Philip: The Final Portrait

by Gyles Brandreth

  There is no question: the Queen and Prince Philip enjoyed an outstanding partnership that certainly worked to the nation’s benefit and appeared to work to their own. But were they truly happy – whatever happiness means?

  I once asked the eminent Irish psychiatrist Dr Anthony Clare, Professor of Clinical Psychiatry at Trinity College, Dublin, to define happiness for me. He laughed, but, obligingly, had a go. ‘I would say happiness is a cognitive state, an intellectual perception or understanding of you, the person, and your relationship with your environment. It does have pleasurable components, but that’s not the essence of happiness. The essence of happiness is a conscious appreciation of the rightness of being. And it’s a state. It’s not a permanent trait. People aren’t “happy” – they have experiences of happiness. Most people’s customary state is one of balance between conflicting needs and desires and emotions, and happiness comes into play as one of those experiences which people from time to time describe and clearly aim for.’

  I then asked Professor Clare to go further, to forget his caveats, throw caution to the wind, and give me a prescription for happiness – tell me what it takes, in his experience, to be ‘happy’ in the way most of us understand the word. He laughed again, but, again, sitting in his consulting room at St Patrick’s Hospital in Dublin, he did his best to oblige. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘Here goes. Number one: cultivate a passion. How important it seems to me in my model of happiness is having something that you enjoy doing. Next, be a leaf on a tree. You have to be both an individual – you have to have a sense that you are unique and you matter – and at the same time you need to be connected to a bigger organism, a family, a community. Some very interesting stuff has been done over the years on the issue of networks. The people who are best protected against certain physical diseases – cancer and heart disease, for example – in addition to doing all the other things they should do, seem to be much more likely to be part of a community, socially involved. If you ask them to enumerate the people that they feel close to and would connect and communicate with, those who name most seem to be happiest and those with least unhappiest. Of course, there may be a circular argument here. If you are a rather complicated person, people may avoid you. If, on the other hand, you are a centre of good feeling people will come to you. I see the tragedy here in this room where some people may sit in that chair and say they don’t think they’ve got very many friends and they’re quite isolated and unhappy, and the truth is they are so introspective they’ve become difficult to make friends with. So that’s my third rule: avoid introspection. Next, don’t resist change. Change is important. People who are fearful of change are rarely happy. I don’t mean massive change, but enough to keep your life stimulated. And finally, live in the moment. Live now.’

  On the basis of Professor Clare’s ‘happiness index’, I reckon we can regard the Queen and Prince Philip as happy individuals. The Queen is much more resistant to change than her husband was, but a score of four out of five isn’t bad. Even in their eighties and nineties both of them lived in the moment, neither was introspective, each could be described as ‘a leaf on a tree’, both were undoubtedly community-orientated and socially involved. Each had a consuming passion: the Duke had his carriage driving, the Queen has her horses and her dogs.

  But were they happy together? Off and on, and particularly when they were young and middle-aged, they seemed to spend quite a lot of time apart. Even when they were in their sixties and seventies, the Queen was frequently on her own, walking the dogs, riding her horses, playing Patience, completing a jigsaw, sorting her photograph albums, watching television, phoning friends. Was she neglected? Did she mind? Or did she simply take it in her stride because she understood the nature of her man?

  Robin Dalton, his cousin David Milford Haven’s girlfriend, said to me, ‘Philip’s a cold fish.’ Reginald Bennett, once an MP, a member of the Thursday Club, and a sailing companion of the Duke’s, said, ‘Philip is the coolest man I know.’ But talk with Lord Buxton or Lord Brabourne and the impression you got was a quite different one. They had stories to tell of Philip holding his wife’s hand, gently stroking her hair, coming into the room at the end of the day and saying simply, ‘Lovely to see you’ and watching her face light up with happiness. ‘Philip is not sentimental,’ Lord Brabourne said to me, ‘but he is sensitive, profoundly so. When our son was killed [by the IRA bomb that killed Lord Mountbatten] the first letter that arrived was from Philip. It was wonderful. You can talk to him about matters of the heart.’

