The Queen's Husband

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It was by all odds the gayest and most gala evening of the London season, and everyone was having a lovely time--everyone, that is, but a certain young lady. Beautifully gowned, as pretty of face and form as any in the room, she sat in regal isolation, helplessly frozen in the icy formality of unapproachable rank, her eagerness to dance hidden under a fagade of gracious half smiles. At last, the only person in the'room able to do so decided on drastic action. Bearing down on a stag line of diffident lordlings, he seized one by the arm and muttered: "For God's sake, go and ask the Queen to dance. The poor thing's been bored stiff all evening."

This week, as Her Most Excellent Majesty Elizabeth the Second by the Grace of God, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of Her other Realms and Territories Queen, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith, arrives in Jamestown, Va. (after four days in Canada) to begin her first visit to the U.S. since her accession to the world's loftiest throne, the same personable troubleshooter will be there to shatter the sometimes forbidding ice of majesty with the impact of his own easy personality. He is the Queen's husband. Prince Philip, and he will play a considerable part in the success (or failure) of a royal diplomatic mission whose underlying purpose is to help restore to its old warmth the U.S. public's image of Britain, recently smudged by misadventure in Suez.

Gracious by training, but never fully relaxed in public, Britain's Queen is not gifted at putting people at their ease. Her conversational ploys are stiffly predictable and her smile too controlled to be encouraging. But as the stilted gambits of formal conversation begin to freeze into an awful possibility of utter silence in her presence, the Prince strolls up, speaks, and all the tight, polite smiles, including that on the Queen's own peaches-and-cream face, widen into the kind of relaxed good humor that warms hearts.

New Bridge. Thousands of Americans who see the Queen during the coming round of balls and receptions, and millions more who get only a glimpse on the television screen, may detect Philip at this small but important task. But this is only one facet of a larger achievement. In the increasingly equalitarian Britain of the postwar years, Britain's monarchy found itself subject to a questioning, scarcely articulated, of the utility of an expensive royal household whose members saw only other aristocrats and seemed chiefly concerned with horse racing or - shooting grouse. But today, Britain's throne has never been more secure, nor its occupant more firmly rooted in her subjects' affections. The man chiefly responsible for building this new bridge of sympathy and understanding between throne and subject is the vigorous, handsome man Elizabeth married ten years ago.

Elizabeth, captive of tradition and training, could not have established this cordial atmosphere alone. Like all royal children before her, she was sheltered from childhood from the outside world, rarely met any commoner who was not a servant, was spared the experience of school .by a succession of royal tutors. But Philip, a relatively impoverished princeling, was reared like a commoner, has washed dishes, fired boilers, even played on a skittles team organized by the owner of a local pub. As husband to the Queen, he has literally brought the world to his wife's door, and opened that door wide on the world itself. Artists, writers, businessmen and even trade unionists who would have been shown the back door in Queen Victoria's day now lunch regularly at Buckingham Palace.

With a naval officer's knowledge of engineering and an amateur's enthusiasm for science, Philip has poked his head into factories and laboratories, has surprised and pleased workers and scientists with his knowledgeable questions (as the Queen stood by with often ill-concealed impatience). He speaks extemporaneously when he feels moved to it, does not hesitate to criticize, once told a group of industrialists tartly: "I'm afraid our nomen are a thousand times more harmful than the American yes-men. If we are to recover prosperity, we shall have to find ways of emancipating energy and enterprise from the frustrating control of the constitutionally timid."

He has a breezy common touch, once greeted some late-arriving newsmen with a comradely: "What pub were you boys at?" Observed the sedate Sunday Observer: "It may arouse misgivings in those who saw, with admiration, the reigns of King George V and King George VI achieve their resplendent success by very different means. But the new style of monarchy shows the vitality and adaptability of the ancient institutions; it suits the uncommon gifts and energies of the dynamic man who is now at the Queen's side; and, most important of all, it happily meets an urgent need."

