Prince Philip Revealed

A Man of His Century

Ingrid Seward

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781471183553
• eBook ISBN: 9781471183546
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: History

For more than 70 years until his death on 9 April 2021, Prince Philip was the Queen's constant companion and support, but his vital role in the monarchy too often went largely unnoticed. Now, in Ingrid Seward's superb new biography of the Duke of Edinburgh, we get the chance to read the full story of his remarkable life and achievements. Born into the Greek and Danish royal families in 1921, a descendant of Queen Victoria, Prince Philip 's aristocratic credentials were second to none. But, only 18 months after his birth, the family had to be rescued by a British warship from the island of Corfu after his father was exiled. His nomadic childhood was spent in Germany, Paris and eventually England where he was sent to boarding school. At the age of 18, while studying at Dartmouth Naval College, he was asked to look after the King's two daughters, 13-year-old Elizabeth and her sister Margaret, during a royal visit. It was their first proper meeting and, only eight years later, their marriage in 1947 brought new light to the country after the perils of the war.But, within a few years, their lives were transformed when in 1952 she became Queen Elizabeth II, and he had to give up his naval career and learn a new role as consort, deferring in public to the monarch and even having to give up his surname. In Ingrid Seward's brilliant new biography, we see how such a man of action coped with having to spend the next 70 years of his life walking two steps behind his wife. His reaction was to create a role for himself, modernising the monarchy, campaigning to protect the environment, supporting the sciences and engineering, and inspiring the young through the Duke of Edinburgh Awards. But, above all, he proved himself to be the Queen's most valuable and loyal companion throughout her long reign. The TV series The Crown has helped bring Prince Philip to the centre of attention, but t his superb biography not only examines the major influences on his life but is packed with revealing behind-the-scenes details and great insight. This first major biography of Prince Philip for almost 30 years shines new light on his complex character and extraordinary career.

Chapter 1 ANCESTRY

As a young naval lieutenant based in Melbourne with the Pacific Fleet in 1944, Prince Philip of Greece and Denmark described himself as ‘a discredited Balkan prince of no particular merit or distinction’. It was typical of his self-deprecating style of repartee. Far from being a minor Greek prince, Philip’s royal antecedents connect him to the highest ranks of European royalty. His bloodlines provide direct links to British royalty, to the royal house of Denmark, to the grand dukes of Hesse in Germany and to the Romanov imperial family in Russia.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the convoluted family trees of the royal houses of Europe show a high degree of intermarriage, with cousins marrying cousins. Princes and princesses never married commoners and large families were the norm. At the pinnacle reigned the most powerful queen in the world, Queen Victoria, who with her German husband, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, had nine children who went on to produce a total of forty-two grandchildren. Their marriages linked together the great powers of Great Britain, Germany and Russia. France, albeit also a major power, was outside the circle of northern royal European marriages as it was principally Roman Catholic and without a royal family.

The other great European dynasty was that of King Christian IX of Denmark, who reigned from 1863 to 1906. At the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, the grandchildren of Queen Victoria and King Christian IX together occupied the thrones of Denmark, Greece, Norway, Germany, Romania, Russia and Great Britain.

The Queen and Prince Philip are third cousins because both are great-great-grandchildren of Queen Victoria. The Queen is a direct descendant of Queen Victoria’s eldest son, Prince Albert Edward, later King Edward VII. Philip is a direct descendant of Queen Victoria’s second daughter, Princess Alice, the grandmother of Philip’s mother, who was also called Alice. King Christian IX’s daughter Queen Alexandra, who was the wife of King Edward VII, and his son William, who was later King George I of Greece, were brother and sister, linking Philip’s father Andrew (King George I’s son) to King George V of England (King Edward VII’s son) as first cousins.

