Her Majesty (53 page)

While the apparatus of monarchy was ready and waiting for the new Queen, the Court had no idea what to do with the new, well, … what
was
he? The wife of a King is automatically the Queen. But the husband of a Queen, rather like the husband of a Dame or a Baroness, receives no reciprocity. Queen Victoria had complained that no formal role had existed for Prince Albert after their marriage but nothing much was done about it. The Duke was perfectly happy to carry on being the Duke. He was much more concerned about the impact on his young family and, to a lesser extent, on himself. The first of several run-ins with the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, followed the Duke’s suggestion that the family might carry on living at Clarence House. Churchill, primed by the Queen’s Private Secretary, Sir Alan Lascelles, was having none of it. Monarchs, the Duke was told firmly, lived at Buckingham Palace. There was even greater tension when the old guard got wind of a house party rumour. Lord Mountbatten, it was said, had been boasting that the ‘House of Mountbatten’ now reigned. Whether he had or not (Churchill thought it pure Mountbatten), the Prime Minister wasted no time in making it clear that he, the Cabinet and the Queen were adamant that there would be no change of name. It was still the House of Windsor. The Duke had never suggested otherwise but it hurt to be squashed so firmly and so publicly. He was, he said, no more than a ‘bloody amoeba’.

Within the Palace, there was a lot of territorial growling from the old guard – the ‘men with moustaches’ as the Duke’s staff would call them. They were determined to keep the new consort in his place in case he got any ideas about being the new master.

Among the dimmer patrician elements it was a case of plain snobbery, even bigotry. The chap was an impoverished outsider from a third-rate, clapped-out foreign monarchy and had a lot of dubious German relations. According to Kenneth Rose, the Duke received an extraordinary snub following the Queen’s accession and automatic promotion to Colonel-in-Chief of all the Foot Guards. She suggested that he might take her old appointment as Colonel of the Grenadier Guards. But the idea was sniffily rejected by a cabal of senior officers.
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It is a measure of the man that when the same idea was proposed again many years later, the Duke did
not tell the regiment where it could stick its offer. Instead, he accepted, went on to be a devoted Colonel – and still is. He even spent the evening of his ninetieth birthday – Friday 10 June 2011 – chairing the Household Division’s Senior Colonels’ Conference.

The Duke could live with the snobbery. He had never felt the slightest need to prove his dynastic credentials to anyone. He was neither marrying ‘up’ nor ‘out’ of his social position. As one Mountbatten cousin has pointed out, he was ‘more royal than the Queen’, with lineal connections to almost every throne in Christendom, past and present. It was a family joke that, when in London, his Aunt Louise would always carry a note in her handbag just in case she should fall under a bus. It stated (quite correctly): ‘I am the Queen of Sweden.’ Lord Mountbatten, never one to underplay pedigree, had traced his nephew’s lineage back to Charlemagne, the Holy Roman Emperor. Years later, when a fantasist would claim to be the true Romanov heir to the Russian imperial throne, it was the Duke of Edinburgh who provided a DNA sample and stopped the claim in its tracks. He is even in the line of succession to the British throne himself, although it would take a pretty apocalyptic scenario to get him there. He currently hovers somewhere around the five hundred mark. Breeding was not his problem as far as the Duke’s more cerebral opponents were concerned. Their fear was that a headstrong young blade, fresh from a naval command, might put silly, new-fangled ideas in the head of the pretty young Monarch. What it all boiled down to was a simple issue of control. Lord Brabourne later recalled the Household hostility towards the Duke: ‘Lascelles was impossible. They were absolutely bloody to him. They patronised him. They treated him as an outsider. It wasn’t much fun. He laughed it off but it must have hurt.’

As the late Lord Charteris pointed out, the courtiers even kept the Duke at arm’s length during the Coronation itself. George VI had been crowned with his Queen at his side. The Queen was crowned alone. Even today, some members of staff are mindful of what happened to the Duke. ‘He was slightly bruised by all that, quite frankly, and he was pretty shoddily treated,’ says one. ‘If Courts want to gang up on someone, they can do it all right, I can tell you.’

