The royals - Kitty Kelley [28]
“Then came the surprise,” the Admiral wrote in his diary. “Prince Philip went on to say: ‘My Uncle Dickie has ideas for me; he thinks I could marry Princess Elizabeth.’ I was a bit taken aback and after a hesitation asked him: ‘Are you really fond of her?’
“ ‘Oh, yes, very,’ was the reply, and ‘I write to her every week.’ ”
The Admiral added to his diary entry in brackets: “I wrote this conversation down directly afterwards and so it is pretty correct.”
Two years later, in 1941, Philip, twenty years old, was still corresponding with the fifteen-year-old Princess. During a holiday visit in Cape Town, South Africa, his cousin Princess Alexandra of Greece saw the midshipman bent over his stationery. She asked to whom he was writing.
“Princess Elizabeth of England,” said Philip.
“But she is only a baby!”
“But perhaps I’m going to marry her.”
Alexandra was crestfallen. “I suspect I was a little in love with Philip myself,” she admitted years later. “In my teens, there was a prospect that I might marry him…. Our families discussed it.”
Philip had become the ward of relatives when his own family fell apart. His father, Prince Andrew, was the seventh child of George I of the Hellenes. His mother, Princess Andrew of Greece, was Alice the daughter of Prince Louis of Battenberg, First Sea Lord of England at the outbreak of World War I. His father was a professional soldier in the Greek army. When Turkey invaded Greece in 1922, Andrew was accused of treason for disobeying orders and abandoning his post under enemy fire. He was tried, convicted, and jailed. As he sat in prison facing possible execution by a firing squad, his wife appealed to her powerful British relatives to save her husband’s life. The King, George V, remembered what had happened to his Russian cousin (“dear Nicky”) and dispatched a ship to Greece to forcibly remove Andrew and his family. The Prince, accompanied by his wife, who was deaf, and their four daughters, boarded the HMS Calypso. He was carrying an orange crate that contained his only son, Philip, eighteen months old.
The platinum blond toddler had been born on a kitchen table on the Greek island of Corfu in a house, Mon Repos, with no electricity, no hot water, and no indoor plumbing. He learned sign language to communicate with his mother, who had turned deaf after catching German measles at the age of four. He also learned English, French, and German but did not speak a word of Greek. After being evacuated from Greece with his family, he spent nine years living outside Paris with his parents, who were royal but not rich. In disgraced exile, they lived in borrowed houses, wore shabby hand-me-downs, and accepted the charity of relatives and friends to feed, clothe, and educate their children.
Within nine months in 1930, Philip’s four older sisters, who had been educated in Germany, married German noblemen. One was an SS Colonel on Himmler’s personal staff, and the others were Princes who supported the Nazis during World War II. One sister, Sophie, named her eldest son Karl Adolf in honor of Adolf Hitler. With his four daughters securely married, Philip’s father abandoned his borrowed home to live on the yacht of his mistress in Monte Carlo, where he became addicted to the gaming tables. He left behind his ten-year-old son. His wife—Princess Andrew—collapsed. After the separation she suffered a nervous breakdown, which in retrospect appears to have been a traumatic menopause. No longer able to care for her young son, she was institutionalized in Switzerland.
She emerged a few years later, found religion, and established the Christian Sisterhood of Martha and Mary, an order of nuns who helped the sick and needy in Greece. During the war she sheltered Jewish families in Greece and was posthumously honored for heroism by Israel. Even though she had been married and borne five children, she