Her Majesty (52 page)

The Royal Family have their disagreements, like any other. But there is a common perception at large that the Duke and the Prince of Wales are always at loggerheads. Not true say those who know them both well. ‘If you see them together, they get on like a house on fire,’ says one. ‘It’s constructive tension. I think in many ways they’re on the same routes and it’s been helpful to them that they don’t always agree. They do approach things from different angles. That’s the way life is in families.’

Gyles Brandreth says that the Duke once explained it all to him as follows: ‘Prince Charles is a romantic and I’m a pragmatist. And sometimes a romantic thinks that a pragmatist is unfeeling.’

‘It’s just the classic eldest son and father thing – always seeking approval
and always wanting to do things differently,’ says a member of the Prince of Wales’s inner circle. ‘He’s not like Philip physically,’ the Duke’s sister, Sophie, Princess George of Hanover, once remarked, ‘but very like him in his ways of laughing and his quick way of saying something.’

Others point to the Prince’s Trust as an example of shared interests pursued in different ways. The Duke of Edinburgh’s Award is a global success, having helped more than six million young people in 120 countries.
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Since 1956, it has encouraged young people to set and achieve challenges for themselves. Two decades later, when the Prince of Wales, came to leave the Royal Navy, he used the contents of his pension fund to create the Prince’s Trust and give disadvantaged young people help in turning their lives around. It’s now one of the giants of the charitable sector. There are many similarities with the Duke’s Award but it is neither a copy nor a rival. ‘They are complementary,’ explains Elizabeth Buchanan, former Private Secretary to the Prince of Wales. ‘The Prince’s Trust helps a lot of people who might be missed by the awards, people who have been forgotten. So you get the Trust and the Award working very well alongside each other. What the Royal Family don’t like to do is bump into each other and operate in the same area. It is not a good use of resources.’

Prince Andrew, the Duke of York, is the one whose professional life has most closely followed that of the Duke – career Royal Navy officer and then globetrotting trade promoter. He gave up the trade role for regular royal duties in 2011. There had been complaints about his robust diplomatic style, his encounters with certain dubious regimes and his friendship with an American financier convicted of sex offences. The Duke of York’s supporters have pointed out that he was simply a vigorous champion of British interests and that his meetings with unsavoury regimes were in the line of his (unpaid) duty as a business ambassador, for the British Government. Furthermore, they say, we all have embarrassing friends.

But it is Prince Edward, the Earl of Wessex, who has taken on many of his father’s duties, notably the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award scheme. These days, it is the Earl and Countess of Wessex who see most of the Queen and the Duke – accompanying them to church at Windsor on Sunday, dropping round for weekend tea, hosting the annual private party for the Queen’s birthday. It is also the Earl who will ensure that the Duke of Edinburgh title continues to ‘enjoy perpetuation’. It goes against all the rules of the hereditary peerage but it is the Monarch who sets the rules and she made this one on Prince Edward’s wedding day in 1999. Amid all the excitement, most people overlooked the announcement that,
following the deaths of both Prince Philip and the Queen, the title of Duke of Edinburgh would pass to Prince Edward and his heirs. Otherwise, it would have followed the usual route for a hereditary title and gone to the eldest son, in which case it would simply have been absorbed into the Prince of Wales’s extensive collection of titles.

It is often said that, of all his children, the Duke is closest to the Princess Royal, although the fact that she is an only daughter may have something to do with it. What can be argued with a greater degree of certainty is that it is the Princess who most closely resembles the Duke. Her workaholism, absence of vanity, briskness, coolness under fire (literally, in the case of the 1974 attempted kidnapping), loyalty to staff, contempt for flatterers and ditherers and her love of the sea are all ducal characteristics which seem particularly pronounced in the Princess. Tony Blair was immediately struck by the likeness. In his memoirs he recalls the day his wife met the Princess for the first time at Balmoral. When Mrs Blair attempted some ‘Call me Cherie’ informality, the Princess replied: ‘Actually, I prefer Mrs Blair.’ None the less, Mr Blair retains an abiding respect for the Princess: ‘I always liked her. I doubt the feeling was mutual. She is a chip right off the old man’s block. People think Prince Philip doesn’t give a damn about what people think of him and they are right. Anne is exactly the same. She is what she is and if you don’t like it, you can clear off. It’s not a quality I have but I admire those who do. The unfortunate thing is it stops people seeing the other side of their character.’ In fact, in the most trying situations, the Duke can display great sensitivity entirely at odds with his media persona. One of the less predictable disclosures of the six-month inquest into the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, was the correspondence which showed the extent to which the Duke had tried to help and reassure his daughter-in-law during the breakdown of her marriage. Perhaps the Duke’s own experience of being up against some of the old Palace hierarchies, of being simultaneously inside and outside the royal loop, help him to identify with others struggling on their royal pedestals.

