‘Whither the storm carries me, I go a willing guest.’1 So Prince Philip wrote in a visitors’ book in one of the innumerable houses he stayed at for a few nights in early 1946. Yet asked many years later by his biographer, Basil Boothroyd, whether his movements at this time connoted a definite statement of purpose towards Elizabeth, he was both defensive and bluff. ‘During the war, if I was here, I’d call in [to Windsor Castle] and have a meal. I once or twice spent Christmas at Windsor, because I’d nowhere particular to go. I thought not all that much about it, I think.’ When it came to his future wife, he was similarly diffident. ‘We used to correspond occasionally … I suppose if I’d just been a casual acquaintance, it would all have been frightfully significant. But if you’re related – I mean I knew half the people here, they were all relations – it isn’t so extraordinary to be on kind of family relationship terms. You don’t necessarily have to think about marriage.’2
The twenty-four-year-old Philip may have been widely expected to propose to Princess Elizabeth during 1946, but he was not someone who went about the country shouting his emotions from the hilltops. As his equerry, Mike Parker, told the royal biographer Gyles Brandreth, ‘[Philip] was the same, then as now, good at keeping his feelings to himself. He didn’t tell me anything and I didn’t ask. I might have had my suspicions, but until around 1946, when an engagement was in the air, I didn’t know a thing.’3 Philip himself put it in gruff terms to Brandreth. ‘We were cousins; we became friends; we got to know each other better; we became closer; in due course, we became engaged. That’s about it, really.’4
While Philip and Elizabeth continued to see one another socially throughout the early months of 1946, there was no overwhelming expectation on either of their parts that the friendship could be transformed into anything more permanent. Philip was not yet a British citizen, and his family’s German associations were still the subject of rumour and disquiet. In April that year, he travelled across Europe to Salem, where he had briefly been educated, to attend his widowed sister Sophie’s second wedding. While such a trip was entirely innocuous for a private citizen, there might have been considerably greater interest in it if his relationship with Princess Elizabeth had been anything other than a casual acquaintanceship.
It did not help that there were many at court who were less than kindly disposed towards Philip, and their opinions could only influence the king and queen. Although Queen Elizabeth felt affection for the dashing blonde sailor who had become a regular house guest, her younger brother, David Bowes-Lyon* – memorably denigrated by the aristocrat Gina Kennard to Brandreth as ‘a vicious little fellow’5 – loathed him, and did his best to poison his sister against him, aided by various courtiers who were only too happy to concur with Lascelles’ assessment that Philip was ‘rough, uneducated and would probably not be faithful’. And the king, despite his own fondness for Philip, felt uneasy at the prospect of his elder daughter marrying and leaving him behind; as Elizabeth’s subsequent lady-in-waiting Lady Airlie later commented, she was his ‘constant companion in shooting, riding, walking – in fact in everything’.6
Princess Elizabeth had also barely seen anything outside of the confines of Windsor Castle and Buckingham Palace, bar carefully orchestrated trips to open factories and buildings. As Queen Mary said to Lady Airlie, although Philip and Elizabeth had now been on familiar terms with one another for at least eighteen months, ‘the King and Queen feel that she is too young to be engaged yet. [Her parents] want her to see more of the world before committing herself, and to meet more men. After all, she is only nineteen, and one is very impressionable at that age.’7 Channon’s party may have been a raucous, drink-sodden affair, but it at least exposed her to a different set of people than the stiff and often stuffy world of court. The war had taken away the opportunity for her to mix with people of her own age, and so there was the suspicion – barely articulated by anyone, but present nonetheless – that Philip may have been of interest simply because he was the first even semi-eligible man to have crossed her path.
Nonetheless, his continued presence near her, or next to her, did nothing to dispel rumours of their intimacy. He was photographed standing with her on 29 May at the wedding of her lady-in-waiting Jean Gibbs, and even if one newspaper cattily referred to him as ‘a figure still largely unknown to the British public’,8 it now seemed quite natural for him to be welcomed into the royal circle. One letter that he sent to the queen in June, while he was serving as a naval instructor in North Wales on board HMS Glendower, archly apologised for ‘the monumental cheek’ of having invited himself to Buckingham Palace, but justified it by saying, ‘However contrite I feel, there is always a small voice that keeps saying “Nothing ventured, nothing gained” – well, I did venture and I gained a wonderful time.’9
The precisely calibrated tone – polite, but not sycophantic; grateful, but not oleaginous – endeared him to the queen, and soon enough, Philip was granted the ultimate gesture of approval – or was presented with his trickiest task yet. He was invited to Balmoral in August, where he would be on show in front of the entire family. The potential rewards were considerable, but then so were the risks.
