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later he warned his sister, Philip’s mother, not to raise the subject with the King and
Queen, ‘the best hopes are to let it happen – if it will – without parents interfering. The
young people appear genuinely devoted and I think after the war it is very likely to
occur.’ 11
Philip himself did not entirely welcome his uncle Mountbatten’s activities on his
behalf nor his too obvious enthusiasm for the match. ‘Please, I beg of you,’ he wrote,
‘not too much advice in an affair of the heart or I shall be forced to do the wooing by
proxy.’ He was too determined to be his own man to want to feel that he was being
pushed, or being seen to be pushed, into anything, let alone this particular marriage. He
also very much disliked gossip about the machinations of the Greek royal family over it.
But he was often on leave in Britain during his spell on ‘E-boat Alley’ in 1942 and 1943,
staying with his cousin Princess Marina at her house, Coppins, at Iver in
Buckinghamshire, a convenient distance from Windsor. Princess Marina and her first
cousin were very close; she regarded him in a sense as her protege. ‘She very much
encouraged the marriage,’ one observer said. The ubiquitous Chips Channon, visiting
Princess Marina in the autumn of 1944, noted the number of times he found the
signature ‘Philip’ in the visitors’ book. ‘As I signed the visitors’ book I noticed “Philip”
written constantly. It is at Coppins that he sees Princess Elizabeth, I think she will marry
him.’ Already in February that year, after gossiping with Lord and Lady Iveagh who had
had tea with the King and Queen at Buckingham Palace, he had recorded his belief that
the marriage would take place.
In January 1944 Queen Mary, an altogether more reliable source, had confided to her
old friend Lady Airlie that Elizabeth and Philip had
been in love for the past eighteen months. In fact longer, I think… But the King and Queen feel that she is too
young to be engaged yet. They want her to see more of the world before committing herself, and to meet
more men. After all she’s only nineteen, and one is very impressionable at that age.
Mabell Airlie, an incurable romantic who had played Cupid to ‘Prince Bertie’s’ romance
with Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, objected. She herself had fallen in love at nineteen and it
had lasted until her husband’s death. ‘Yes, it does happen sometimes [Queen Mary
agreed] and Elizabeth seems to be that kind of girl. She would always know her own
mind. There’s something very steadfast and determined in her – like her father.’
The last full year of the war, 1944, had been a great strain, particularly during the
summer when the anxious days of the Allied invasion of Normandy coincided with the
arrival of Hitler’s new weapon, the VI flying bomb. More than 100 people were killed
when the Guards’ chapel just yards from Buckingham Palace took a direct hit during the
Sunday morning service on 18 June. It was the only time during the war, Crawfie wrote,
that she saw the Queen really shaken; everyone’s nerves were on edge, as the Queen
wrote to Osbert Sitwell at the time of D-Day in June 1944:
It has been an exhausting few months with the anxiety over our invasion of France lying heavily on the head
& mind, and now these great battles raging, & so many precious people killed, makes the days long &