Christian IX was chosen as heir to the Danish throne when the senior line of succession became extinct. He was the first Danish monarch of the House of Glucksburg. As a young man he had sought the hand of Queen Victoria but was rejected in favour of Prince Albert. He married Princess Louise of Hesse-Cassel, and with his German wife they had six children. Every father wants to see his children marry well, especially so if a royal family is involved. Few could have done quite as well as King Christian IX of Denmark. He was the father of a British queen, a Russian tsarina and two European kings. It was the ambitious Queen Louise who successfully schemed to get their children married to scions of Europe’s royal and princely houses. Their second eldest daughter, Dagmar, became Maria Feodorovna when she married the future Tsar Alexander III, Emperor of Russia and King of Poland. Their eldest daughter, Alexandra, married the Prince of Wales in 1863 and became Queen of England when Edward VII acceded on the death of Queen Victoria. Another daughter, Thyra, married the heir to the throne of Hanover.

After he was crowned king, Christian IX organised a family gathering that was held every other year at the Fredensborg Palace north of Copenhagen. So great were the numbers attending from across Europe that several 300-place-setting dinner services were commissioned from the Royal Copenhagen porcelain factory. The grandchildren who played games together in the extensive grounds included the future Tsar Nicholas II of Russia and three future kings: George V of the United Kingdom, Haakon of Norway and Constantine I of Greece. Although coming from a country with a population of under 2.5 million, such was the influence of the Danish family among the royal houses of Europe that King Christian IX became known as ‘the father-in-law of Europe’.

King Christian IX was created a Knight of the Garter in 1865 and his descendants have continued close links with the British royal family ever since. At the time of her coronation, both Queen Elizabeth and Philip – Christian IX’s great-grandson – were awarded the Order of the Elephant, Denmark’s highest ranked Order of Chivalry.

Christian’s eldest son, Frederick, succeeded him as King of Denmark, while his younger son William became King George I of Greece at seventeen years old – the latter would be Philip’s grandfather. William was a reluctant monarch who did not want to abandon his career in the Danish Navy and spoke not one word of Greek. The great powers of Europe – England, France and Russia – had signed the London Protocol of 1830, which declared Greece an independent state and stated that a hereditary sovereign for Greece should be chosen from outside the country. Otto, a Bavarian prince, was selected as the first King of Greece, but he became unpopular and was deposed in 1862. William was subsequently chosen because it was thought that having a Danish King of Greece would avoid upsetting the balance of power in Europe. On 30 March 1863, the Greek National Assembly elected him King of the Hellenes, under the regnal name of George I. He soon became a popular monarch, learning to speak Greek in a matter of months and making himself available to the Greek people with weekly audiences.

George went to stay with his sister, the tsarina, in Russia for the purpose of finding a wife. When visiting the tsar’s younger brother, the Grand Duke Constantine, he fell for his fifteen-year-old daughter Olga. They were married shortly after Olga’s sixteenth birthday at the Winter Palace in St Petersburg in 1867. Together they had seven children, of whom Philip’s father Andreas, commonly called Andrew, was last but one. Philip’s paternal grandmother Olga was the niece of Tsar Nicholas II. After fifty years on the throne, George I was assassinated in Thessaloniki in 1913 while taking his daily stroll among his people.

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Entry number 449 in the Corfu Register of Births shows that on 28 May 1921 a son was born to Prince Andrew of Greece, son of King George I of Greece, and Princess Alice, daughter of Prince Louis (Ludwig) of Battenberg. The baby was baptised in the Greek Orthodox Church as ‘Philippos’. It was not until two years later, when Greece adopted the Gregorian calendar, that the date of birth was changed to 10 June, which is Philip’s official birthday. His full title was Prince Philip of Greece and Denmark, but at school he insisted that he was just plain Philip. The royal family into which Philip was born a prince on his father’s side was not Greek in origin. It was a branch of the House of Glucksburg descended directly from the kings of Denmark. Until Philip took British nationality in 1947, he called himself ‘Philip of Greece’. When he became a British citizen, he renounced his foreign title of prince and became Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten RN. On the eve of his wedding he was created His Royal Highness Duke of Edinburgh, Earl of Merioneth and Baron Greenwich. He would not become a prince again until ten years later, when the Queen elevated him to ‘the style and dignity of a Prince of the United Kingdom’.