If there is one concern which even good friends of the family are prepared to voice it is that the Duke’s paternal advice to his younger children has pushed the ‘be yourself’ mantra too far. ‘The Duke has encouraged them to be too like him and not enough like her. They do need to be a bit more like the Queen,’ says one close ally. ‘He has told them to follow their instincts and be their own people and not be bossed around like he was when he arrived at the Palace. While that’s admirable, it has led to things like
It’s a Royal Knockout
. It’s why we get the Duke of York sounding off to a room full of senior businessmen about whatever
he thinks.’ But the same friends are also quick to point out that what makes the Duke of Edinburgh’s attitude entirely understandable – and his achievements so remarkable – is his own extraordinary childhood. His is a story which would today be classified as a borderline case for social services. Yet it produced an uncommonly determined, cheerful, self-starting, intelligent young man who would win the heart of the most eligible young woman on earth. Is it any wonder he has raised his own children to follow their instincts rather than dwell on their frailties?

Prince Philip was born in Corfu on 10 June 1921, the fifth child and only son of Prince Andrew of Greece and Princess Alice of Battenberg (Lord Mountbatten’s sister). His father’s family were Danish/Russian/German, his mother’s German/British, but the baby was sixth in line to the Greek throne. This was not a glittering prize in the Euro-royal scheme of things. Prince Philip’s grandfather had been assassinated eight years earlier, his parents had already had one spell in exile and cousin Alexander’s reign had come to a sudden end in 1920 courtesy of a fatal monkey bite. Following another military coup, Prince Andrew was made a scapegoat for the disastrous 1919-22 war with Turkey during which he had commanded the 2nd Army Corps. He had fought gallantly but his reward was a death sentence – for ‘disobeying orders’ – from a kangaroo court in December 1922. Just hours later, a British diplomat managed to negotiate his release for long enough to get him aboard a British warship, dispatched by his cousin George V. Joined by his family, Prince Andrew set sail for a life of exile in France. Prince Philip, still a baby, was famously carried aboard in an orange crate. In Paris, the family lived perfectly comfortably although, by contemporary European royal standards, they were poor. By the age of seven, Prince Philip was sent to Britain to attend Cheam preparatory school and within two years the family had broken up. His four sisters had all married, his parents were separated and his mother was committed to a Swiss sanatorium after a mental breakdown.

When not at school, the young Prince would be passed among Mountbatten relations in Britain or make his own way across Europe to stay with his sisters and his network of royal cousins. It was a life of contrasts not easily comprehensible to modern minds. One week, this ten-year-old child might be alone on a train, heaving a suitcase from Calais to Germany. The next, he might be riding on the shores of the Black Sea with Cousin Michael, the schoolboy King of Romania. As he himself has remarked, it all seemed perfectly normal at the time – though not in hindsight: ‘It really is amazing that I was left to cross a continent all by myself – taxis, trains and boats – to get to my sisters.’ At school,
he was a thoughtful, unstuffy child who neither complained nor bragged about his strange royal existence. Apparently he was known as ‘Flop’, although he was anything but. Few were aware of his royal links or of the photograph of his cousin George V, which he kept in a suitcase. Yet, come the holidays, he would set off for a kinsman’s
schloss
, often to be reunited with his adored father. There would, though, be no contact with his mother until his mid-teens, by which time she had emerged from self-imposed medical exile (mother and son would be much closer in later life). After Cheam, the Prince spent a year at Salem, a German school housed in a brother-in-law’s castle and run by the pioneering educationalist Kurt Hahn. Nazism was on the rise. More than sixty years later, the Duke would recall that every new boy was assigned someone called a ‘helper’ and that his ‘helper’ was Jewish. One night, a gang of pupils cornered the boy in his bed and cut all his hair off. ‘You can imagine what an effect this had on us junior boys,’ the Duke recounted. ‘Nothing could have given us a clearer indication of the meaning of prejudice and persecution.’ Prince Philip gave the boy the cricket cap he had brought with him from Cheam to cover his scalp until his hair grew back. ‘It taught me a very important lesson about man’s capacity for inhumanity,’ the Duke explained. ‘And I have never, ever, forgotten it.’