In the pre-war days, there was a set expectation of the etiquette required when a young would-be suitor visited his aristocratic inamorata’s family home for a weekend. He should be polite and formal, but never dull or silent; well versed in current affairs, but prepared never to contradict his hosts, whatever the outrageousness of their opinions or views; well dressed for a variety of occasions, from shooting to formal dinners, but never ostentatious or peacock-like.
He would be surrounded – some might even say confronted – with a host of fellow guests, who might range from the charming to the choleric, and would be expected to overcome the conversational minefields that their disparate presence could also involve. In other words, if he managed to give a good account of himself in the most unpromising and stressful of situations, then it was likely that he would be given the nod to marry the daughter of the house. If he failed, he could expect a letter curtly informing him of his would-be fiancée’s betrothal to another, more accomplished man.
The social rules were strict, even harsh, but they existed for a reason. The British aristocracy had not maintained its grip on society by allowing its denizens to marry whomsoever they pleased. Instead, the process was a precisely regulated affair, in which negotiations as to worth began as soon as the women ‘came out’ – in other words, were launched onto the matrimonial market – and would only conclude once the season’s debutantes were safely fixed up with appropriate husbands. Romantic affection was not wholly absent from the exercise, but it was hardly seen as the predominant means of arranging matches between eligible partners.
Yet after two world wars, the rules had been bent, if not broken, not least because there was now a dearth of eligible young men. Had Prince Philip not been a naval hero, it is doubtful that his suit would have been taken at all seriously, given his dubious heritage and uncomfortably close familial associations with the Germans. But when the notice of his invitation to Balmoral was included on the guest list that was distributed to the papers – his name had been absent from the advance list – it was widely believed that he had been invited to the royal family’s Scottish home as an audition, and that should he be successful, the notice of engagement would be published before the year was out. If he failed, however, one can only imagine his receiving a regretful letter, written in an elegant hand, beginning, ‘My dearest Philip, I am sorry to say that …’
The royals headed up to Balmoral on 8 August, and Philip was invited to join them shortly afterwards, for three weeks of grouse shooting, stalking and chit-chat. The length of the invitation connoted purpose; he was not there simply for the pleasure of his company, but for the wider family to see what they made of him. That he might have had opinions about them as well, and that these views might have coloured his later behaviour, did not seem to have occurred to anyone. Nearly a decade earlier, Edward and Wallis had had their own Balmoral holiday, which had ended in chaos, with signs being daubed on Aberdeen streets saying, ‘Down with the American harlot!’* It could only be hoped that there would not be a repeat of such a development.
Crawfie subsequently wrote, with the benefit of hindsight, that ‘when it was known that Prince Philip was going to Balmoral that autumn, public excitement and speculation brimmed over. The papers carried whole columns of “inside information” and entirely unfounded stories.’ She sighed, ‘It must have been trying indeed for these two young people, between whom there had as yet been neither proposal nor acceptance.’ Yet she knew the truth. ‘The generally accepted idea was that this was for Prince Philip a trial trip. The King and Queen were commonly supposed to have invited Philip up to see whether he would be acceptable as a son-in-law.’ Crawfie disagreed with this summation – ‘the silliness of all this is apparent when it is realised that they had both known him from his boyhood … he was asked up because he was a young man they all liked, who would make an amusing addition to the party … [and] perhaps also to give Lilibet a good long spell of his company, to see how she liked him in large doses’.10
However, when Philip arrived at Balmoral, he would no doubt have been dismayed to see the ‘vicious little fellow’ David Bowes-Lyon dripping poison into his sister’s ear about ‘the German’, along with such courtiers as Lord Eldon and ‘Bobbety’ Cranborne, neither of whom bore Philip any particular goodwill. Another sort of man might have been cowed into polite silence, or made an especial effort to charm everyone in sight, constantly. Philip did neither.
