The royals - Kitty Kelley [61]
After the row about renaming the House of Windsor, Queen Elizabeth II, the fourth sovereign of that dynasty, dutifully announced on April 9, 1952, that unlike every other wife in the realm, she would not carry her husband’s name.
“It was very hurting to Prince Philip that the one thing he felt he brought to his marriage, which was his name, was no longer possible,” said Patricia, Countess Mountbatten. “But Churchill was an old, very experienced man, and [Elizabeth] was a very young and new Queen, and, understandably, she felt… it wasn’t her place to stand up to him and say, ‘I don’t want to do this.’ ”
Philip’s position was uncomfortable. When a man ascends to the throne and becomes King, his wife automatically becomes his Queen Consort and is crowned with him. Not so when a woman ascends and becomes Queen. There are no rules defining the position of her husband. The husband of Mary, Queen of Scots, became King Consort as did the husband of Mary I. Queen Victoria honored her husband with the title Prince Consort. Elizabeth declined to do the same for Philip.
She tried to mollify her husband by elevating his position within the realm. She declared that “His Royal Highness, Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, henceforth and on all occasions… shall have, hold and enjoy Place, Pre-Eminence and Precedence next to Her Majesty.” This declaration of rank put Philip ahead of everyone in the kingdom, including someone who had once been King (the Duke of Windsor) and someone who would become King one day—Prince Charles.
The Queen then promoted her husband from lieutenant to Admiral, which entitled him to wear the uniform and receive full honors as Admiral of the Royal Navy.* She also elevated him to the highest rank in each of the other military services, making him Field Marshal of the Army, Marshal of the Royal Air Force, and Captain General of the Royal Marines. Despite these honors—sudden and unearned—Philip had no authority: he was only background music for the melody. During the painful adjustment to his wife’s accession, he learned what his father-in-law, King George VI, had meant when he said: “Being a consort is much more difficult than being a sovereign. It’s perhaps the most difficult job in the world.”
Days after moving from Clarence House to Buckingham Palace, Philip had an attack of jaundice, a liver disease his friends attributed to stress and depression. Engorged with bile, he was confined to bed for three weeks. His valet, John Dean, served him his meals—”all boiled and bland”—and the Queen visited him three times a day.
“The Duke’s complexion went a sickly yellow, and he was very disgusted and depressed when told what he had got,” said his valet. “I paid great attention to him all the time he was ill, doing my utmost to meet his every wish, because I felt so sorry for him in that gloomy room.”
Prince Philip recovered his health gradually but continued to feel diminished in his marriage. A few months later he rallied for the coronation because his wife had put him in charge of the ceremony, but the bleakness of being the Queen’s Consort nearly capsized him.
“People forget what it was like when the Queen was twenty-six and I was thirty, when she succeeded [to the throne],” he told the writer Fiametta Rocco. “Well… that’s when things started….”
SEVEN
The black armbands disappeared three months after the King’s death, and for the next year the coronation of the Queen seemed to dominate the country’s newsrooms, barrooms, boardrooms, and drawing rooms. The event was set for Tuesday, June 2, 1953, at 10:30 A.M., and until that moment, everything revolved around regalia.
The coronation, which was to be England’s reward for prevailing in the war, resonated with the memory of sacrifice and the hope of rebirth. The hyperbolic