The first reigning monarch to celebrate a 60-year marriage
The Queen and Prince Philip celebrate 60 years
By Andrew Pierce
Last Updated: 2:16am GMT 17/11/2007
In public and private, Prince Philip has been the Queen's compass and confidant. Andrew Pierce examines a momentous marriage.
When the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh walk into Westminster Abbey on Monday for the service to celebrate their diamond wedding anniversary the following day, Prince Philip will, as throughout their long and resilient marriage, be several steps behind his wife and monarch.
Yet, despite the Queen's constitutional superiority, there is a another balance of power that has made the marriage so successful.
For 60 years, the couple have had to combine the duties of state with their private lives and the raising of four children, while coping with the end of the age of deference and an ever more intrusive media. Since the moment of their engagement, everything they have done and said has been subjected to microscopic scrutiny.
The Queen, now 81, and still the world's most famous woman, has rarely put a foot wrong in public - unlike her children and her outspoken husband.
But the success of her reign, and her continued and remarkable popularity, is not just down to her own selfless commitment to the job of monarch, but also to the unstinting support of Prince Philip, 86, who has been there to lean on through the most turbulent years.
Their relationship has been at the core of the Queen's life. They met at the Royal Naval College, Dartmouth, when Princess Elizabeth, then aged 13, was shown round by Cadet Captain Prince Philip of Greece. After this first encounter, they met intermittently.
Unlike most other women of her time, Elizabeth had only one boyfriend. He was born on a kitchen table in Corfu in 1921, the great-great-grandson of Queen Victoria and the son of Prince Andrew of Greece, with German, Danish, Dutch and Russian ancestry.
His father, a career soldier who was sentenced to death for abandoning his post in the face of the enemy, was then driven into exile.
When Philip was eight, his mother, Princess Alice, was committed to a lunatic asylum, while his playboy father drifted around the Continent in a state of gloom. This perhaps accounts for official disapproval of the Queen's choice of husband.
In the words of Sir Alan Lascelles, private secretary to George VI, "They felt he was rough, uneducated, and probably would not be faithful."
This issue of faithfulness has surfaced in several books. In Elizabeth, Sarah Bradford wrote: "The question of Philip's fidelity is, like the real extent of Elizabeth's personal fortune, the last bastion which courtiers will defend to the death."
Gyles Brandreth, a friend of the Duke whose book Philip and Elizabeth: Portrait of a Marriage gave him unrivalled access to the couple, is adamant that Philip has never betrayed the Queen. It was in his book that the Duchess of Abercorn revealed that she had "a highly charged chemistry" with the Duke in an intense friendship that spanned two decades from the late 1960s.
Whatever the truth, there is no doubt that the marriage is strong. The Prince, asked about the success of his marriage, said: "The Queen has the quality of tolerance in abundance."
It is clear from Elizabeth's warm tribute to her husband in her golden wedding speech at London's Guildhall in 1997 that the relationship had been a personal as well as a public triumph.
"He is someone who doesn't take easily to compliments," she said. "He has, quite simply, been my strength and stay all these years, and 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."
However, in the beginning there was unease about the love match. He was born Prince Philip Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glucksberg; a "Greek princeling of no consequence," he once said.
Politicians were worried about how a union would be received by a man dismissed as "a German" by the people and dubbed "the Hun" by Queen Elizabeth, his future mother-in-law. Even Philip's sisters were not invited to the wedding, because they had made the supreme social mistake of marrying Germans.
It was the wily Lord Mountbatten who had ensured that Philip, his nephew, conducted the guided tour at Dartmouth, during which the Princess met her Prince Charming, and who used his skills and connections to ensure his nephew's naturalisation. He even donated his name to the suitor, who arrived at the altar as Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten.
The Queen, as Supreme Governor of the Church of England, takes her wedding vows very seriously. She would never have countenanced divorce and, at the beginning of her reign, no divorcee could be presented to her.
She is the first reigning monarch to celebrate a 60-year marriage and it is one of her greatest disappointments that her own close family has been so visited by marital troubles.
Princess Margaret and three of her four children all divorced, destroying the myth that the monarchy sat astride a higher social order.
Yet it was Prince Philip who proved a stalwart source of strength and comfort as her children's marriages disintegrated, and the tabloids went in hot pursuit of Diana and Sarah Ferguson.
For many years, the Queen was opposed to Prince Charles marrying his long-time companion Camilla Parker Bowles. Prince Philip accepted that Charles should marry to tidy up his private life.