The Duke, however, remains phlegmatic about it all. ‘I was told “Keep out” and that was that,’ he told Gyles Brandreth a decade ago. ‘I tried to find useful things to do. I introduced a Footman Training Programme. The old boys here hadn’t had anything like it before. We had an Organisation and Methods Review. I tried to make improvements – without unhinging things. Some of the old guard weren’t too happy. We met with a fair bit of resistance. But I think we made a few improvements, dragged
some of them into the twentieth century.’ It would be another forty years before Michael Peat and his team of management consultants dragged the rest of the Household into the twentieth century. The Duke had long given up by then. If the Palace didn’t want his help, then he would carve his own role in the wider world. His office gained a reputation as the exciting place to be in the Palace, the only department where lady clerks were known as ‘the girls’ and called by their first names. ‘There was always lots of laughter,’ says one of them, recalling the gales of mirth when the Duke succumbed to jaundice and a lady wrote to him advising a daily diet of twenty-four grapefruit. ‘He has always had a wonderful team around him. And if he thinks you know the answer, he’ll always come to you. It’s great fun to work for someone like that.’

His office staff were a small, devoted crew led by Lieutenant General Sir Frederick ‘Boy’ Browning, dashing war hero and errant husband of the writer Daphne du Maurier. A single office contained the four ‘girls’ – ‘none over forty; no one got institutionalised’ – while the Duke had two equerries next door. One was ex-RAF and one was the Duke’s old Royal Navy chum Mike Parker, a quick-witted, rumbustious Australian. ‘Boy Browning was an absolutely charming man,’ recalls one of the team. ‘But he had suffered in the war. He always talked about “me turn” – he’d had amoebic dysentery – and he had trouble with his nerves. Mike Parker could be exasperating at times but he was great fun and fitted the bill very nicely.’

It was Parker who would often bear the brunt of Establishment complaints about the Duke. On one occasion, he was summoned before Winston Churchill to receive a reprimand for allowing the Duke to travel by helicopter. ‘Is it your intention,’ Churchill asked him, ‘to wipe out the Royal Family in the shortest possible time?’ ‘Churchill was even against Prince Philip learning to fly. The thing you have to remember is that all those old men absolutely adored the Queen and couldn’t bear to think of anything happening which would upset her,’ says one of the team. The Prime Minister did not win that one. The Duke went on to master fifty-nine types of aircraft, including nine different helicopters, and logged 5,986 flying hours over forty-four years before retiring in 1997 with a last blast, from Carlisle to Islay, at the controls of a BAe 146.

All the sniping merely made him even more determined to do his own thing. When not accompanying the Queen on her travels, he expanded the range of his patronages enormously and created new ones. The Duke of Edinburgh’s Award was born in 1956, despite the grumbles of some reactionary elements who warned that it smacked of the Hitler Youth and would kill off the Boy Scouts. Under his leadership – he was always a leader rather than a figurehead – organisations like the National Playing
Fields Association, the Outward Bound Trust, the Automobile Association or the Industrial Society all found themselves propelled in fresh directions.

The Duke was part of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) from the moment it was founded around a dining-room table in Switzerland in 1961. President of the British arm for twenty years, he became International President for another fifteen and, by the time he left in 1996, it was among the most influential environmental voices in the world. He had paved the way for his eldest son’s environmental crusades a generation later – even if he occasionally despairs of some of today’s ‘tree-huggers’ (as he calls the more ethereal eco-warriors). His Commonwealth Study Conferences were ground-breaking assemblies of business and union leaders from all over the world, an international, industrial version of George VI’s boys’ clubs from a previous generation. Nor had the Duke entirely given up on innovation at the Palace. He knew that the ‘men with moustaches’ would never let him near state banquets, of course, but he introduced ‘Luncheons’. Interesting figures from random areas of national life would suddenly get a call to see if they might like to join the Queen and the Duke for lunch (then, as now, many assume it is a practical joke). They proved so successful that, in 1972, he introduced dinners on the same lines. In private, the Duke was sympathetic to those calling for a more modern monarchy. It is widely accepted that the Duke was instrumental in persuading the Queen to sever links with the annual debutante circus (which she duly did). He wrote books – fourteen in total – and forewords to other people’s books. He delivered lectures, to both lay and academic audiences, presented television programmes, visited parts of the world that had never seen a member of the Royal Family. And, over time, his willingness to embrace change started to rub off on the rest of the institution.

