fire. ‘Her bravery and superb obstinacy were unbelievable,’ Prince Charles recorded in his diary when he heard about the incident. ‘My admiration for such a sister knows no bounds!’ Anne was unhurt, but her personal protection officer was shot and wounded during the assault, and later awarded the George Cross for his bravery. Mark Phillips was appointed a Commander of the Royal Victorian Order and Anne was given the Grand Cross.109

  Mark Phillips was a handsome husband, an outstanding horseman and a good father. He sired two fine bipeds and moved on. The marriage failed, as marriages do, and, since the passing of the Divorce Reform Act in 1969, nobody needed to take the blame. The couple separated in 1989, the marriage was dissolved in April 1992, and, on 12 December the same year, the Princess Royal married Commander Timothy Laurence, RN, at a private ceremony at Crathie Church, near Balmoral Castle in Scotland.

  Tim Laurence, the naval son of a naval father, is also from solidly middle-class stock, thoroughly respectable, if a little unexciting. When I met him I liked him. He seemed on the shy side and sparing with the small talk – but what do I know about nautical manoeuvres? He is five years younger than Princess Anne. The couple met when he was the assistant navigating officer in the Royal Yacht Britannia. He was an equerry to the Queen from 1986 to 1989 and in consequence became an MVO. Soft-eyed, rosy cheeked, and chinless, he is brighter and more determined than he looks. In July 2004, promoted to Rear Admiral, he was appointed Assistant Chief of the Defence Staff, making him the armed services’ highest-ranking member of the Royal Family since Lord Mountbatten was appointed Chief of the Defence Staff in 1959. He went on to even higher things and ended his naval career as a Vice Admiral in charge of the Defence Estates. The Queen made him a Knight Commander of the Royal Victorian Order in June 2011. I got the impression from Prince Philip that his daughter’s marriage has not been a bed of roses, but what marriage is? There have been ups and downs, and reported rifts and separations, but Tim Laurence keeps himself busy and the Princess Royal keeps herself busy (her commitment to duty is almost obsessive), and the marriage has survived and, with the advent of grandchildren, some say has once again begun to thrive. Anne’s parents were saddened by her divorce, but, as Prince Philip put it to me, ‘What could we do?’ They were hopeful that her second marriage would bring lasting happiness. Prince Philip worried openly and in a caring way about his daughter.

  Now and then Philip sent Anne letters, offering his daughter support, encouragement, and good advice. The Duke of Edinburgh was an assiduous correspondent. He typed his letters himself. He wrote with head and heart, and always to a purpose. It was his most effective means of personal communication. In conversation he could be hectoring and difficult to read. On paper he seemed calmer, more considered, more considerate. He used letters to show he cared. He used them, too, to think out loud, to explore, to question, to offer ideas and advice, and to say those things that, within a family, are sometimes more comfortably written down than spoken out loud.

  At the beginning of 1981, when his eldest son was thirty-two and flirting with the idea of marrying Lady Diana Spencer, then nineteen, Philip wrote to Charles, as perhaps a father should write to a son, encouraging him to make up his mind. The girl was young and vulnerable, and the press speculation about a possible match was at fever pitch. The child was in the spotlight and Charles was dithering. He was, he admitted to himself, in ‘a confused and anxious state of mind’. Seven years earlier, on Valentine’s Day 1974, his great-uncle, Dickie Mountbatten, had written to Charles with his own brand of matrimonial advice: ‘I believe, in a case like yours, the man should sow his wild oats and have as many affairs as he can before settling down but for a wife he should choose a suitable, attractive and sweet-charactered girl before she met anyone she might fall for. After all Mummy never seriously thought of anyone else after the Dartmouth encounter when she was 13! I think it is disturbing for women to have experiences if they have to remain on a pedestal after marriage.’

  By 1981 Mountbatten, whom Charles regarded as ‘infinitely special’, the one man in his life who combined the roles of ‘grandfather, great uncle, father, brother and friend’, was no longer around to offer advice. From the Duke of Edinburgh I got the distinct impression that he regarded the ‘infinitely special’ relationship between his uncle and his son as somewhat self-indulgent on both their parts. The Duke was his own man, unsentimental and dispassionate. He was a cool and shrewd judge of character. He would never speak of anyone as Prince Charles speaks of Lord Mountbatten or Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother. The Duke admired his uncle greatly, but he had the measure of him. And it irritated him that some people seemed to think that he was virtually brought up by Mountbatten. He complained once, ‘I don’t think anybody thinks I had a father. Most people think that Dickie’s my father …’ He told me that his grandmother, Victoria Milford Haven, probably had a greater influence on him than either of his uncles, Dickie or Georgie.

  Dickie Mountbatten was murdered by the IRA in August 1979, leaving Charles bereft, overwhelmed by ‘a kind of wretched numbness’, convinced that ‘something’ should be done about the IRA, but admitting to his diary that he felt himself to be ‘supremely useless and powerless’. In January 1981, ‘confused and anxious’, he told his diary he was ‘terrified’ of making a promise ‘and then perhaps living to regret it’.

