The Queen: Elizabeth II and the Monarchy

Mountbatten took this as a carte blanche. Replying that ‘nothing would suit him better,’ he asked to see the King. Then he moved, striking hard and fast, making good use of his standing with the Labour Government. On 14 November, he saw the Home Secretary, and then the Prime Minister, and secured the agreement of both to the naturalization, and also that Philip would be known, in his new British persona, as ‘HRH Prince Philip’ – an extra bit of varnish to his nation-swapping nephew’s image. Next day he wrote triumphantly to the Prince, sending him a form to fill, instructing him on what to put in it, and promising path-smoothing letters.

The politics remained delicate. Backbench Labour MPs, many of whom took a keen interest both in foreign affairs and immigration policy, were liable to object not just that Philip was linked to an unpleasant dynasty but also that his naturalization, at a time when many aliens were clamouring for it, constituted favourable treatment. Mountbatten anticipated this danger by showering the press with detailed information designed to show that, in everything that mattered, Philip was already British.

In August, the Labour MP and journalist Tom Driberg, who was friendly with Mountbatten, took Philip on an educational trip round Parliament. Afterwards, he offered to help with newspaper articles. Mountbatten had replied with an urgent request that Driberg should not allow ‘any form of pre-publicity to break, which I feel would be fatal’ – while also sending the MP a biographical information pack for use later, which would show that his nephew ‘really is more English than any other nationality.’

Now he asked Driberg to use this material, which recounted that Philip was the son of ‘the late General Prince Andrew of Greece and of Denmark, GCVO,’ that he had spent no more than three months in Greece since the age of one, and that he spoke no Greek. Mountbatten also asked Driberg to persuade his ‘Left Wing friends’ – that is, Labour MPs who might ask awkward questions – that Philip had ‘nothing whatever to do with the political set-up in Greece, or any of our reactionaries.’ Finally, he briefed the Press Association that ‘the Prince’s desire to be British dated back several years before the rumours about the engagement,’ and somewhat disingenuously, had ‘no possible connection with such rumours’.

To his great relief – as, no doubt, to that of Philip and Elizabeth – the press rose to the occasion. Most newspapers printed the Mountbatten memorandum almost verbatim, but without attribution, and as if it were news. The Times even obligingly suggested that, but for the war, Philip might have become a British subject on passing out from Dartmouth in 1939.

Philip turned down the offer of ‘HRH,’ which was anomalous once he stopped being Greek, preferring to stick to his naval rank. There remained the question of his surname. On this, Dickie received his reward. Philip’s Danish-derived dynastic name, Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg, did little to assist the desired transformation. The ex-prince therefore turned to his mother’s and uncle’s family, adopting the appellation ‘Mountbatten’, itself the anglicized version of a foreign name changed during an earlier bout of xenophobia. Lord Mountbatten took the name change back to the King and Home Secretary, and fixed that too,

and on 18th March 1947 the change of nationality of Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten of 16 Chester Street appeared in the London Gazette.

There was a sequel to the saga of Philip’s rushed naturalization. In November 1972 Lord Dilhorne, the former Lord Chancellor, replied to an inquiry from Lord Mountbatten with a remarkable piece of information. It was undeniably the case, he wrote, that under a 1705 Act of Parliament all descendants of the Electress Sophie of Hanover were British subjects. The point had, indeed, been tested in a 1956 case involving Prince Ernst August of Hanover, which concluded with a decision in the House of Lords that the Prince was a British subject by virtue of the same Act. Philip was, of course, a descendant of the Electress, through Queen Victoria. ‘. . . [S]o it appears,’ wrote Dilhorne, ‘that the naturalization of Prince Philip was quite unnecessary and of no effect for you cannot naturalize someone who is already a British subject . . .’ The law was quite clear: the Queen’s consort had had British nationality since the date of his birth.

Chapter 6

IF UNCLE DICKIE and his nephew believed that Buckingham Palace was dragging its feet over procedures which, when complete, would remove the major political objection to a marriage, they were probably right. Buffeted by his daughter, the King made enquiries. A few days before the Japanese surrender, Sir Alan Lascelles even wrote that George VI was ‘interesting himself keenly’ in the question of Philip’s naturalization.