It has subsequently been put about that the Balmoral sojourn was a wonderful and romantic occasion, during which Philip proposed marriage to Elizabeth and was accepted, and that everything stemmed from the weeks they spent together in Scotland. Certainly, the thank-you letter that Philip wrote to the queen on 14 September seemed to suggest that he had been exceptionally fortunate, and also hinted strongly that he had become at least unofficially engaged. ‘I am sure I do not deserve all the good things which have happened to me’, he panted. ‘To have been spared in the war and seen victory, to have been given the chance to rest and re-adjust myself, to have fallen in love completely and unreservedly, makes all one’s personal and even the world’s troubles seem small and petty.’ Praising the family’s ‘generous hospitality’ and the ‘warm friendliness’ of those he encountered, he stated, ‘I only realise now what a difference those few weeks, which seemed to flash past, have made to me … [the stay] did much to restore my faith in permanent values and brighten up a rather warped view of life’, and hinted at the existence of an engagement by writing, ‘Naturally there is one circumstance which has done more for me than anything else in my life.’11
He may have seemed joyful in his letter of thanks, but it had not been an easy few weeks. As Crawfie described it, ‘Lilibet was well aware that … some of the King’s advisers did not think [Philip] good enough for her … there must have been for Lilibet in those autumn days … plenty of doubts, plenty of embarrassments, uncertainties, and heart-aches’, even if ‘her own mind never wavered for an instant … it was solidly made up’. The word used about Philip was ‘unpolished’ – something he himself might have regarded as a badge of honour. It was seen as decidedly eccentric that he had no plus fours and shot in flannel trousers using a borrowed gun, and that his ‘solitary naval valise’ contained remarkably few clothes: the only pair of walking shoes he possessed ended up being so worn that they had to be sent to a local cobbler for repairs. The king himself noted in his diary – the sole veiled allusion to his subsequent son-in-law – that ‘We have had several young people to stay. Some had never seen a grouse or a stag.’12
It is unclear precisely how long Philip was at Balmoral for – Crawfie believed that it was over a month, but this seems unlikely, unless he had arrived immediately after or with the royal family, and had only left on 13 September – but it was a frustrating and unrelaxing time. Not only did Philip have to contend with the sneering and bitching of Bowes-Lyon and others, which he dealt with robustly and uncompromisingly, but he was barely able to see Princess Elizabeth unchaperoned. They went out shooting, and for picnics, but the extent of their time together consisted of the odd drive, and a swift walk around the gardens after tea.
Crawfie was not present at Balmoral, but the impression she had when Elizabeth returned was that ‘both Lilibet and Philip had had rather a bad break’, and that ‘the summer could not have been much fun for them’. Philip was generally well thought of in the wider royal household, as an unpretentious and likeable figure whose naval service stood him in good stead to be accepted into the family. George VI had himself seen combat aboard ships, including HMS Jutland in World War I, and welcomed the idea of a son-in-law having a similar level of dutiful, and distinguished, service. Yet Crawfie also noted that ‘the family is a very demanding one, and however sympathetic’ – or otherwise – ‘the other guests might be, there was little they could do to help. The general feeling was that if nothing was to be announced, the boy ought to go south. It was fair to neither of them to keep him hanging around.’ She suggested that the royal household were ‘all a little bewildered’ as to the outcome of the visit – were they engaged, or weren’t they? – and wrote, ‘I think what it really amounted to was that neither the King nor the Queen could make up their minds what was best for their very dear daughter, and so postponed [a] decision.’
The king’s assistant private secretary, Sir Edward Ford, stated pithily of the situation that ‘the queen had produced a cricket eleven of possibles, and it’s hard to know whom she would have sent in first, but it certainly wouldn’t have been Philip’.13 Although the queen was nothing but charm and gratitude itself when she wrote to her potential son-in-law, it was whispered by her daughter’s ladies-in-waiting that she felt he had not set out to charm her, that he was ‘cold … lacking in our kind of sense of humour’, and that his inability to embrace self-deprecation was labelled as that most dreadful of things, ‘rather Germanic’.*14
It was by no means a done deal that, informal proposal or not, Philip could expect to be accepted into the family. Nonetheless, Lascelles put out a formal statement in September 1946, on behalf of Buckingham Palace, denying the rumour in the Star newspaper that the princess was engaged, although it did not completely repudiate the possibility – or likelihood – of such an announcement being made in the future. The statement also announced that both Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret would be accompanying their parents on the South African trip early the following year, although there was no mention of Prince Philip travelling with them.
