Prince Philip is remembered by most people as the man who walked two steps behind the Queen for 73 years. The husband, the consort, the symbol of dependability. But behind that silent public figure was an entirely different life. A private men's club in a Soho oyster restaurant. A divorce that nearly broke the monarchy. A circle of women whose names the Palace spent decades keeping out of the newspapers. A separate house at Sandringham where he spent his final years largely alone, and a companion 32 years his junior who sat one row behind the Queen at his funeral. This is the truth the Palace spent seventy years hiding.
Chapter 1: The boy carried off Corfu in an orange crate.
He was born on a dining table in a Regency villa above the Greek sea. Eighteen months later he was carried into exile in a fruit basket. The villa was Mon Repos, on the Kanoni peninsula of Corfu, its white walls and shuttered windows built to keep out the heat, looking out over the Ionian Sea. It had been built in the early 1830s as the summer residence of the British Lord High Commissioner of the Ionian Islands. In 1864 it was given to King George I of the Hellenes, the grandfather of the baby on that table. That baby was Prince Philip of Greece and Denmark. The date was 10 June 1921.
He was the fifth child and only son of Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark and Princess Alice of Battenberg. His four older sisters, Margarita, Theodora, Cecilia and Sophie, were already at school in central Europe. His mother, deaf from birth and able to lip-read in four languages, was 36. His father was 39 and a serving officer in the Hellenic Army. The room where he was born is open to the public today. The table on which his mother laboured is preserved. It is a small, dark wooden dining table, ordinary, the kind kept in a country house for breakfast. The villa around it is now a museum.
The country of his birth did not want him for long. The Greek monarchy was in crisis. The disastrous Greco-Turkish War of 1919 to 1922 was destroying his uncle's army on the plains of Anatolia. In September 1922 the Greek forces collapsed at Smyrna. The army staged a revolution. Prince Andrew, who had commanded the Second Army Corps, was arrested. A revolutionary court martial tried him for disobeying orders and sentenced him to death. In early December 1922 he was found guilty. Six other senior figures were convicted and shot the same day. Prince Andrew was spared because King George V of Britain sent a cruiser.
In the autumn of 1922 the boy on the Mon Repos dining table, his mother and his four sisters were evacuated by the captain of the British destroyer HMS Calypso. The boy was 18 months old. There was no proper bed for him on the warship. The story, confirmed by every biographer, is that a sailor made one himself. He took an orange crate from the wardroom, lined it with bedding, and lifted the future husband of Queen Elizabeth II aboard. It is worth keeping that image in mind for the rest of this story. The most photographed husband in the world began his life in a wooden box.
The family settled first in a rented house at Saint-Cloud outside Paris. They had almost no money. These exiled members of the Greek royal family depended on relatives across Europe. Princess Alice ran the household on borrowed funds. The boy's clothes came from cousins' hand-me-downs. His sisters were sent to schools that would take them for nominal fees. His parents' marriage, contracted for love in 1893, had by the late 1920s survived largely out of habit.
He grew up across schools. The American School of Paris, then the experimental school Schloss Salem in Germany, founded by the educator Kurt Hahn on the principles of Plato's Republic. When Hahn was forced to leave Germany in 1933 with the rise of the Nazi regime, he re-founded the school at Gordonstoun in Moray, Scotland. The 12-year-old boy followed him there. Before he turned ten he had no home in the conventional sense. By ten, his sisters had married German princes, who later became members of the Nazi Party. His father was on the Riviera. His mother had been placed in a hospital for mental illness, and at every school he was learning that the only way to keep his inner world safe was to hide it.
He was good at schoolwork to the extent required. He was a skilled sailor and cricketer, captain of the hockey team, and won prizes for diving. He played Macduff in a school production of Macbeth and, according to a schoolmaster's note, had considerable comic timing. He learned to deflect emotional questions with humour. At the dinner table he learned to behave as if no news, even bad news, could touch him. He learned to speak English without a Greek accent. He learned to disappear.
Before his sixteenth birthday his favourite sister Cecilia was dead. What followed belongs to the next chapter. The boy carried off Corfu in a basket had by then lived in five countries, attended four schools, watched his parents' marriage collapse, lost his mother's presence for nearly five years, and been taught a discipline he would maintain through his married life and his time as consort to the British throne. That discipline was an inflexibility about not showing his feelings. He did not yet know what it would cost him.
Chapter 2: The father who left and never came back.
His father left him for a mistress on a yacht in Monte Carlo, and in the same year his mother was committed to a sanatorium in Switzerland. The year was 1930. The boy was nine. The two events did not happen on the same day, but to him they happened at the same time and meant the same thing. The house went silent at exactly the moment a child needed the reassurance of a household.
His father, Prince Andrew of Greece, had been adrift for some time. After the failed court martial of 1922 and the family's exile to France, Andrew had no work. He was a soldier. In exile he had no army to lead. He read, he gardened, and he wrote a book, Towards Disaster, defending his conduct in the Greco-Turkish War. He developed a gambling habit at the casino in Monte Carlo. By the late 1920s he had formed a relationship with a married Frenchwoman, the Countess Andrée de La Bigne, who kept a yacht on the Riviera coast. He went aboard that boat. He never came back to his wife.
Princess Alice's breakdown was longer and more complicated. From the late 1920s she began behaving in ways her household first described as religious mania. She believed she was receiving messages. She believed she had healing powers. She believed she could converse with the Apostles. In 1930 the German psychiatrist Ernst Simmel, and later Sigmund Freud himself, diagnosed her with paranoid schizophrenia, having been consulted by her family. Freud's proposed treatment, unacceptable by modern standards, was to X-ray her ovaries to reduce her libido. She was sent without her consent to the Bellevue Sanatorium at Kreuzlingen in Switzerland, under Dr Ludwig Binswanger. She was there for two and a half years. The boy did not see his mother for nearly five years.
The four sisters were absorbed into their newly married German aristocratic families. Margarita had married Prince Gottfried of Hohenlohe-Langenburg. Theodora had married Berthold, Margrave of Baden. Cecilia had married Georg Donatus, Hereditary Grand Duke of Hesse and by Rhine. Sophie had married Prince Christoph of Hesse. In the years that followed, three of those four husbands became members of the Nazi Party.
The future husband of Queen Elizabeth II, then nine years old, was the only one of the siblings not in Germany. He was at Cheam in England, and in the school holidays he was parcelled out to relatives. His maternal grandmother, the Marchioness of Milford Haven, kept him for the holidays of 1930 and 1931. She lived in a grace-and-favour apartment at Kensington Palace. The boy slept in a converted nursery. When she died in 1950, he was seen to weep in public in front of his wife for the first time as an adult.
His uncle George, the Marquess of Milford Haven, then took him in hand. When the boy was 17, in 1938, George died of cancer. Another uncle, Lord Louis Mountbatten, then took over. Mountbatten was a naval officer with no interest in bowing to anyone. He had particular ambitions for his nephew. He dreamed of establishing a strong Battenberg position within the British royal succession. Over the following years that plan was confirmed.
Throughout this period he had no money. Philip later told the journalist Gyles Brandreth that at 18 he had one suit and no pocket money. He had to economise on socks. He stayed with friends because he could not afford to rent a flat. He travelled third class. He took ordinary trains. The future Duke of Edinburgh, Buckingham Palace, Sandringham and Balmoral spent his late adolescence borrowing from relatives. His survival depended on the willingness of the British branch of his family to take him in.
His mother came out of Bellevue in 1932. She lived quietly, first in Cologne and later in Athens. She had undergone a religious conversion. She wore plain clothes. She avoided society. She became a stranger to her children. When the boy saw her again at his sister Cecilia's funeral in 1937, the meeting was brief.
Cecilia's death remained a deep wound for the rest of his life. She was only 26. She was about to become a mother for the fourth time and was eight months pregnant. On 16 November 1937 she boarded a Ju 52 airliner at Frankfurt with her husband Georg Donatus, her mother-in-law Grand Duchess Eleonore of Hesse, her two young sons Ludwig, six, and Alexander, four, and their family friend Lord Louis Hamilton. They were flying to London for the wedding of Ludwig's brother. Bad weather forced the pilot to make an emergency landing at Ostend in Belgium. In fog he struck a factory chimney. The aircraft crashed and caught fire. Everyone on board was killed. The newborn, whose mother had gone into labour in the air, was found in the wreckage beside her. A British inquiry found no specific cause.