  Throughout his twenties Charles appeared to have been following his great-uncle’s advice. He had fallen in love (‘whatever that means’) a number of times. In the summer of 1971, at Smith’s Lawn, the Guards’ polo ground at Windsor, he had met Camilla Shand, a year older than him, already the girlfriend of Andrew Parker Bowles, but a game girl, with a reputation as something of a goer and proud to be the great-granddaughter of Alice Keppel, celebrated mistress to Charles’s great-great-grandfather, Edward VII. Charles and Camilla had an affair – Uncle Dickie allowed them to use Broadlands for illicit weekends – but, in March 1973, Camilla announced her engagement to Major Parker Bowles. Charles heard the news while serving in HMS Fox somewhere in the Caribbean. He wrote to Uncle Dickie, mourning the end of an idyllic relationship, bleating that now he had ‘no one’ to return to in England, but, concluding, stoically, that ‘the feeling of emptiness would eventually pass’. It did and it didn’t. Other girls came and went – Mountbatten’s granddaughter, Amanda Knatchbull,
among them – but the yearning for Camilla never wholly disappeared and, in the aftermath of Uncle Dickie’s murder, Charles turned to Mrs Parker Bowles for consolation. She was ready to give it, and her husband, an older man and not inexperienced in the ways of women, was ready to look the other way.

  Uncle Dickie had indulged Charles at Broadlands, but, before he died, he had also cautioned his great-nephew against selfishness and self-indulgence. In April 1979, five years after sending Charles his Valentine’s Day advice, Lord Mountbatten wrote to his great-nephew again, holding out before him this time, not the prospect of wild oats, but the fearful ghost of the black sheep of the family, Charles’s other great-uncle, the Duke of Windsor. Uncle Dickie confessed to his great-nephew that his behaviour was the cause of sleepless nights: ‘I thought you were beginning on the downward slope which wrecked your Uncle David’s life and led to his disgraceful Abdication and his futile life ever after.’

  Deep down, Mountbatten knew that Charles would not continue on what he called ‘your Uncle David’s sad course’. Charles knew it, too. In his diary entry of 29 January 1981 he recognised the absurdity of his own confusion: ‘It all seems so ridiculous because I do very much want to do the right thing for this Country and for my family.’

  That is all the Duke of Edinburgh wanted, too. What Mountbatten would have termed ‘a suitable, attractive and sweet-charactered girl’ was now on the scene. She was innocent and eligible, ready and willing. It was time for Charles to put up or shut up. He should either propose to Diana, counselled his father, so ‘pleasing his family and the country’, or release her. He really should not let her go on dangling in the wind like this.

  Mountbatten’s daughter, Patricia, Charles’s godmother, said to me when I went to see her, ‘I take it you’ve seen the letter? It wasn’t a bullying letter at all. It was very reasonable. It was fair. It was sensible.’ That is not how it seemed to Charles at the time. He said that his father’s letter made him feel ‘ill-used and impotent’. Faced with what he regarded as a parental ‘ultimatum’, Charles felt emasculated, cornered, compelled almost, to do what he did next. He telephoned Diana and suggested they meet. On Friday, 6 February, at Windsor Castle, the Prince of Wales, aged thirty-two, asked Lady Diana Spencer, aged nineteen, to marry him. Apparently, she giggled nervously, and said, ‘Yes, yes, of course, yes.’

  Charles and Diana were married at St Paul’s Cathedral on 29 July 1981. Fifteen years later they were divorced. The decree nisi was granted on 15 July 1996, the decree absolute on 28 August – the feast day of St Augustine of Hippo, the fourth-century divine, famous for his maxim ‘Audi partem alteram’: ‘Hear the other side.’

  There are certainly two sides to the sorry story of the marriage of Charles and Diana, and, having friends who were good friends of each of them, I have heard both sides, in extenso. Charles, according to Diana’s camp, was selfish, self-indulgent, thoughtless, unsympathetic, uncaring, and cruel. He made no effort to share her interests and took no trouble to like her friends. He was older than her and more experienced: he had a duty of care which he neglected, almost from the start. Faced with her frailty – her post-natal depression, her mood swings – he was unable to cope. Faced with her cries for help – her bulimia, her attempts at self-injury – he turned away and sought solace in the arms of the one woman he had loved all along, Camilla Parker Bowles. He was weak yet wilful, pathetic yet petulant. He behaved like a spoilt child. He lacked emotional intelligence and generosity of spirit. Above all, he was jealous of his young wife’s popularity with the public.

  Diana, according to Charles’s friends, was a sad case, almost from the start. She was in love with the position, not the Prince. She never came close to understanding her man – or trying to.110 She was self-regarding, self-absorbed, self-obsessed. She resented her husband’s range of interests: she demanded a cull of some of his closest friends. She came from a difficult background – a dysfunctional family with a history of marital and mental instability – and it showed. Diana was difficult, deceitful, and manipulative. She made up stories, she told lies, she had affairs. She really was beyond the pale.

