The royals - Kitty Kelley [27]
“She’s only partly English, you know,” the Queen told one of her ladies-in-waiting. “Her mother was half-Jewish.” The implication was that the “half-Jewish” part accounted for Edwina’s taste in jazz, fast cars, cocktail parties, and moonlight swims in the nude—all unacceptable to the Queen, who now saw herself as the embodiment of English respectability.
“The Queen was far too clever to slam with a sledgehammer,” said John Barratt, Mountbatten’s private secretary. “She despised Edwina, who was named one of the best-dressed women in the world and looked like a gazelle in her Chanel suits, while the Queen made her suits look like slipcovers on fire hydrants. But the Queen never overtly sliced Edwina up. Rather, her cuts were sly and deftly delivered, even in death. When Lady Mountbatten died in her sleep in 1960, the Queen, who by then was the Queen Mother, attended the funeral service in Romsey Abbey but returned to Clarence House to view the burial at sea on television. As Edwina’s coffin was lowered into the water, she smiled and said: ‘Oh, my. Edwina always did want to make a splash.’ ”
During the early days of their reign, the King and Queen felt insecure as they struggled to lift the weight of Edward’s abdication from the throne. They worried that Winston Churchill was stealing their limelight. “K. and Q. feel Winston puts them in the shade,” the Conservative MP Victor Cazalet wrote in his diary of June 1940. After visiting with the King’s courtiers, he wrote, “We talk of K. and how Winston quite unconsciously has put them [King and Queen] in background. Who will tell him?”
The motives of Lord Mountbatten, or “Uncle Dickie,” as he was known to the family, were even more suspect. The Queen objected when he started addressing the issue of her elder daughter’s future husband. He first raised the subject when Princess Elizabeth was only thirteen years old; the Queen dismissed the discussion as premature, although her mother-in-law, Queen Mary, already had compiled a list of eligible young men to be considered. Her possibilities, all of royal blood, included Prince Charles of Luxembourg, who was considerably younger than Elizabeth, and Prince Gorm of Denmark.
Unfazed, Mountbatten persisted through the years by strategically placing his handsome nephew Prince Philip of Greece at various family affairs. He encouraged the young man, whom he treated as a surrogate son, to ingratiate himself with the King and Queen and to get to know Lilibet, who was his third cousin. Mountbatten suggested that Philip correspond with Elizabeth (“A card here, a note there, would be very nice, my boy”) during the war, so by the time Philip was eighteen, he, too, was seeing himself as a potential prince consort.
When he went to sea, Philip shocked his navy skipper by divulging his uncle’s scheme. Vice Admiral Harold Tom Baillie-Grohman was Captain of the battleship Ramillies in the Mediterranean during the summer of 1939. As a favor to Lord Louis Mountbatten, he had taken on board the midshipman known as Prince Philip of Greece. He told the young man, who was born in Greece to a German Danish father of the house of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glucksburg and a German mother (Battenberg/Mountbatten), that he would not be able to advance in the Royal Navy as a Greek citizen. Philip understood and said that he wanted to become a naturalized British subject. He knew his career in the British navy would not progress if he didn’t give up his Greek nationality.