The royals - Kitty Kelley [40]
Laden with jewels, the royal family returned to England in May 1947. But the King still wouldn’t announce his daughter’s engagement. He excluded Philip’s name from the Royal Ascot house party at Windsor Castle, but on July 8 Philip, who was teaching at the Royal Navy Petty Officers School at Kingsmoor, phoned the King. He asked permission to go to Buckingham Palace that evening to give Elizabeth a three-carat diamond engagement ring that had belonged to his mother.* The King consented and graciously invited his future son-in-law for dinner. Philip drove his sporty MG ninety-eight miles from Wiltshire to London. Two days later the engagement was announced by the same Palace spokesman who had been denying it for two years.
“We got engaged,” said Elizabeth’s dresser, Margaret “BoBo” MacDonald, on the day the betrothal was announced. So close was she to Elizabeth that she frequently talked of herself and her future sovereign as a single person. The Scotswoman, who had been with Elizabeth since she was born, would accompany her on her honeymoon and serve her morning coffee every day until BoBo died in 1993, forty-seven years later.
The wedding was set for November 20, 1947, but again over the King’s objections. Citing the coal shortage and the country’s economic collapse, he suggested a quiet ceremony at St. George’s Chapel in Windsor to minimize the expense of pomp and ceremony. But Elizabeth and her mother insisted on a big wedding. The King tried to stall the inevitable by suggesting June of the next year, when, he said, the weather would be warmer. Elizabeth said she didn’t care if it snowed: she was getting married in November.
The British press reported the engagement as the love match of the century. “This is no arranged marriage,” said the Daily Mail. “The couple is well and truly in love,” said the Daily Telegraph. Skeptical Americans did not try to dispute the matter. “The world, seeing this pretty girl and young navy officer together, will like to think of this as a love match rather than as any union dictated by politics,” declared an editorial in The New York Times.
Arranged marriages were not foreign to Philip. Until 1923 such marriages had been the rule for royalty, not the exception. Love was seldom an option, as he knew from the marriages of his parents, his two Mountbatten uncles, and all of his cousins, including Marina, the impoverished Greek Princess who had been imported to England to straighten out the bisexual Duke of Kent. Ever pragmatic, Philip, too, was marrying for a reason.
“Why do you think I’m getting married?” he asked Cobina Wright. “I’ll tell you: It’s because I’ve never really had a home. From the time I was eight, I’ve always been away at school or in the navy.”
Almost a quarter century later, Philip admitted publicly that his marriage to Elizabeth had been arranged. “There was their excursion to South Africa, and then it was sort of fixed up when they came back,” he told his biographer, Basil Boothroyd, in 1971. “That’s what really happened.” By then he had been married to Elizabeth for twenty-four years, provided a male heir to the throne, and become resigned to his role as Consort. Beyond that, he had learned to be discreet about the life he led with other women.
“This is not to say that he wasn’t fond of Elizabeth when he married her,” said his friend Larry Adler, the American harmonica player who moved to England after being blacklisted as a suspected communist* in America. He belonged to Philip’s male luncheon group known as the Thursday Club. “Was he in love with Elizabeth? No, but he had a great deal of respect for her.”
So much so that when someone suggested Philip was marrying the ugly duckling and that Princess Margaret was far prettier than her sister, he flared. “You wouldn’t say that if you knew them. Elizabeth is sweet and kind,” he said, “just like her mother.”
As soon as the engagement was announced, Uncle Dickie, writing from India, bombarded his nephew with advice