  Countess Mountbatten said to me, ‘The Queen and Prince Philip have a mutual understanding that’s profound. And they get on. They are good together – anyone who knows them well will tell you that.’

  Archbishop Carey told me, ‘I had the great joy of presiding over the Queen and Prince Philip’s fiftieth wedding anniversary service in Westminster Abbey. And you know it was so moving for me to lay hands on both of them – that was at their request. They wanted me to lay hands on them and to pray for them.’

  But what about Philip’s testiness, his grumbling and his grouches? Lord Charteris said to me, ‘Prince Philip is the only man in the world who treats the Queen simply as another human being. He’s the only man who can. Strange as it may seem, I believe she values that. And, of course, it’s not unknown for the Queen to tell Prince Philip to shut up. Because she’s Queen, that’s not something she can easily say to anybody else.’

  Lord Charteris also pointed me in the direction of this line from The Unquiet Grave by Cyril Connolly: ‘The true index of a man’s character is the health of his wife.’ This was more than twenty years ago and, by implication, the Queen’s longest-serving secretary was inviting me to compare and contrast Her Majesty’s robust and lifelong good health with the frailty of the then Princess of Wales.

  Countess Mountbatten said to me, ‘They’re good together. They’re good for one another. They always have been. Make no mistake.’ ‘Oh, yes,’ said Gina Kennard, who knew them, individually and as a couple, for something like seventy-five years, ‘They own each other. Nothing could come between them. What they have for one another is the greatest respect – which counts for so much – and deep love. Deep love that goes back a long, long way.’

  ‘After all,’ as Lord Mountbatten reminded Prince Charles, ‘Mummy never seriously thought of anyone else after the Dartmouth encounter when she was 13!’ Mountbatten’s son-in-law, John Brabourne, said to me, ‘Philip learnt singularity of purpose from Mountbatten. The course that’s set is the course that’s followed. Philip is not a man to be deflected. When he gave Elizabeth his love and his loyalty, he gave them to her for life. He has not deviated from that.’

  On 3 December 1947 the Duke of Edinburgh, aged twenty-six and just married, wrote to his mother-in-law and outlined for her the course he had set himself: ‘Lilibet is the only “thing” in the world which is absolutely real to me and my ambition is to weld the two of us into a new combined existence that will not only be able to withstand the shocks directed at us but will also have a positive existence for good.’

  I think that Lilibet would tell you that he achieved his ambition. Their marriage was not a fairy tale: it was ‘absolutely real’ to them both. Welded together, they withstood all the shocks and, between them, theirs was indeed ‘a positive existence for good’. The Duke of Edinburgh gave the Queen a lifetime of unwavering support – and it was support that was personal, specific, intelligent, consistent, and thought through. And what did Lilibet give Philip? Beyond the obvious (her beauty, her integrity, her sense of fun, her transparent worth), she gave him security, a settled place in an uncertain world, and a love that he knew that he could depend upon – always.

  Whenever I challenged Prince Philip about the traumatic nature of his childhood, he brushed away the subject. But he knew the truth. When once I asked him how he thought he was perceived, he said, ‘Refugee husband.’ When he was a boy, if you asked for his address, he answered, ‘No fixed abode.’ From the chaos of his
childhood, he sought – and found – order in his life as the Queen’s consort. In 1991 he began working on a personal project that he called ‘The Edinburgh Tables’. Essentially, it was an updated version of a family tree that his uncle, Earl Mountbatten of Burma, had begun to compile before the war, based on both research and the recollections of Prince Philip’s grandmother, Victoria, Marchioness of Milford Haven. The Duke of Edinburgh brought it right up to date, tracing every one of the many descendants of the grandfathers of both the Queen and of himself – namely the descendants of George V and the 14th Earl of Strathmore and George I of Greece and Prince Louis of Battenberg (later Marquess of Milford Haven). The project was very important to him. As a boy Philip had been a prince without a country, a son without a home. As Lilibet’s husband, Philip was a refugee who found a refuge – a nationality, a wife, and a home. In ‘The Edinburgh Tables’ everything is well ordered and HRH The Duke of Edinburgh KG KT is there alongside HM Queen Elizabeth II, each in their proper place.

