Elizabeth & Philip by Tessa Dunlop

Author:Tessa Dunlop
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pegasus Books
Published: 2023-04-04T00:00:00+00:00

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In 2022, the Queen’s Platinum Jubilee year, Kensington Palace staged a stunning exhibition: Life Through a Royal Lens was a visual romp through our most recent royals, tracing the family’s relationship with photography from the medium’s inception under Victoria through to the present day. There are various standout shots: Dorothy Wilding’s hand-coloured stylised accession portraits of our late Queen; Margaret being Margaret, sitting in a bathtub, a tiara a top her head; and David Bailey’s mesmeric side profile of the late Diana, Princess of Wales. ‘I like to take away everything… and get closer and closer until you have the essence of the girl.’31 Diana’s face, especially those doe-eyes, were a window into her soul – she was a photographer’s dream, with an expression that immediately engendered sympathy, even compassion. Not so the family into which she had married. Royalty, reared in their confined privilege, learned from birth how to keep the camera at bay, which is why, of all the photographs in that 2022 exhibition, the one I loved the best was Matt Holyoak’s ‘never-before-seen picture’ of the Queen and Prince Philip.

It is a darling portrait of the pair, captured in deep old age to celebrate their 2017 Platinum Wedding anniversary. Elizabeth, in gentle cream, is seated looking up with incredulous devotion at a jovial Philip. The Duke’s face is cracked in a wide spontaneous smile, he is laughing at the camera, a demobbed hand casually thrust into his pocket. Squint your eyes and there is something of the young sailor boy about him. As for the Queen, her expression is one of deep love, a sentiment more commonly associated with teenage girls than nonagenarian monarchs. But although there is no physical contact between the couple, the photograph was initially considered ‘too personal’ for wide distribution. Prince Philip was not a man who indulged in public displays of affection – the portrait’s release came after his death in 2021.32

This careful editing of their marital image is a reminder that what we saw of Elizabeth and Philip’s relationship was only ever part of their story. All too often the public were privy to abrupt Philip, the man forged by upper-class detachment and remote (virtually non-existent) parenting, someone whom even his equerry, straight-talking Mike Parker, tried to goad into being a little more affectionate with his young wife. ‘I always wanted to see him put his arms around the Queen, and show her how much he adored her. What you’d do for any wife. But he always sort of stood to attention. I mentioned it a couple of times but he just gave me a hell of a look.’33 Like any marriage, much of Elizabeth and Philip’s relationship existed behind closed doors and yet, even when the royal couple were finally tucked up in Clarence House in 1949, their privacy was compromised. By the mid-1950s, valet John Dean, like governess Marion Crawford before him, divulged the Edinburgh’s domestic secrets in an insipid little memoir.

Thirty years after the publication of Dean’s book, an intruder burst into the Queen’s bedroom.

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