In August, the Labour MP and journalist Tom Driberg, who was friendly with Mountbatten, took Philip on an educational trip round Parliament. Afterwards, he offered to help with newspaper articles. Mountbatten had replied with an urgent request that Driberg should not allow ‘any form of pre-publicity to break, which I feel would be fatal’ – while also sending the MP a biographical information pack for use later, which would show that his nephew ‘really is more English than any other nationality.’75 Now he asked Driberg to use this material, which recounted that Philip was the son of ‘the late General Prince Andrew of Greece and of Denmark, GCVO,’ that he had spent no more than three months in Greece since the age of one, and that he spoke no Greek. Mountbatten also asked Driberg to persuade his ‘Left Wing friends’ – that is, Labour MPs who might ask awkward questions – that Philip had ‘nothing whatever to do with the political set-up in Greece, or any of our reactionaries.’ Finally, he briefed the Press Association that ‘the Prince’s desire to be British dated back several years before the rumours about the engagement,’ and somewhat disingenuously, had ‘no possible connection with such rumours’.76 To his great relief – as, no doubt, to that of Philip and Elizabeth – the press rose to the occasion. Most newspapers printed the Mountbatten memorandum almost verbatim, but without attribution, and as if it were news. The Times even obligingly suggested that, but for the war, Philip might have become a British subject on passing out from Dartmouth in 1939.77
Philip turned down the offer of ‘HRH,’ which was anomalous once he stopped being Greek, preferring to stick to his naval rank. There remained the question of his surname. On this, Dickie received his reward. Philip’s Danish-derived dynastic name, Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg, did little to assist the desired transformation. The ex-prince therefore turned to his mother’s and uncle’s family, adopting the appellation ‘Mountbatten’, itself the anglicized version of a foreign name changed during an earlier bout of xenophobia. Lord Mountbatten took the name change back to the King and Home Secretary, and fixed that too,78 and on 18th March 1947 the change of nationality of Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten of 16 Chester Street appeared in the London Gazette.
There was a sequel to the saga of Philip’s rushed naturalization. In November 1972 Lord Dilhorne, the former Lord Chancellor, replied to an inquiry from Lord Mountbatten with a remarkable piece of information. It was undeniably the case, he wrote, that under a 1705 Act of Parliament all descendants of the Electress Sophie of Hanover were British subjects. The point had, indeed, been tested in a 1956 case involving Prince Ernst August of Hanover, which concluded with a decision in the House of Lords that the Prince was a British subject by virtue of the same Act. Philip was, of course, a descendant of the Electress, through Queen Victoria. ‘. . . [S]o it appears,’ wrote Dilhorne, ‘that the naturalization of Prince Philip was quite unnecessary and of no effect for you cannot naturalize someone who is already a British subject . . .’ The law was quite clear: the Queen’s consort had had British nationality since the date of his birth.79
Chapter 6
IF UNCLE DICKIE and his nephew believed that Buckingham Palace was dragging its feet over procedures which, when complete, would remove the major political objection to a marriage, they were probably right. Buffeted by his daughter, the King made enquiries. A few days before the Japanese surrender, Sir Alan Lascelles even wrote that George VI was ‘interesting himself keenly’ in the question of Philip’s naturalization.1 But the King did not press his advisers to speed things along, and his advisers did not press ministers. It took the energetic intervention of Lord Mountbatten to bring the matter to a conclusion. Indeed, a profound ambivalence seems to have characterized the attitude of the entire Court, almost until the engagement was announced.
The Windsors were a harmonious family, and Elizabeth’s views were usually respected. It is interesting, therefore, that on something so important there should have been a difference of opinion. The explanation, common enough in royal romances through the centuries, seems to have been that the qualities that made the suitor lovable to the Heiress, did not have the same effect on those who guarded over the inheritance.
There were good grounds for approving of Prince Philip. In looks, public manner, war record, even in his choice of the Royal Navy, he fitted the part of ‘crown consort’ to perfection. The reasons for objecting to him were more complex. Some were obvious – in particular, the fact that, as Crawfie unerringly put it, he was a ‘prince without a home or kingdom,’ and hence, in seeking the hand of a British princess who had both, was aiming too high.2 But there were other factors. In particular, ambivalence towards Philip reflected ambivalence towards his uncle. Though Mountbatten was close to the King, he was also known for his politicking and intrigue, and for his intimacy with the Labour Government. There seems to have been a dislike of conceding yet another round to Uncle Dickie’s apparently ungovernable ambitions, and a fear that in doing so a fifth columnist might be introduced who would give Mountbatten the chance to exert a reforming influence on the style and traditions of Buckingham Palace.3
As far as the King and Queen themselves were concerned, there were personal reasons for not being rushed into a precipitate match. Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon had been twenty-two when she accepted the proposal of the Duke of York in 1923. Her daughter was a mere seventeen at the time of Prince Philip’s first formal request to be considered as a suitor. Queen Mary’s belief, as related to Lady Airlie, that Elizabeth’s parents simply considered her too young for marriage, may well be right. So too may Lady Airlie’s own theory that the King was miserable about the prospect of letting her go, that his elder daughter ‘was his constant companion in shooting, walking, riding – in fact in everything,’ and he dreaded losing her.4 Both views are also compatible with Wheeler-Bennett’s suggestion that the King regarded Elizabeth as not only too young but too inexperienced, and found it hard to believe that she had fallen in love with the first young man she had ever met.5
In addition, there was the Prince himself – and here there was a contradiction that has continued to dog him all his life. Philip had a capacity to attract admiration and to cause irritation in equal measure. At the time, he was a man with enthusiastic supporters, but also with angry detractors. On the one hand, friends extolled his energy, directness, and ability to lead, attributes that brought him success at school and Dartmouth and in the Navy, and helped to win the hearts of many an English débutante and émigré countess. On the other, his forthright manner made some older people suspicious. What worked with naval ratings and princesses – abruptness, a democratic style, intolerance of humbug – grated at Court, and in the grander houses of the aristocracy. A courtier once told Harold Nicolson that both the King and the Queen ‘felt he was rough, ill-tempered, uneducated and would probably not be faithful.’6 According to a former adviser to the King: ‘Some of the people who were guests at Balmoral thought him rather unpolished’.
There was also something else, alluded to in the last chapter: Philip’s supposed (and actual) connections with the nation which, at the time of his first overtures, Britain was engaged in fighting. For all his acquired Englishness, there was something in Philip’s character, in his tendency to put backs up, and in his mixture of rootlessness and dubious roots, that stirred in the previous generation of high aristocrats a mixture of snobbery and xenophobia. ‘The kind of people who didn’t like Prince Philip were the kind who didn’t like Mountbatten,’ suggests an ex-courtier. ‘It was all bound up in the single word: “German”.’7
In view of the Germanic links of the British Royal Family over the preceding two centuries, this was scarcely a rational prejudice, but it was undoubtedly there. The strongest evidence of its existence is provided by unpublished sections of the diary of Jock (later Sir John) Colville, who had been a private secretary to Neville Chamberlain and then to Winston Churchill, and became Princess Elizabeth’s private secretary in the summer of 1947. During his first stay at Balmoral in the same year, Colville noted with fascination the prevailing