  Philip and Elizabeth were two very different human beings. Their childhoods were so different. Each was royal, they had shared values, a joint heritage and a common purpose, but as characters, as personalities, they were not at all alike. They had different attributes and different interests. Philip was more adventurous, more assertive, and more intellectual than his wife. She was more placid, more cautious, more conventional, less changeable in mood. They were different people. Yet they understood each other – and they got on so well. Once I travelled in the car behind theirs and watched them chatting. For half an hour I saw them telling each other stories, listening to each other, laughing repeatedly. These two were good companions: the chattering never stopped. And they were allies. I saw that, one November night, in the interval at the Royal Variety Performance, as they looked at each other across a crowded room, and smiled. I caught then a glimpse of the conspiracy – the shared secret – that sustained them in their marriage over more than seventy years. You will recall that it was seeing them in that brief moment, apart yet together, that made me want to write this book.

  Life is complicated. Marriage is not easy. But, somehow, these two distinct, unusual, profoundly impressive people made it work. They gave each other respect and freedom. They accepted each other – completely. He was active, she was passive, but both were strong. As I heard a Jungian say once, ‘The passive are not necessarily weak or put-upon. Passivity is a kind of control: control by what one doesn’t do.’ The Queen has always been in command of her own ship – and she knows about the movement of the tides. Her father explained that to her many moons ago.

  In 1930, when Philip was nine and Elizabeth was four, Philip’s middle sister, Cécile – the one who died in an aeroplane crash in 1937 – was engaged to be married. From her sanatorium, near Lake Tegel, in the north of Berlin, Philip’s mother, Princess Alice, sent her daughter a letter of congratulation and advice. ‘For you know, dear child,’ she wrote, ‘each woman manages & directs her married life herself, just as she would control herself in a profession if she had one & so you see when a girl marries a decent boy, she makes her own happiness with her own judgement and self-control. No marriage entered into, in that spirit, with the most dissimilar characters even, ought to be a failure. A little patience in the first years & one has an enduring happy love & friendship for life & which unlike ordinary friendships will be just as fresh when you are old.’

  When they were old, when the tide was in, I sensed that Philip and Elizabeth – as man and wife, as consort and queen, as the best of friends – were closer than they had ever been.

  ELIZABETH ALONE

  Chapter Fourteen

  ‘Thou know’st ’tis common. All that lives must die,

  Passing through nature to eternity.’

  William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Hamlet

  The Duke of Edinburgh formally ‘retired’ in the summer of 2017, a couple of months after his ninety-sixth birthday. He completed what was reckoned to be his 22,219th official engagement on Wednesday 2 August 2017, stepping out onto the forecourt at Buckingham Palace in his role as Captain General of the Royal Marines, an appointment he had taken on sixty-four years earlier in succession to his father-in-law, the late King George VI.

  In the Palace forecourt, Prince Philip, wearing a bowler hat and fawn raincoat (yes, it rained on his final parade), inspected men from the Royal Marines who had taken part in the 1664 Global Challenge, each running 16.64 miles a day over a period of one hundred days, among other tests of endurance.

  Typically, he told them, ‘You should all be locked up’ and asked if the rain was trickling down their backs. Joshing and banter done, the inspection duly completed, the Regimental Sergeant Major called for ‘three cheers for the Captain General’, to which the Duke responded by raising his bowler. As the Plymouth Band played ‘For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow’, His Royal Highness offered a small wave, turned on his heels and walked back into the palace. And that was that: a simple, unassuming end to a lifetime of public service.

  In December 2017, the Queen confirmed that her grandson, Prince Harry, would succeed her husband as Captain General of the Royal Marines. ‘It was high time to hand it on,’ said Prince Philip. ‘Enough’s enough.’

