Prince Philip Revealed

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For Nicky and James

Prologue

I first met the Duke of Edinburgh in the late 1970s. He was in his mid-fifties and no longer the dashing polo-playing prince, simply a man in a suit. I was one of a group of girls involved in raising monies for a theater of which Prince Philip was a patron, and we went backstage afterward to meet him. He was charming, polite, and funny, and only now when looking back do I realize how wary he must have been of being photographed with a bunch of young girls.

The next time I met him was in Amman, in March 1984. I had moved on from PR and was working for Majesty magazine. He was with Queen Elizabeth on a state visit to the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan as guests of King Hussein and Queen Noor. On the first afternoon there was a reception for the royal press corps, of which I was one, to meet Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip—this was standard in those days.

As we walked into the British Embassy, all of us visiting media journalists and some of the heavy-hitting Middle East foreign correspondents lined up to shake hands as if we were at an old-fashioned wedding reception. I clearly remember the master of ceremonies calling out Ingrid Seward from Hanover Magazines, who then published Majesty. It was my first royal tour and I hadn’t a clue what to do, so I just stuck around Michael Shea, Queen Elizabeth’s press secretary, who told me where to stand and wait to be introduced to the Queen.

Before this happened I was approached by an equerry who said to me, His Royal Highness the Duke of Edinburgh would like to meet you. I nodded vaguely, and before I could do anything, Prince Philip walked up to me and asked me in his crisp, dry voice if I was German. I suppose with a name like Ingrid and working for an organization called Hanover Magazines it was a possibility. As soon as I replied in the negative, he turned on his heel and walked away.

I was humiliated—I couldn’t understand what I had done, but I later learned it was standard behavior for the duke. According to behavioral psychologists, people in a position of power such as Prince Philip frequently don’t terminate a meeting properly. They just walk away if they are not interested. They know people only want to talk to them because of who they are, not as a real person, so they have no sensitivity toward the other individual’s feelings.

Years later, when I was introduced to the duke again, this time by his then private secretary and friend Brian McGrath, at a small party in the grounds of Home Park during the Windsor Horse Show, he looked straight at me and walked away without uttering a word. Brian, looking flustered, came over to apologize, saying that the duke had thought I was from the Daily Mirror not Majesty magazine, which was why he had walked away. I met him again a few days later, when perhaps he had been briefed I was not from a tabloid newspaper, and we had what I imagined he would think was a civilized conversation about carriage driving. Realizing I was not the enemy, he was charm personified and put me in touch with his head groom, at that time David Muir. He had allowed David to take me out with his carriage ponies so I could see for myself what it was like.

I still couldn’t quite believe it when I found myself sitting on the Balmoral tartan–covered box seat being driven from the Royal Mews to the showground at Windsor with the Queen’s four Fell ponies pulling us along. With Windsor Castle behind us, we clopped past the carefully trimmed lawns and flowering trees to Home Park and the nine-hole golf course where Prince Andrew used to practice his golf swing. We trotted beside the river Thames and the railway track on to the showground, where it was much rougher, and when a train roared past, the ponies quickened their pace, but they responded immediately when told to stop. I used the moment to ask David Muir about his boss.

People that don’t know the duke are intimidated by him, Muir admitted. It can be like the parting of the Red Sea. As the duke walks up everyone stands back, but if you are honest with him, he is honest with you. He can spot a fake a mile away.

I have seen him dancing at the Squadron Ball at Cowes, expertly wrapped around Penny Romsey (now Countess Mountbatten of Burma) without a care about who would see them, so I presumed rightly or wrongly it was totally innocent. I have seen him being unpleasant and brusque, but I have also seen him lifting little children out of a crowd and over a barrier so they can give the Queen a posy. I have seen him feeding sugar lumps to his ponies after they have competed in a marathon.

With his intellectual rigor goes a great generosity of spirit. Practically everyone who has worked for him has unqualified affection for him, even though he continually shouts at them. He also has a capacity for intense dislike: of the press, his critics, and fools. His best relationships are those based on mutual respect such as he has for the Queen; his daughter, the Princess Royal; and his youngest son, the Earl of Wessex. He is also surprisingly unstuffy, although he has more blue blood running through his veins than his wife, the Queen.

According to Major General Sir Michael Hobbs, a former director of the Duke of Edinburgh Award who has worked with the duke since 1988: He is reserved by nature and not a demonstrative man. He meets discomfort absolutely head-on and isn’t worried by it. He is a loner, utterly happy within himself.

The duke claimed it was his mentor, Kurt Hahn, who persuaded him to become involved with the award: "Kurt Hahn came along one day and he sent for me and I went to see him at Brown’s Hotel, where he always stayed, and he said, ‘Boy, I want you to start an awards scheme.’

I said, ‘Thanks very much!’ We had a badge scheme at Gordonstoun, and if you qualified throwing and running and jumping, you got a badge for it. I said, ‘I can’t start it, but if you put together a committee of the great and the good, I am perfectly happy to chair it, which is what happened.’

