The royals - Kitty Kelley [39]
I declare before you that my whole life, whether it be long or short, shall be devoted to your service and the service of our great Imperial Commonwealth to which we all belong.* But I shall not have strength to carry out this resolution unless you join in it with me, as I now invite you to do; I know that your support will be unfailingly given. God bless all of you who are willing to share it.
Finally, against his better judgment, the King relented. He agreed to allow his daughter to marry Philip, provided Philip, who changed his name, his nationality, and his religion, was deemed acceptable by the British establishment. His uncle quickly introduced him to Britain’s most powerful press lords, who agreed that his relationship to Queen Victoria (he, like Elizabeth, was a great-great-grandchild) and his service in the Royal Navy qualified him as suitable. Still, the King declined to announce the engagement. He ordered absolute secrecy about any future plans until after the tour of South Africa, hoping against hope that Elizabeth might change her mind. He instructed the Palace to keep denying the rumors swarming around the couple, and he demanded total discretion from Philip. He forbade him to be seen with Elizabeth in public until after the royal family returned in 1947. He had told Philip that he could not see the family off at Waterloo Station, and he could not go aboard their ship at Portsmouth to say good-bye. The King would not allow his future son-in-law to attend the bon voyage luncheon at Buckingham Palace with the royal household staff or to be at the pier to welcome the royal family home ten weeks later. He did say Philip could write his fiancée during the trip, and he allowed him to attend his engagement party with the royal family and Lord and Lady Mountbatten at their London home on Chester Street two nights before departure. There the two families secretly celebrated the announcement, which would not be made official for several months. That night the King drank heavily.
Aboard ship, the Queen took comfort in the kindness of Surgeon Rear Admiral Henry “Chippy” White, who accompanied the royal family to South Africa, where he retired the following year. “Chippy White, whose son was my uncle, was knighted for his service to the King,” said Hugh Bygott-Webb, “but I don’t think that KCVO [Knight Commander of the Victorian Order] included his affair with the King’s wife. Now, I have no absolute proof of this love affair with the Queen, who later became the Queen Mother, but their romance, accompanied by love letters, has been assumed within the family for years and years. The letters remain in the family and always will.”
In photographs taken during the South African tour, the Queen beamed while her daughter Elizabeth looked bored and distracted, except during the celebration of her twenty-first birthday on April 21, 1947, in Cape Town. Feted with salutes all day and a grand ball and fireworks in the evening, Elizabeth spent the morning opening birthday presents of extravagant proportions: a platinum brooch in the shape of a flame lily set with three hundred diamonds and paid for with one week’s pocket money collected from forty-two thousand Rhodesian schoolchildren; a pair of diamond flower-petal earrings from the members of the royal households, who barely made £1,000 ($2,000) a year; a diamond-studded badge of the Grenadier Guards, her favorite regiment, of which she was the Colonel; and from her parents a twin pair of Cartier ivy-leaf brooches covered with two thousand pavé diamonds surrounded by two five-carat diamonds in the center. The state gifts from South Africa, worth more than $1 million at the time, were equally lavish: the King received a gold box full of diamonds to put on his Garter star, and the Queen was given an engraved twenty-two-karat gold tea service. Princess Margaret received a necklace of seventeen graduated diamonds, and Elizabeth was given a silver chest containing