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Although born in Greece, a country he was to leave while still an infant, Philip’s connection to that country was tenuous to say the least. His mother, Princess Alice, had never been in Greece until she married Prince Andrew and had no Greek blood relatives. Alice was a Battenberg with close connections to the British royal family. She was born at Windsor Castle in the presence of Queen Victoria in 1885. Her mother Victoria was one of Queen Victoria’s granddaughters and would become a huge influence on Philip when he was a schoolboy in England. After she was widowed, Philip’s grandmother Victoria often travelled with him to Germany in the school holidays to visit her granddaughters who lived there. Alice’s father was Louis of Battenberg, later 1st Marquess of Milford Haven, whose family home was in Darmstadt.

Louis may have been born German, but he joined the British Navy at the age of fourteen and became a naturalised British subject. He rose to be First Sea Lord. When the First World War broke out, Louis sent a signal to all the British warships: ‘Commence hostilities against Germany’. However, Louis had married Princess Victoria of Hesse and by Rhine, and being a Grand Duke of Hesse himself, he was considered to be too German to be head of the Royal Navy in wartime. In 1914, anti-German sentiment was running high in England; Dachshunds were kicked in the street and Beethoven and Wagner’s music was considered unfit for British ears. After forty-six years in the Royal Navy, Prince Louis was persuaded to write to the First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill as follows:

‘I have lately been driven to the painful conclusion that at this juncture my birth and parentage have the effect of impairing in some respects my usefulness on the Board of Admiralty. I feel it to be my duty as a loyal subject of His Majesty to resign the office of First Sea Lord hoping thereby to facilitate the task of administration of the great Service to which I have devoted my life.’

For his troubles he was created the 1st Marquess of Milford Haven. Three years later, in 1917, King George V felt compelled to change the family name from Saxe-Coburg-Gotha to the House of Windsor. At the same time Battenberg was anglicised to become Mountbatten. Louis’ younger son, also called Louis but known to all as Dickie, was a naval cadet who vowed to avenge his father’s humiliation. He too became First Sea Lord and rose to even greater heights as the last Viceroy in India and Supreme Commander of the allied forces in South East Asia in the Second World War. As well as being Philip’s uncle, Dickie became a close friend and had a great influence on Philip’s future.

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In her childhood, Philip’s mother Alice was brought up in England and became a favourite of Queen Victoria, who wrote to her frequently. Alice would stay at the royal residences of Osborne on the Isle of Wight, Balmoral and Windsor Castle for weeks at a time while her father was stationed with the navy in Malta. When Queen Victoria died, Alice was sixteen and considered a great beauty, so much so that the Prince of Wales remarked, ‘No throne is too good for her.’

Alice was born profoundly deaf but became an expert lip-reader proficient in several languages. In 1902, she was staying at Buckingham Place for the coronation of King Edward VII when she met Andrew, then a handsome young cavalry officer in the Greek army, and fell in love.

When it was announced in 1903 that Prince Andrew of Greece and Princess Alice of Battenberg had become engaged, the Prince and Princess of Wales, later King George V and Queen Mary, gave an engagement party at Marlborough House that was attended by King Edward VII. Alice and Andrew’s closeness to the British royal family would prove a vital factor in their lives some twenty years later, when the intervention of King George V saved Andrew from execution.