Philip’s relationship with Kurt Hahn was forged in the crucible of Gordonstoun School, where, under Hahn’s tutorship, Philip developed his adult self. Because of his respect for Hahn, anything the elder man needed, Philip would consider very carefully. His dream was that one day the award that bears his name wouldn’t be necessary. It was a genuinely altruistic dream, and he believed and hoped it would become part of the development process of young people, said Michael Hobbs.

Philip likes a lot of people for specific parts of what they are, but he does not have many complete friends. Not surprisingly many of those he did have are dead, but Philip is pragmatic and doesn’t dwell on the past or what might have been. As a high achiever himself, he expects the same from his friends when they are helping him, and yet when they disappoint him he is always fair. It was the same with his children.

In his youth his eldest son, the Prince of Wales, was frightened of him, and although they now have great respect for each other, it took years of misunderstanding. The late Diana Princess of Wales said he was an amusing dinner companion but she would never look to him for sympathy or go to him for help as opposed to advice or guidance, which he gave her. But at the end of her life she declared she hated him. In a conversation I had with her on the subject, she informed me she had warned her sons, William and Harry, never to shout at anyone who couldn’t answer back the way their grandfather did.

As is often the case between younger and older generations, the duke’s grandchildren find him easier than his children, in particular the Princess Royal’s son, Peter Phillips, who has always been a particular favorite. According to a member of staff, as the duke became more cantankerous in his old age, the only one who could cheer him up was Peter, who used to love to go duck flighting with his grandfather, and they still play games together and tease each other.

His numerous physical impairments and auditory problems may have made him increasingly bad tempered, and according to research lowered testosterone also plays a part in making older men more irritable and moodier. Regardless, even in his late stage of life, Prince Philip still takes huge pleasure in defying convention. When the Queen was hosting a tea for President Donald Trump of the United States in July 2018, Prince Philip got himself into a helicopter to make the two-hundred-mile journey from Wood Farm in Sandringham to Romsey in Hampshire to stand at the font at Romsey Abbey as a godfather to six-month-old Inigo Hooper, his first cousin three times removed. Inigo, son of Lady Alexandra Hooper and her husband Tom, will one day inherit Broadlands, and ninety-seven-year-old Philip wanted to be there among the Mountbatten family, not at Windsor Castle with the US president.

Prince Philip continues to enjoy his life. He spends most of his time at the refurbished Wood Farm on the Sandringham estate, where if he has to do the occasional family get-together, he does it with good heart and a huge amount of the willpower he has always possessed. His determination to be at Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s wedding in May 2018, despite having a hip operation only six weeks beforehand, was an example of his fortitude. As always, he walked ramrod straight into the chapel and sat through the long service without displaying a flicker of discomfort. Although he didn’t attend the reception afterward, he did turn up at Lady Gabriella Windsor’s wedding to Tom Kingston when they married in May 2019, and he attended their reception at Frogmore House. At Christmastime he always hosts his staff party at Frogmore and refuses to change anything because of his age. The staff at Windsor has noted that since his car accident in January 2019, he has a renewed zest for life and has been far more cheerful, possibly because he feels he has been given a reprieve to get on with whatever remains of his life. He enjoys watching cooking programs on television, can still read, and enjoys the company of attractive women and intelligent conservation. He is surprisingly sensitive and has always been appalled by the stream of negative stories in the media about the royal family—his family—but he has always cautioned against suing the press except in a few instances. He knows it gives more coverage to a libel, plus it is an unpleasant and expensive process to go through.

Watching Fergie and Diana tearing apart what he considered sacrosanct—the institution of the monarchy—for their own ends made him very angry and hurt him considerably. It was only in 2019 that he would finally be reconciled with Fergie and be present at a lunch at Windsor Castle with the Queen, Fergie, and Andrew. They never touch on the past, as Philip sees no point in that, but he is able to be in Fergie’s company without making her feel awkward. She is a good conversationalist and enjoys his continuing fascination with new things and ideas, which are sometimes a bit off-the-wall—but she can relate to them well. He once decided, for instance, it would be a good idea to introduce hawks into New York City to kill the vermin population that was a problem at the time.

Above all Prince Philip is loyal. He is loyal to his wife, the Queen, and the institution of the monarchy—which they have both given up so much to support—and it grieves him that the younger generation do not all appear to have the devotion to duty that has always been his byline. For him duty is at the center of everything. It is not a choice. It is one of life’s givens and it is the framework from which all other things follow. Prince Philip has always operated within the framework that if you obey the rules, life will be so much easier. There will be no embarrassment and no one will step over the line and say things they later on regret. Although Philip finds comfort and security in structure, there is also a rebellious streak at the core of his character. He has always held the opinion that his way is the right way, and he does not enjoy being corrected if someone contradicts him.

He is an alpha male playing a beta role, but he accepts that as it’s his duty, said behavioral psychologist Dr. Peter Collett. He buys into paying homage as it’s playing the role, but outside of that he appears to find it difficult.

