The human heart of the Royal marriage
As the Queen and Duke celebrate their 70th wedding anniversary, biographer Sally Bedell Smith shares the secrets of their happiness
Late last spring, the Queen arrived at Cumberland Lodge, a royal residence in Windsor Great Park where her father, King George VI, had established an educational foundation to encourage exchanges between people with differing religious and political views. As the foundation’s patron, she was due to be briefed by one of her former advisers on plans for its 70th anniversary celebrations. At the last minute, the Duke of Edinburgh – only days from his 96th birthday – joined his wife for the reception and presentation. Spotting the Queen’s courtier who he hadn’t seen in over a decade, Prince Philip exclaimed: “I see you are being recycled!”
The Queen couldn’t help smiling. Such moments of levity have been an essential ingredient in their 70-year marriage, the anniversary of which is on Monday. During their honeymoon at Birkhall on the Balmoral estate in November 1947, Philip set out his ambition for their life together in a letter to his mother-in-law: “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 the good.”
Fulfilling such a goal over so many years is an achievement few other couples have matched – and is certainly unequalled in the history of the Royal family. Many factors account for their success, but underlying it all is a shared sense of humour. It has bound and leavened them in private, and occasionally sparkles in public.
They revel in moments that go slightly awry during long days of engagements. At the end of a walkabout in Bermuda eight years ago, the Queen was heard saying to her aides: “Where’s Philip? Where’s Philip?” Moments later, they were laughing together in their car. “In the middle of the hullabaloo they were sharing a story,” one of the Queen’s advisers recalled. “They often do that.”
They learned to move through public events with a kind of telepathic choreography. He meanders around and cracks jokes, she is carefully guided through her obligations, but they somehow manage to cross paths at precisely the right moment at the end of a garden party or drinks reception.
Twenty years ago at a speech in the Guildhall for their golden wedding anniversary, the Duke of Edinburgh noted the importance of tolerance in a happy marriage, especially “when the going gets difficult”. The Queen, he said, “has the quality of tolerance in abundance”.
She was attracted to him at the outset as much for his bright and inquisitive mind as for his stunning good looks. She understood he wouldn’t be easy, but she also knew that he would never be boring. She appreciated both his irreverence, and a sense of duty and service that matched her own.
In her own golden wedding anniversary tribute, she said Philip had “quite simply, been my strength and stay all these years,” adding slyly that “all too often, I fear [he] has had to listen to me speaking”.
When he had to abandon his promising career in the Royal Navy to be her consort and was consigned to walking two steps behind, he fully recognised that “supporting the Queen” would be vital to her reign. Yet she gave him the freedom to craft a role for himself, becoming an active patron of more than 800 charities, pursuing avocations such as oil painting and jewellery design, and writing essays on topics from physical fitness to science and conservation.
She counted on him to be her global ambassador who could give her keen assessments of foreign leaders and events. He took charge of her estates at Balmoral and Sandringham, where he organised shooting weekends and even invented an elaborate trailer to transport food to their picnics. He installed solar panels in the early Eighties, produced organic truffles and cultivated fruits for apple juice and blackcurrant cordial. She supervised the décor of their apartments, but he bought the art for
‘Philip has quite simply been my strength and stay all these years’
their private collection and hung the paintings himself.
During his decades as an avid polo player, she stood on the sidelines cheering him on. When he had to abandon the sport in 1971 due to arthritis, the Queen encouraged him to take up competitive carriage driving. Well into her seventies, she drove her Range Rover to each of the obstacles, watching Philip navigate his four-horse carriage, then running back to her car, scarf flying, followed by her corgis.
Above all, behind the scenes, she embraced his role as a moderniser. He persuaded her to allow her coronation to be televised in 1953 and four years later to deliver her Christmas message on television. With the assistance of friends from the BBC, he coached her on how to master an Autocue. In later years he was a prime mover in the use of computers at Buckingham Palace, on launching a royal website in 1997, and in hiring professionals to run the Palace communications office.
One of them, Simon Lewis, recalled that when he was interviewed by the Queen and Prince Philip in 1998, “my abiding impression was how remarkably open they were”. He was struck “by the interaction between the two of them, how comfortable and easy they were, and how they had both thought about this role together”.
The Duke has had no part in the Queen’s duties as head of state. He has never attended his wife’s weekly meetings with her prime ministers, nor has he been privy to her daily boxes of official documents. But she has relied on him as a sounding board. When her courtiers query her about a matter outside a constitutional issue, she asks, “What does Philip think?”
“There is a lot that comes across her desk,” said one courtier, “and she is not the sort to zero in and peel the skin of the onion away until you get to the heart of it.” Philip, on the other hand, can tear an idea apart to figure out what works and what doesn’t. At that stage, her advisers can return to the Queen, knowing that if Philip is satisfied, she will likely agree.
Yet they are both strong characters capable of sharp verbal exchanges. Once on a trip to the Great Barrier Reef, the Queen declined to swim because she wished to stay out of the sun. “You are a premature grandmother!” Philip snapped. As her longtime adviser Martin Charteris once put it, “Prince Philip is the only man in the world who treats the Queen simply as another human being. And of course, it’s not unknown for the Queen to tell Prince Philip to shut up. Because she’s the Queen, that’s not something she can easily say to anybody else.”
The couple have always been happiest in the countryside, and they have passed along their love of the natural world to their children and grandchildren. On shooting weekends, as he brought down pheasants, grouse, and partridges (“incredibly stupid birds,” in his view), she displayed an impressive array of whistles, hand signals and calls to direct her gun dogs to retrieve the birds. Knee pain finally ended her retrieving several years ago, and Philip put down his gun at age 94.
As the Duke of Edinburgh spends more time in his retirement at Wood Farm on the Sandringham estate – a modest refuge of tranquillity that he has enjoyed for many years – he and his wife of seven decades can enjoy the camaraderie of shooting luncheons in a nearby barn. When she is at Buckingham Palace or Windsor Castle carrying out her duties, he remains her emotional touchstone, and they try to speak on the phone every day.
There was a special poignancy in their moment of solidarity on the balcony of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office while watching the Remembrance Sunday commemoration scarcely a week before their milestone wedding anniversary. It was a reminder that their public role together will continue to diminish.
No service will be held in their honour at Westminster Abbey this year as there was a decade ago. But it is worth remembering the verse by poet laureate Andrew Motion read by Judi Dench that day, commending Queen Elizabeth II and the Duke of Edinburgh for “a life where duty spoke in languages their tenderness could share, a life remote from ours because it asked each day, each action, to be kept in view”.
‘Of course, it’s not unknown for the Queen to tell Prince Philip to shut up’