The boy was 16. He attended the funeral at Darmstadt in a borrowed morning coat. Photographs survive. He walked between his two German brothers-in-law, both wearing Nazi lapel pins. His face was fixed and calm. He did not cry. He made no statement to the press. The lesson in silence he had learned at nine had become the foundation of his adult character. He carried it into his married life. Very early he decided that the best way to protect his private life was to hide it from everyone. He remained committed to that decision.
The men and women who later knew him as husband, friend, companion and member of the Thursday Club all said the same thing. Mike Parker, his closest friend for 40 years, said he never once heard Philip speak about his mother's illness. Penny Junor, who interviewed dozens of people who knew him, said the same. The silence was total and deliberate.
He had not yet met the girl who would decide within two years to marry him. When they met, she did not know whom she was marrying. Like everyone else she knew only the outside: the Dartmouth cadet, the sturdy sailor, the handsome teenager with the crooked smile and the joking manner, the one they called the "orange crate boy," who had by then disappeared into himself and was becoming a future royal consort.
Chapter 3: The princess who fell for a naval cadet.
The future Queen of England fell for the penniless Greek cadet on a rainy July day at Dartmouth when the girl was 13 and the boy was 18. It was 22 July 1939. King George VI and Queen Elizabeth had come on a state visit to the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth in Devon with their two daughters, Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret. Philip of Greece, by then a cadet in the Royal Navy and having shortened his name to Philip, was assigned to entertain the two princesses. He was 18. They had a family connection through Lord Louis Mountbatten, who was in the King's party. He had polished manners, a tall frame and an open laugh.
The royal nanny, Marion Crawford, who was present, later wrote in her memoirs that Princess Elizabeth did not take her eyes off him for the rest of the visit. She wrote that "from that moment she never thought of anyone else." That line has appeared in every biography since. The future Queen had made up her mind at 13. She never changed it.
The following year their wartime correspondence began. Philip joined HMS Ramillies in January 1940 and sailed for the Indian Ocean. He served in HMS Valiant in the Mediterranean and was mentioned in dispatches for his role in the Battle of Cape Matapan on the night of 27 March 1941, where he operated the searchlight that illuminated the Italian cruiser squadron for the British battleships. He was awarded the Greek War Cross of Valour. He was transferred to the Pacific and was present at the Japanese surrender in Tokyo Bay aboard HMS Whelp on 2 September 1945. Between postings he wrote to her. Those letters have not been widely released. The Royal Archives keep them sealed. What is known is that throughout the war she kept his photograph on her dressing table at Windsor, and when their engagement was announced on 9 July 1947 it surprised no one who knew them.
The negotiations before the engagement were not romantic. Philip was not initially an acceptable suitor. He was foreign. He was Greek Orthodox. He was poor. His three surviving sisters had married former Nazis, and inviting them to the wedding was considered embarrassing. They did not come. The Privy Council and the King's private secretary, Tommy Lascelles, were concerned. Lord Mountbatten took the matter in hand. In February 1947 Philip was granted British citizenship by Act of Parliament. He renounced his Greek and Danish royal titles. He converted to the Church of England. He took his uncle's surname, Mountbatten, in place of his father's German-derived name of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg. He became engaged as Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten of the Royal Navy.
They married at Westminster Abbey on 20 November 1947. He was 26. She was 21. The country was in its second post-war winter. Rationing was still in force. Elizabeth's wedding dress was paid for with clothing ration coupons and public gifts. Two thousand guests were in the Abbey. The ceremony was broadcast by the BBC and heard around the world. On the morning of the wedding he was made Duke of Edinburgh, Earl of Merioneth and Baron Greenwich. He was not yet a Prince of the United Kingdom. That title would take another ten years and would come only because of another scandal.
That morning he was the husband of the heir to the British throne, holder of two new English peerages, and a serving lieutenant in the Royal Navy. Within weeks he returned to his post. For the next four years they lived a life closer to ordinary people than anything that came later. In October 1949 he was posted to the Mediterranean Fleet at Malta. She joined him at Villa Guardamangia at Pietà on the island. She drove herself to the hairdresser. She paid in cash. She invited friends for cocktails. He commanded the frigate HMS Magpie. For nearly two years he was a serving officer with a post, a uniform and a future of his own.
It ended in Kenya on 6 February 1952. They were on a Commonwealth tour. Elizabeth was watching wildlife from a treetop platform at the Treetops Hotel in the Aberdare Forest. Her father, King George VI, had died in his sleep at Sandringham at the age of 56. The news reached Philip first. He took her aside and told her in a quiet sitting room at Sagana Lodge, where they were staying. By his own private account, he went into another room and wrote letters expressing regret for the engagements that would have to be cancelled. That morning Philip's active naval career ended. He never commanded a ship again. He gave up the future he had built, which was entirely his own, at the exact moment his father-in-law's heart stopped. The discipline of silence learned at nine now became a discipline he would carry for another 70 years.
At the Queen's coronation at Westminster Abbey on 2 June 1953 he knelt before her. The Metropolitan Police estimated the crowd outside at three million. Inside the Abbey, 8,251 guests sat under the floodlights of the new television age. An estimated 27 million people in the United Kingdom watched on television; it was the first event in British history to draw a majority of the population to a single broadcast. He placed his hands between hers and swore to be her liege man of life and limb. The camera lenses were fixed on him as he said the words. His face was set, his eyes bright. By every account of those present, the emotion was genuine. He was 32. He was the new Queen's consort, father of a four-year-old heir, a Knight of the Garter, the youngest member of the Privy Council, and at that moment the most photographed husband in the world.
By then he had also established his Thursday Club, his circle of close friends, his country pursuits, his polo and his private routines. The public man and the private man grew up side by side. The public man stood beside the Queen for the next 69 years. The private man met friends in an upstairs room in Soho every Thursday afternoon and lived a life no one saw.
Chapter 4: The Soho oyster bar where the Prince drank.
Every Thursday afternoon a group of men climbed the stairs of Wheeler's Oyster Restaurant on Old Compton Street, and among them was the new consort of the future Queen of England. The restaurant stood at 19 Old Compton Street, in the heart of Soho, half a mile north of Trafalgar Square and a short walk from the gentlemen's clubs of St James's. The ground floor was an elongated oyster bar with sawdust on the floor. The upstairs room at the back was used for private parties. The Thursday Club met there from 1947 until the mid-1960s.
The club was founded in 1947 by the journalist Shaa Fielding, the actor James Robertson Justice and the photographer Sterling Henry Nahum, known professionally as "Baron." Baron Nahum was of Italian and Maltese descent. During the war he had become one of London's leading society photographers. He took the engagement photographs of Princess Elizabeth and Philip in 1947. He took the wedding photographs. He took the coronation photographs. He was a friend of Lord Louis Mountbatten. And through Mountbatten he became a friend of Philip.
The members of the Thursday Club were men, drinkers, and by the standards of the day, bohemian. Beyond the three founders, the regulars included Mike Parker, Philip's equerry from 1947 and his private secretary from 1954. David Milford Haven, Marquess of Milford Haven, Philip's first cousin and his best man at the wedding. The actor Peter Ustinov. The broadcaster Gilbert Harding. The playwright Compton Mackenzie. The artist Felix Topolski. The magician David Nixon, newspaper editors such as Arthur Christiansen of the Daily Express and Frank Owen of the Daily Mail, and in the late 1950s the osteopath Stephen Ward. That last name will return in the third act of this story.
For now it is enough that the Thursday Club was a meeting place for the country's senior newspaper figures, leading photographers, celebrated actors and the Queen's consort, in an upstairs room of a Soho oyster restaurant. Two of the country's biggest tabloid newspapers were edited at the very table where Philip drank. Those lunches were recorded in no document the public has ever seen. The most accurate description comes from Compton Mackenzie's diary, in which he wrote that lunch ran from one o'clock until five and that the drinks bill was astronomical. He wrote that the conversation was free and the discretion absolute. The club's unwritten rule was that what was said at the table stayed at the table.
