On the afternoon of April 17, 2021, Penelope Knatchbull, Countess Mountbatten of Burma, sat in a pew at St. George’s Chapel in Windsor Castle. She was 67 years old. She wore black, with a hat and veil that covered the upper half of her face.
She was one of only 30 people present at the funeral of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, who had died eight days earlier at the age of 99. The Queen sat alone in a separate pew, in a black mask, observing the social distancing rules that the rest of the country was under threat of fine to follow.
The seating plan had been the subject of three weeks of quiet negotiation between the Lord Chamberlain’s office, the Mountbatten family, and at least one private secretary whose involvement was never officially acknowledged. Penny was placed three pews back on the opposite side of the chapel from the senior royal family, in the section reserved for close family friends.
On paper, she was the godmother of Princess Eugenie’s son and a long-standing friend of the Duke through her late husband, Norton Knatchbull, the third Earl Mountbatten of Burma, who was Prince Philip’s second cousin once removed. In the actual texture of Prince Philip’s life across the previous three and a half decades, she was something else, the precise nature of which has never been publicly resolved.
The thing the seating plan could not communicate was that Penny had been placed close enough to be present and far enough to be deniable. She had been included, which mattered because exclusion would have been its own statement. She had not been placed near the family, which also mattered because proximity would have been a different statement.
She did not weep visibly. She had been managing surfaces for so long that the management had become indistinguishable from the surface itself.
This is the story of how she got into that pew and what she gave up to be allowed to remain in it. It is also a story about letters. The letters Buckingham Palace will never release are not, by all available accounts, scandalous in the way the public uses that word. They are something more difficult, which is private.
She was born Penelope Meredith Eastwood on April 15, 1953, in London. Her father, Reginald Eastwood, ran a chain of restaurants called Angus Steak House. Her mother, Marion, was the daughter of a clergyman.
The Eastwoods were not aristocratic. They were not titled. They were what the British class system called comfortable. They lived in a house in St. John’s Wood with a garden, and they kept a small place in the country that was used for weekends.
Penelope was sent to a girls’ day school in London, where she was reported by her teachers to be quiet, intelligent, and unobtrusive. She was sent away to boarding school at 13. She left school at 18 and did not go to university. She enrolled instead in a secretarial course in London.
She worked briefly at her father’s company for about 18 months. She left when she met the man who would become her first husband.
His name was Norton Knatchbull. He was the eldest son of John Knatchbull, the seventh Baron Brabourne, and Patricia Mountbatten, the elder daughter of Louis Mountbatten. This meant Norton was Lord Mountbatten’s grandson, and his godfather was Prince Philip.
Penelope Eastwood and Norton Knatchbull met in 1974. The introduction was made through mutual friends. Norton was 27, blonde, friendly, and possessed of a slightly diffuse quality. Penny was 21.
By the descriptions of those who knew her then, she was thoughtful, intelligent, careful, and possessed of an interior life that she did not advertise. She was beautiful, but in a way that did not announce itself, with dark hair and a quality of stillness.
They were engaged in 1978. The engagement was approved by both families, which mattered, and by Norton’s grandfather, Lord Mountbatten, which mattered more. He met Penny several times during the engagement. He approved of her.
The wedding was scheduled for the autumn of 1979. It did not happen on schedule.
On the morning of August 27, 1979, Lord Mountbatten was killed by an IRA bomb placed on his fishing boat off the coast of County Sligo in Ireland. Three other people were killed with him, including his 14-year-old grandson, Nicholas, who was Norton’s younger brother. Norton’s mother, Patricia, was severely injured. Norton’s father, John, was severely injured.
Penny was 26. She had been engaged to Norton for less than a year. The bomb did not target her, and she was not in Ireland that summer, but the bomb arrived in the household she was about to enter with a totality that meant the household she was entering was not, going forward, the household she had agreed to enter.
She went to Norton. She did not hesitate. She accompanied him through the funeral. She helped manage his parents’ recovery, which was prolonged and physically demanding.
They married on October 20, 1979, eight weeks after the bombing, at Romsey Abbey, the same church where Lord Mountbatten had been buried. The decision to hold it at Romsey was made by Norton’s parents, who had decided the family would not be defeated by the bomb.