It was he, too, who steadied the Queen's nerves while her courtiers were panicking over the extraordinary outpouring of public grief after the death of Diana - a phenomenon which, to this day, neither of them understands.
When they married in 1947, he was 26 and she 21. It was the fairytale wedding that shone a glittering shaft of light into the depressing gloom of post-war Britain.
For Clement Attlee's great reforming government, the wedding was a chance to lift the spirits of the King's loyal subjects, who were struggling with rationing and the grim austerity of life barely two years after the celebrations of VE Day.
On the day of the wedding, Princess Elizabeth rode to Westminster Abbey with her father in the Irish State Coach.
The crowds cheered all along the procession route. Richard Dimbleby described her arrival at Westminster Abbey thus: "The doors of the coach are open. The crowds shout with excitement and love. Now she steps down. A great cheer arises to sustain her."
The carefree mood of the day was meant to last much longer - the King was only 52. The first few years of their marriage were idyllic, living in Malta, where Prince Philip was stationed with the Royal Navy, as the Duke and Duchess of Edinburgh.
It was a relatively ordinary life, away from the cameras and the onerous grind of official engagements. But after only four years Elizabeth's father was dead, and she was Queen. Their private life was over - as was Philip's naval career, which he resented.
In the subsequent decades, the irascible Duke, short-tempered and gaffe-prone, has often caused controversy. But without his love and unceasing support, the Queen's enthusiasm for her job would be diminished.
"Prince Philip is not an easy man and the Queen knows he can be difficult," says a former lady-in-waiting. "But she adores him and defers to him."
They talk all the time, including on the telephone when they are apart. The Duke is deliberately challenging. The Queen does not have to say anything remotely interesting, as she is the reason everyone is there. She is a good mimic and unswervingly conscientious. He is cleverer. She is cautious. He is unpredictable, she is predictable. She is non-judgmental; he is not. He is always protective of her, often barking at photographers who get too close to the Queen to "get out of the way".
While the Duke is often portrayed as being remote from Prince Charles, father and son have more in common than people think. They are both deep thinkers. Prince Philip has a library of 11,000 books, including 1,000 on art and 200 volumes of poetry. It was a shared love of Jung that sparked the friendship with the Duchess of Abercorn. He reads T S Eliot and Shakespeare.
The Queen, who is not an avid reader, and is more at home with her horses, is deeply religious; far more so than her husband.
The marriage has often come under pressure, particularly in the early years, when he had to come to terms with taking a back seat to his wife - something any husband in the 1950s would find difficult. At the start, he was regarded as an outsider by the court. He was kept in the dark about affairs of state and not even at first permitted to pass his surname on to his own children. "I am nothing but a bloody amoeba," he once complained.
This was one of the reasons why the Queen, in so many speeches, referred to "my husband and I", to the delight of the satirists. 8)
In 1960, with the birth of Prince Andrew imminent, she announced a change of the rules: her descendants - other than her children and those entitled to use HRH - would bear the surname Mountbatten-Windsor.
While the Queen is the head of state, with the power, technically at least, to dissolve Parliament, Prince Philip has assumed the traditional mantle of head of the family.
It was the Duke who insisted that Charles stayed in the spartan atmosphere of Gordonstoun school in Scotland, of which he was an old boy.
It was also he who wanted Prince Edward to maintain tradition by entering the Armed Forces: the spell in the Royal Marines was one of the unhappiest periods of Edward's life, and was cut short in the full glare of publicity. It was also Prince Philip, according to popular legend, who pushed his eldest son into the fateful decision to marry Lady Diana Spencer.
Ultimately, it was Lord Charteris who summed up the success of the union when he told Brandreth: "Prince Philip is the only man in the world who treats the Queen simply as another human being. I think she values that. And, of course, it is not unknown for the Queen to tell the Duke to shut up."
Today, as they prepare to enter their seventh decade together, the Queen and Prince Philip are enjoying their twilight years. They are closer than ever, particularly since the deaths of Princess Margaret and Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother.
Lady Penn, a former lady-in-waiting to the Queen Mother and a friend of the Queen, says: "They are good friends and that is their secret. She has had a lot to contend with. The fact she has coped so wonderfully is mostly thanks to him."
http://tinyurl.com/2wljey
And if you waded through that lot, good luck to you
- I had to live through it!
(There were fancy dress parties for the kids at the Coronation in '53, and we all got models of the Coronation coach. Wonder what that would be worth now, if I still had it...?)
