The royals - Kitty Kelley [37]
A century earlier, when Prince Albert came to England as Queen Victoria’s husband, the courtiers called him “that German.” They called his aides “German spies.” Now, more than one hundred years later, the courtiers exhibited a similar xenophobia. They called Philip “Phil the Greek.”
Philip labeled himself as Scandinavian, “particularly Danish,” he told an interviewer. “We spoke English at home… but then the conversation would go into French. Then it went into German on occasion because we had German cousins. If you couldn’t think of a word in one language, you tended to go off in another.”
The daughter of the Duchess of Marlborough remembered her brothers mocking Philip behind his back for not being an aristocrat. “He did not know the country life,” she said. “He came from the other side of the tracks, which attracted Elizabeth. That and the fact that he was dead glamorous, absolutely drop dead glamorous. Although he was never quite digested into the British establishment, he decided in time to become just as pretentious, dull, and stuffy as the rest of us, while pushing his own personality uphill.”
Elizabeth stood fast against her father’s disapproval. She argued that she hadn’t asked to be born and that if she, as an accident of birth, had to spend her life doing her duty as Queen, the least he could do was let her marry the man she loved. “After all, you married Mummy,” she said. “And she wasn’t even royalty. Philip is.” The King sighed and said he felt Elizabeth was too young to get married. The Princess invoked Queen Victoria. “She was only twenty years old when she married Prince Albert, and look how happy that marriage was.”
The King was not persuaded. As a father, he fretted about Philip’s commitment to fidelity. He had been apprised of some of the young lieutenant’s shore leaves with his navy buddy Michael Parker and their visits to brothels in Alexandria; he did not like the sound of Philip’s continuing relationship with his childhood friend Helene Foufounis Cordet, and he heartily disapproved of Philip’s midnight crawls through London’s West End with his cousin David Milford Haven. But the King was growing anxious over his daughter’s increasing willfulness and determination to marry Philip. She knew that because she was heir presumptive, her marriage required her father’s approval as well as that of the government and the Commonwealth. Yet she alarmed her father when she intimated that if he did not give her permission to marry Philip, she would follow the footsteps of her uncle, the Duke of Windsor, who abdicated to marry the person he loved.
The Princess’s apparent willingness to put love before duty was noted even by the U.S. Ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, Lewis Douglas, a close friend of the royal family. He informed the State Department in a 1947 memo:
… it was learned that Princess Elizabeth had determined to marry [Prince Philip] and declared that if objections were raised she would not hesitate to follow the example of her uncle, King Edward VIII, and abdicate. She has a firm character.
More than forty years later, one of the King’s former aides quaked at the mention of the 1936 abdication by the Duke of Windsor, which is still considered a sacrilege within royal circles. “The Princess did not threaten to do that… exactly,” the aide said in an effort to “clarify” the record. “She only indicated that she could understand the romance behind her uncle’s rationale. That’s a far cry from declaring her intention to abdicate.”
In public, Elizabeth could no longer hide her feelings. Her adoration of Philip was so obvious that rumors began circulating, prompting the foreign press to report that the couple were “informally engaged.” The British press did not dare to make such a conjecture. Still, nervous about world opinion, the King told the Palace to officially