But the King did not press his advisers to speed things along, and his advisers did not press ministers. It took the energetic intervention of Lord Mountbatten to bring the matter to a conclusion. Indeed, a profound ambivalence seems to have characterized the attitude of the entire Court, almost until the engagement was announced.

The Windsors were a harmonious family, and Elizabeth’s views were usually respected. It is interesting, therefore, that on something so important there should have been a difference of opinion. The explanation, common enough in royal romances through the centuries, seems to have been that the qualities that made the suitor lovable to the Heiress, did not have the same effect on those who guarded over the inheritance.

There were good grounds for approving of Prince Philip. In looks, public manner, war record, even in his choice of the Royal Navy, he fitted the part of ‘crown consort’ to perfection. The reasons for objecting to him were more complex. Some were obvious – in particular, the fact that, as Crawfie unerringly put it, he was a ‘prince without a home or kingdom,’ and hence, in seeking the hand of a British princess who had both, was aiming too high.

But there were other factors. In particular, ambivalence towards Philip reflected ambivalence towards his uncle. Though Mountbatten was close to the King, he was also known for his politicking and intrigue, and for his intimacy with the Labour Government. There seems to have been a dislike of conceding yet another round to Uncle Dickie’s apparently ungovernable ambitions, and a fear that in doing so a fifth columnist might be introduced who would give Mountbatten the chance to exert a reforming influence on the style and traditions of Buckingham Palace.

As far as the King and Queen themselves were concerned, there were personal reasons for not being rushed into a precipitate match. Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon had been twenty-two when she accepted the proposal of the Duke of York in 1923. Her daughter was a mere seventeen at the time of Prince Philip’s first formal request to be considered as a suitor. Queen Mary’s belief, as related to Lady Airlie, that Elizabeth’s parents simply considered her too young for marriage, may well be right. So too may Lady Airlie’s own theory that the King was miserable about the prospect of letting her go, that his elder daughter ‘was his constant companion in shooting, walking, riding – in fact in everything,’ and he dreaded losing her.

Both views are also compatible with Wheeler-Bennett’s suggestion that the King regarded Elizabeth as not only too young but too inexperienced, and found it hard to believe that she had fallen in love with the first young man she had ever met.

In addition, there was the Prince himself – and here there was a contradiction that has continued to dog him all his life. Philip had a capacity to attract admiration and to cause irritation in equal measure. At the time, he was a man with enthusiastic supporters, but also with angry detractors. On the one hand, friends extolled his energy, directness, and ability to lead, attributes that brought him success at school and Dartmouth and in the Navy, and helped to win the hearts of many an English débutante and émigré countess. On the other, his forthright manner made some older people suspicious. What worked with naval ratings and princesses – abruptness, a democratic style, intolerance of humbug – grated at Court, and in the grander houses of the aristocracy. A courtier once told Harold Nicolson that both the King and the Queen ‘felt he was rough, ill-tempered, uneducated and would probably not be faithful.’

According to a former adviser to the King: ‘Some of the people who were guests at Balmoral thought him rather unpolished’.

There was also something else, alluded to in the last chapter: Philip’s supposed (and actual) connections with the nation which, at the time of his first overtures, Britain was engaged in fighting. For all his acquired Englishness, there was something in Philip’s character, in his tendency to put backs up, and in his mixture of rootlessness and dubious roots, that stirred in the previous generation of high aristocrats a mixture of snobbery and xenophobia. ‘The kind of people who didn’t like Prince Philip were the kind who didn’t like Mountbatten,’ suggests an ex-courtier. ‘It was all bound up in the single word: “German”.’

