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master, Lord Beaverbrook:
The Princess Elizabeth money debate has caused a lot of talk… a large number of people think the King made
a mistake in asking for so much at such a time… Many think that the Royal Family is very well looked after
& that they could afford to keep the heir out of the Duchy [of Cornwall] funds… until she comes to the
throne. I am surprised that the King made the mistake because up to now he has stepped gently and very
wisely. The marriage itself has been extremely popular. The only criticism is that the young couple are going
after too many big and expensive houses… 13
The King was as sensitive to the need to suppress his German connections as his father
had been in 1917. None of the royal German relations were to be invited to the
wedding, not even Philip’s three sisters who had German husbands. Anti-German feeling
in Britain in the immediate post-war period ran too high for the King to risk the
embarrassment of underlining how many of his and the bridegroom’s relations were
actually Germans. One opinion poll taken at the time of the engagement produced a
disapproval rating of 32 per cent against the marriage on the grounds that Philip was ‘a
foreigner’. Princess Marina’s sister, Elizabeth, was not invited either; her husband,
Count Carl zu Toerring-Jettenbach, was regarded as a Nazi sympathizer. Her other
sister, Princess Olga, married to Prince Paul of Yugoslavia, was another enforced
absentee. Churchill had condemned the unfortunate Prince Paul (or ‘Palsy’, as he
contemptuously referred to him) as a treacherous collaborator for his part in the pact
between Germany and Yugoslavia in 1941. The King and Queen remained friendly
towards Prince Paul, and had visited him secretly during their South African tour, but it
was still thought impolitic to court a row by bringing him and Princess Olga out of exile
to attend the wedding. Most embarrassing of all was the Eton-educated Duke of Saxe-
Coburg and Gotha, a grandson of Queen Victoria through his father, Leopold, Duke of
Albany, and brother of Princess Alice, who was married to Queen Mary’s brother, the
Earl of Athlone. The Duke of Coburg had enthusiastically embraced the Hitler regime to
the extent of becoming a Nazi gauleiter and had had his estates confiscated after the war.
Prince Philipp of Hesse, another descendant of Queen Victoria, who had acted as a gobetween
for Hitler and Mussolini, had been arrested by the Americans for Nazi
activities.
One family absentee caused a good deal of comment. The bride’s uncle, the Duke of
Windsor, was not invited to his niece’s wedding, the first great royal occasion since the
Coronation of George VI. This was a clear indication of how family attitudes had not
softened over the ten years since the Abdication. The Duke of Windsor had occasionally
visited London to stay with his mother at Marlborough House, but his pleas to Queen
Mary to receive his wife had still fallen on deaf ears and, although he was on
reasonably cordial terms with the King, the Queen refused to see him. ‘You could always
tell when the Duke was coming to Buckingham Palace,’ Joey Legh, Master of the King’s
Household and one of the ex-King’s closest friends before the advent of Wallis, recalled.
‘There was a tense atmosphere and the Queen would disappear. I begged her to give
him just a cup of tea, but she wouldn’t.’ 14 Another family absentee was the Princess