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‘was always regarded as much too progressive from the point of view of the oldfashioned
brigade… dangerous ideas you know… they thought now here’s his nephew
who’s going to have the same ideas and we’re jolly well going to keep him in his place.
The old brigade really thought, I think, he could be a dangerous influence.’ 3
Tommy Lascelles probably summed up early court reactions to Prince Philip when he
told a friend, ‘They felt he was rough, ill-mannered, uneducated and would probably not
be faithful.’ What Lascelles meant by ‘rough and ill-mannered’ was that Prince Philip
was ‘cocky’, i.e. showed insufficient respect for courtiers such as himself; by
‘uneducated’, that he had not been to one of the acceptable English public schools,
namely Eton or Harrow (although Lascelles himself had gone to Marlborough and not to
Eton). Lascelles typified ‘the men with moustaches’, as Princess Margaret called the
senior courtiers. ‘Tall and aristocratic of bearing, with a long face and long thin hands
and feet, his manner was at the outset austere,’ Sir John Wheeler-Bennett wrote of him.
His intimate circle of friends appreciated ‘the delightful and unusual workings of his
mind’, his shrewd judgement and his dry, often caustic wit, but to most people he was
the ‘aloof, austere, jealous guardian of the royal prerogative; a man who had the
reputation not only of not suffering fools gladly, but of rarely enduring their presence in
the same room’. 4 He had the intimidating ability to maintain a total silence if he had
nothing particular to say and was given to issuing discouraging dicta such as ‘I prefer
books to men’, and, at the outset of the First World War, ‘Thank God I’m an
Englishman.’ As a first cousin of Lord Hare wood he was related to the royal family by
marriage, while his wife was the daughter of one of the Viceroys of India. Wheeler-
Bennett’s view of Philip was that he had ‘great shrewdness and charm, but is a German
Junker at bottom. Laughs too loudly at bad jokes; talks too loud; airs his opinions too
much.’ To Philip, the Lascelles he met at Buckingham Palace in 1946 appeared cold,
snobbish and pedantic, a ‘stuffed shirt’. He was, in short, just the type of man to make
Philip’s sensitive hackles rise. ‘The effect of his childhood upon his character’, a relation
said, ‘definitely must have made him feel that he wasn’t going to be pushed around by
the world – he’d have felt he’d have to stand up for himself because there weren’t that
many people around to do it.’
Elizabeth was probably unaware of the hostility towards Philip on the part of some of
the courtiers and her father’s friends, but if she had been it would have made no
difference. She was in love with him and wanted to marry him, and when he proposed
to her at Balmoral in the late summer of 1946 she accepted. It does not seem to have
been any formal kind of proposal. Prince Philip himself described it to his biographer in
his usual offhand way: ‘I suppose one thing led to another. It was sort of fixed up. That’s
what really happened.’ ‘Lilibet’s engagement keeps meandering on for ages,’ Margaret
reported to Crawfie. Nothing was to be official because the King wanted it that way.
Although he liked Philip, with his naval background and wardroom sense of humour so
like his own, and thought him, as a princely relation, a suitable husband for the
Princess, he could hardly believe that his daughter had fallen definitively in love with
and was determined to marry the man she had met when she was only thirteen. It was