LOYALTY, LOVE ... AND LAUGHTER
An unfeeling curmudgeon? Far from it. In this intimate account the Queen’s biographer pays tribute to a truly remarkable man . . .
THE EVER-IRASCIBLE Prince Philip was being shown the ultra-modern design of the new GCHQ building in Cheltenham by a busybody MP, who, by way of small talk, enquired: ‘Would Charles approve?’ Quick as a flash came the response: ‘Charles who?’
One cannot help thinking the Queen’s husband would have taken special delight in such an exchange. With a single broadside, the old sailor had taken out not only an irritating and over-familiar public official but his own son — the one he never seemed to quite get on with and of whom he was quoted just this week as saying: ‘He’s a romantic and I’m a pragmatist. We see things differently.’
A double hit, then! The Royal Family’s master of the irreverent, the outspoken and the tactless had done it again. It is for this that people have come to love him, and still do.
Old age — it is Philip’s 95th birthday today — has not blunted his forthright manner and his propensity to call a spade a bloody shovel.
At last year’s Battle of Britain anniversary, he was posing for a photograph with a group of distinguished airmen, old and young. Most of them were in uniform but he was in a lounge suit, his chest adorned with medals. With slightly alarming eyes starting furiously from his angular, though still handsome, skull, he resembled the most distinguished old member of a seaside bowls club.
The photographer was dithering. Everyone was bored. Then came one of those moments that Philip-watchers treasure. ‘Just take the f***ing picture!’ he barked.
Such forthrightness has had royal officials leaping for the smelling salts for 70 years — ever since Philip of Greece asked for the hand in marriage of Princess Elizabeth in 1946. When they were betrothed the following year, Tommy Lascelles, the King’s private secretary, probably spoke for the rest of the court when he described the bridegroom as ‘rough, ill-mannered, uneducated and would probably not be faithful’.
Yet some of those very qualities that Lascelles and his colleagues deplored are what have enabled Philip to be the Queen’s strength and stay ever since. What the courtiers viewed as defects were in fact assets in a marriage to a shy and often stilted woman, despite her clear goodness of heart.
On their first major Commonwealth tour in 1953, there were occasions when the Queen was going through the motions and could not do any more than her duty, whereas he remained a recognisably human being.
WHEn the temperatures in Australia soared to 110f and the her face, he said: ‘Cheer up, sausage, it’s not so bad as all that. ’Queen, pining for the cold air and damp heather of Balmoral, could not remove the scowl from Later, in new Zealand, when they were greeted by Maori children jumping up and down on a riverbank, the Queen did not even cast them a glance. It was Philip who called out: ‘Look, Bet, aren’t they lovely?’ (‘Bet’ is short for Lilibet, which is what he calls her.)
As for his famous ‘gaffes’, journalists (and many readers) so enjoyed them that they sometimes made them up — as when, during the nineties, he attended a pop concert in Wales with some deaf children and was supposed to have said: ‘no wonder you’re deaf, having to listen to this racket!’
(This was one of the few occasions when Philip demanded a correction, pointing out that his own mother had suffered from deafness and he would never have mocked the affliction.)
But there was no need to invent them — enough came naturally and every one was refreshingly un-PC.
To a group of women at a community centre in London’s East End a few years ago: ‘Who do you sponge off?’ To the President of nigeria, who was wearing his national costume: ‘You look like you’re ready for bed.’ To a British trekker in Papua new Guinea: ‘You managed not to get eaten, then?’
The Queen was bending over a man injured by an IRA bomb, who had lost much of his sight. ‘How much can you see?’ she inquired. ‘not a lot,’ said the Duke, behind her, ‘judging by that tie he’s wearing.’
To the matron of a Caribbean hospital: ‘You have mosquitoes. I have the Press.’ Seeing a press photographer fall out of a tree in Pakistan: ‘I hope to God he breaks his bloody neck.’
At the same time — as he must have come to realise, moving from the ripeness of old age into the second half of his tenth decade — he has enjoyed a remarkably easy ride from the Press, in comparison with the way the private lives of his children were treated.
From the Fifties onwards there were rumours about the marriage. He took risks. For many years he drove himself round London in a black taxicab, conveying chums to bars or nightspots in Soho. They were never photographed and their visits to such haunts were never reported.
The rumours about his close relationships with a string of women were never substantiated, and there are those who know him who have evidently come to believe that these were all Platonic.
We cannot know if those relationships ever caused heartache to the Queen — only that, in the words of Philip’s biographer Gyles Brandreth, ‘she is not a sentimentalist, she knows her man, loves him, admires him and accepts him as he is’.
Prince Philip has certainly been part of the success story of the British monarchy in recent history. His combination of abrasiveness and constancy has worked in the difficult role of prince consort (though without him ever being rewarded with that title, which Queen Victoria bestowed on Prince Albert).
HE HAS been a dutiful servant of the state, both as a young naval officer and as a friend and encourager of serving members of the Armed Forces. When he was 85, he flew out to Basra in Iraq to make a surprise visit to a regiment of which he is colonel-in-chief. He was dressed in combat gear, a man among men.
Eight years later, aged 93, this time wearing a bowler hat and ‘civvies’, he welcomed home men of the same regiment from Afghanistan and pinned medals on their chests. By now skeletally thin, he still had a sparkle in his eyes and was in jovial form.
The off-colour jokes and laddish behaviour with women that had supposedly clouded earlier decades of his life would only have enhanced his standing with these men.