What survives publicly is what happened at the after-parties. Baron Nahum kept a rented flat in Brick Street, Mayfair, behind Park Lane. After Wheeler's closed for the afternoon, the real drinking moved there. The flat hosted a small number of regular members and a varying number of guests. The guests included, at various times, photographers, models, actresses, West End show dancers and occasionally cabaret singers. The atmosphere was social, not predatory. The young women came knowing whose flat it was. The men knew Baron would photograph them the following week.
The Palace knew about the Thursday Club from the start. The King's private secretary, Tommy Lascelles, who had doubted Philip before the engagement, wrote a private letter in 1949 objecting to the Duke of Edinburgh's companions. The King rebuffed him, believing the matter was not important enough to intervene. After the King's death in 1952 the matter passed to the Queen and her advisers. They did not intervene either. The reason they did not intervene becomes clearer when you look at the club's membership. Two of the regulars, Arthur Christiansen and Frank Owen, edited the country's biggest popular newspapers. A third regular, Shaa Fielding, edited the Tatler. A fourth, Baron Nahum, photographed the royal family. The Thursday Club was, among many other things, the country's most effective arrangement for keeping certain stories out of certain papers. The men who could have printed a scandal about the consort or the prince sat beside him at lunch.
The exception came in October 1948. Philip went to see the musical revue "Starlight Roof" at the London Hippodrome. He was accompanied by David Milford Haven and Baron Nahum. Princess Elizabeth was at Buckingham Palace, eight months pregnant with the future King Charles III. After the show, the three men went backstage. The star of the show was Pat Kirkwood, then 32, the highest-paid actress on the London stage, who during the war had earned £1,000 a week. What happened next belongs to the next chapter. For now the point is the speed of the press response. By the following morning there was nothing in the British papers. The American papers carried a paragraph. The story took another 40 years to appear in print in Britain. The Thursday Club had worked exactly as designed.
The club survived into the early 1950s. Baron Nahum's flat saw a rotating cast of young women including the photographer Antony Armstrong-Jones, later Lord Snowdon and husband of Princess Margaret, the actress Anna Massey, the cabaret singer Hutch, and the American actress Dorothy Dandridge. The press did not name them. The Thursday Club was a private meeting point for a particular kind of mid-century glamour.
It began to fall apart in October 1956. Baron was 49. He was admitted to hospital for a routine examination and died of a heart attack a few days later, on 5 September. The lunches continued under other members for another year or two. The club's character changed. With Baron gone, the Brick Street flat closed. In the later years the Thursday Club became a heavy lunch for conventional gentlemen. By then the equerry's marriage was on the brink of collapse, and with it the public would get its first glimpse of what had been going on above Wheeler's.
Mike Parker's wife Eileen had had enough. She was preparing to take a petition to a London solicitor. The Thursday Club had kept the consort's social life out of the British press for ten years. The club was two months away from a test of its discretion that it could not contain.
Chapter 5: The actress at the stage door.
The Duke of Edinburgh was eating scrambled eggs at four in the morning with the highest-paid actress on the London stage while his wife was eight months pregnant with the future King. It was a Wednesday evening in October 1948. The three men in dinner jackets in the stalls of the London Hippodrome were the consort of the heir presumptive, his first cousin the Marquess of Milford Haven, and the society photographer Sterling Henry Nahum, known professionally as Baron. The woman on stage was the singer and dancer Patricia Kirkwood. The newspapers called her "Legs of the Empire." She was 32. She had begun her career at 18 at the Manchester Hippodrome in 1936. During the war she had been a leading performer in London revues, and that autumn she was performing in the "Starlight Roof" revue at the London Hippodrome on Charing Cross Road. American film columnists described her as the highest-paid actress on the British stage. By the reports of the time she was earning £1,000 a week, worth more than £30,000 a week today.
After the second house, the three men went backstage. Baron, who knew Kirkwood from West End show photography, made the introductions. Philip stayed in her dressing room for some time. The two of them sat and talked. Kirkwood later described one incident: Philip leaned over her dressing table and said, "Charming, charming, charming." At each costume change she went behind a screen in the corner of the room. She insisted nothing improper happened. She said he was charming, polite and curious. She liked him.
The four of them, including David Milford Haven, left the theatre together. They drove to Les Ambassadeurs restaurant on Hamilton Place near Park Lane. They dined there for two hours. They drank champagne. After the restaurant they went on to the Milroy nightclub upstairs. They danced. Other guests saw Kirkwood and Philip dancing together. Press agency photographers took their picture at the club door. Not one of those photographs appeared in any British newspaper.
At around three in the morning, when the Milroy closed, the group went on to Baron Nahum's flat in Brick Street, Mayfair. Baron's cook had been instructed to stay up. She made scrambled eggs for four. Philip ate standing up. He left the flat by the back stairs at about half past four in the morning. He returned to Clarence House, where he and Elizabeth were living, and was at his desk by breakfast. This is the story Kirkwood told for the rest of her life. Reports that appeared in the press in the 1970s and 1980s added further details, some of which she denied. She was clear on one point. There was no affair. There was one evening. The evening began with a curtain call and ended with scrambled eggs.
She never saw Philip alone again after that night. For the next 60 years she received one Christmas card from him every year. The final outcome of Pat Kirkwood's life from that one evening was deeply unhappy. Through the early 1950s the story circulated in gossip columns but never reached print. By the late 1960s it had become a rumour that she had been the Duke of Edinburgh's mistress. She was offered a run of increasingly poor roles. Eventually the work dried up. She married four times and lived for many years in Yorkshire, far from London. In 1993 she wrote to Philip asking him to issue a formal denial. She received a reply from his private secretary saying the Duke did not feel able to do so. She wrote back angrily accusing him of cowardice. She received no further reply. She died on 25 December 2007, aged 87.
In her last interview, given to the Mail on Sunday in 2005, she returned to that evening once more. She said that if 99.5 per cent of what you read about someone is wrong, then the same must be true of what is written about her. For 60 years she denied a relationship that, by her own account, never happened. She blamed the rumour for the destruction of her career.
The pattern of the Hippodrome sighting repeated. It is worth being precise about what that pattern actually was. It was not the pattern of a man working through a list of women. It was the pattern of a man maintaining a social life in which beautiful, glamorous and often famous women came and went; in which a particular evening might or might not have turned into a relationship, and in which the Thursday Club's protective arrangements ensured that nothing he did ever became news. Whether he slept with Pat Kirkwood that night will remain unknown, since no party to it is alive to confirm it. What can be said is that the press had begun to ask the question, even if they could not yet print it.
By 1949 gossip columns were discussing stories the Palace's lawyers would not let them publish. The Hippodrome story circulated in Fleet Street conversation. By 1951 a small American paper, the Baltimore Sun, was printing paragraphs the British papers could not touch. At that distance the Baltimore Sun was beyond the reach of British libel law. That American coverage gave British papers the opening, in 1957, to print what they had been suppressing for years.
Meanwhile Philip's social life continued. Eileen Cord, a childhood friend from the years of exile in France, returned to London in the 1940s. She was the daughter of a Greek family who had been friends of Philip's parents at their rented house at Saint-Cloud outside Paris. In 1938, at 16, she had married an Englishman, and Philip had been best man at the wedding. Her first marriage broke down during the war. She had two children, a son, Max, born in 1942, and a daughter, Louise, born in 1945. Philip was godfather to both. She built a career in London television as a presenter of the BBC's "Café Continental," a Saturday-night variety show with a European flavour. She was known to viewers as the woman with the European drawl who introduced the dancers. She was not invited to the coronation in 1953. The press noticed.
Her memoir, "Born Bewildered," published in 1961, did not mention the rumour that Max Bujard was Philip's biological son. Max himself denied it all his life. Max said his real father lived in Paris. He died in 2011, still holding to that position. Philip paid Max Bujard's school fees at Gordonstoun. He took a considerable interest in the boy's progress. The school records confirm the payments, which were made discreetly through the Mountbatten family's solicitors. Whether this was the act of a generous godfather towards a friend in difficult circumstances or something else has never been publicly established. Both Eileen and Max died claiming it was the former.