How Elizabeth felt after the Balmoral holiday is hard to assess. Crawfie took the sentimental approach of describing her as a ‘quiet and subdued little Princess’, and compared her to Prince Albert, referring to his ‘touching sweetness of disposition, a shy gentleness that was both moving and appealing’. She suggested that the princess was unhappy about the prospect of heading on the South African trip, saying, ‘she would have liked to have matters fixed and to be properly engaged before she went away’. After all, ‘four months is a long, long time to a girl in love’.15
She continued to be in daily contact with Prince Philip, whether by letter or telephone, and they saw each other with a degree of regularity that belied any suggestion of tension or disagreement. Public rumours of a relationship between the two were, in any case, stoked, firstly by the unprompted denial of the engagement – ‘Where there’s smoke, there’s fire’, a thousand bar-room pundits dutifully opined – and secondly by newsreel footage of the wedding of Patricia Mountbatten to Lord Brabourne on 26 October 1946. Elizabeth was a bridesmaid, Philip an usher, and a mischievous – or romantic – editor deliberately included a shot of a tender glance between the two of them in the film. When it was shown in cinemas, it was greeted with cheers and applause.
Yet it was not merely Philip’s romantic affairs that caused difficulty. He wished to maintain his commission in the Royal Navy, but his foreign-born status and lack of British citizenship made this impossible. He may have walked with kings, and retained the common touch, but it was still problematic for a Greek-born prince to serve in his adopted country’s armed forces. Although he had been initially told that he could remain in the navy, the Admiralty now ruled that he would have to become a naturalised British citizen for such a step to be viable.
Philip therefore found himself in an unusual and frustrating situation. His career, potential marriage and perhaps even continued residence in Britain all depended on his being allowed to obtain citizenship, but he lacked an obvious sponsor. While he could count on a degree of warmth and good feeling from the king and queen, they were unable to exert themselves on his behalf, thereby creating a precedent in the process. Even if he had unofficially proposed to, and been accepted by, their daughter over the summer, their hands were tied by issues of protocol. What he truly needed was a maverick, someone who was willing to go against convention and stand contra mundum, if needs be. Cometh the hour, cometh the Mountbatten: step forward Uncle Dickie.
‘Dickie came to lunch and we discussed everything.’16 So the king wrote in his diary on 14 October. Lascelles had wearied of how what he saw as a family matter was occupying his time, and so had suggested to Mountbatten that he should deal with the question of his nephew’s naturalisation himself: the implication was that he was doing so with royal complicity, even if it was made entirely clear that the monarch’s name was to be kept away from any shenanigans of this nature. ‘Nothing would suit me better’,17 Dickie cheerfully replied.
The full force of the Mountbatten charisma was therefore unleashed, and all around him could not resist, even if one enemy of his, Lord Thorneycroft, grumbled that he was ‘an elephant trampling down the jungle rather than a snake in the grass’.18 His intriguing had been more limited in the first half of 1946 because he had been in South East Asia overseeing the transition from war to peace, but the newly created rear admiral had now returned, and his intention was twofold: to see that his nephew was granted the British citizenship he desired, and, by extension, to make sure that there could be no obstacle to a marriage between Philip and Princess Elizabeth.
Mountbatten had been typically active since his arrival in the country. He had cultivated a friendship with the Labour MP Tom Driberg, who he saw as a useful conduit to get anything through Parliament, and attempted to ensure that Driberg was on good terms with Philip. He introduced the two of them over lunch at the House of Commons on 14 August, and later wrote to the politician to say that Philip was ‘was tremendously thrilled by his day in the House, and very favourably impressed by you’, before suavely reminding Driberg of what he had agreed to. ‘It is most kind of you to say that you will help to give the right line in the press when the news about his naturalisation is announced.’19 He did not allude to whether the flamboyant Driberg had taken a liking to the handsome young naval officer, but he was swift to reassure him of Philip’s British credentials, saying, ‘he really is more English than any other nationality … he had nothing whatever to do with the political set-up in Greece’.20
Mountbatten was right to be cautious about Philip’s Greek roots. Although the country’s monarch, King George II, was restored to the throne shortly after Driberg’s meeting with the prince, on 28 September, the country was seen as unstable and diplomatically problematic, which meant that the idea of a prince of that nation obtaining British citizenship – and, by necessity, renouncing his Greek nationality – was one that would scandalise.