Throughout the reign, he has taken a hands-on, troubleshooting role in resolving issues which do not have a political or constitutional dimension but which have been of great sensitivity to the Queen – the organisation of the Coronation, the design of her coins, the filming of the first royal documentary, the restoration of Windsor Castle after the fire, the funeral plans for Diana, Princess of Wales, and so on. During the fifties, it was the Duke who suggested converting the ruins of the bombed-out Palace chapel into a public exhibition space for the Royal Collection. He was greeted by the usual shuffling of papers and courteous inertia, but he persisted. Since 1962, the Queen’s Gallery has been visited by millions. It proved so successful that, forty years later, another Queen’s Gallery was opened at the Palace of Holyroodhouse.

Typically, the Duke prefers to downplay his role as a catalyst for change.
Asked by the author in 2004 if he saw himself as a royal rebel, he smiled and replied: ‘Not a rebel, no – an innovator!’ As the Duke told Gyles Brandreth, any changes he made were ‘not for the sake of modernising, not for the sake of b***ering about with things. I’m anxious to get things done. That’s all. I’m interested in the efficient use of resources.’

There is no doubt, though, that the Duke also played a critical role in encouraging the Queen during the great royal reforms of the eighties and nineties. Having learned from long and unhappy experience, he knew that there was no point trying to get involved directly. But that did not stop him helping from the wings. Lord Airlie, the Lord Chamberlain who supervised the overhaul of the monarchy and its finances, remains very conscious of the Duke’s contribution. ‘Prince Philip played a very important part,’ he says. ‘The Queen quite often deferred to him on matters where he could make a meaningful contribution. He came up with all sorts of ideas. Some of them were extremely helpful and, if you didn’t think they were, you had quite a job arguing him out of it. He could be quite argumentative sometimes. But you do need somebody to challenge you. He made you think.’

‘Prince Philip is the unsung hero of the reign,’ says a very senior ex-courtier firmly. ‘People underestimate the help the Queen has had from him, especially when times were hard. Like all really great men, he’s not always easy. But if he was always easy, he wouldn’t be the chap he is.’ One former Private Secretary remembers being pilloried in a Channel Four television documentary to the point that he could no longer watch the programme and left the Palace for a long walk. On his return he found a letter from the Duke already waiting for him. ‘I thought, “I’d better not open this tonight” but then I did. And the Duke had written: “Fear not the taunts of men. The moth shall eat them up like a garment – Isaiah”. And I thought that was very good. It wasn’t a case of patting you on the back and saying, “Come on, cheer up, old chap.” It was just what you wanted at a particular moment. It was very typical of the way he helped the private secretaries.’ That has not always been the case. One of those who worked in the Private Secretary’s Office during the seventies found that the Duke had not forgotten some of the treatment he received in the fifties.

Retirement, as we have seen, is out of the question. But, since turning ninety, the Duke has made a few concessions to age, stepping down from twenty of his more time-consuming patronages, such as the Chancellorships of Cambridge and Edinburgh universities and the City and Guilds Institute. It follows the quiet internal transfer of a few favourite charities in recent years. Just as the Earl of Wessex has taken on the Duke of Edinburgh’s
Award, so the Duke of York now chairs the trustees of the Outward Bound Trust and the Princess Royal looks after the Commonwealth Study Conferences. The Duke does not like long goodbyes and is appalled by the idea of hanging around old haunts. ‘If you are the boss and you’re handing on, you do not want to be sitting on someone’s shoulder,’ says Sir Miles Hunt-Davis. ‘He’s the last person to sit on anybody’s shoulder.’ Despite his long years of close partnership with some of these organisations, despite all that lobbying and fundraising and head scratching and plaque-unveiling, the Duke wants no part in choosing his successors. If organisations want a younger royal patron and the candidate is happy, all well and good. But some want a change. Some want no patron at all. Hunt-Davis points to the Duke’s involvement with the WWF. For many years, the Duke was its dynamic, table-thumping global leader and ambassador. When the time came, he made a discreet exit and then a clean break. Reflecting on the Duke’s retirement from the charity, Sir Miles explains: ‘It was almost without a ripple. It was painless. It just happened very gradually and very sensibly. He’ll still see the annual report but that’s it.’