The royals - Kitty Kelley [43]
At the wedding, the Archbishop of Canterbury declared that the ceremony for Princess Elizabeth was “exactly the same as it would be for any cottager who might be married this afternoon in some small country church in a remote village in the Dales: the same prayers are offered; the same blessings are given.” The differences: the twelve wedding cakes at the royal reception, including one nine feet high that Philip cut with his sword, each slice containing a week’s sugar rations for the average family; 2,666 wedding presents, including a Thoroughbred horse, a mink coat, a twenty-two-karat gold coffee service, a television set, a fifty-four-carat pink diamond said to be the only one of its kind in the world, and a plantation and hunting lodge in Kenya.
Led by a procession of eighteen horse-drawn carriages, the royal guests included six kings, six queens, seven princesses, one princess regent, one prince regent, one Indian rajah, one crown prince, one crown princess, seven counts, six countesses, eleven viscounts, fourteen dukes, and eleven duchesses, who accounted for most of the sixty-seven diamond tiaras worn.
“The jewelry at that wedding was staggering,” recalled the Danish Ambassador’s daughter, who attended with her father. “I was breathless and gaping at the stupendous display. It was prewar dimension. Everyone had gone to the bank to get their jewels out of the vault. Diamond tiaras looked like beanies, and the former Duchess of Rutland had her entire head wrapped in diamonds. She said it was her grandmother’s belt. A woman wearing a turban made of pearls the size of cherries passed another lady weighted down with bunches of cabochon emeralds cascading down her shoulders like grapes on a vine. The Indians wore breastplates of rubies and diamonds and wrapped their arms from wrist to shoulder in sapphires.”
Overnight, the impecunious bridegroom, who was earning eight guineas a week as a navy lieutenant, became a nobleman with rank, title, and position, entitling him to layers of shining gold epaulets. He acquired a valet, a social secretary, and an equerry, plus a royal residence at Clarence House with £50,000 (about $100,000) for refurbishments, and a castle (Sunninghill Park) for country weekends. Before the couple could move into the castle, the Crown property on the edge of Windsor Great Park went up in flames—the first of many unexplained fires to haunt the House of Windsor.
“Oh, Crawfie, how could it have happened?” Elizabeth wrote to her former governess. “Do you really think someone did it on purpose? I can’t believe it. People are always so kind to us….”
The morning before the wedding, Philip knelt before the King, who unsheathed his sword and, tapping each shoulder, knighted his future son-in-law with the Order of the Garter. Within the British honors system, the cornflower blue sash and eight-pointed star of the Garter is recognized as the highest accolade* a monarch can bestow. In a letter to his mother, the King said he had given the honor to Elizabeth eight days earlier so that she would have precedence over her husband.
Previously Philip had been reduced to the status of a commoner when he was forced to renounce his Greek name, title, nationality, and religion. Now he was rewarded with three exalted British titles—Baron Greenwich, Earl of Merioneth, and Duke of Edinburgh. The title of Prince of the Realm was withheld and would not be conferred until 1957. But before his wedding day Philip was granted the distinction of being addressed as His Royal Highness. This rankled some of the nobility, who still point out that Britain’s dukes not born of royal blood are to be addressed as His Grace, not as His Royal Highness. But the King was determined to ennoble his twenty-six-year-old son-in-law so that his daughter would have the status of a peer’s wife. The King also wanted to make sure that his grandchildren would be born of noble blood. “It is a