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courtier and never will be. He will fearlessly say what he thinks is right… Frankly,
Philip, I do not think you can do better.’ 6
Some people thought that Browning had been put into the household as a restraining
influence on Philip and Mike Parker, but, although he was considerably older than both,
the three of them managed to maintain a boyish camaraderie. He was occasionally
shocked by Philip’s unconventional ways. When Philip visited the Brownings at their
home, Menabilly, both Boy and Daphne, told by the man they had brought in to act as
his valet that ‘those buggers at the Palace had forgotten to pack the Duke’s pyjamas’,
were surprised when Philip rejected the loan of a pair – ‘Never wear the things.’ James
MacDonald, George VI’s former valet, later confessed to one of Browning’s staff how
embarrassed he was when he went in to see Philip in the morning and found him naked
in bed with the Princess (who always wore a silk nightgown). Queen Elizabeth had been
used to knocking considerately on the door to let him know when he could come in and
the King would by then always be wearing a dressing-gown. ‘Prince Philip didn’t care at
all,’ said MacDonald. Boy was shocked too, later on, when Philip used to give his
children swimming lessons in the Palace pool naked. But there were jokes, as on one
occasion when at a film premiere line-up Elizabeth Taylor, then married to Michael
Wilding and pregnant, displayed a prominent cleavage: ‘Hop in,’ Philip advised
Browning out of the corner of his mouth as they passed.
In May 1948 Elizabeth undertook her first official tour abroad with Philip visiting
Paris for four days over the hottest Whitsun weekend of the century. The Parisians were
taken by surprise at the quality of her French accent (polished by Antoinette de
Bellaigue) and of her speech, the work of Colville, no mean writer as his later books
were to show, delivered with a cool, clear precision despite the constant clicking of
cameras and deafening ringing of nearby church bells. They were also taken aback by
the twenty-two-year-old Princess’s beauty when seen in the flesh, the startling blue eyes
and the clear skin which effaced the rather heavy jaw emphasized by photography.
Philip too, although far more photogenic than his wife, was in real life, as Harold
Nicolson commented, much better looking than in his photographs; a teenage girl who
saw him at the time went so far as to call him ‘a dream of beauty’. Chips Channon,
seeing the couple at a ball a year later, described them as ‘that glamorous couple, the
Edinburghs… they looked divine’. The trip was in some senses an echo of her parents’
triumphal visit to Paris only ten years before when they equally had taken the city by
storm. This time Communism, not Fascism, was the threat behind this expression of
Anglo-French solidarity. The Cold War had set in in earnest; this was the year of the
Russian blockade of Berlin and the Allied air-lift which eventually forced the Soviets to
back down. They drove to lunch in the Grand Trianon at Versailles, where the fountains
played, shimmering in the heat; the tablecloths were specially woven for the occasion
with the couple’s initials entwined with roses. They travelled down the Seine to be
greeted by Charles de Gaulle’s brother at a heated, crowded reception at the Hôtel de
Lauzun, attended a banquet and a reception at the British Embassy (at which the
Princess glittered in a diamond tiara and necklace given her by the Nizam of Hyderabad