Prince Philip attended. The Queen attended. The Prince of Wales attended. The wedding photographs showed a young couple in formal dress against a backdrop of senior royals in a country church in Hampshire.
Penny stood at the altar with Norton. She wore a long-sleeved white gown with a high collar. She held a small bouquet. She said the words.
The photographs from that day show a woman who is composed and who is not happy in any visible way because the day was not designed for happiness. She is performing the function the family requires. She has begun at 26 the particular labor that will define the rest of her life inside this family, which is the labor of providing steadiness for people whose lives have been disrupted by forces they cannot control.
Prince Philip noticed. In the months after the wedding, as the Brabourne and Mountbatten families went through the long process of recovering from the bombing, Philip wrote to Norton’s parents, visited them, and made a particular point of including the new Lady Romsey in the family circulation.
He had liked her at the wedding. He liked her more in the months that followed. She was, in the specific terms that mattered to him, useful. She did not flinch. She did not ask for attention. She managed surfaces.
He was 60 years old. She was 26. The relationship that he was beginning to form with her was at this stage entirely within the parameters of family connection. There was nothing to remark upon. No one remarked upon it.
Norton and Penny moved into Broadlands, the Mountbatten estate in Hampshire that Patricia and John had given them as a wedding present. Penny moved into the house and began, in the methodical way that would characterize everything she did, to learn how it worked.
She did not redecorate dramatically. She did not impose. She studied. She learned the names of the staff, the rhythms of the agricultural year, the specifics of the building’s maintenance requirements. By 1981, she was running it.
Norton was glad of this. He returned to his film work in London. Penny ran Broadlands, and the marriage settled into a pattern that resembled a successful upper-class English marriage of that period.
The children came. Nicholas, named for Norton’s murdered brother, was born in 1981. Alexandra was born in 1982. Leonora was born in 1986.
Penny was, by the accounts of those who saw her with her children during this period, an attentive mother. She did not delegate the children entirely to staff. She read to them. She drove them to things. She knew their teachers’ names.
It was during this period in the early to mid-1980s that her relationship with Prince Philip began to take on the particular shape that it would maintain for the next 35 years. He visited Broadlands often. He had grown up partly under Mountbatten’s influence, and Broadlands had been for him one of the few places where he had felt entirely at home.
He continued to feel at home there. He came to shoot, to see Patricia, to participate in the family weekends. But he also, over time, began to come specifically to see Penny.
The distinction matters because it was visible to the people in the household before it was visible to anyone outside it. He arrived. He had tea with her. He talked to her in a specific way, which was different from the way he talked to other family members.
What he was responding to in her was something specific. He was 62 when this began. He had been married to the Queen for 35 years. The marriage was a real marriage, with affection, partnership, and a shared institutional project.
But it was also a marriage that had been organized from the beginning around the Queen’s role rather than his own. He had given up his career, his name, his religion, and the political and social position he had occupied as a Greek prince in exile in order to support her accession.
He had also lost most of the people he had been closest to. His mother had died in 1969. His sisters had remained in Germany. Mountbatten, who had been the closest thing he had to a father, had been blown up.
By the early 1980s, the man underneath the carapace he had constructed was lonely in a way that the surface was specifically designed not to communicate.
She was intelligent. She was well-read. She was interested in things that he was interested in: environmental conservation, design, the practical management of land. She did not flatter him. She did not defer to him in the way that almost everyone he encountered deferred to him. She talked to him. She disagreed with him when she disagreed with him.
She was also beautiful and 26 years younger than him, and the wife of a man he had known since infancy and was fond of. There was no door that needed to be pushed open. There was no transgression at the level of social access.
What developed between them over the course of the 1980s was a friendship that was, in the assessment of the people closest to it, extraordinary in its depth and unremarkable in its conduct. They wrote to each other. He wrote to her with a frequency and a candor that was startling.
The letters covered the range of subjects that he found interesting, and they covered them at length. She replied. The replies were preserved by her with care, and they have not been released, and they will not be released.