In 2016, the year of the Queen’s ninetieth birthday, she was asked to present the trophies to the winner on Derby Day at Epsom for the first time in her reign. After the race the Queen took her place as the connections to the winning horse, Hazard, mounted the dais one by one to collect their trophies. First up was the winning owner, the Aga Khan, with whom the Queen could be seen discussing the race—she has extensive knowledge of the breeding of all the fancied runners. Next in line were the trainer Dermot Weld and the jockey Pat Smullen along with the stable lad who looked after the winning horse. Each man in turn received his trophy after a few words of congratulation from the Queen. Meanwhile ninety-four-year-old Prince Philip was standing erect as always and off to one side of the Queen and the winning group. He was impeccably dressed in a morning suit with a gray top hat and a colorful green-and-maroon tie with a pearl-and-diamond anchor tiepin. He shook hands with each man as he mounted the dais, but took no part in the presentation ceremony. Despite the Queen’s passion for horse racing, the duke has little interest in it himself and tried not to look bored by the proceedings. But the Derby is not a state occasion, so why did Philip make the trek down from the royal box to the presentation, only a week after his doctors ordered him to cancel his official engagements because of fears about his health? It was not an obligation.

It was his sense of duty. In all the years since the Queen’s accession, Prince Philip’s sense of duty has never wavered. He is always there. Two steps behind. His complex character is part of what makes him fascinating. I often describe Prince Philip as a whirling comet with bits shooting off in different directions, recounted one of his female friends. He is not a gentleman, because he doesn’t put people at their ease when he can’t be bothered, but he plays by the rules with his wife and family.

The Queen, who has been married to him for more than seventy years, has told us he doesn’t take easily to compliments. He doesn’t; he mistrusts their motives. He also objects to any details about his private life becoming public property. When Michael Fagan broke into the Queen’s bedroom in 1982, the thing that worried Prince Philip the most was that the public would know their sleeping arrangements—they have separate interconnecting bedrooms like many aristocratic couples with different life schedules. The Queen switches off when the duke becomes difficult and walks away both physically and mentally. But although their marriage has been challenging at times, it has never been dull.

When he was still actively involved, the worst thing about royal life for Prince Philip was the official engagements that could be so personally restricting and stultifyingly boring. Philip is as well known for his gaffes as anything else, but most of them are couched not to be rude but to relieve the boredom. Occasionally a mishap relieves the tedium, and one of Philip’s favorites occurred during a state banquet in May 1966, probably the only time anything has ever gone wrong on such an occasion.

The Queen was at the head of the table with Prince Philip next to her and the guest of honor, President Franz Jonas of Austria, on her right. The Archbishop of Canterbury was seated nearby, and opposite him sat a dame commander of the Order of the British Empire, who was also a brigadier in the army.

The brigadier, a well-proportioned lady, was wearing a black evening dress held in place by two thin shoulder straps. On the left side of the dress she wore medal ribbons. As a footman bent over to serve her vegetables, one of the buttons on his livery became entangled with the row of ribbons above her ample bosom. He tried to extricate himself while holding the salver of vegetables, which proved impossible. With difficulty he found a spot on the table to set down the dish, and with the help of the brigadier managed to untangle the button and strap.

Relieved but embarrassed and flustered, the footman bent to retrieve his vegetable dish and then another button became caught in the lady’s other shoulder strap. Dismayed, she pulled away from the footman just as he pulled away from her. The strap snapped, closely followed by the other. In a panic she pushed herself back from the table and with the same movement pushed herself out of her dress. The archbishop stared at his plate while the Queen determinedly carried on her conversation with the president of Austria so he did not dare look toward the commotion. For once the rule that no one leaves the table before the Queen was broken and the lady hurriedly left in search of a couple of safety pins.

Prince Philip still repeats the story that tickled his well-developed sense of the ridiculous, although it might have been altered a little down the years of retelling.

The multifaceted, complex, humorous character that is Prince Philip has been fortunate enough to dedicate his spare time to the pursuit of knowledge, and to enjoy his life while doing so. During his last years he has refused to give in to illness or infirmity, realizing that to do so would deny him his final opportunity to understand what he had not understood before. He has used this time to read the books he always wanted to read but never had the time to do so and to go through the archives of his life so carefully filed by his loyal archivist. I don’t think he has been afraid of death or afraid of life. His fear has been to leave things undone.

To the last he has remained a man of immense personal discipline and dedication to duty. Within the pages of this book I have attempted to explain who this man is and how he has managed to survive within his extraordinary life and make it actually worth living.

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 showed 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 favor 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 organized 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 three-hundred-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 less than 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 March 30, 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.

Entry number 449 in the Corfu Register of Births shows that on May 28, 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 baptized 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 June 10, 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.

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 she 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 traveled 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 naturalized 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’s 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 anglicized to become Mountbatten. Louis’s 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.

In her childhood, Philip’s mother, Alice, was brought up in England and became a favorite 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.

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.

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-martialed 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 toward 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 realization 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