From the late 1940s through the 1950s the question followed him. Each individual incident could be denied. The sum of the incidents could not. The Palace knew it. By all reliable accounts, so did the Queen. She said nothing about it in public. By the available records she did not raise it in private either. She behaved as if there were nothing to resolve. The discipline of silence Philip had learned at nine had now become the rule of his marriage as well.
In February 1957 that rule was tested by an event the Thursday Club could not contain. The royal yacht Britannia was returning from a five-month Commonwealth tour. Philip's close friend and private secretary, Mike Parker, had been with him for the whole voyage. In a quiet office in Beaconsfield, a London solicitor was preparing a divorce petition. The papers were to be filed on 5 February. The same morning the story was to break in the Fleet Street press. The Thursday Club's ten-year run of perfect press control was about to end.
Chapter 6: The divorce that nearly broke the monarchy.
On a February morning in 1957, while the royal yacht Britannia was anchored in Gibraltar harbour, the news of his closest friend's divorce broke in the newspapers. The friend was Lieutenant Commander Mike Parker, an Australian Royal Navy officer who had served with Philip in the Pacific during the war. He had been Philip's equerry from 1947 and his private secretary from 1954. They were so close that the Australian press said Parker was the only person, apart from the King, who called the Duke of Edinburgh by his first name.
Britannia had been at sea for nearly five months. Philip had sailed from Portsmouth in October 1956 on a long Commonwealth tour to open the Melbourne Olympic Games. He had then visited New Zealand, Antarctica, the Falklands, Ceylon and Gambia. The voyage was now heading home. Britannia was due back in early February. Five months of official duties, hundreds of speeches and hundreds of receptions. And five months of Mike Parker at his side day after day, and five months of nights at sea aboard a yacht where the rules of the British shore did not always apply.
In a small solicitor's office in Westminster, Mike Parker's wife Eileen had reached a decision. Their marriage had been unhappy for several years. They had three children. Her husband was almost always away from home. The Parker family flat at Lowndes Square in Kensington had become a place where she had grown tired of being alone. She instructed the divorce lawyer Theobald Mathew. On 5 February 1957 the petition was filed. Under English divorce law at the time the ground was adultery. The woman named as co-respondent was a Mrs Mary Alexandra Thompson. The story reached the press the same day.
The London papers were cautious. The Australian and American papers were not. The Baltimore Sun, which had been printing royal marriage stories since 1949, splashed the story. The headline was: "Distance Between Queen and Duke." The report named no woman in connection with Philip. It did not need to. It said only that the Duke's closest friend was being divorced for adultery, that the Duke had spent the past five months with him aboard a private yacht, and that the Duke's behaviour during the voyage was the subject of widespread speculation. Under the influence of the American coverage, within 48 hours the British papers picked up the story.
Buckingham Palace's response was unusually sharp. The Queen was at Sandringham. Her private secretary, Sir Michael Adeane, was summoned to London. The press secretary, Commander Richard Colville, was instructed to issue a public denial, an unprecedented step. On 12 February the first denial was issued. On 22 February, as the British press continued to run the story, a second and stronger denial followed. It stated that reports of a rift between the Queen and the Duke were entirely untrue. The Court Circular rarely issues such statements. It had not been done in the reign of George VI. It would not be done again in the reign of Elizabeth II. The denial was printed in every paper. It did not stop the story.
The British press kept digging. Reporters were sent to Gibraltar to meet the yacht. They were sent to Mike Parker's London flat. They were sent to his lawyer's house. The Palace was forced to act again. On the same day as the second denial, 22 February 1957, the Queen granted her husband the title of Prince of the United Kingdom. The title was conferred by letters patent. It elevated him from Duke of Edinburgh to Prince of the United Kingdom, giving him the status of a full member of the royal family above the ordinary peerage and beyond ordinary legal process. Constitutional commentators of the time understood exactly what had happened. The new title placed Philip at a level at which he could not be summonsed. Until the morning of 22 February, in principle, Mike Parker's wife's lawyers could have called him as a witness in the divorce case. After the morning of 22 February, they could not. The marriage was protected. The Queen had used her special royal powers to place her husband beyond the reach of the witness box.
Mike Parker himself had resigned on 8 February. He flew back from Gibraltar to London and faced a crowd of reporters at the airport. He made a brief statement. He had resigned as private secretary to the Duke of Edinburgh in order to give Mrs Parker the divorce she wanted. He said nothing about Philip. He said nothing about the tour. He went home to Lowndes Square and closed the door. Parker never returned to royal service. He moved to Australia in 1960. He worked in shipping management. He married a second time in 1965 to Carol Thompson, who had no connection to the woman named in the first divorce case. He died in Melbourne on 25 August 2001. Philip attended his funeral, having flown there privately, and returned without speaking to the press.
The divorce was finalised on 23 June 1958. Eileen Parker was granted a decree on the ground of her husband's adultery with Mrs Thompson. She was given custody of the three Parker children. She accepted a financial settlement and a confidentiality agreement. She wrote a memoir, "Step Aside for Royalty," published in 1982, in which she gave a guarded account of her married life. She said that the closeness between Mike and the Duke had become impossible for her to bear. She said nothing more.
The Thursday Club survived another year or two, but much diminished. With Baron dead in 1956 and Mike Parker gone to Australia, the club's core was gone. Members met less often. The press attention on the club in the spring of 1957 was brief but real, and it introduced the club's name to most of the country for the first time. Ten years of secrecy had been broken.
For Philip the experience was clarifying. The marriage was protected. The discipline of the private life held. The Queen had backed him completely. She had honoured him in the middle of a storm. She had risked her own special powers for him. He understood what he had been given.
From 1957 the social life continued, but its structure changed. The bohemian Soho lunches ended. The discreet weekends in country houses began. The next phase of the private life would be conducted in the private homes of aristocratic friends. There were no more public denials. The equerry's divorce had taught the Palace the cost of speaking. From 1957 the rule was total silence on all rumours and all names, however loud the press became. The discipline was set. It held for the next 64 years, until his death.
Chapter 7: The portraits that vanished with Stephen Ward.
When the osteopath who had drawn the Duke of Edinburgh in pen and ink took an overdose on a mattress in Soho, the Palace went very quiet. The osteopath was Stephen Ward. He was 50. The mattress was in his friend the fashion designer Noel Howard-Jones's flat on Vauxhall Bridge Road in central London. The date was 3 August 1963. Ward had taken a bottle of Nembutal. He left a note. He had been on trial at the Old Bailey for eight days on charges of living on immoral earnings. His lawyer had told him that morning that the jury was going to convict. He decided not to wait for the verdict. He died at St Stephen's Hospital in Fulham at 3.20pm on 4 August.
To understand why Buckingham Palace went quiet that afternoon, it is necessary to understand who Stephen Ward was to Philip. Ward was a well-known London osteopath. He had treated Sir Winston Churchill, Paul Robeson, Ava Gardner, Frank Sinatra and a large section of post-war London's establishment at various times. He was also a skilled portrait artist. He drew royal family portraits for the Illustrated London News and other magazines. He drew Philip in three separate sittings in 1961. The drawings were attractive portraits based on a live model. Philip sat for him in person. Ward was a member of the Thursday Club. His membership overlapped only briefly with the club's golden years. Baron had introduced him in the early 1950s. He attended lunches occasionally. He was present at parties at the Brick Street flat from time to time. He was not a central figure in the club, but he was known and accepted. He was the kind of man the Thursday Club had been designed to include.
In 1961 Ward became close to a young woman named Christine Keeler. She was a dancer at the Murray's Cabaret Club in Soho. She was 18 when they first met. Ward was 47. The relationship between them was complicated and has been argued over by historians and lawyers ever since. Ward insisted repeatedly during his trial that he was not Keeler's lover and not the beneficiary of her earnings. The prosecution claimed the opposite. What later researchers, including the QC John Mortimer, established was closer to a sympathetic older friend than a procurer. But the boundaries were blurred, and the social circle he and Keeler moved in was small and open.
In July 1961 Ward took Keeler to a swimming party at Cliveden, the country house of Lord Astor in Buckinghamshire. Also present was the then 46-year-old married Secretary of State for War, John Profumo. A relationship developed between Profumo and Keeler. It ended within weeks. At the same time Keeler was also involved with the Soviet naval attaché at the London embassy, Yevgeny Ivanov. Ivanov was a known intelligence officer. The security services had him under surveillance. The connection between Profumo and Ivanov, through the same young woman, was the core of the Profumo affair.