It is also necessary to say that there is no reliable evidence the relationship was ever sexual. The phrase no reliable evidence is doing work in that sentence. It does not mean that the question has been resolved. It means that the people who would be in a position to know have not in any documented case suggested otherwise.
The British tabloid press in the 1990s and 2000s repeatedly attempted to construct a sexual scandal narrative around the friendship and repeatedly failed to produce evidence. What was there instead was something more difficult for the British press to describe, which was a friendship of unusual closeness conducted across a generational and institutional divide.
The institution that surrounded Prince Philip was aware of the friendship, monitored it, and did not intervene. This is its own piece of evidence. The institution intervenes when it judges intervention to be necessary. It did not intervene in this case.
The family, which is to say the Queen, was aware of the friendship and did not object. She included Penny in family events. She invited her to Sandringham and to Balmoral. She was a presence in the family photographs, in the carriage processions at Royal Ascot, in the Christmas gatherings at Sandringham.
The Queen knew her husband well enough to know what was happening, and well enough to know what was not happening, and she made the judgment that the friendship was a friendship and that her husband was entitled to it.
The carriage driving is where the friendship became visible. Prince Philip had taken up competitive carriage driving in 1971 after he had been forced to give up polo because of arthritis. He competed at the highest amateur level. He represented Britain at the World Driving Championships. He wrote a book about the rules and history of the sport.
Penny took up carriage driving in the mid-1990s. The trigger for this was the death in 1991 of Penny and Norton’s younger daughter Leonora from a cancer of the kidney at the age of five.
Leonora had been diagnosed with Wilms’ tumor, a kidney cancer that primarily affects children, the previous year. She had been treated at the Royal Marsden Hospital in London, and had not responded to treatment, and had died at Broadlands on October 22, 1991.
The funeral was at Romsey Abbey, the same church where she had married Norton. The same church where Mountbatten had been buried. The Knatchbull family had now buried in that church the patriarch, a teenage son, and a five-year-old daughter, all in the space of 12 years.
Prince Philip wrote to her. He wrote to her at length. The letters he wrote to Penny in the months after Leonora’s death have been described by the few people who know about them as among the most substantial things he ever wrote.
He sent her writing by C.S. Lewis. He sent her his own thoughts, at length, on the experience of losing people. He treated her as someone capable of receiving the real thing, which was an analysis of grief rather than a softening of it.
What this constituted, in the context of their relationship, was an escalation. Up to this point, the friendship had been substantial but lateral. After Leonora’s death, it became something deeper.
Norton was destroyed by the loss in a way that Penny had not anticipated. He withdrew. He drank more. He was less present at Broadlands. He developed, over the following years, a series of relationships with other women that became progressively less discreet.
The marriage, which had been functional and affectionate up to the point of Leonora’s death, became the kind of marriage that two people maintain because dismantling it would require energy they no longer have available.
Penny did not, in any visible way, retaliate against Norton’s withdrawal. What she did instead was redirect her attention into the parts of her life that were still working. She redirected it into the children. She redirected it into the management of Broadlands. She redirected it into charitable work, centered on cancer research and the support of bereaved families.
And she redirected it into Philip. The friendship intensified. They saw each other more often. They corresponded more. He encouraged her to take up carriage driving, which she did, at first as a kind of therapeutic activity, and then with the seriousness that she brought to anything she committed to.
By the late 1990s she was competing herself, and they were appearing together at carriage driving events with sufficient frequency that the British tabloid press began to pay attention.
The first major piece of public attention came in 1999, when several British tabloids published photographs of Philip and Penny at a carriage driving event at Sandringham, and accompanied the photographs with insinuating captions. The captions used the word close. They used the word companion. They mentioned the age difference. They mentioned that Norton was not present at the event.
The captions did not produce a story in the sense that there was no story to produce, no source, no quote, no document, but they produced an atmosphere, and the atmosphere persisted.
Penny’s response and Philip’s response was to do nothing. They did not issue denials. They did not modify their behavior. They did not stop appearing at carriage driving events together.
The institutional position of the royal household, communicated through the absence of any communication, was that there was nothing to comment on. The friendship was a friendship. The Queen knew about it. The Queen was unconcerned.
