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his doubts about the likelihood of the future Prince Consort’s remaining faithful in the
light of his behaviour in Australia; but, like most courtiers, he would not report this kind
of thing to his employers. There had never, apparently, been anything serious; he was
too cool emotionally to fall in love. ‘Philip [and his uncle, Louis Mountbatten] are cold,
Germanic Battenbergs,’ a relation said of him. He was dominant, masculine, but not a
romantic. ‘He’s 150 per cent male and that’s his trouble really,’ a contemporary said of
him. Typically he was always dismissive when later questioned by biographers about his
romance with Elizabeth, as if talking about such things was not what a real man would
do:
I went to the theatre with them [the royal family] once, something like that. And then during the war, if I
was here I’d call in and have a meal. I once or twice spent Christmas at Windsor, because I’d nowhere
particular to go. I thought not all that much about it, I think. We used to correspond occasionally… 1
Philip has remained an enigma to his biographers. He is a man who arouses strong,
often opposite reactions. He is intelligent, practical and competent, a man for solving
problems, for change and movement and ideas which are not always well thought out.
He bottles up his feelings and can explode without warning; he is impatient, restless,
driven. He can be a bully, even cruel, but he can be warm and kind to people he knows
are in trouble. He can be courteous (his manners towards his mother-in-law are
impeccable), but he can also be arrogant, rude and overbearing – particularly towards
politicians, a breed he holds in almost universal contempt. On many occasions when his
wife became Queen, he would embarrass her by holding forth on subjects with which he
was not totally acquainted in front of professionals who were, and he would speak to
political guests at Windsor or Buckingham Palace in a manner which most hosts (and
guests) would find intolerable. He is an action man who likes to think his own way
through problems, someone who likes to challenge established ways and notions.
The key to his character is that he has had to be self-reliant and independent since the
age of ten. Since the family broke up at St Cloud in 1930, he had had nowhere that he
could call home, just a succession of relatives’ houses, schools, ships. By 1946 he was
virtually an orphan. His father, Prince Andrew, had died on 3 December 1944 in Monte
Carlo, which was then in occupied France, while Philip was at sea. Philip had therefore
been unable even to attend his funeral; after the war he and Mike Parker travelled to
Monaco to collect from the Prince’s mistress all that he had left to bequeath to his son, a
pair of hairbrushes and cuff-links and some trunks full of old suits. At his grandmother’s
home in Kensington Palace, he kept trunks described by his valet as ‘donkey’s years old’
crammed with junk from childhood and schooldays – even baby clothes – as if he wanted
to be able to cling on to some tangible identity in his rootless life. His mother was still
in Athens, where she founded an order of nuns and where his cousin, George of Greece,
had obtained his throne back as a result of a plebiscite in 1946 and was now installed as
King George II of the Hellenes. The remainder of his family, his three surviving sisters,
were all living in Germany, fortunately for them in the Allied Zone. His sister Princess
Sophie, widowed when her husband, Prince Christopher of Hesse, was killed in Italy