In view of the Germanic links of the British Royal Family over the preceding two centuries, this was scarcely a rational prejudice, but it was undoubtedly there. The strongest evidence of its existence is provided by unpublished sections of the diary of Jock (later Sir John) Colville, who had been a private secretary to Neville Chamberlain and then to Winston Churchill, and became Princess Elizabeth’s private secretary in the summer of 1947. During his first stay at Balmoral in the same year, Colville noted with fascination the prevailing atmosphere of bitterness towards the ex-Greek prince. ‘Lords Salisbury, Eldon and Stanley think him no gentleman,’ he recorded; ‘and in a sense they are right. They also profess to see in him a Teutonic strain.’

‘People in the generation which had fought in the First World War were not very much in favour of what they called “the Hun”,’ says a former adviser to George VI.

An aristocrat linked to the Conservative Party used privately to refer to Philip as ‘Charlie Kraut’.

One of the fiercest of Philip’s opponents was the Queen’s brother, David Bowes-Lyon, who did his best to influence his sister against the match.

What exactly did being ‘no gentleman’ mean? There were several, generally unspoken elements. ‘He wasn’t part of the aristocracy’, suggests a former courtier meaning that he did not share British aristocratic assumptions.

This point was linked to the unfortunate matter of his schooling. The problem was not its extent – if high scholastic attainment had been a requirement for joining the Windsor family, few twentiethcentury consorts (let alone the royals they married) would have passed muster – but its location. It was a significant disadvantage that he was not a member of the freemasonry of old Etonians to which virtually everybody in the inner circle who was not actually a Royal Highness, almost by definition, belonged.

Philip’s unusual academy, regarded by the world at large as an interesting variation, contributed to the sense of him as an outsider – even possibly, like his uncle, as a kind of socialist. ‘He had been at Gordonstoun,’ points out a former royal aide. ‘So he had very few friends. Eton engenders friendships. The more severe ethos at Gordonstoun leaves you without friends.’ (Being ‘without friends’ should not, of course, be taken literally: what it meant was friends of an appropriate type. The same source acknowledges that, though Philip did have friends, they tended to be ‘Falstaffian’ ones.

) In addition, Gordonstoun’s ‘progressive’ ethos could give rise to disturbing ideas. Thus, one member of the Royal Family apparently complained that the would-be consort ‘had been to a crank school with theories of complete social equality where the boys were taught to mix with all and sundry.’

There was no single, or over-riding, objection: just the raised eyebrow, the closing of ranks at which royalty and the landed classes were peculiarly adept. If there was a unifying theme, it was a kind of jealous, chauvinistic protectiveness – based on a belief that so precious an asset should not be lightly handed over, least of all to the penniless scion of a disreputable house who, in the nostrils of his critics, had about him the whiff of a fortune-hunter. Contemplating the presence of ‘Philip of Greece’ and his cousin the Marquess of Milford Haven at the Boxing Day party at Windsor Castle in 1943, Sir Alan Lascelles laconically observed: ‘I prefer the latter’.

Whatever the full reason, a courtly and aristocratic distaste for the young suitor, and suspicion about his motives, hindered his full acceptance into courtly and aristocratic circles for years to come.

ONE PERSON had no doubts: Princess Elizabeth herself. ‘She was a stunning girl’, a close friend fondly remembers, ‘longing to be a young wife without too many problems.’

In this ambition she was supported by most public opinion, apart from a sliver of the Labour Party on the pro-Communist left, which continued to associate Philip not with the Hun, but with the Greek right. In general, however, press and public took what they saw: a handsome, eligible naval officer, who happened to be a prince. So far from objecting, most early commentators found his combination of royal status, a British naval commission, and lack of celebrity, entirely appropriate for the back-seat but decorative role that would be required. Yet for the time being, Philip remained a shadowy figure.

Elizabeth, by contrast, was ever more visible in the popular magazines – with interest enhanced by speculation about the developing but unannounced romance. The American press, always ahead of the British, anticipated an engagement early in 1947 by turning her into a cover girl, a newsreel star, and – highest compliment – the ultimately desirable girl-next-door. In January 1947, the International Artists’ Committee in New York voted her one of the most glamorous women in the world. In March, Time declared her ‘the Woman of the Week’, and praised her for her ‘Pin-Up Charm’. Devoting four pages to her life story, it revealed her as a princess the magazine’s readers could take to their hearts. She was practical, down-to-earth, human – the essence of suburban middle America. As well as being an excellent horsewoman she was, the article declared, a tireless dancer and an enthusiastic lover of swing music, night clubs, and ‘having her own way’. She enjoyed reading best-sellers, knitting and gossipy teas with her sister and a few girlfriends in front of the fire at Buckingham Palace.