But there is another side to him that is less often seen and rarely recognised. Many who know Prince Philip personally comment on his sensitivity, a quality that plainly exists side by side with the abrasiveness. It surfaced when Brandreth talked to him about Princess Diana.
‘I said to him: “The public view of you is of a grouchy old man, unsympathetic to his daughter-inlaw. But I happen to know, not from you, that when things were difficult, you wrote to her kind, concerned, fatherly, caring letters from pa, explaining how you knew, firsthand, the difficulties involved in marrying into the Royal Family.”
‘He smiled at me. “The impression the public has got is unfair,” I said. He shrugged. “I’ve just got to live with it,” he said.’
But of course he knew all about the difficulties of marrying into the Royal Family. He was a young naval officer with no money when he married Princess Elizabeth. When she became Queen in 1952, he had to give up the career he loved.
no wonder he had seemed to some observers to be over-assertive, not to say bullying, in his demeanour towards her.
This was particularly so in the awful business over whether the family surname should switch from hers—Windsor—to his, Mountbatten( though at least Sch les wigHolstein- Sonderburg- Glücks burg, his original family name, was never contemplated).
When this was ruled out, he famously exclaimed in fury that he was regarded as nothing but a ‘bloody amoeba’.
And of course he could sympathise with Diana and the disturbing effect of her unsettled childhood, because his own had been a nightmare too.
‘We had the good fortune to grow up in happy, united families,’ the Queen said in a speech to mark
their silver wedding in 1972. But as far as her husband was concerned, this was a piece of pious fiction.
Indeed, if you wrote down a short biography of Prince Philip without mentioning that he was royal — ‘born on a kitchen table; penniless refugee parents; mother certifiably insane; father deserted the marital home; only occasionally seen by unsympathetic grandparents’ — you would think that, rather than being sent to school at Gordonstoun, he should have been taken into care.
His parents — like Diana’s — were, to put it mildly, ill-matched. His father, Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark, was an impoverished royal playboy who ran away from his marriage to a wife, Princess Alice of Battenberg, who suffered from severe mental illness.
Her delusions took lurid form, including the belief that she had enjoyed a carnal relationship with Christ.
There was also a family tragedy when, in 1937, a plane carrying some of his relations to a wedding in London hit a factory chimney near Ostend in dense fog and crashed in flames. Prince Philip’s sister Cecile, aged 26, and her two boys — Ludwig, six, and Alexander, four — were among those killed. He never forgot the ‘profound shock’ of being told.
So Prince Philip’s childhood and early life were troubled, and he learnt early on to deal with disaster by breeziness.
As he put it: ‘Suddenly my family had gone. My father was in the South of France and my mother was ill. I was in England and just had to get on with it.’
He has been ‘just getting on with it’ ever since.
It was in this frame of mind that, during the Diamond Jubilee celebrations in 2012, he stood beside his wife on the Royal Barge to go down the Thames.
It was cold and pouring with rain but neither flinched for the two sodden hours it took the barge to make its journey. Few who saw it will forget the sight of ‘my husband and I’ standing for hours on that rain-assaulted ceremonial vessel.
Short of death itself, nothing could apparently dislodge their dogged willingness to stand, and stand, and stand, as the cold wind blew and the rain fell.
Not long afterwards he was taken off to hospital, and those of us who are invited by the media to comment on royal deaths were put on alert. We stood beside our laptops, black armbands at the ready.
In fact, as so often before and several times since, it was a false alarm. This seemingly indefatigable old man was soon back in action.
But what is outstanding about him was encapsulated by the sight of him that day, by the Queen’s side, the faithful public servant standing in his uniform, upright in the rain.
His ramrod uprightness as a supporter of the contemporary monarchy is not in question. Much of what the Queen has achieved could not have been done without
him. She acknowledges this. At a lunch to celebrate their golden wedding anniversary in 1997, the Queen said: ‘He is someone who doesn’t take easily to compliments, but he has, quite simply, been my strength and stay all these years.
‘I, and his whole family, and this and many other countries, owe him a debt greater than he would ever claim or we shall ever know.’
In his self-deprecatory way, he would almost certainly scoff at such a notion. After all, this is the man who, with his usual lack of tact, once pointed out that when he and the 13-year-old Princess Elizabeth first met, there was a distinct shortage of other suitors for her hand.
‘How many obviously eligible young men were available?’ he asked, without apparently realising that this came over as a put-down not just to himself but to her.
But being consort has also been the saving of him. For all his strutting claims as a young man that he found the burden of being second fiddle to his wife hard to bear, and the abandonment of his naval career a sad deprivation, he actually needed the disciplined, restricted life which being the Duke of Edinburgh imposed upon him.
And as a result he has managed to tread the fine line required of a man in his sometimes uncomfortable position.
He set the tone from the start. As the Queen emerged from the Coronation in 1953, her new crown on her head, he quipped: ‘Where did you get that hat?’
Here was the sort of irreverence — insolence, even — that, allied to deep love and loyalty, has made him the perfect royal partner. He made her laugh then and apparently still does. It is the secret of their enduring partnership, according to Brandreth.
On his 95th birthday, he can look back on a job well done. We have much to thank the ‘bloody amoeba’ for and wish him well.
The Queen, by A.N. Wilson, is published by Atlantic, £10. © 2016 A. N. Wilson. To order a copy, call 0844 571 0640 or visit mailbookshop.co.uk.