‘I remember watching them just before their Diamond Wedding anniversary teasing each other and giggling almost like newlyweds,’ says a former lady-in-waiting. They had only to use their eyes to see not merely a Queen, but a contented and fulfilled wife.ĭispensing with one royal tradition, she and Philip shared a double bed for most of their married lives - a routine interrupted only when one of them had to be up and away particularly early. As millions of people came to adore Elizabeth, they admired him. And as the decades rolled by, who would say that her judgment was not absolutely right?Įven the doubters in the family were won over. It is hard to believe these serious doubts in official quarters never reached Elizabeth’s ears, but if they did she ignored them. In later years, when she saw how crucial he was to her daughter’s happiness, she grew very fond of him. Indeed, even Queen Elizabeth (later the Queen Mother) insisted on referring waspishly to Philip in private conversations as ‘the Hun’, an ungracious dig at his German family links. They didn’t like him, they didn’t trust him, and it showed.’ We were at Balmoral one summer and they were being absolutely awful to him. He was perceived as simply not good enough for the princess.Īccording the late Lord Brabourne, the film producer who married Earl Mountbatten’s daughter, Patricia: ‘ were bloody to him. Philip was, after all, the penniless son of a gambling reprobate, the exiled Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark, who’d spent the final years of his life in the fleshpots of Monte Carlo. Their views were succinctly summed up by George VI’s private secretary, Sir Alan ‘Tommy’ Lascelles.Ĭelebrations - both public and private - could never be the same without Philip, always the focus of fun as well as being treasured for his wisdom and common senseĪs he wrote: ‘They felt he was rough, uneducated and would probably not be faithful.’ One can see why they felt this way about him. She and Philip enjoyed 73 happy years as man and wife until his death on April 9, 2021, a marital triumph that had certainly not been forecast by courtiers and some members of the Royal Family. Years later, as Queen, it was his same certainty about everything that made her feel secure. He exuded a brash confidence that made her almost breathless.
While the King and Queen were taken on an official tour, Philip was the blond, handsome young cadet deputed to entertain her and her little sister, Princess Margaret. That famous first meeting came when Elizabeth was just 13 and on a visit with her parents to Dartmouth Naval College. ‘She was smitten from the start - a one-man woman.’
‘She never looked at anyone else,’ said her first cousin and close childhood friend, Margaret Rhodes, who died in 2016. So even when he withdrew into retirement at Wood Farm on the Sandringham estate, and she was still immersed in official duties at Windsor, she remained devoted to the jaunty, handsome young naval officer who, five years her senior, inevitably had a past when they married. And how she would need them (pictured here arriving at her husband Prince Philip's funeral in Windsor Castle on April 17, 2021 It really was love.įor she still possessed great reserves of resilience. This very distinction was what made them fit together. They really admired each other’s very different qualities. She and Philip had always complemented each other so well - he sharp, decisive and bold she ever cautious before making up her mind. Only the deepest love could have been so understanding. It didn’t mean their love for each other was any less. In that decision one could feel the strength of their relationship. In those final years of his life, after he retired from official duties in 2017 and they lived virtually apart, she recognised that the ‘Old Salt’ needed calmer waters and had to get away from the suffocating officialdom of palace life. Philip had never been far from her thoughts. She would have to cope, and how well she did when he finally died just two months short of his 100th birthdayīut now, finally, the last chapter in their great love story is over.
Philip, she accepted, might go before her.
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