According to Crawfie, she was an indifferent knitter.

However, the picture was not entirely false. Whatever she may have read in her teens, her adult tastes in literature and drama were, as a British observer put it delicately in the 1950s, ‘those of the many rather than the few’.

In this respect, as in others, efforts to nip any blue-stocking tendency in the bud had succeeded.

It was also true that she enjoyed music, especially if it was not too demanding. She took a keen interest in the ‘musicals’ currently in vogue on the London stage. She liked the satirical entertainment 1066 and All That so much that she obtained a copy of the song ‘Going Home to Rome’ from the management.

Jean Woodroffe (then Gibbs), who became her lady-in-waiting early in 1945, remembers that the two of them would while away the time on long car journeys to and from official engagements by singing popular songs.

After the war ended, weekly madrigal sessions were held at the Palace – either Margaret or a professional musician played the piano and both girls sang, together with some officers in the Palace guard.

One madrigal singer was Lord Porchester (now the seventh Earl of Carnarvon) who had known Princess Elizabeth when he was in the Royal Horse Guards at the end of the war, and had taken part in the Buckingham Palace VE-Night escapade. Porchester (‘Porchey’)* also shared the Princess’s interest in riding, breeding and racing horses. During the war, they had seen each other at the Beckhampton stables on the Wiltshire Downs, where horses bred at the royal studs were trained. Porchester was the grandson of the fifth Earl of Carnarvon, who, as well as being the joint discoverer of the tomb of Tutenkhamun, had been the leading racehorse owner-breeder at the beginning of the century, and had set up the Highclere Stud at his Hampshire home. His father, the sixth Earl, had bred the 1930 Derby winner Blenheim. ‘The King thought I was a suitable racing companion of her age group,’ says Lord Carnarvon. ‘There were not many people then who could accompany her to the races.’ Since the 1940s, he says, ‘We have developed our interest together, and it has got sharper.’

He was beside her at Newmarket in October 1945, and at almost every Derby since.

Before the war, horses had been Elizabeth’s childhood fantasy. During it, her confidence as a rider had been built up with the help of Horace Smith. After 1945, the horse world became her chief relaxation and escape. She read widely on the subject, extending her knowledge of horse management, welfare and veterinary needs, and she developed a sixth sense as a trainer. ‘She has an ability to get horses psychologically attuned to what she wants,’ says Sir John Miller, for many years Crown Equerry and responsible for all the Queen’s non-race horses, ‘and then to persuade them to enjoy it.’

What started as a hobby later became a serious enterprise, and an area for her own independent professionalism. ‘Prince Philip shrewdly kept out of it all,’ says a former royal employee. ‘Otherwise he would have dominated the discussion.’

For Elizabeth, horse breeding was a family interest. The royal studs had been founded at Hampton Court in the sixteenth century, later moving to Windsor. In the late nineteenth century, the then Prince of Wales, later Edward VII, had re-confirmed the royal hobby by establishing the Sandringham stud. Royal interest seemed curiously, though perhaps not surprisingly, to mirror the royal fascination with dynastic genealogy. The result had been an exclusive attitude to bloodlines. ‘Royal managers had avoided sending to some of the best stallions, often because they did not like the owner,’ Carnarvon recalls. On one occasion, an otherwise ideal candidate for covering a royal mare was rejected by Captain Charles Moore, George VI’s (and later his daughter’s) Manager of the Royal Studs, on the grounds that it belonged to a bookmaker. In much the same way, the King – who took a mild interest in racing – had a patriotic approach to the sport. Not only did he prefer to send to British-based stallions, it upset him if French horses too often won British races.

