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6
The Edinburghs
‘The Edinburghs… looked divine. She wore a very high tiara and the Garter – he was in the dark blue
Windsor uniform, also with the Garter. They looked characters out of a fairy-tale…’
Chips Channon describing a ball at Windsor, 18 June 1949
Both as a wife and the heir to the throne, Elizabeth continued to do what was expected
of her. Within three months she was pregnant. Even Tommy Lascelles had come round
to Philip: ‘… such a nice young man,’ he confided to Harold Nicolson, ‘such a sense of
duty – not a fool in any way – so much in love poor boy – and after all put the heir to
the throne in the family way all according to plan’. 1
The marriage was a success on every level; physically, mentally and temperamentally
the couple were compatible. Elizabeth was physically passionate and very much in love
with her husband. Philip found her sexually attractive and was equally, although
perhaps more coolly, in love. And importantly, for a man like Philip, he loved and
respected her. Theirs was a traditional marriage, Elizabeth was used to a household in
which the man came first. She had not yet acquired the authority which she was to have
when she became Queen, and Philip was a particularly dominant male. There were
times when he would tell her publicly, in his typically naval impatient way, not to be
‘such a bloody fool’. On one occasion, driving down late to Goodwood House with
Mountbatten, he drove even faster than his usual hair-raising speed, causing his wife to
draw in her breath. ‘Do that once more,’ he told her, ‘and I’ll put you out!’ When they
arrived, Mountbatten said to the Princess that Philip had been driving much too fast and
why hadn’t she told him so. ‘But didn’t you hear him?’ she said. ‘He said he’d put me
out.’ Yet he was also supportive, determined to help her in every way he could and
never to let her down. ‘At home he was very attentive and protective,’ John Dean wrote.
‘If he had been out during the day he would always go straight to her room when he
returned.’ This period when they lived as a newly married couple with, in a short space
of time, two children was probably the happiest of their lives.
For the first year they had no home of their own. Sunninghill Park, a large house in
Windsor Great Park, which the King had designated for them (and which was later to be
the site of the young Yorks’ controversial house), burnt clown. Their main London home
was to be Clarence House overlooking the Mall next to St James’s Palace, but when the
couple visited it in October 1947, they had found it dreadfully dilapidated. It had