  Prince Philip retired because the Queen encouraged him to do so. She wanted to stop him ‘pushing himself all the time’. She had become anxious about him. A senior courtier told me he had found the Queen in the corridor at Buckingham Palace one day looking for her husband. ‘Where’s he got to?’ she asked. ‘Where is he? I can’t find him.’ In 2017, the Queen decided to let the Prince of Wales take her place laying a wreath at the Cenotaph on Remembrance Sunday – not to spare herself, but to spare her husband. The royal couple sat together watching the ceremony from a balcony in the Foreign Office.

  Prince Philip told me that he was ready to retire, glad to be getting some time to himself at last, but he didn’t plan to ‘disappear completely’. He said he preferred to bow out of solo public engagements ‘while I’m still standing, just about’. He had had the occasional health scare – including heart surgery and stenting to deal with a blocked artery when he was ninety – but for a man of his age he was remarkably fit—and steady on his feet. He kept himself active and did daily stretching exercises. He maintained his sensible diet. (According to his tailor, John Kent, who made his suits for half a century, ‘He was a 31in waist when I first measured him and that only ever went up to 34in. There wasn’t an ounce of fat on him.’) For as long as possible the Duke was determined not to be seen using a walking stick. He hoped his retirement would reduce speculation about his health and would ‘spare people having to see me falling to pieces in front of them.’

  Inevitably, as he moved through his mid-nineties, he was beginning to look his age: his eyes were increasingly red-rimmed, his nose grew beakier, he became more stooped, he shrank a bit. ‘I’ll soon be dead,’ he kept saying. Increasingly, of course, there were reminders of mortality all around him.

  Sir Brian McGrath, the wine merchant turned courtier who became his private secretary in 1982 and went on to become one of his closest friends, died in June 2016, aged 90. McGrath had officially retired in 1992, but he continued to serve the Duke thereafter in a variety of capacities, from attending memorial services on his behalf to overseeing his personal finances. He retained an office at Buckingham Palace until the end and, famously, was the only courtier allowed to bring his dog (a black Labrador) with him to work. McGrath’s father, it turned out, had been a friend of Prince Andrew of Greece, and one of Sir Brian’s principal duties was to deal with Prince Philip’s assorted German relations. Philip was generous to his nephews, nieces and cousins, often helping fund their education, and when required McGrath would be drafted in to assist younger members of the family when they got into scrapes. ‘I’m just a nanny really,’ he used to say. Until their deaths, one of his particular responsibilities was to look after Prince Philip’s sister, Princess Sophie, and her husband, Prince George of Hanover,
when they came to visit. This could be quite challenging, according to McGrath, because as Prince George grew older he tended to leave his bath overflowing or forget items from his personal luggage when he moved from Windsor Castle to Buckingham Palace.

  Gregarious, bluff but beady-eyed, McGrath was Prince Philip’s no-nonsense man-of-all-business and good companion for thirty-four years. In March 2017, the Duke lost another key ally with the death of his archivist and librarian, Dame Anne Griffiths, aged 84. She first joined the Duke of Edinburgh’s office in 1952, when she was only nineteen, originally employed as a ‘temp’ to help out with the additional workload in the run-up to the Coronation. She was one of the two lady clerks who accompanied Philip on board Britannia on the controversial 1956/57 trip to the South Atlantic and the Melbourne Olympic Games. As a consequence of this trip, she and her colleague, Ione Eadie, became the first British women to cross the Antarctic Circle. Ione went on to marry the commander of the Royal Yacht and, inevitably, some said that Anne and the Duke became quite sweet on each other during that four months at sea. Anne left royal service in 1960 to get married herself, but returned in 1983 and remained part of the Prince’s team for ever after. On the day of the announcement of her DCVO in 2005, Prince Philip was heard walking along the corridor at Buckingham Palace towards her office cheerily singing, ‘There’s nothing like a dame …’