The royals - Kitty Kelley [33]
Philip’s father, sixty-two years old, died in 1944 in the arms of his rich mistress. He had not seen his wife or son for five years. Penniless, Prince Andrew left his only son an estate that consisted of a battered suitcase filled with two moth-eaten suits, a worn leather frame, and a set of ivory shaving brushes. Philip did not get around to collecting his meager inheritance until 1946. Then he had the suits altered to fit him so he would have civilian clothes to wear when not in uniform. But the shiny gabardine hand-me-downs did not impress His Majesty, who counted a man without tweeds or plus fours as a man without breeding. Elizabeth had insisted that her father invite Philip to join them for a grouse shoot at Windsor, but the King balked because Philip did not own plus fours. Philip didn’t know what they were. The King explained that the trousers were so called because they were four inches longer than ordinary knickerbockers—the baggy knee pants that golfers wore.
“Then he can wear a pair of yours,” Elizabeth said to her father.
The King grudgingly agreed. He still retained reservations about the young man who never wore pajamas or bedroom slippers, had no formal clothes, and was unembarrassed by his scuffed shoes. The King felt that Prince Philip had been reared as a commoner, not as a royal.
The King’s private secretary, Sir Alan (Tommy) Lascelles, dismissed Philip as a hooligan. “He was rough, ill-mannered, uneducated, and would probably not be faithful,” he said, according to writer Philip Ziegler.
The monarch marked a man by what he wore and could not understand his lack of interest in buttons and bows. While Philip was always courteous and deferential to “Uncle Bertie and Aunt Elizabeth,” he was still too assertive and familiar to suit the King. As far as the Queen was concerned, Philip made himself too much at home; she rebuked him several times for ordering the servants around. Neither she nor her husband realized then that their gawky seventeen-year-old daughter had marked the young man for marriage.
“I realized they were courting long before it got in the newspapers,” said Charles Mellis, who for twelve years was chef on the royal train. “I saw something of the way they laughed, teased, and looked at each other while traveling together. And I shall never forget the time I heard the Queen Mother call out to them, ‘Now, you two, stop kicking each other under the table and behave properly.’ ”
Princess Margaret teased her sister unmercifully about having a crush on Philip, but the King and Queen seemed oblivious. They noticed that Elizabeth was growing up in 1944 when they attended a small dinner dance given by the Duchess of Kent. There they saw Philip dancing almost every dance with their elder daughter and being photographed helping her with her fur coat. But they never considered the prospect of marriage until shortly after Elizabeth’s eighteenth birthday, when Uncle Dickie nudged his cousin King George of Greece to broach the subject with her father. King George VI turned on Mountbatten, saying he “was moving too fast.” Later, in a letter to his mother, Queen Mary, he wrote:
We both think she is far too young for that now. She has never met any young men of her own age…. I like Philip. He is intelligent, has a good sense of humour and thinks about things in the right way…. We are going to tell George that P. had better not think any more about it at present.
Philip’s plotting uncle was not to be discouraged. He seized the promise implied by “at present” and began campaigning to get Philip to switch his citizenship and religion so he would be perfectly situated for a royal marriage later. With British troops engaged on the side of the Greek government in the civil war, Mountbatten was told that making Philip a British subject might be misinterpreted and indicate British support for the Greek royalists or, conversely, be misconstrued as a sign that Britain regarded