Latest part of our portrait tells how rumours have dogged the Queen and Duke of Edinburgh's 70-year marriage.
Through most of the Queen and Prince Philip’s 70-year marriage, rumours of his alleged affairs have been rife.
Even now, people wonder how he could have left his wife and two young children — Charles and Anne — for a jaunt round far-flung outposts of the Commonwealth in late 1956.
It lasted more than four months, and there was gossip about wild parties. Did it have any foundation? The jury is out, but it hardly seems credible that anything untoward could have taken place without the knowledge of at least some of the royal yacht Britannia’s crew of 220 men and 20 officers.
The following year, a London-based correspondent for the Baltimore Sun claimed that rumours abounded of Philip’s interest in an unnamed woman, whom he allegedly met regularly in a society photographer’s apartment in the West End. ‘Report Queen, Duke in Rift Over Party Girl’ ran the headline.
Gossip was further fuelled by the fact that the Prince’s private secretary Mike Parker had chosen this moment to tender his resignation. This was taken as a sign that he had to go because he’d been leading Philip astray. In fact, Parker felt he had to resign because his wife had just filed for divorce. According to him, ‘The Duke was incandescent [about the reports]. He was very, very angry. And deeply hurt.’
In a break from the rule that the Palace never comments on rumour, the Queen authorised her press secretary to announce: ‘It is quite untrue that there is any rift between the Queen and the Duke.’
Some people wondered if the unnamed party girl referred to in the Baltimore Sun was Pat Kirkwood, a beautiful musical comedy star.
Rumours about her having an affair with Philip had surfaced as early as 1948, when Princess Elizabeth was pregnant with Prince Charles. Pat, then the highest-paid star on the London stage, was the girlfriend of society photographer Baron Nahum — a member of the Thursday Club in Soho, which Philip regularly attended for a boys’ night out.
So what is known about her association with the Prince? Years later, Pat said that one evening, after she’d performed in the musical Starlight Roof at the London Hippodrome, Baron had taken Philip and an equerry to her dressing room.
The foursome then went out to dinner at Les Ambassadeurs Club in Hamilton Place, run by a Polish ex-wrestler. Afterwards, they carried on — at Philip’s request — to the Milroy Club for some music and dancing. According to Pat, the Prince wouldn’t let her sit down, dancing with her to whatever the band played. They stayed out until dawn and had scrambled eggs at Baron’s flat.
Pat insisted that the only time she’d ever met the Prince again was at theatrical command performances.
After she died in 2007, her fourth husband Peter Knight announced that, at her request, he’d one day give ‘correspondence’ between Pat and the Duke of Edinburgh’ to Philip’s official biographer. It would prove that there was no illicit relationship, he said.
This didn’t explain, however, why Pat and the Prince were corresponding with each other at all.
Another woman with whom the Prince has been romantically linked is Hélène Cordet, formerly Helene Foufounis. They became friends as children when they spent holidays together at her parents’ villa in Le Touquet, France.
Helene, who became the hostess of the BBC variety show Café Continental, had two children while separated from her first husband, but refused to reveal who their father was. So when Philip elected to become godfather to both, some assumed that it must be him.
Despite this, Helene allowed the paternity of her children to remain a mystery — though one of her sons has flatly denied that the Prince is his father.
The rumour mill has kept on grinding, even alleging he had a relationship with Sarah Ferguson’s mother, Susan Barrantes. His alleged indiscretions include: the Countess of Westmorland, wife of the Queen’s Master of the Horse; the novelist Daphne du Maurier, who was married to ‘Boy’ Browning, former Comptroller of the Royal Household; the actresses Merle Oberon and Anna Massey; the TV personality Katie Boyle; the Duchess of Abercorn, wife of the Lord Steward of the Royal Household; his cousin, Princess Alexandra; and his carriage-driving companion Lady Brabourne (now Lady Mountbatten).
When the Queen arrived back at Heathrow on February 7, 1952, Winston Churchill and the rest of the Privy Council lined up to greet her. At that moment, Philip knew that his life had changed for ever.
Years later, he recalled: ‘People used to come to me and ask me what to do. In 1952, the whole thing changed, very, very considerably.’
Churchill insisted he and the new Queen move to the palace — an enormous wrench for Philip, for whom Clarence House had been the only home he’d ever been able to call his own.
For the Queen, however, it was simply a matter of going to the place where she’d lived very happily for much of her life.
For the Prince, problems soon multiplied. ‘Philip was constantly being squashed, snubbed, ticked off, rapped over the knuckles,’ said Mike Parker. ‘It was intolerable. The problem was simply that Philip had energy, ideas, get-up-and-go, and that didn’t suit the Establishment, not one bit.’
In his new role, Philip sought the guidance of Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands who, as the husband of Queen Juliana, had 15 years’ experience as consort.
Bernhard told him: ‘Practically everything you do will be a subject of criticism. You can’t ignore it because some of it may be justified. And even if it isn’t, it may be politic to heed it. But don’t let it get you down. In this job, you need a skin like an elephant.’
For Philip at this point, frustration, irritation and disappointment were daily occurrences. But, with Parker’s help, he set about modernising the palace, much to the consternation of the old guard.
Among other things, he started a footman training programme, set in hand redecoration of the gloomy private apartments and installed a nearby kitchen so that food didn’t have to be traipsed along miles of draughty corridors.
And as chairman of the Coronation Commission, he oversaw every detail of the ceremony.
Leaving nothing to chance, he even stood on the palace balcony to find the best angle from which the Queen — still wearing her heavy crown — could watch the fly-past after the ceremony without getting a crick in her neck.
But losing his career and being relegated to backroom status couldn’t help but occasionally grate on him.
His chief role in the Coronation on June 2, 1953, was to kneel before his wife, taking the ancient oath of fealty: ‘I, Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, do become your liege man of life and limb and of earthly worship…’ He then had to stand, kiss her cheek and back away.
But at the rehearsal, possibly feeling a bit emasculated, he mumbled the words quickly, missed the Queen’s cheek and retired backwards fast. The Queen told him off: ‘Don’t be silly, Philip. Come back here and do it properly.’
Half a million people turned up in the rain to line the Coronation route. Inside Westminster Abbey, photographer Cecil Beaton noted the Queen’s ‘sugar pink cheeks and tightly curled hair and her demeanour of simplicity and humility’.
As she walked, he said, she allowed ‘her heavy skirt to swing backwards and forwards in a beautiful rhythmic effect’.
‘The Coronation was a deeply moving spiritual experience for her,’ said the Queen’s cousin Margaret Rhodes, ‘especially the part which wasn’t filmed — when she stood bareheaded, wearing only a white linen shift as the Archbishop of Canterbury marked the sign of the cross on her with the words: “As Solomon was anointed by Zadok the priest, so be thou anointed, blessed and consecrated as Queen over the people thy God hath given thee to govern.”’
When it came to Philip’s part, he performed well, but his touch on the crown was a bit heavy-handed and his wife had to adjust it. Over the years, he never forgot his pledge to be her ‘liege man of life and limb’. At times, he’d be irascible, laddish and difficult — but he would always give the Queen his whole-hearted support.