The affair became public in March 1963. Profumo denied the relationship in the House of Commons on 22 March. In June he admitted he had lied. He resigned on 5 June. Harold Macmillan's government was destabilised. The press tore through the social networks of those involved. For the first time the Thursday Club was named in print. Stephen Ward was charged with living on the earnings of Keeler. His trial opened at the Old Bailey on 22 July 1963. It ended with his death 12 days later.
This brings us to the question that journalists such as Tim Tate and others have pursued for decades. What did the security services do about the Duke of Edinburgh's portraits by Stephen Ward? And more broadly, what did Ward know about the Thursday Club's after-parties, and whether any of the women who came to Baron Nahum's flat also went to other flats where they might have come to the attention of Soviet intelligence?
The answer that has emerged piecemeal over the following six decades is that the matter was managed through the office of Sir Anthony Blunt. Blunt was the Surveyor of the Queen's Pictures from 1945 to 1972. He was also, secretly, a Soviet spy. He had been recruited at Cambridge in the 1930s. He had been on MI5's list of suspects since at least the late 1950s. In April 1964 he confessed in exchange for immunity from prosecution. That confession was kept secret for 15 years. Margaret Thatcher exposed him in the House of Commons on 15 November 1979.
In the autumn of 1963, shortly after Ward's death, the sketches of Philip by Stephen Ward changed hands. An intermediary acting for the Palace collected them from a London gallery. They have never been seen in public since. In later decades they occasionally appeared at auction, but how they moved was impossible to trace. What Tim Tate has reported, based on interviews and former intelligence sources, is that Anthony Blunt was the channel through which the whole matter was managed. Whether that is entirely accurate or partly accurate, the essential fact is documented. Within months of Ward's death the sketches were removed from public view. The Thursday Club's connection to the wider Profumo scandal was kept out of the press. Philip's name was never mentioned in connection with Stephen Ward in any British newspaper.
The Profumo affair changed the press. It was a watershed in British journalism that broke a particular attitude towards the post-war establishment. After 1963 the British tabloids stopped believing Palace press releases blindly. The political class came under open criticism. The royal family was not far behind.
By the time of Ward's death the Thursday Club had effectively ended. The consort's private life discipline had moved out of Soho and into the countryside. Philip himself never mentioned Stephen Ward in public. He never mentioned the Thursday Club in public. He never mentioned John Profumo in public. The discipline of silence, learned in his ninth year and reinforced six years earlier during Mike Parker's divorce, was now the discipline of his public life. It did not crack. It never cracked again.
What the public has about this period is only what was visible. The Queen's official schedule, Philip's official schedule, the growth of the Duke of Edinburgh's Award, which began in 1956 with 1,000 teenagers and by 1963 had reached 30,000 participants. The patronage of the World Wildlife Fund, of which Philip became British president in 1961. Their four children, the youngest, Edward, born in 1964. Official photographs showed a stable family. Official court circulars showed an unrelenting schedule.
What was less visible was the next chapter of the private life. From the mid-1960s Philip's social orbit shifted to the countryside. Long weekends with the polo set at Cowdray Park in Sussex. Shooting weekends in Yorkshire with the Earl of Mexborough, boating trips with the King of Norway, weekend visits to Mountbatten's Broadlands estate in Hampshire. In place of the young women of the Soho years came the daughters and wives of the country house set. The conversation became less risky and more political. During this period the presence of the Duchess of Abercorn became increasingly visible. The Duchess of Abercorn was to become his principal female friend for the next 20 years.
The portraits were gone. Ward was dead. The Thursday Club was over. The discipline held. The next phase of the private life had already begun.
Chapter 8: The Duchess who said it was an emotion of the mind.
For more than 20 years she moved in his circle, exchanged long letters with him and described their relationship as an emotional friendship. Her name was Alexandra Anastasia Phillips, known to family and friends as Sacha. She was born in 1946. Her father was Harold Phillips, known as Bunny Phillips, a cavalry officer and close friend of the Mountbatten family. Her mother was Georgina Wernher, granddaughter of the South African diamond magnate Sir Julius Wernher. She was a woman at the centre of the post-war Anglo-Irish aristocracy.
In October 1966 she married James Hamilton, then Marquess of Hamilton. She was 20. He was 32 and became the 5th Duke of Abercorn in 1979 on his father's death, making her the Duchess of Abercorn. Their family seat was Baronscourt in County Tyrone, Northern Ireland. She had known Philip since early in her marriage. They had been introduced through the Mountbatten family. By the late 1960s she was a regular presence in his company. By the early 1970s, by every contemporary account, she was his principal female friend of his middle years.
The friendship was different in kind from what had come before. There were no nightclubs. There were no after-parties at Baron Nahum's flat. Everything was country houses and rural weekends. The conversations were literary and philosophical. Sacha was a serious reader. She had a long-standing interest in the work of Carl Jung. She attended seminars at the Jung Institute in Zurich. She and Philip read books together and exchanged letters about them. The letters survive in part. They have not been made public. Members of Sacha's family have confirmed that there were hundreds of letters over more than 20 years. They have confirmed that the letters were not love letters in the conventional sense. They were, in the broadest sense, the correspondence of two people who were each other's intellectual companions for a significant portion of their adult lives. What else was in the letters is for future historians.
The Duchess of Abercorn herself gave the only detailed account of the relationship in an interview recorded in 2003 with the journalist Gyles Brandreth and published in his 2004 biography of Philip. That interview is the closest anyone has come to a first-hand account of Philip's emotional friendships outside his marriage. Sacha was clear. She used the words "an extremely strong chemistry." She used the phrase "an emotional friendship." She used the words "playmate" and "intellectual companion." She was equally clear about what the friendship was not. It was certainly not a full relationship. She said, "I did not go to bed with him."
Brandreth, who conducted the long interview, concluded that the friendship was at one stage physical. He wrote in his biography that evidence gathered from other sources had convinced him that there was a relationship. He did not name the sources. He did not present the evidence. When the Duchess of Abercorn was asked to respond to Brandreth's conclusion, she restated her position. She did not change it for the rest of her life.
The opposing biographer's view came from the American writer Sally Bedell Smith, whose biography of Elizabeth II was published in 2012. Bedell Smith spoke to a different set of sources, largely members of the royal family. Her conclusion was that the marriage of the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh was fundamentally faithful and that the friendships, however close, were only friendships. She believed the Duchess of Abercorn, two biographers working from sources that overlap but are not identical, reached directly opposite conclusions about the same friendship.
This is a problem for everything written about Philip's private life. When witnesses speak, they contradict each other. Where the Palace speaks, it is silent. Where documents exist, they are sealed. What remains for historians is a pattern of friendships that look like more than friendships from a distance, and an absence of evidence that could prove what they were or were not. That pattern is the only thing that is truly visible.
What is visible in the case of the Duchess of Abercorn is its duration. From the late 1960s until the late 1980s she was a constant presence in his social life. She was invited to events at Buckingham Palace and Windsor. She spent weekends at country houses. She was a guest at private dinners. She was a companion at lectures and openings. The Queen herself, by every reliable account, knew Sacha well, liked her and regarded her as a natural part of the royal family's social world. There was no public disagreement. There was no visible personal conflict in the eyes of outsiders. The friendship was not in opposition to the marriage but part of it.
In 1990 Sacha began to develop the philosophical work that would become her main occupation later in life. She founded an organisation called the Pushkin Trust, named after her great-great-grandfather, the Russian poet Alexander Pushkin. The trust worked on post-conflict reconciliation through creative writing and storytelling with children from both communities in Northern Ireland. Philip supported the work. He attended trust events. He spoke at fundraisers. The trust continues its work today.
At the same time the centre of gravity of his life's close intellectual presence began to shift again. In the early 1990s Sacha's place as the principal female companion was gradually and without drama taken up by the much younger Penny Knatchbull. The two friendships ran in parallel without conflict. Sacha and Penny knew each other and liked each other. At 70, Philip's emotional life was not a succession of replacements. It was a collection of long friendships, each of which lasted the lifetimes of the people involved.