Lord Porchester, who had studied at Cirencester Agricultural College and had acquired a knowledge of the principles of ‘hybrid vigour,’ tried to advance royal practice by encouraging the family to be less fussy about equestrian social backgrounds. As Porchey and Elizabeth became more expert together, a quiet revolution came eventually to overtake royal breeding methods. After Elizabeth became Queen, her interest increased, and in 1962 she leased Polhampton Lodge Stud, near Overton in Hampshire, for breeding race horses – adding to the studs (Sandringham and Wolverton) at Sandringham. In 1970, Lord Porchester took over as the Queen’s racing manager. Over the years their shared passion for horses became the basis for a close friendship. ‘With Henry Porchester, racing and horses bring them continually together,’ says a former royal adviser. ‘Henry tells her a lot of gossip. She’s very fond of him and he’s devoted to her.’

Princess Elizabeth’s other recreations were also uncompromisingly those of royalty and the landed aristocracy. Like her grandfather, father and mother, she was relentless in her pursuit of the fauna on the Sandringham and Balmoral estates. She did not use a shotgun, but she became skilled with a rifle, and in stalking deer during Scottish holidays. One report described how, while staying on the Invernesshire estate of Lord Elphinstone, the Queen’s brother-in-law, in October 1946, the twenty-year-old Princess followed a stag through the forest, ‘aimed with steadiness and brought down the animal,’ which turned out to be a twelve-pointer.

It was a sport for which she was well-equipped. After visiting Balmoral during the war, King Peter of Yugoslavia, Alexandra’s husband, expressed admiration at the quality of the rifle she lent him.

Later, Porchey gave her a .22 rifle as a present.

The pace quickened at the end of the war, in shooting as in everything else. Aubrey (now Lord) Buxton, a Norfolk neighbour who became a close friend of the royal couple – and who later helped to inspire Philip’s interest in wildlife and conservation – described one extraordinary day’s shooting at Balmoral, a fortnight after the Japanese surrender. A royal house party, headed by the Monarch, set itself the task of killing as wide a range of different birds and animals as possible. The King set out in search of ptarmigan, somebody else had to catch a salmon and a trout, and so on. After a hard day, the final bag in the game book was 1 pheasant, 12 partridges, 1 mountain hare, 1 brown hare, 3 rabbits, 1 woodcock, 1 snipe, 1 wild duck, 1 stag, 1 roe deer, 2 pigeons, 2 black game, 17 grouse, 2 capercailzie, 6 ptarmigan, 2 salmon, 1 trout, 1 heron and a sparrow hawk. Princess Elizabeth was the proud dispatcher of the stag.

Margaret did not share Elizabeth’s sporting enthusiasms – one of the factors which led to the growth of different and contrasting circles of friends. To some extent, despite the age gap, their circles overlapped. Weekend parties in the mid-1940s included the heirs to great titles, who were regarded as potential husbands for either of them. Names like Blandford, Dalkeith, Rutland, Euston, Westmorland tended to crop up. ‘There was a good deal of speculation,’ an ex-courtier remembers, ‘about whether any of them would do.’ When Philip became a fixture, the circles diverged. Margaret began to attract a smarter set: her friends thought of themselves as gaier, wilder, wittier, and regarded Elizabeth’s as grand, conventional and dull.

As well as the gap in interests, the distinction reflected a difference in temperament. ‘Princess Margaret loved being amused,’ suggests one of her friends, ‘in a way that her sister didn’t.’ It was also a product of the princesses’ contrasting relationship with the King. Elizabeth, the introvert, had been brought up to be responsible; Margaret, the extrovert, to be pretty, entertaining and fun. ‘George VI had a strong concern for Princess Elizabeth,’ says the same source, ‘but he had a more fatherly attitude towards her sister. I remember him leaning on a piano when she was singing light-hearted songs, with an adoring look, thinking it was frightfully funny.’ While Margaret reached out to people, Elizabeth seemed never to give much away. A lady-in-waiting recalls her, in the mid–1940s, as ‘very charming, but very quiet and shy – much more shy than later.’