Yet Dickie was not wasting his time. On 14 November, he was able to convince both Attlee* and Bevin that not only should Philip be a naturalised British citizen, but that he should take the title ‘HRH Prince Philip’. Had the Duke and Duchess of Windsor known of the relative ease with which this had been accomplished, given their own – or, to be exact, his – scheming for Wallis to be granted such a distinction, there would have been great anger. In the event, Philip turned down the honour, preferring to retain his naval rank instead.
Eventually, on 5 December, Mountbatten and Philip’s wishes were granted, when the Home Secretary, James Chuter Ede, was able to confirm in the House of Commons that ‘Prince Philip of Greece’ had begun the appropriate bureaucratic rigmarole for a foreign-born citizen who had served in the country’s armed forces to be granted naturalisation. Underneath the dry official language, the implication was clear: there was now little, if anything, standing in the way of a potential engagement between Prince Philip and Princess Elizabeth. So inevitable did the match now seem that the News Chronicle wrote on 10 December, ‘the moment is approaching when the public should be given some explicit information … this is not a trivial issue. The British throne has never been held in such good esteem as it is today. It is of the utmost importance that the strong links of mutual confidence should be preserved.’21
Mountbatten now, disingenuously, put out a press statement to the effect that ‘the Prince’s desire to be British dated back several years before the rumours about the engagement’ – as with the palace’s denial, the use of the word ‘engagement’ simply served to exacerbate the stories – and that, unbelievably, ‘[I] had no possible connection with such rumours’. Yet there was no pushback from the papers, who seemed happy to accept Mountbatten’s half-truths as documented fact.
It was just as well that matters moved fast. A poll in the Sunday Pictorial on 12 January 1947, asking whether Philip and Elizabeth should marry, saw the country supporting such a match, albeit by a slim majority: 55 per cent were in favour, 40 per cent against, and the remainder had no opinion either way. But Philip’s standing as a foreigner did not endear him to xenophobic elements of the public, and it was also acknowledged that nothing could occur until after the conclusion of the royal family’s South African trip, which was scheduled to depart from Portsmouth on 1 February 1947.
It was felt right that Philip should take a new name. His dynastic surname, Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg, was not an easy mouthful, and so it was decided that he should be called Mountbatten: both a nod to his uncle’s unstinting efforts on his behalf, and an attempt to place him within the aristocratic lineage of his adopted country. Philip himself later expressed a mild antipathy towards his nomenclature,* saying, ‘I wasn’t madly in favour [of it] … but in the end I was persuaded, and anyway I couldn’t think of a better alternative.’22
As for the much-rumoured engagement, it seemed that the king had made a deal with Philip. While he had not wished to stand in the way of what was more a love match than any kind of hard-headed dynastic union, there were two conditions to his assent, in addition to Philip’s naturalisation as a British citizen. The first was that no formal engagement could take place until Princess Elizabeth came of age, on 21 April 1947 – during which time she would be coming to the end of her South African trip – and the second was that the trip, which would last for three months, would allow for reflection and a calm consideration of the couple’s future. It might not have been romantic, but it was practical. Such considerations temporarily trumped any idea of ‘true love’.
In any case, the prime mover behind the machinations was to depart shortly. In December 1946, Mountbatten was offered the position of viceroy of India by Attlee, which, after much careful consideration, he finally accepted in February 1947, pronouncing it an honour to be the man who would be responsible for handing power and responsibility back to the Indian people. He may have felt some reluctance to leave the country behind just as it seemed his greatest opportunity was about to come to fruition, but he could take solace from the knowledge that he had played the hand that he had been dealt exceptionally well. Surely, he mused to himself, there was now an opportunity for something unprecedented to occur: for house Mountbatten to establish itself upon the throne of Great Britain.