The Nazis drove Hahn (himself the son of a German-Jewish industrialist) into exile and Prince Philip was sent to join his new foundation at Gordonstoun in Scotland. It was a small school, dedicated more to helping every boy achieve his own potential than making him conform to type. Prince Philip flourished and became head boy before signing up for the Royal Navy in 1939. Years later, he said it was probably his maternal uncle, Lord Louis ‘Dickie’ Mountbatten, who steered him into it. ‘He may have persuaded me. I just sort of accepted it,’ Prince Philip told Basil Boothroyd in 1970. ‘I didn’t feel very strongly about it. I really wanted to go into the Air Force. Left to my own devices, I’d have gone into the Air Force without a doubt.’ But he flourished at Dartmouth Royal Naval College, emerging as best cadet. It was also during his time there that the King and Queen came to visit with their daughters and Prince Philip was deputed to entertain the two Princesses. If the encounter did not have an enduring impact on him, it left a lasting impression on Princess Elizabeth.

During the Second World War, the Prince was again caught between two worlds. As he later reflected: ‘You get swept up into these things. It was tragic.’ His three sisters (the beloved Cecile had been killed in a plane crash in 1937) were all married to German officers. His father was marooned in German-controlled Monte Carlo where he would die in 1944. Prince Philip
would never see him again.
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The Prince’s mother, by now recovered, insisted on remaining in occupied Athens. There she organised food and medical supplies for the poor, hid a Jewish family from the Nazis and founded an order of nuns. In short, one way or another, Prince Philip’s entire family ended up in enemy territory. His own war took him to the Indian Ocean and then to the Mediterranean. Serving in HMS
Valiant
, he was mentioned in dispatches for his part in the Battle of Cape Matapan. It was his search-light battery which snared two Italian battle cruisers and helped send them to the bottom. With the characteristic modesty of his generation, he now looks back on it as nothing more than ‘a bit of activity’.

Promoted rapidly, he became one of the youngest first lieutenants in the Royal Navy, serving as second-in-command of HMS
Wallace
in the North Sea and during the Allied landings in Sicily. He would finish the war in HMS
Whelp
, witnessing the Japanese surrender in Tokyo Bay. During his shore leave in Britain, he would stay with Mountbatten relations and, occasionally, with his distant cousin the King at Windsor Castle. ‘I’d call in and have a meal,’ he remarked years later, as if recollecting a favourite cafè. ‘I once or twice spent Christmas at Windsor because I’d nowhere particular to go.’ But, by now, he had definitely caught the eye of Princess Elizabeth. Despite introductions to a succession of eligible Guards officers on duty at the castle, her heart was set on her sailor Prince. With peace came progress. ‘When I got back in ’46 and went to Balmoral,’ he told his biographer, ‘it was probably then that it became, you know, that we began to think about it seriously and even talk about it.’

There was plenty of time to think about it. At the start of 1947, the Princess had to accompany her parents on their four-month tour of southern Africa. She celebrated her twenty-first birthday in Cape Town and returned to find her Prince waiting with a proposal (or, as he later put it: ‘it was sort of fixed up when they came back’). The engagement was announced in July and their November wedding brought a much-needed splash of colour to a monochrome, washed-out, ration-book nation. As Duke and Duchess of Edinburgh, life got better and better. Charles and Anne were born in quick succession and the Duke was finally given his own ship, HMS
Magpie
, in 1950. But in 1951 it became clear that the King’s health was deteriorating and that the Princess would have to start deputising for her father more and more. The Duke returned
from sea, ostensibly on a temporary basis, to assist his wife until the King and Queen returned from a forthcoming Commonwealth tour. That tour never happened and the Duke never went back to sea. On 6 February 1952, everything changed.