The marriage took place in 1903 in Darmstadt; the week-long celebrations paid for by Tsar Nicholas II were lavish and attended by the greatest ever assembly of European royalty to gather in one place, including Queen Alexandra of England. The tsar arrived in the luxurious imperial train, bringing with him the Russian Imperial Choir and an entourage of grand dukes and duchesses and a retinue of servants. There were three separate wedding ceremonies, at one of which Alice gave the wrong answers to the priest’s questions – she could not read his lips, which were obscured by his flowing beard. The lavish celebrations continued for a week. Alice’s Uncle Ernie, Grand Duke of Hesse, put up the guests in his two palaces in Darmstadt. Ernie’s cousin the Grand Duchess of Mecklenburg-Strelitz complained about the expense and extent of the celebrations, saying ‘there is no reason for it, a Battenberg, daughter of an illegitimate father, Andrew a fourth son of a newly baked king’.

It is true that Andrew’s father was a new king but Prince Louis was not illegitimate. He was the son of a commoner Julie Hauke, later the first Princess of Battenberg. When in 1947 Dickie Mountbatten published his family tree, establishing the Battenbergs and their ancestors as one of the oldest and most chivalrous families in Europe, he had to acknowledge that his grandfather Alexander, son of the Grand Duke of Hesse, broke with tradition and married a lady-in-waiting at the Imperial Russian Court.

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After the wedding Alice moved to Greece to live with Andrew in his family home in the royal compound at Tatoi outside Athens. They also had a home in Corfu named Mon Repos, where Alice brought up her four daughters before Philip was born some seven years their junior. Andrew and Alice were relatively poor as he had only his Greek army pay and Alice came with no great dowry, but Philip’s background was not as impecunious as has been made out. In their home in Corfu, his parents employed an English couple as housekeeper and houseman, an English nanny called Emily Roose, and several maids and gardeners. They also had the means to travel all over Europe whenever the need arose. Philip and his nanny were taken to London with his family twice before he was two years old, firstly for the funeral of Prince Louis, the Marquess of Milford Haven, and then in 1922 for the wedding of his uncle Dickie Mountbatten to the hugely wealthy heiress Edwina Ashley. The Prince of Wales, later King Edward VII, was Dickie’s best man.

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Andrew was a career soldier and had gone to an officers’ training school in Athens at the age of fourteen. He had risen to the rank of lieutenant general when disaster struck in 1922. Andrew was engaged fighting the Turks in Asia Minor. After the Greek army was destroyed at Smyrna and millions of Greeks became refugees, Andrew and several fellow officers were court-martialled for their part in the debacle. Andrew was sentenced to death on the grounds of disobeying an order in battle. However, his life was saved by the intervention of King George V, who ordered a gunboat to be sent to Crete. Andrew’s sentence was reduced to banishment from Greece and loss of citizenship. Philip was still a baby when he and his family were evacuated from Greece in the British gunboat Calypso.

As Calypso sailed out of Phaleron Bay towards the Italian port of Brindisi via Corfu, the intense sense of relief that Andrew had felt at escaping the firing squad soon evaporated as the realisation of the dreadful situation in which he now found himself dawned upon him. He had dedicated his life to the Greek army as a professional soldier only to suffer the disgrace of being stripped of his rank and nationality and sent into permanent exile. Years later he asserted in his memoirs that he had been made a scapegoat to cover up the incompetence of the Greek high command. He was facing an uncertain future with no career, few assets and a young family of five children to look after. Being the proud man that he was, it was difficult for him to accept the reality that, in order to survive, he would have to go begging to his brothers, of which two had married wives with great fortunes.

The family’s first stop was in London, where Andrew was able to thank the king for saving his life and his family. Andrew never recovered from the ignominy of being drummed out of the Greek army. After eight years of living in Paris, the family home broke up in 1930 when all four of his daughters married, his wife was committed to a sanatorium and Philip went away to boarding school in England. Andrew drifted round Europe, occasionally staying with one of his daughters in Germany. Apart from a brief return to Greece in 1935, when the monarchy was restored, he spent his remaining years in Monte Carlo. After the occupation of France by the Germans, Andrew was stranded in Monte Carlo, unable to get a visa to travel anywhere. He lived with his mistress, Comtesse Andrée de la Bigne, until he died in 1944 at the age of sixty-two. Philip never saw his father again during the last five years of Andrew’s enforced stay in Monte Carlo.