The press, faced with this kind of institutional silence and lacking the documentary evidence that would have allowed them to push past it, eventually moved on. But the atmosphere persisted, and it shaped the way Penny was perceived in the public mind for the next two decades.
The photographs from this period show the two of them in conversation, in shared concentration on the technical questions that the sport produces, in the kind of relaxed engagement that two people who have known each other for 30 years display when they are not performing for anyone.
The photographs are unremarkable to anyone who does not know who the people in them are. The photographs are, to anyone who does know, the most public available evidence of what the relationship actually was, which is two people who liked each other a great deal, and who had organized, inside the constraints of their respective lives, a way of seeing each other regularly and meaningfully across decades.
Philip was, throughout this period, the husband of the Queen. He was not, by any account that has been published, in any sense disengaged from the Queen. The marriage, in the late 1990s and into the 2000s, had deepened in the period after Diana’s death rather than weakened.
Penny existed alongside this in a parallel that did not threaten it. Norton existed alongside this also and existed in a more complicated position. He was Philip’s godson. He was Penny’s husband. He was aware of the friendship and he had his own friendships and his own affairs.
The marriage continued as a structure. They lived at Broadlands. They appeared together at family events. They raised their two surviving children. They had reached by the early 2000s the kind of arrangement that long marriages sometimes reach in which the marriage continues for reasons that are no longer about the relationship between the spouses.
What was happening between Philip and Penny in the 2000s and into the 2010s was something that the institutional structures around them had effectively normalized. The friendship was a friendship. It was 30 years old then 40. It had its own routines. They wrote. They drove. They appeared at the events where their appearance was uncontroversial.
By the 2010s Penny had effectively disappeared from the news cycle altogether except as an occasional named presence in the captions of group photographs at royal events. Inside this disappearance the friendship continued and it deepened in the particular way that long friendships deepen when both parties have grown old together.
By 2017, when Philip retired from public duties at the age of 96, the friendship was 38 years old. He was now mostly at Sandringham in the cottage on the estate where he had decided to spend his retirement. Penny visited him there. The visits were frequent, were known to the family, and were unremarked upon outside it.
He wrote to her. She wrote to him. The volume of correspondence in this period was, if anything, greater than it had been in previous decades because he had more time and because the question of how much time he had remaining was now a real question.
The death of the Duke of Edinburgh on April 9, 2021, was the event for which the institution had been preparing for many years. The funeral was scheduled for eight days later.
The pandemic restrictions reduced the planned funeral to a service of 30 mourners conducted in St. George’s Chapel under social distancing rules. The 30-person guest list was the subject of significant internal discussion. There was no room for the wider Mountbatten family in the volume that would normally have been included. There was no room for most of the friends that Philip had accumulated across his long life.
Penny was on the list. This was, by the standards of the institution, a significant statement even if it was not formulated as one. The list had been narrowed to the people whose absence from the funeral would have been a substantive omission. Penny’s absence would have been a substantive omission.
She sat in the pew where she had been placed. She wore the veil. She did not weep visibly because she had been managing surfaces for nearly 50 years by that point. She listened to the hymns. She watched the coffin lowered. She left the chapel after the service in the order that the seating plan dictated.
What happened next is the part of the story that the institution will manage for as long as the institution continues to exist. And that will be managed after that by Penny’s children and grandchildren, who will inherit a body of correspondence that they will at some point have to decide what to do with.
Norton had died in 2017, four years before Philip. The Mountbatten title had passed to their son Nicholas, who became the fourth Earl Mountbatten of Burma, and Penny became the dowager. She continued to live at Broadlands.
She continued her charitable work. She attended royal family events when invited, which she continued to be by the Queen until the Queen’s own death in 2022.
The Queen’s death in September 2022 was for Penny a different kind of loss because Elizabeth had been not only the wife of her closest friend but also the person who had granted the friendship the institutional permission that had allowed it to continue. The Queen had known. The Queen had not objected.
King Charles III, who had known Penny his whole adult life, continued the inclusion. He invited her to events. He confirmed through the kind of small institutional gestures that monarchs use to communicate continuity that she remained part of the family’s accepted circle.
She turned 70 in April 2023. The birthday was unmarked publicly. She conducted a small private dinner at Broadlands.
The letters were in a room at Broadlands. The room had been chosen for the purpose. The letters were not cataloged in any formal sense, but they were organized and they were complete in the sense that Penny had kept everything Philip had sent her across 40 years, and the volume was very large.
What is in the letters is not, by any account that has been published, scandalous in the conventional sense. It is the record of a friendship between two intelligent people across half of the second half of the 20th century and into the 21st.
It includes Philip’s reflections on his role, on the institution he served, on the country he had been brought to, on the family he had built, on the deaths he had absorbed, on the religious questions he had been working through, on the books he was reading, on the conservation work he was doing, on the carriage driving, on the dogs, on the granddaughters, on the great-grandchildren, on the question of what he thought he had done with his life and on the question of what he thought he had failed to do.
It also includes the things he said to her about her, which are the things that are most particularly hers, and which are the things that the institution will be most concerned about because they are the things that, if released, would convert a friendship that has been managed at the level of implication into a friendship that is documented at the level of statement.
The institution’s interest in keeping the letters private is therefore not the institution’s usual interest in concealing wrongdoing. The institution’s interest is in preserving the indeterminacy that has characterized the friendship for 45 years.
There is also the more practical institutional concern, which is that the letters contain Philip’s frank views on a wide range of subjects, including his frank views on members of his own family, on senior politicians, on public figures, on policy questions, and on the institution itself. Many of the people they concern are still alive.
The straightforward institutional answer to letters of that kind is that they remain private, and they remain private indefinitely, and the question of when they become public, if they ever do, is a question for a generation that does not yet exist.
Penny has not in any public statement addressed the letters directly. She has not denied that they exist. She has not described them. She has, on the few occasions when she has been asked publicly about her friendship with Philip, given the same answer in different forms, which is that he was a great friend, that she was very fond of him, and that the friendship was sustaining for both of them.
It is worth saying something about what the friendship cost her. She had a husband whose marriage to her was diminished by the friendship’s existence, regardless of what either of them thought about the diminishment. The friendship was not the cause of the marriage’s deterioration, but the friendship’s existence created an asymmetry in the marriage that made the deterioration easier to extend.
She also gave up the possibility of any other significant relationship. The friendship with Philip had occupied, from the time she was 30, the central place in her interior life that in another life would have been occupied by a romantic partnership. She did not seek another partnership after Norton became distant. She did not seek one after Norton died.
When it ended in 2021 with Philip’s death, she was 68 years old, and the central organizing relationship of her adult life was now retrospective, and she was alone in a way that she had not been alone in 40 years.
She also gave up, in a quieter and longer way, the public version of herself. She had become, by the early 1990s, a person who could not say what she thought in public because what she thought was too proximate to the friendship. She had become a person who appeared in photographs and did not give interviews.
This is a substantial set of costs. The friendship paid them. Whether it paid them in proportion to what it gave her is not a question that admits of an external answer. Her one available answer, on the few occasions she has been asked, has been to characterize the friendship as sustaining.
The letters were almost certainly composed in the small sitting room on the first floor that had been her room for 40 years. She wrote at length. She wrote by hand. The letters went into envelopes that were addressed to Philip and that were delivered to him through channels that were not the public mail system.
He read them in the cottage at Sandringham in the last years, in the late afternoons, when his eyesight was still adequate for the task. He answered them. The answers went back through the same channels.
When he died, the letters that he had received from her were, according to the institutional protocols that govern his estate, removed from his cottage and placed in the archive of his papers, which is held at Windsor Castle in the Royal Archives.
Whether the letters from her to him will ever be released is a question that depends on decisions that will be made by future monarchs. The practice of the Royal Archives is to not release private correspondence of senior royals during the lifetimes of the people involved or their children.
The letters from him to her are in a different position because they are at Broadlands, and they are her property, and the disposition of them is hers to decide. She has not, in any public statement, indicated what she intends to do with them.
The conventional answers in cases of this kind are that the correspondent of a senior royal either burns the letters or returns them to the Royal Archives during her lifetime, or instructs her executors to return them upon her death, or instructs her executors to do something more idiosyncratic.
It is not currently known which of these she has chosen. The institutional expectation is that the letters will be returned to the Royal Archives either during her lifetime or upon her death, and will be sealed alongside the corresponding letters from her to him for a period that exceeds the foreseeable institutional horizon.
The more interesting question is what Penny herself thinks about this. The few people who know her well enough to have asked her have indicated that her view of the letters is that they were a private correspondence between two people, and that the privacy of the correspondence was the condition under which it was possible.
There is a separate question, which is whether the historical record is owed something that the principle of privacy is not prepared to provide. The argument for release is that Prince Philip was a significant historical figure, that the inner life of significant historical figures is a legitimate subject of historical inquiry, that the letters represent the most substantial body of his private writing.
The argument has merit. It also has an institutional answer, which is that the historical record is allowed to wait, and that the institutional protection of privacy at the level of senior royal correspondence is more important, in the institution’s judgment, than the historical record’s interest in immediate access.
It is necessary to say something about the alternative readings of this story. The first reading is that the friendship was a disguised affair. This reading is available. It cannot be definitively disproved. It is, however, inconsistent with the texture of the evidence that does exist, which is that the relationship between Philip and the Queen during the period of the friendship was, by all accounts, deepening rather than weakening.
The second reading is that the friendship was an emotional affair, regardless of whether it was a sexual one. This reading also has merit. It also has limits. It assumes that the marriage between Philip and the Queen had a fixed quantity of available emotional and intellectual capacity, and that Penny’s friendship was drawing from that capacity. The available evidence about the marriage suggests, instead, that the marriage had its own deep structure and its own deep capacity, and that the friendship with Penny existed in a parallel, rather than in a competition.
The third reading is the most interesting, which is that the friendship was simply what it was, which is a friendship of unusual closeness across an institutional and generational divide, and that the cultural categories that are available for describing such friendships are inadequate to the friendship itself.
Penny chose, at 26, to enter a family that demanded labor of a kind she could not have anticipated. She chose, at 38, after the death of her child, to accept the support of a man who was offering it for reasons that included his own loneliness, and she gave him her support in return. She chose, across the long decades, to maintain a friendship that was, in its texture, the most substantial thing in her life.
She is choosing now what to do with the letters. Her likely choice, by every indication available, is to do nothing dramatic with them. The letters will sit for the rest of her life in the room at Broadlands. Upon her death, by the conventional institutional protocol, they will be returned to the royal archives and will join the corresponding archive of her letters to him, and the combined archive will be sealed by the institution.
The letters will become, in the institutional language, papers. They will be cataloged. They will exist, but they will not be readable.
This is the outcome that the institution prefers. It is also, by the available indications, the outcome that Penny prefers. It is the outcome that Philip himself would have preferred.
It is worth lingering for a moment longer on the carriage driving, because the carriage driving is the place where the friendship was most visible. Carriage driving, as a competitive sport, is structured around three disciplines: dressage, the marathon, and cones.
Philip’s strongest discipline was the marathon. He was a tactician. He drove four-in-hand, which is the most technically demanding configuration in the sport.
Penny started with a single pony. She progressed over several years to a pair and then to a team. She drove ponies rather than horses. She was good at it. She was not at Philip’s level, but she was a serious competitor.
The events at which they appeared together, Sandringham, Windsor, the Royal Windsor Horse Show, were events at which the structure of the day allowed for considerable informal time alongside the competitive components. The structure of the events allowed Philip and Penny to spend extended periods of unstructured time together in a context that was institutionally sanctioned.
The British carriage driving community, which is a small, technically focused community of people who care intensely about the sport, became, over the decades, a kind of protected zone for the friendship. The community knew. The community did not talk.
When Philip stopped competing in the late 1990s, because of the inevitable physical limitations of advancing age, he continued to attend events as a spectator and as an organizer, and he continued to attend with Penny, who continued to compete.
By the 2010s, when Penny had also largely stopped competing, the pattern had shifted again into one in which they attended events as senior figures of the community, rather than as participants, and in which they sat in the marquee at the side of the course and talked.
This was, by the descriptions of those who saw it, a pleasant way to spend a long afternoon. It was also, in the longer arc of their relationship, the principal way they spent the time they had together.
The relationship had its dramatic events: Leonora’s death, Norton’s withdrawal, the press attention of the late 1990s, Philip’s eventual retirement, his death. But most of the relationship was not its dramatic events. Most of the relationship was the long afternoons at carriage driving competitions, with the conversation that the long afternoons allowed.
The conversation was the thing both of them needed and that neither of them got from anyone else in the same form, in the same volume, with the same trust. The carriage driving was the alibi for the conversation. The institutional structure of family connection was the wider alibi for the carriage driving. The Queen’s tolerance was the wider alibi for the institutional structure.
The funeral, in this analysis, was the day the conversation ended. He had stopped writing letters in the final weeks, when he was no longer well enough to write them. By the time of his death, the conversation was a memory rather than an active thing.
After the funeral, the conversation became fully retrospective. There would be no more letters. There would be no more long afternoons. There would be only the letters that already existed in the room at Broadlands and the memory of the long afternoons in the head of the surviving participant.
There is one further element that should be mentioned, which is the granddaughters. Philip’s relationship with his grandchildren and great-grandchildren was, across his last several decades, one of the central pleasures of his life. And Penny’s children and grandchildren were folded into this circle in a way that was distinctive.
He took an interest in Nicholas, in Alexandra, in their children that exceeded the interest he took in the children of other family members at the same level of relationship.
When Princess Eugenie chose Penny as the godmother of her son August, born in 2021 only weeks before Philip’s death, the choice was a confirmation that Penny’s place in the family circle had been formalized at the level of the next generation.
This was by every indication what Philip had wanted. He had not been able to grant her any institutional position himself because the institutional positions in his life were not his to grant. The Queen had granted what she had granted. The next generation had granted the rest.
By the time he died, Penny was as fully inside the family circle as she could be without holding a title within the family directly, and her place inside the circle was protected against any future shift in institutional priorities.
The letters Buckingham Palace will never release are, in the end, the letters that two people wrote to each other across 40 years inside an arrangement that the institution permitted, that the family supported, and that the public was not invited to read.
The institution will not release them because the institution does not release private correspondence of senior royals. The family will not release them because the family does not release private correspondence of family members. Penny will not release them because she is the kind of person who does not release things that were given to her in confidence.
What is left for the historical record that exists outside the sealed archive is the shape of the friendship. The shape is a friendship that began at a wedding in a country church in Hampshire in October 1979, that deepened across the long, difficult decades of the 1980s and 1990s, that survived the deaths of children and parents and spouses, that was visible to those who watched carefully and invisible to those who did not, that produced a body of correspondence whose volume and quality has been described by those who know about it as exceptional, and that ended on the morning of April 9, 2021, with the death of one of the two participants.
The other participant, who is alive at the time of this account, lives at Broadlands in Hampshire. She is 72 years old. She is the Dowager Countess Mountbatten of Burma by virtue of a marriage she entered at 26 to a man who has been dead for eight years.
She continues her charitable work. She continues to see her children and her grandchildren. She continues, when she has the time and the inclination, to drive a carriage, although less competitively than she used to.
She thinks about her friend. The thinking, by all the structural evidence available, occupies a substantial portion of her interior life now in the way that the thinking about a major friendship occupies the interior life of anyone who has been left after the friendship has ended.
She does not in any public way share the thinking. She does not share it with the press. She does not share it with the public. She does not share it with the historians who have, on a small number of occasions over the past several years, sought to interview her about her friendship with the Duke. The historians have been politely declined.
She has, in this respect, won. The institutional management of her relationship with Prince Philip across 40 years was a project, and the project succeeded. The friendship was conducted. The friendship was protected. The friendship ended when it ended in a form that had not been forced into any of the categories that the categories would have failed to fit.
The cost of the success was that the friendship is not and will not be available to the public in the form of its actual documents, and the public will have to accept the public’s exclusion from the documents.
This is, on balance, probably the right outcome given what the friendship was. The friendship was an arrangement of considerable subtlety between two intelligent people who had each been shaped by lives of considerable difficulty and who had found in each other a particular kind of relief that neither of them had found elsewhere.
The arrangement was not transgressive in the legal or moral sense. It was transgressive in the more interesting sense of being a relationship that the available categories did not accommodate and that therefore had to be protected from the categories by the parties to it.
The protection has held. The protection will continue to hold. The seating plan at the funeral was, in this regard, a final visible expression of the protection. She was in the chapel. She was three pews back. She was visible enough to satisfy the requirement that she be present. She was distant enough to satisfy the requirement that she not be presented as anything other than what the institution had agreed to present her as.
The friendship is now historical. The friendship will be discussed in private by the small number of people who knew about it and who are still alive for as long as they are alive. The friendship will be referenced, in the limited way that the available record permits, by future biographers of Prince Philip who will note its existence and will be unable to say more about it than the available record permits.
The friendship will pass, eventually, into the oblivion that contains most relationships that have not been formally documented for public access, which is the oblivion that contains most of the actual texture of human life across most of human history.
This is, perhaps, the appropriate ending for it. Most of the things that happened between two people happened between those two people, and they pass with them. The expectation that the things that happened between two famous people are owed to the public is a recent expectation produced by the recent technologies of mass attention.
The friendship between Penny Knatchbull and Prince Philip belongs, by the standards that prevailed during their lifetimes and that they themselves endorsed, to them and not to the public.
In Hampshire, at Broadlands, in a room on the first floor that has been her room for almost half a century, Penelope Knatchbull sits in the long evenings with the letters that document a friendship the public was not invited to read.
She is alone in the way that she has been alone since the friend who occupied the central place in her interior life died four years ago. She is also not alone in the way that someone who has the major correspondence of their adult life in the room with them is not alone even when the correspondent is dead.
The letters are present. The letters are read. The letters are folded back into their envelopes and returned to the room where they have been kept. The room is locked in the evenings when she has finished.
The keys are kept in a place that is known to her and to her son, who is now Earl Mountbatten, and who will, when she dies, have to make the decisions about the letters that the institution has been quietly waiting for someone to make.
He will make them in consultation with the institution, and the decisions will be the decisions that the institution prefers because the institution has been managing decisions of this kind for centuries and has, in the long run, very rarely lost the management.
The letters will go where the letters have always been going to go. They will be sealed. They will join the archive. The archive will hold.
What was it, in the end, that they wrote about across 40 years in letters whose volume was substantial and whose contents will not be known. They wrote about everything. They wrote about the books they were reading and the dogs they were keeping and the gardens they were tending and the deaths they were absorbing and the children they were watching grow up.
They wrote about the work he was doing and the work she was doing and the long institutional questions that the country was working through and the smaller institutional questions that the family was working through.
They wrote across the long decades the kind of correspondence that two people write when they have the time and the inclination and the trust and the sustained attention that long correspondence is required.
What it produced is in the room at Broadlands. What it produced will be sealed and will remain sealed for as long as the institutions in question continue to be the institutions they are.
The friendship was theirs. It will remain theirs. It is the conclusion they would have wanted and it is the conclusion they engineered across the whole of the friendship’s duration by the discipline of their conduct and by the care of their management of the public surfaces that they were both in their different ways expected to manage.
They managed the surfaces. The surfaces held. The friendship is by their own judgment complete.
Penny is 72. She will not in any way that can be currently anticipated change her position on the letters. The letters will remain hers in the practical sense for as long as she is alive, and they will pass on her death into the hands of her son who will return them to the institution and the institution will seal them and the seal will hold.
The country has moved on. The institution has moved on. The next generation of the royal family has its own pattern of public life, and the long friendship between the late Duke and his goddaughter-in-law is settling, as such things settle, into the texture of the institution’s accumulated history.
This is in its way an achievement. It is the achievement that she wanted and that he wanted and that in its quiet completion has been delivered.
The friendship is by their own measure finished. The letters remain. The letters will remain.