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used to complain loudly about their always wanting to be invited to stay. Some, like the
Coburgs, were considered completely beyond the pale since the old Duke had been a
Nazi gauleiter. The Duke of Brunswick, the head of the House of Hanover, was not
popular with his royal British relations, while his wife had been a Hitler mädchen and
had recently all too obviously transferred her loyalties to General de Gaulle. The Duke
of Brunswick made a point of having his servants dressed in Windsor livery when he
held a grand-banquet – something which, despite the fact that he was entitled to do so,
did not go down well with the British House of Windsor. He and his mother were not on
speaking terms and at a reception in Hanover for the Queen, at which both had to be
present, the Ambassador and his wife had to look after them separately after they had
met the Queen.
Prince Ludwig of Hesse and his wife, known in the family as ‘Princess Peg’, were old
friends of the royal couple. Prince Ludwig was an extremely talented man, very musical
and a friend of Benjamin Britten, whose operas he translated into German. Before the
Second World War he had been anti-Nazi and had planned to live in England after
marrying his English wife; he had only reluctantly gone back to Germany to fulfil family
responsibility when his elder brother, Philip’s brother-in-law, Prince George Donatus,
had been killed in an air crash en route to his wedding in 1937. Elizabeth was very fond
of Philip’s youngest sister, Sophie, known as ‘Aunt Tiny’, and her second husband,
Prince George of Hanover, younger brother of the Duke of Brunswick and of Queen
Frederika of Greece, and while in Germany she took time off to visit Philip’s family and
see the two places, Wolfsgarten and Salem, where he had spent so much of his youth
before the war.
In the end Elizabeth genuinely enjoyed the German visit and the warmth of her
reception. At Schloss Bruhl near Bonn she triumphed, looking, as one observer
remarked, ‘devastatingly beautiful’ coming down the double staircase to a fanfare of
trumpets, the embroidery on her pale blue dress echoing the rococo swirls of the
plasterwork ceiling. ‘Oh,’ said Cecil Beaton, standing beside Hardy Amies, designer of
the dress, ‘she looks like realroyalty.’ At one Embassy reception the Ambassador, taking
Elizabeth round, and thinking to give her a break, introduced her to Baroness
Oppenheimer who shared her interest in breeding horses. It was, he said, a slight
mistake: ‘I couldn’t get her to move on.’ At Munich the Minister-President of Bavaria,
with the Duke of Bavaria present, entertained the Queen to an opera gala. ‘She doesn’t
like operas very much,’ an official said, ‘so we insisted it was a light opera –
Rosenkavalier? Curiously, the Duke of Bavaria, as the head of the Wittelsbach family,
was the Stuart claimant to the throne. The Duke had been slightly nervous previously,
having been asked to address the Stuart Society as guest speaker at their annual dinner
the following January. Wanting to accept but equally not wishing to seem discourteous
to the present incumbent of the British throne whom he was to meet, he – through an
intermediary – consulted the Duke of Edinburgh, whom all the German princes seem to
have used as a channel to Buckingham Palace. Philip replied to the intermediary in his
famously blunt style: ‘Well, you can tell him that we don’t mind but it’s a damn dull