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Alice spent several years being treated for mental illness in Switzerland before she started to recover in 1936. During this period she did not see Philip for five years. Her recovery became complete when in 1937 her daughter Cecile died in an air crash along with her husband and three children. It seems that the shock of their deaths brought Alice to her senses. She had become extremely religious and devoted the rest of her life to helping those in need. She moved back to Athens and remained there throughout the war. The Greek people suffered terribly during the German occupation with all food being requisitioned for German troops. Many thousands of Greeks died of starvation. Alice organised soup kitchens for the starving children and risked her life by hiding a Jewish family from the Germans, for which she was posthumously awarded Israel’s highest honour, Righteous Among the Nations. Philip and his sister Sophie travelled to Jerusalem in 1994 to receive the award. In the last years of her life, Alice returned to England and lived in a suite of rooms at Buckingham Palace as the guest of Queen Elizabeth.

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When bloodlines are considered Philip is a true-blue mix of German, Danish and Russian blood. His grandmother Victoria married Louis of Battenberg, grandson of the Grand Duke of Hesse-Darmstadt, and German blood flows down from Christian IX’s wife, Louise of Hesse-Cassel, and Queen Victoria’s husband, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. It was no coincidence that Philip’s four older sisters all married German aristocrats. When Philip, then a first lieutenant in the Royal Navy, was first interviewed for the British press in the naval dockyard in Newcastle, his interviewer Olga Franklin described him as having ‘the looks of a typical prince of a Hans Andersen fairy tale’. She put his blond hair and blue eyes down to his great-grandfather King Christian IX of Denmark. Throughout his life Philip displayed the characteristics of his Northern European bloodlines, not those of the hot-blooded emotional Greeks and other Mediterranean peoples.

Philip’s connections to Russia should not be overlooked. His grandfather King George I of Greece married the Grand Duchess Olga, giving Philip a Russian grandmother; King George’s sister Dagmar married Tsar Alexander III; Philip’s two aunts Marie and Alexandra both married Russian grand dukes; his uncle Nicholas married Grand Duchess Elena of Russia and his great-aunt Alix (Princess Alexandra of Hesse) married Tsar Nicholas II, both of whom were executed along with their children at Ekaterinburg in 1918. Philip’s great-aunt Ella, who was the widow of Grand Duke Serge and the inspiration for Alice’s life of service to others, suffered a horrible death in 1918. Along with five other members of the Russian imperial family, the Romanovs, she was thrown down a mineshaft and left to die. There was a close connection between the Romanovs and Darmstadt in Germany. The Russian church in Darmstadt, St Mary Magdalene Chapel, is named in honour of the patron saint of Tsar Nicholas’s mother and was built of Russian stone on Russian soil transported to Darmstadt by train. The Russian imperial family and court used the church during regular visits to the tsarina’s brother Ernst Ludwig, who was Uncle Ernie to Alice.

This family clos...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Prologue
• Chapter 1: Ancestry
• Chapter 2: Early Influences
• Chapter 3: Education
• Chapter 4: The Royal Navy and the Courtship
• Chapter 5: ‘Incredibly Happy, Just Gorgeous’
• Chapter 6: Happy Days
• Chapter 7: Two Steps Behind
• Chapter 8: Change for the Worst
• Chapter 9: Charles and Anne
• Chapter 10: The Middle Years
• Chapter 11: Andrew and Edward
• Chapter 12: Sports and Other Interests
• Chapter 13: Conservation
• Chapter 14: The Philosopher Prince
• Chapter 15: A Ladies’ Man
• Chapter 16: Humour and Wit
• Chapter 17: Diana
• Chapter 18: Today and Yesterday
• Chapter 19: Winding Down
• Chapter 20: Conclusion
• Photographs
• Acknowledgements
• Prince Philip’s Extended Family
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright