Do Let's Have Another Drink! by Gareth Russell

Author:Gareth Russell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atria Books
Published: 2022-11-02T00:00:00+00:00

48. Philip Mountbatten

Elizabeth might have liked to see her eldest daughter marry a British aristocrat. The younger Elizabeth was set on one candidate, and one only—Philip, a prince who had been born on a kitchen table in Corfu as his parents fled the political turmoil that swept his uncle King Constantine I from the throne of Greece. The exiled Philip had been educated initially in Germany and then in the United Kingdom, where he joined the Royal Navy and served in the Second World War. There had been a great deal of tragedy in Philip’s early life. His mother was institutionalised for years as the result of a nervous breakdown, culminating in a possible misdiagnosis of schizophrenia. Philip left Germany when his Jewish headmaster, Kurt Hahn, was forced to flee and set up a new school in Scotland; Philip was among its pupils, to the discomfiture of several of his German brothers-in-law who joined the Nazi Party. One of them, travelling with Philip’s pregnant sister Grand Duchess Cecilie, was en route to a family wedding in England when their aeroplane crashed in fog. Cecilie had apparently gone into labour as the aeroplane plummeted, for her remains and those of the baby were found in the wreckage with those of her husband, her mother-in-law and Cecilie’s two sons, aged six and four at the time of their deaths. Initially, Cecilie’s only surviving child was her infant daughter Princess Johanna, too young to fly with the family in 1937, but who then died of meningitis two years later.

Love and support for Philip were offered by his mother’s Mountbatten relatives, including his cousins Patricia and Pamela, who adored him, and by his uncle “Dickie,” Lord Mountbatten, who was Supreme Allied Commander of the South-Asia Theatre during the Second World War. Stability was provided by Gordonstoun, the Scottish boarding school founded by Philip’s exiled German headmaster. Philip and Princess Elizabeth met briefly on several occasions in the 1930s, and by the tail end of the war, romantic feelings had developed. Lord Mountbatten was thrilled, so much so that Philip had to ask him to take a step back from meddling.

Neither the King nor the Queen were quite so enthusiastic. The King did not want to see the family unit break up just yet, while the Queen harboured reservations about Philip’s suitability and Mountbatten’s enthusiasm. She worried that Philip leaned left in his politics and that Lord Mountbatten was a little too fond of publicity—and far too fond of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. Princess Elizabeth held her ground, and after Philip was invited to join the Royal Family at Balmoral, he reassured his putative mother-in-law with a letter in which he reflected, “I am sure I do not deserve all the good things which have happened to me. To have been spared [death in] the war and seen victory, to have been given the chance to rest and re-adjust myself, to have fallen in love completely and unreservedly.” The night before the Westminster

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