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11
Mountbatten – Windsor
‘The Queen’s in a terrible state; there’s a fellow called Jones in the billiard room who wants to marry her
sister, and Prince Philip’s in the library wanting to change the family name to Mountbatten…’
Duke of Gloucester to Harold Macmillan, December 1959 1
At the moment when British paratroopers were descending from the sky over the Canal
Zone, Elizabeth’s husband was on the royal yacht Britannia off the eastern coast of
Ceylon (as it then was). Accompanied by Mike Parker, he was halfway through what
was billed as a tour of the outlying territories of the Commonwealth, many of them
never visited before by a member of the royal family. It had been prompted, officially,
by an invitation to open the 1956 Olympic Games in Melbourne. Philip was escaping
from the Palace. On that four-month tour he could feel free to grow a naval-looking
beard and indulge his interest in painting (a talent inherited from his father), wildlife,
and science with a visit to the British scientific station in Antarctica. No one seems to
have questioned the cost of this expedition, which was as much a personal quest for
space as a public duty. For one tricky moment it seemed as though Britannia, which was
listed as a hospital ship, might have to turn back and take part in the Suez expedition;
fortunately for Philip, the operation was called off before a decision had to be taken. He
had been away since October; by the time the tour was over rumours that Elizabeth’s
marriage was in trouble had made headlines across the world. ‘Last week’, Time
reported on 18 February 1957, ‘the [rumour] mongering winds were howling louder
around Buckingham Palace than they had since the day of Wallis Warfield Simpson and
Edward VIII.’
Like the piece of fluff which Princess Margaret had picked off Peter Townsend’s
uniform, the trigger for the reports was news of something apparently unrelated. Eileen
Parker was suing her husband, Michael, for divorce. The Parker marriage had been in
trouble for some time; like Townsend’s, it had been a wartime decision taken in haste
and repented at leisure. As in the case of the Townsends, the demands of Palace life had
proved the last straw. When the story broke, Philip and Parker were approaching
Gibraltar almost at the end of their tour. When they reached the Rock, Parker,
accompanied by a lawyer and a contingent of the world’s press, flew back to London.
To save further embarrassment to his employer, he resigned; the Townsend experience
only two years before had proved that divorce was still a dirty word as far as Palace