with rouge, and wearing paddy-hats and green three-cornered scarves. An almost hysterical atmosphere of loyalism lasted until the Princess’s departure from Belfast on 21 March, when a mob of schoolchildren broke flag-bedecked stands and ran to the edge of the quay. As her cruiser left the harbour, the whole crowd sang ‘Will ye no’ come back again?’ and ‘Auld Lang Syne’.12
In Northern Ireland, enthusiasm was a symptom of sectarian anxiety. Elsewhere and on other occasions, the excitement the Heiress caused is less easily explicable, especially so soon after the election of a Government committed to dispossessing the better off. At the beginning of 1946, support for socialism was at its zenith: Gallup put Labour twenty per cent ahead in the polls, as the Cabinet prepared to introduce its most radical measures.13 Yet, such popularity – and apparent popular support for levelling down – was not accompanied by any decline in pro-royal sentiment. In April, a gigantic crowd came to watch the bands of the Royal Horse and Grenadier Guards playing on the East Terrace of Windsor Castle, to mark Princess Elizabeth’s twentieth birthday. The Times estimated it at 40,000, a figure three times as large as for any such event in the 1930s.14 Perhaps the austerity and restrictions, as great after the war as during it, sparked a reaction. Such gatherings, and the carnival mood that infused them, may have been a form of escape, a release from drabness. But there was also a deep personal interest in the Princess: in her beauty, her clothes, her shy smile, and, increasingly, her prospects.
When and whom would she marry? The assumption was that she would do so soon; this, after all, had been the point of her education. ‘That the Heiress to the Throne would stay unmarried’, as Crawfie archly but accurately put it, ‘was unthinkable’.15 The matter had been discussed in the popular papers since the 1930s. The difficulty lay in finding a suitable consort, at a time when suitability still entailed reasons of state. No heir to the throne had ever contracted a marriage for reasons that did not take dynastic considerations into account. However, conventions were changing. Although Edward VIII had been refused permission to marry the woman of his choice, the marriage of George VI had been a non-arranged, romantic and successful one. It was now accepted that a husband could not be forced upon the Princess. It was also accepted, however, that she could not be allowed unrestricted freedom, and that the range of possible suitors was limited to the diaspora of European royalty, few of whom were now in reigning families, and to the upper ranks of the British aristocracy. Though the Princess was well known, she did not know many people. Moreover, her small circle of friends, acquaintances and sufficiently distant relatives included hardly any young men who would be acceptable as a consort, or who would presume to such a role. That she was desirable, there was no question: but to pay court to the Heiress to the world’s premier Monarchy required an exceptional degree of passion, confidence or gall.
Perhaps she sensed these difficulties, for in practice they never arose. There were minor flirtations, and stories of heirs to great titles who took liberties and were frozen out for ever. But there was never a phase of boyfriends, of falling in and out of love, of trial and error. From early in her adolescence she took a friendly and romantic interest in one man, and there is no evidence that she ever seriously considered anybody else. ‘She fell in love with him,’ says one former courtier.16 According to another, it was a matter of coming contentedly to terms with what had to be. ‘There really was no one else she could possibly marry but Prince Philip.’17 Yet if Philip was, in a sense, hand-picked, it was not the Princess’s parents, or the Court, who did the picking.
Prince Philip of Greece, nearly five years older than the Princess, had several commanding advantages: he was royal, on first acquaintance extremely personable and, though not British, he gave an excellent impression of being so. The British Royal Family had known him since he was a small child, when he had taken tea at Buckingham Palace with Queen Mary, who reported him ‘a nice little boy with very blue eyes’.18 He had been in the company of Princess Elizabeth at several pre-war family gatherings, including the wedding of the Duke and Duchess of Kent in 1934, and the Coronation three years later. Even before the Coronation, Philip’s name had been linked in the press with that of the Princess, as one of a tiny list of hypothetical bridegrooms.19 The first significant encounter, however, took place on 22 July 1939, during the short interlude between the Canada-America trip and the outbreak of war, in the course of a Royal Family visit to the Royal Naval College, Dartmouth. According to Crawfie, the introduction took place in the nursery of the house of the Captain of the College. Philip, who had recently been admitted as a cadet, was taken in to see the princesses, who were playing with a clockwork train. Allegedly, the new friendship was sealed with ginger crackers and lemonade, and by a game of tennis.20 As far as the adult, non-nursery world was concerned, however, the first important meeting took place at a tea party on board the royal yacht Victoria and Albert. This had been arranged – engineered might conceivably be a better word – by Lord Mountbatten, the King’s cousin and Philip’s uncle. ‘Philip came back aboard V & A for tea and was a great success with the children,’ Mountbatten wrote in his diary.21 There are also filmic and photographic records of the day. One amateur snap shows the Greek cadet and the much smaller princess together alone, apart from the watching photographer, playing croquet in the Captain’s garden. A still picture from a contemporary newsreal encapsulates the whole drama, as if it were a tableau: the child-like, solemn Princess Elizabeth, looking much younger than thirteen in a sea of adult faces, her parents and sister, Philip, laughing at some private joke, Mountbatten, also smiling, at his shoulder.
‘It is hard to believe,’ suggests Mountbatten’s official biographer, discussing his subject’s attitude towards the 1939 Dartmouth meeting, that ‘no thought crossed his mind that an admirable husband for the future Queen Elizabeth might be readily available’.22 In view of Mountbatten’s character, his personal and dynastic ambition, his taste for intrigue, it is more than hard. We may take it for granted that one did. It is possible that such a thought had also occurred to the King and Queen. They were aware, after all, of the need to find a son-in-law before very long, and a foreign prince training for the British Navy was an obvious possibility. In Philip’s case, however, there were some worrying features.
Indeed, the Prince’s origins and early life raised the question of what ‘royal’ meant, if it was to be treated as a qualification. Should it be defined in terms of bloodlines, or did it relate to real-world wealth, reputation, and constitutional significance? By the first criterion, Philip was unquestionably royal, in one sense more so than Princess Elizabeth, for he had royalty on both sides of his family, instead of just one. He also happened to be related to the Princess several times over. His most important relationship was through his mother, Princess Alice of Battenberg, who was sister to Lord Mountbatten, mentor and cousin to George VI. But there were also other strands. He was even a fourth cousin once removed through collateral descendants of George III.23 Moreover, he was not just descended from royalty, he had been born into a reigning Royal Family, the grandson and nephew of Greek kings.
On the other hand, by the second criterion, the current standing of his dynasty, Philip scored badly, or not at all. His birth took place at the Greek royal residence of Mon Repos on the Ionian island of Corfu in June 1921. This did not remain his home for long. Within eighteen months, following the passing of a death sentence by a Greek revolutionary court on his father, Prince Andrew, he and all his family became refugees. A few years later, Philip’s mother recorded her thanks to George V for his personal intervention, ‘realizing the deadly peril’ her husband was in, to ensure that a warship got him ‘out of the clutches of the military dictators and brought him and his family away from Greece’ on the day after the trial.24 The exile of Andrew, his wife, four daughters and baby son, turned out effectively to be permanent. Dispossessed, impoverished and in the case of Prince Andrew embittered, they settled in a house provided by Philip’s aunt, Marie Bonaparte, at St. Cloud, on the outskirts of Paris.
It was to be a shambolic, meagre existence, built on fading dreams and painful memories. Philip’s birthplace in Corfu had been lacking in amenities: in the early 1920s, there was no electricity, gas, running hot water or proper heating.25 But it had been grand in style, and magnificent in location. By contrast, the villa in St. Cloud was humiliatingly unpretentious, ‘a very simple country house,’ according to one of Philip’s sisters.26