The Duchess of Abercorn died on 12 November 2018, aged 72. She had been ill for some time. Philip sent a personal message of condolence to her widower, the Duke of Abercorn. The letter was not made public. He sent a wreath to her funeral at Baronscourt. The wreath was the only formal acknowledgement of the loss.
Who the Duchess of Abercorn was to Philip is almost impossible to answer without new evidence. Their friendship was long. The intellectual companionship was real. The correspondence was extensive. The chemistry, by her own description, was extremely strong. The Queen accepted and welcomed the friendship from the start. Whether at any stage it had a physical dimension is disputed among those who were there. The Duchess insisted until her death that it did not. Brandreth concluded otherwise on the basis of unnamed sources. The lasting public impression Sacha left was a phrase she used in 2003. The emotion was only in the mind. It is the closest thing to a first-hand account of what the inside of Philip's emotional life looked like from the outside. He gave a particular kind of attention to a particular kind of woman, sustained over decades, and it could not be described in the conventional definitions of friendship or love. Witnesses had to invent new words. Intense attraction, playmate and intellectual companion, emotional friendship. The conventional vocabulary does not fit.
What does fit, and what the next chapter will address, is the relationship that took his uncle's life and began his next principal friendship. The phone call came from Mullaghmore Bay on 27 August 1979. It came while the young Norton Knatchbull and his new wife Penelope were in the next room.
Chapter 9: The phone call from Mullaghmore Bay.
On a warm August morning in 1979, a bomb the size of two bricks blew his uncle's wooden boat to pieces off the coast of Sligo. The date was 27 August. The time was 11.30am. The boat was Shadow V, a 30-foot lobster boat owned by Lord Mountbatten and kept each summer at the small harbour of Mullaghmore on the coast of County Sligo in the Republic of Ireland. The bomb had been placed the previous night beneath the cabin deck by Thomas McMahon, a member of the Provisional Irish Republican Army. It contained 50 pounds of gelignite. An unknown person on the steep hill above the harbour detonated it using a modified remote control unit from a model aeroplane.
There were seven people on the boat. Lord Louis Mountbatten, aged 79. His elder daughter Patricia, Countess Mountbatten of Burma, aged 54. Patricia's husband John Brabourne, 7th Baron Brabourne, aged 54. The Brabournes' 14-year-old twin sons Timothy and Nicholas Knatchbull. Nicholas's grandmother, Dowager Lady Brabourne, aged 83, and a local teenager named Paul Maxwell, 15, who had been hired as a boat boy for the summer. They had set out at 11.15am to check the lobster pots. The explosion lifted the boat out of the water. Mountbatten was killed almost immediately. The force of the blast severed his legs below the knee. He was pulled alive from the water but was not conscious for more than a few seconds. Nicholas Knatchbull was killed. Paul Maxwell was killed. Lady Brabourne was gravely injured and died the following day. Patricia, John Brabourne and Timothy Knatchbull were all seriously injured. They survived.
The British and Irish papers led with the story for nearly a week. Philip was at Balmoral when the news came. The call came through the Royal Communications Centre in London. The first call was made at 1.30pm, two hours after the bomb. Philip was in the gun room. The Queen was upstairs. By the family's established rule the information was given to her first and then to Philip. She came down to the gun room to tell him herself. The account of what was said was given years later by Mountbatten's younger daughter, Lady Pamela Hicks, who was at Balmoral that week. She wrote that Philip stood up, was silent for a moment and said only, "Oh God." He went for a walk alone before dinner. At dinner he said nothing about it.
The next morning he flew to London and travelled on to Sligo. He brought the bodies back to Britain on a Royal Navy aircraft. The funeral was held at Westminster Abbey on 5 September 1979. Mountbatten had planned it himself. He had written the order of service in 1974 and updated it twice. Philip walked behind the coffin. He read the lesson. The lesson was from the Book of Ecclesiasticus, chapter 41. The memory of Josiah is like the composition of a perfume made by the art of the apothecary. It is sweet as honey in all mouths and as music at a banquet of wine. He read it without his voice shaking. He returned to the front bench. He sat down beside the Queen. He did not cry.
Mountbatten's death was the first event of his adult life that came close to breaking his discipline of silence. Friends at the time reported that he was much quieter and more subdued than usual for several weeks afterwards. He cancelled several engagements. He spent longer at Balmoral than he had planned. He took his children on walking trips in the hills. He said nothing about his uncle. His grief was expressed in his withdrawal, not in words.
This chapter sits where it does in this story because of the second person on the boat who survived, and the person who was not yet on the boat but was about to enter Philip's life through the same family tragedy. The person on the boat who survived was Norton Knatchbull, born Norton Louis Knatchbull, then 32. He was the elder son of Patricia and John Brabourne. He was Mountbatten's grandson. He was on land when the bomb went off. He was not on the boat. The deaths of his grandfather and younger brother made him the heir to the courtesy title Lord Romsey and later to the Mountbatten earldom. He was already engaged. He married Penelope Eastwood in October 1979. Six weeks after his grandfather's funeral. The wedding had been planned for months. The family refused to postpone it.
Penelope was the daughter of Reginald Eastwood, a wealthy Manchester businessman. She was 25. She had grown up in a very ordinary background. She had no public profile. Philip attended the wedding at Romsey Abbey on 20 October 1979. He was the groom's godfather. He had known Norton since childhood, but he had not met the bride before the engagement. He stood outside the church and watched a young woman almost unknown to Britain marry into the Mountbatten family. On that October afternoon he did not know that the bride standing at the altar would, 12 years later, become the closest companion of the last 30 years of his life.
The closeness between Philip and Penny did not develop immediately. The Romseys spent the first three years of their marriage restoring the Mountbatten estate at Broadlands. In 1982 their first child, a daughter, Alexandra, was born. In 1986 their second daughter, Leonora, was born. In 1981 their son, Nicholas, was born. Their lives were extremely busy and full. Penny had come to know Philip socially through the family. He liked her. She did not seek him out. At this stage their friendship was no more than the ordinary relationship between the junior bride of the Mountbatten family and the head of the family. It was a distant kinship of the kind common in the British aristocracy, of no particular significance.
What turned that distant connection into the central relationship of the last part of Philip's life was a misfortune in a Spanish hospital in 1990. The Romseys had gone on holiday to Majorca in August that year with their three children. They were guests at the Marivent Palace, the Spanish royal family's summer residence, at the invitation of the Prince and Princess of Wales. On the third day of the holiday the five-year-old Leonora fell ill. Spanish doctors identified a tumour on her kidney. In the words of the Spanish oncologist, the diagnosis was devastating. The family returned to London quickly. Leonora was admitted to the Royal Marsden Hospital on Fulham Road, Britain's leading cancer hospital. She underwent 14 months of chemotherapy and radiotherapy. The treatment was gruelling. The tumour had spread extensively.
The Princess of Wales visited almost every week. She held the Princess's hand during chemotherapy sessions. According to Penny, the Princess was among the last people to visit Leonora in hospital before she died. Leonora died on 22 October 1991, two weeks before her sixth birthday.
Philip's response to the death of the Romseys' youngest child was characteristic and significant. He did not write a letter. He did not, according to Penny's later account, sit her down and talk about the loss. He did what he always did with the bereaved. He occupied the grieving person with a task. He invited Penny to begin carriage driving with him at Windsor. It had become his principal recreation since he had given up competitive polo in 1971. By 1994 he had become the most experienced amateur carriage driver in Europe. By the late 1990s Penny was his regular driving companion. They competed together. They trained together. They spent long mornings together at the stables at Windsor. Palace staff began to refer to her, in his absence, as "and also" or "and Penny too." The phrase originated in the way Philip issued invitations. When he asked for a list for an event, he would say, at the end of the names of old friends, "and Penny too." The nickname stuck.
This was the relationship that was then forming. It lasted the next 27 years. The young woman who had walked behind her husband's grandfather's coffin in 1979 was, 12 years later, at the centre of Philip's emotional life at the time of her own daughter's death. She did not displace anyone. She did not assert herself. She simply became the daily companion of his old age. The shape of it was strange and the shape of it was lasting. The next chapter is hers.
Chapter 10: The five-year-old who brought Penny to his side.
Their daughter was five when Spanish doctors identified the tumour and six when she died at the Royal Marsden in the autumn of 1991. The news of Leonora's diagnosis had come without warning in August 1990. The family was on holiday in Majorca. Leonora had been a healthy child. There had been no symptoms. Doctors at the Palma hospital found a Wilms tumour, a common kidney cancer in small children. In Leonora's case, by the time it was found, the tumour had grown extensively. The five-year survival rate for that type and stage of cancer in 1990 was below 30 per cent.
The Royal Marsden began treatment within a week. The treatment protocol involved surgery to remove the affected kidney, followed by chemotherapy and radiotherapy. By the accounts of the staff who cared for her, Leonora was a remarkable patient. She was always cheerful. She made friends with the nurses. She drew pictures of the chemotherapy machines and gave them to the doctors. She wore a pink hat because of her hair loss and gave the hat a name. She thanked the radiographers every time she came out of the radiation room. Hospital staff, many of whom had worked with childhood cancer for years, spoke of her for the rest of their careers.
The Princess of Wales visited almost every week. These visits were not media events. They were not announced in advance. The Princess parked her own car in the staff car park at the back of the hospital. She came in through a side door. She sat in Leonora's room. She talked to her. She talked to Penny. She brought her own two sons, William and Harry, when she could, though they were younger than Leonora and could not stay long. By Penny's own account, given in interviews years later, the Princess was an extraordinarily patient presence.
The two women had not been especially close before 1990. The hospital changed that. Leonora died on 22 October 1991. She was six. Her funeral was held at Romsey Abbey on 28 October. The Princess of Wales attended and the Queen sent flowers. Philip, who had attended Leonora's christening four years earlier, sent Penny a wreath and a personal note. He did not attend the funeral. The Palace's official position was that the death was a private family matter. Philip's absence was not explained publicly. Penny later said she had not expected him to come. She said the note was more than she had needed. The note has never been made public. What Penny said in later interviews was that it was very short and very brief. There was no soft language in it. There was no consolation in it. There were two lines about the futility of explanation. There was an invitation. Come to Windsor when you are ready. The horses are here.
Penny later said that the horses saved her. The carriage driving programme began in 1993. Philip taught her himself. He was 72. She was 40. The sport, formerly known as combined driving, involves a team of two or four horses pulling a four-wheeled carriage through three phases of competition. The phases are dressage, a marathon course over varied terrain and obstacles, and a cone obstacle course. It is the closest thing in the equestrian world to three-day eventing. It is dangerous. It is physically demanding. By Philip's description it was the only sport in which a 70-year-old could compete on equal terms with a 30-year-old. He had taken it up himself in 1971 when his right wrist would no longer allow competitive polo. By 1996 Penny was competing. By 1998 she was a member of the British team at the European Championships. By 2000 she was driving with Philip at major competitions across Europe. They were regularly seen together at international events at Sandringham Park, Windsor Great Park, Werribee Park in Australia and at world driving championships. They drove for different teams. They competed against each other. They went home together after the competition.
By the mid-1990s the nickname Palace staff had given her had begun to circulate. In later interviews friends of the royal family confirmed it. The nickname was neither affectionate nor hostile. It was descriptive. Philip's invitation lists would include a short list of old friends. He would write and Penny at the end. Members of the royal family understood what it meant. Penny was always included. The standing invitation was part of the fabric of their calendar. The Queen always welcomed her.
The evidence for this is not just hearsay. It is documented. Penny was invited to Sandringham at Christmas. She was invited for shooting weekends at Balmoral. She was invited to Royal Ascot. She was photographed with the Queen at the races. In 2020 she was seen driving her carriage out of Windsor Castle with Philip beside her; it was the last photograph taken of Philip before his death. The photograph appeared on the front page of the Daily Telegraph. There was no editorial comment about who she was.
This is the central mystery of the Penny relationship and the reason it survived as it did. It was not hidden. It was not hidden because the Queen had decided long before that there was nothing to hide. The friendship had begun in unimaginable grief. It had developed into a daily companionship built around horses. The Queen had her own pursuits. Philip had his. Penny was Philip's companion. The royal family folded the arrangement into the calendar and did not have to lie about it.
During this period the two great public scandals of the British royal family, the Waleses' separation and the death of the Princess of Wales in 1997, gave Philip a clear warning. The Waleses' marriage had broken down in public. The Panorama interview, the leaked tapes in the tabloids and the public trial of the relationship had ended it in controversy. By the late 1990s, according to Philip's close staff, his view was that the lesson was the importance of his own discipline. His marriage to the Queen had survived because of silence. That silence had protected his freedom. That freedom included Penny.
Throughout this period Penny's husband Norton remained a regular presence at her side. He and Penny remained a married couple. There was no separation. The Romseys' married life continued in its own way and with its own complications, but it did not break. In the early 2010s Norton and Penny decided to live apart. The decision was taken very privately. They divorced in 2022, the year after Philip's death. By then Penny had, on Norton's accession to the earldom in 2017 after his mother's death, acquired in her own right the title Countess Mountbatten of Burma.
By 2017, 25 years of this equestrian partnership was the longest-lasting emotional relationship of Philip's life outside his marriage. He was 96. She was 64. She was still competing, though in the recreational division rather than the elite division she had once competed in. She was at his side almost daily at Sandringham and Windsor. The summer of 2017 was the last summer of the full intensity of their regular partnership. In August of that year the structural change came. The next chapter is part of that change.
Chapter 11: The farmhouse where he lived alone.
In the summer of 2017 the longest-serving consort in British history quietly moved into a five-bedroomed Edwardian farmhouse two miles from the main house and stopped pretending. The farmhouse was Wood Farm. It sits on the Sandringham estate in Norfolk, two miles from Sandringham House on a narrow lane, half a mile from the North Sea coast, surrounded by wheat fields and pine trees on flat land. It had been built in the 1870s as the farm manager's house. It had been used at various times in the twentieth century as an overflow residence for the royal family. Philip's brother-in-law, the King's younger brother Prince John, who suffered from epilepsy, had lived there from 1916 until his death in 1919. The house had five bedrooms, three reception rooms, a modest kitchen, a boot room, a small library and a walled garden. The upstairs windows looked out over flat farmland. There were no public rooms. There were no royal apartments. They were not needed.
Philip no longer had to entertain diplomats. He had retired. The retirement was announced on 4 May 2017. He was 95. The Palace statement was unusually direct. The Duke of Edinburgh would no longer carry out public engagements from August. He would attend events alongside the Queen at his own wish. He would maintain his patronages but would no longer travel for them. His final public engagement was on 2 August 2017 at Buckingham Palace, where he inspected a parade of Royal Marines as Captain General. It rained heavily throughout the parade. He stood under an umbrella and inspected the men. He shook hands with the parade commander. He went inside. He was never on formal duty again.
Within the following two weeks the move to Wood Farm was completed. The Palace household was restructured. Two members of staff were reassigned to the new arrangement. A page named William Henderson was assigned personally to Philip. A valet named Stephen Niedzyadlo was put in charge of the daily household management. A cook came from the village three days a week. A driver came as needed. Within a fortnight Philip's daily routine was set. He woke at seven. He made his own breakfast, scrambled eggs with toast, and ate alone in the kitchen at the back of the house. He read the newspapers, both the Telegraph and The Times. He answered letters in his upstairs study. He walked in the walled garden. He drove his carriage out into the countryside for an hour in the morning. He ate a light lunch. In the afternoon he painted watercolours in a room facing the garden. He had tea. In the evening he read in the library. He went to bed at ten.
There were three categories of visitor. Penny Knatchbull was the most regular. She drove up from Hampshire several times a month and stayed two or three nights. She had her own bedroom in the house. She drove with him in the mornings. She read with him in the evenings. The Queen was the second regular visitor. She came at weekends from London, by train to King's Lynn and then by car to Sandringham, where she stayed at the main house and drove over to Wood Farm to see him. She came at least once a fortnight. The visits were brief. They had lunch together. They walked in the garden. She returned to Sandringham House in the afternoon. The third category was friends, who came in small groups in rotation for a night at a time.
