The royals - Kitty Kelley [60]
No longer. The strong, dominant, take-charge husband was suddenly unmanned. He was no longer on an equal footing with his wife. Constitutionally he had no status, except what he received from the Queen.
“I remember attending a dinner for only ten people,” said Evelyn Prebensen, the daughter of the dean of the Diplomatic Corps. “And even then poor Philip could not sit down if the Queen was still standing. She was very much the monarch in the early years and insisted on her royal prerogatives. If Philip came into the room after she did, he had to bow to her and say, ‘I’m sorry, Your Majesty.’ ”
His friends watched helplessly as Philip sank into depression after Elizabeth’s accession.
“You could feel it all underneath,” ex-King Peter of Yugoslavia told his wife after the King’s funeral. “I don’t know how long he can last… bottled up like that.”
“He used to say, ‘I’m neither one thing nor the other. I’m nothing,’ ” recalled Michael Parker’s wife, Eileen.
Philip, who had aspired to be an admiral, recognized that his career in the navy was sunk. He locked himself in his room and spent hours shut away by himself, confiding only in his eldest sister, Margarita.
“You can imagine what’s going to happen now,” he said with foreboding.
The day after the King’s funeral, the Mountbattens entertained their German relatives at Broadlands, where Uncle Dickie boasted that the House of Windsor no longer reigned. With a Champagne flute in hand, he proposed a toast to the new House of Mountbatten. He boasted that the blood of Battenberg had risen from obscurity on the banks of the Rhine to the highest throne on earth. His cousin Prince Ernst August of Hanover reported the conversation to Queen Mary, who was outraged. As someone who studied genealogy like a miner assaying gold, she knew that Philip’s family descended from the House of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glucksburg-Beck. She ticked off his royal antecedents like a child reciting the alphabet.
“Philip’s name is not Mountbatten,” she said. “If he has any name at all, it is Glucksburg.”*
She summoned Churchill and reminded him that her husband, King George V, had decreed in 1917 that the House of Windsor was to be the royal family’s name forever, and she said no amount of posturing by that “ambitious upstart” Dickie Mountbatten could change the royal edict. The Prime Minister listened respectfully and marveled at how effectively the elderly Queen had buried her German roots to become an icon of Great Britain. She told him she had always despised Hitler because his German accent was so horrible. “He never could speak the language properly,” she said.
Churchill called a cabinet meeting to discuss Mountbatten’s claim. The cabinet ministers, mindful of the two world wars England fought against the hated Huns, insisted that the new Queen make a public announcement: she must affirm herself a Windsor and proclaim that all her descendants would bear the Windsor surname. Churchill and his ministers felt that anything less would cause political insurrection, so suspicious were they of Mountbatten’s dynastic ambitions and liberal politics.† The Queen was duly informed. Churchill told her that “the feeling of the government reinforced by public opinion was that Her Majesty should drop the Mountbatten name and reign under your father’s name of Windsor.” Philip argued strenuously for the House of Mountbatten and Windsor and, failing that, pleaded for the House of Windsor and Edinburgh. But she relied on her Prime Minister and his advisers, which thoroughly humiliated her husband.
“I’m just a bloody amoeba,” he was heard to cry. “That’s all.”
Many years later Martin Charteris said, “I’ve always taken that to mean Philip [figured he] was just there to deposit semen.”
The Queen even deprived her husband of that function. Having let it be known the year before that she had wanted to have another child, she now changed her mind. But she was angry when she