  Interestingly, both camps – so pitilessly vituperative in their attacks on the integrity and character of their villain of choice – offer a guarded truce in the matter of the Wales’s children. When it comes to William (born 21 June 1982) and Harry (born 15 September 1984), it seems to be agreed by both sides that both parents, in their different but equally loving ways, meant well and did their best. And it is clear now, though it was not at the time, that, throughout the whole unhappy saga, Charles’s parents meant well and did their best, too. They did not take sides and, at first at least, they tried not to interfere.

  The tradition of the Prince of Wales having a difficult relationship with his parents is as old as Prince Hal. Edward VII, as Prince of Wales, fell foul of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. Victoria blamed her son for her husband’s premature demise. Edward VIII, as Prince of Wales, disappointed George V and Queen Mary. Her son’s Abdication in 1937 blighted the rest of Queen Mary’s life. The Queen and Prince Philip had their reservations about their eldest son – about his self-indulgence and tendency to self-pity, in particular – but they recognised and admired his many gifts and achievements, and they loved him dearly and wished him well. They were delighted with his engagement to Diana and full of hope for the success of the marriage. When it began to go wrong and others said, ‘I told you so’ – Charles’s friend Nicholas Soames, Philip’s friend Penny Romsey, the Queen Mother’s friend Lady Fermoy (Diana’s maternal grandmother), among them – Elizabeth and Philip said nothing. They kept their own counsel. They looked on, silent and dismayed. Unlike almost everybody else involved in the drama, Philip and Elizabeth could see both sides of the story, and had some sympathy with both sides, too. They cared about Charles and they cared about Diana. They cared about their grandchildren, especially. And they cared about the Crown and the country, also.

  Initially, as the marriage began to disintegrate, the Queen did not intervene, because, in fairness, what could she do? Unlike Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, the Queen does not avoid unpleasantness by putting her head in the sand, but nor is she an interfering busybody. She is naturally reticent. Time heals so much and ‘Least said soonest mended’ is a policy that often pays dividends. She believes in prayer and patience and hoping for the best. Philip believed in steering clear of trouble – ‘I try to keep out of these things as much as possible,’ was his line – unless he thought he had something useful to contribute. By the summer of 1992, however, both Philip and Elizabeth reckoned ‘something must be done’.

  In June the Sunday Times began to serialise Andrew Morton’s book Diana: Her True Story. Essentially, the book laid bare the devastation at the heart of her marriage. It portrayed Diana as a wronged woman, locked in a loveless union, psychologically battered by an unfeeling husband who refused to hear or respond to her cries of anguish. It was a gripping read – and everybody read it, or at least got the gist of it from the never-ending reports of what it both said and implied. Morton’s sources were acknowledged to be Diana’s friends. At Buckingham Palace they suspected Diana herself. They were right, of course. Diana had not met Morton, but, through an intermediary – James Colthurst, an Old Etonian doctor with an excellent bedside manner and sympathetic ear – she poured her heart out to him, recording tapes in which she told her story her way and answering any supplementary questions that Morton (via Colthurst) fed back to her. Challenged by the Queen’s private secretary, her own brother-in-law, Robert Fellowes111 (who had married her level-headed elder sister, Jane, in 1978), Diana flatly denied any involvement in Morton’s book. When Prince Philip told her directly that many feared that she had in some way cooperated with the book’s author, she told her father-in-law, equally directly, that she had not. She lied.

  That same June, during the week of Royal Ascot, the Queen and Prince Philip sat down with Charles and Diana at Windsor, to listen to their woes and tal
k about the way ahead. According to Diana, the meeting was frank and, under the circumstances, almost friendly. Charles said very little, but Diana laid her cards on the table. Her husband’s behaviour was unreasonable, unjust, and unfair. She believed the time had come for a trial separation. The Queen and Prince Philip (again, according to Diana) listened sympathetically, but firmly resisted any suggestion of a formal separation. They counselled the unhappy couple to search for a compromise, to think less of themselves and more of others, to try to work together to make their marriage work, for their own sakes, for the sake of the boys, for the sake of Crown and country. The Queen and the Duke were totally as one. The Prince and the Princess were hopelessly at odds. The Queen hoped that the meeting had done something to clear the air and proposed a second meeting on the following day. Diana apparently agreed, but failed to turn up. The Queen, the Duke, and Prince Charles remained at Windsor. Diana returned to Kensington Palace.

  As his son’s marriage teetered on the brink of total collapse, Philip initiated a correspondence with his daughter-in-law that he hoped might prove helpful. This correspondence has been the subject of much misunderstanding. A garbled version later appeared in the tabloid press, suggesting that Philip had written to Diana to scold and upbraid her. He was accused of calling her ‘a trollop’ and ‘a harlot’. He was not amused. Nothing could have been further from the truth.

  Not long after Diana’s death I said to the Duke of Edinburgh, ‘The public view of you, for what it’s worth, is of a grouchy old man, unsympathetic to his daughter-in-law, but I happen to know – not from you, but I know it – that when things were difficult you wrote to Diana – kind letters, concerned, fatherly, loving, caring letters from Pa, explaining how you knew, first hand, the difficulties involved in marrying into the Royal Family.’ He smiled at me. ‘The impression the public have got is unfair,’ I said. He shrugged. ‘I’ve just got to live with it,’ he said. ‘It happens to a lot of people.’