This was the structural separation he had achieved. In the final years of his working life he did not live with his wife. He lived alone, in a working five-bedroomed Edwardian farmhouse two miles from the nearest royal residence. He made his own breakfast. He answered his own letters. He read what he liked. He went where he liked. The Palace did not control his calendar. According to one member of staff there, the Queen never once complained about the arrangement. She had her own life. He had his own life. The arrangement was the result of a joint decision by the two of them. Several accounts since his death, including those by the journalists Penny Junor and Ingrid Seward, have confirmed it. The structural separation was not a fracture in their marriage. It was a mature understanding of a marriage in which they had accepted that they were different people who had worked separately for 60 years and who, in their nineties, had the courage to admit it without fuss. Their public relationship continued. Their daily cohabitation did not.
The pandemic changed that. In March 2020 Philip was at Wood Farm and the Queen was at Buckingham Palace. Lockdown was announced on 23 March. The royal household decided that same week that the two of them should be brought to Windsor Castle, where a small staff could keep them safe. The British press called the arrangement "HMS Bubble." Philip moved from Wood Farm to Windsor on 24 March 2020. He never returned to Wood Farm. The 15 months that followed at Windsor were the longest continuous period the Queen and Philip had spent in one place since his retirement. Some photographs survive. There are not many. The most widely circulated is the one released for their 73rd wedding anniversary in November 2020. The Queen was reading a card from one of their great-grandchildren. Philip was smiling. The card was held between them. They were sitting on a sofa in the Oak Room at Windsor Castle. The photograph was taken by Chris Jackson of Getty Images. It is the last photograph of them together in public that clearly shows they liked each other.
In February 2021 Philip was admitted to King Edward VII's Hospital in Marylebone for treatment of an infection. He was there for 28 nights. He was transferred to St Bartholomew's Hospital on 1 March 2021 for heart treatment. He was discharged from hospital on 16 March. He returned to Windsor Castle. He did not return to Wood Farm. The bubble staff at Windsor looked after him and, under special arrangements by the Queen, Penny was allowed to visit him.
He died in the early hours of 9 April 2021, shortly after midnight. The Palace statement was brief. It is with deep sorrow that Her Majesty The Queen announces the death of her beloved husband, His Royal Highness The Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh. His Royal Highness passed away peacefully this morning at Windsor Castle. Further announcements will be made in due course. The death certificate gave the cause of death as old age. He was 99 years and 10 months old. The next chapter is the funeral, and 17 April 2021.
Chapter 12: The woman in the row behind the Queen.
On 17 April 2021 the cameras showed the masked Queen sitting alone in the quire of St George's Chapel, and in the row immediately behind her sat a woman the country did not recognise. The chapel was St George's Chapel, the royal chapel at Windsor Castle. King Edward IV had begun its construction in 1475. It is the burial place of ten English monarchs. It was the chapel where Philip and the Queen had taken Christmas communion almost every year of their married life. And now it was the chapel where his funeral was being held.
Pandemic restrictions in 2021 limited the congregation to 30. The royal family had drawn up the list in consultation with the Palace. There were no foreign royals. There was no diplomatic representation. There were Philip's surviving children and their spouses. There were his grandchildren and great-grandchildren of appropriate age. There were his close relatives. There were three guests from outside the family. They were Dr Doug Hard, his estate manager. The Countess Mountbatten of Burma, Penelope Knatchbull, and the Countess of Brooke, a close friend and neighbour in the Sandringham area.
The funeral service had been planned by Philip himself over many years. He had specified the music. He had specified the readings. He had specified the seating. He had chosen the coffin bearers from among the men who had served as colonels of his regiments. He had asked that a bagpiper from the Royal Regiment of Scotland play a lament. He had directed that no eulogy be delivered. He had said that his coffin would be carried to the chapel in a Land Rover that he had personally helped to modify, with rubber matting and a folding tailgate to hold the coffin.
The Queen entered the chapel alone. She was dressed in black. She wore a mask. She had asked to be seated alone in her own seat in the south quire stalls, distanced from the rest of the family by pandemic restrictions. She walked the length of the chapel to her seat. The cameras were fixed on her. She bowed her head. In the row behind her sat Penny Knatchbull. Penny was masked. She was dressed in black. She was sitting in the seat the Queen had specifically asked her to occupy. She was not in the family mourning dress of the royal household. She was sitting as the Queen's guest in the general congregation of the quire, in a seat the Queen had chosen for her.
An estimated 13.6 million viewers in the United Kingdom watched the broadcast. Most of them did not recognise the woman sitting in the row immediately behind the Queen. Newspaper picture editors did. Royal correspondents knew exactly who she was. The next day's papers carried the photograph. Some captioned her. Some did not. The Daily Telegraph caption read simply, "Lady Mountbatten." The Daily Mail caption read, "Family friend Penny, Countess Mountbatten." The Sun caption read, "Penny, Philip's special companion." It was the first proper introduction of her to the general public. She had been at the edge of his life for 40 years, at the centre of it for 30, and at his funeral she was in the row behind the Queen. The photograph was a kind of official acknowledgement of the second life Philip had lived. The Queen had put her there. The seating was not accidental. It was an acknowledgement by Philip of the woman who had been his closest companion in the last third of his life.
Five months later the will was sealed. The application was made by the Attorney General and supported by the executors. The hearing was before Sir Andrew McFarlane, President of the Family Division of the High Court. The order was made on 16 September 2021. The will would remain sealed for 90 years. At the end of that period, a private hearing would consider whether to extend the seal further. The order applied not only to Philip's will but to the wills of all royal consorts going back to 1910. The Times newspaper challenged the secrecy and lost. In June 2022 the Court of Appeal upheld the order. The contents of the will are now known only to the executors and the court.
The will almost certainly contains provision for Penny Knatchbull. It almost certainly contains provision for Eileen Cord's children, who were his godchildren and whose school fees he had paid. It almost certainly contains provision for surviving members of the Mountbatten family. It may contain other things that, if published, would complicate the public narrative of his second life. The main reason for the seal is that we will never know.
What remains of him in the official record is only the surface. The 22,219 solo engagements, the 5,493 speeches, the 14 books, the patronage of 780 organisations, the award scheme with six million participants in 130 countries, the 73-year marriage, four children, eight grandchildren, ten great-grandchildren, the boy from the orange crate who survived from the dining table at Mon Repos to the quire of St George's Chapel. What does not survive publicly is the man inside. He spent 73 years as part of the most photographed couple in the world and kept that inner self out of every photograph.
The Thursday Club, the Soho lunches, the Brick Street after-parties, the night at Les Ambassadeurs, the breakfast with Pat Kirkwood, the questions about Eileen Cord, the portraits by Stephen Ward, the friendship with the Duchess of Abercorn, the carriage-driving partnership with Penny, the mornings at Wood Farm when he made his own breakfast, read the Telegraph, walked in the garden and finally lived as he chose. The family, exactly as he had wanted to live since he was nine years old; in a flat in Paris, with no money, no parents and no language he had not had to learn.
The deepest truth of his life is that he built a private structure for himself inside the cage of the crown and maintained it for 73 years. He did not leave the institution. He did not divorce. He did not abandon his duties. He did not seek the attention of the press. He stayed inside his marriage and his role. What he did was build a parallel world of friendships, pursuits, residences and emotional refuge that was not owned by the crown and was not seen by the crown. None of it was done for the public. None of it was for royal publicity. It was the second life of a man who had been trained from childhood to reveal nothing.
The Queen sat alone in her seat. Penny sat in the row immediately behind her. The pipes played. The coffin was lowered into the royal vault. The Queen died 17 months later. Her own coffin was lowered beside Philip's. The friend in the row behind has continued to attend royal events. The will is sealed for 90 years. What can a man give to an institution that holds everything of his, except one room where he lets no one in? Philip's answer, maintained for 73 years and visible only in the negative space of hundreds of photographs, thousands of engagements and one funeral, is the answer his nine-year-old self found on a winter morning in Paris, when his mother was in a Swiss sanatorium and his father had not written. You owe the institution service. You owe it duty. You owe it silence. The room you keep for yourself is yours alone. For seventy years the Palace tried to keep that room out of public view. They largely succeeded. The woman in the row behind was the only window the country was ever given into what was inside.