The Consort. More than almost any other public office in all the world, the job of consort to a reigning Queen is what its holder chooses to make it. The vast, amorphous amalgam of protocol, precedent, precept and law which is the British constitution contains no passages outlining a consort's duty. Most of the consorts who preceded Philip did just what they chose. With a prosperous kingdom of his own, Philip of Spain only occasionally visited the British realm of his wife Mary Tudor, who reigned from 1553 to 1558. Methodical William of Orange (1689-1702), declaring firmly that he could never "hold on to anything by apron strings," gently elbowed his wife and coSovereign Mary Stuart aside, and ruled alone. Prince George of Denmark, consort of Queen Anne (1702-14), was described by contemporaries as "very fat, loving news, the bottle and the Queen"; he took so little interest in affairs of state that he has become English history's most forgotten man.

Far more vivid in British memories is Victoria's Prince Albert, founder of the present ruling house, who was the great-great-grandfather of both Elizabeth and Philip. Victoria, eager for the whole world to adore her husband as she did, was all for having the people crown Albert King right at the start. "For God's sake, Ma'am," her avuncular Prime Minister Lord Melbourne cried out at the idea, "if you get the English people into the way of making Kings, you will get them into the way of unmaking them."

Well aware of the dislike and distrust in which he was held by Victoria's subjects for most of his life, Albert himself was wisely self-effacing. "The position of Prince Consort requires that the husband should entirely sink his own individual existence in that of his wife," he wrote. But at a time when the Queen could still conduct diplomacy with other chiefs of state over the head of her government, he carried the key to Victoria's dispatch boxes, served as his wife's guide, mentor, confidant and private secretary, drafted her state orders and supervised all her affairs.. "He is King to all intents and purposes,'' muttered one disgruntled critic.

Delicate Task. Philip could not model himself on his great-great-grandfather even if he would. He has no inclination to effacement, and even if he had a desire for power, the throne no longer commands it. Under the tacit terms of the constitution, Elizabeth is not allowed to express an opinion contrary to that of her parliamentary majority.

But the monarchy embodies what might be called the residual stability of the national community, those values which are enduring beyond changes of politicians at 10 Downing Street or Westminster. Queen Elizabeth is a personification of the unspoken social contract Englishmen have made with each other over the centuries, the contract that preserves the continuity of the community and order despite political or economic or social differences. In the atavistic recesses of virtually every Briton's mind is the real, if irrational, sense that the Queen as a person is there, alert and ready with a cool, restraining hand, to protect him from the excesses of his fellow man. It is a delicate arrangement which must depend on an instinctive confidence between the parties involved. It is to foster and nurture that confidence that Elizabeth's husband has dedicated himself.

Just Philip. There must have seemed few less likely candidates for this job than the little Greek princeling who was born on the island of Corfu on June 10, 1921. Philip was the fifth child and only son of tall, monocled Prince Andrew, brother of King Constantine of Greece. By descent the family was not Greek, but belonged to the royal Danish House of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glucksburg, which the British, French and Russians had put on the throne at the end of the 19th century. Philip's mother was Princess Alice of Battenberg, a great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria. Young Philip never learned Greek. His father, a lieutenant general, was blamed by clamoring republicans for a disaster in the short (1921-22) war with Turkey, was condemned to permanent exile, and left Greece for Paris, taking 18-month-old Philip with him.

A spirited young towhead with lively blue eyes and a raucous manner. Philip spent his earliest years in a Paris crowded to the rafters with the relics of outmoded monarchies. Years later, as a dashing young British naval lieutenant in Mel bourne. Australia, he described himself good-humoredly as "a discredited Balkan prince of no particular merit or distinction." But as a small boy. the little Prince deeply resented the background that made him different from other people. Once when an-old friend of the family introduced him to a stranger as "Prince Philip, the grandson of a King of Greece," the proud four-year-old stormed off in a tantrum. "No!" he shouted to the world at large. "I'm Philip -- just Philip, that's all."

Unlike those of his displaced cousins (practically all of them were related to Queen Victoria in one way or another) who had to drive taxis or serve as waiters to keep alive, Philip's life was clothed in comfortable, if slightly shabby, respectability, kept crisp with starch by a stern British nanny named Miss Roose. Nanny Roose taught him English as his first language, saw to it that her bumptious charge stayed clean and neat, that he responded with gracious dignity when addressed as "Your Royal Highness," and that his royal bottom never wanted for a good sound spanking when the rules were infringed.

"Mealy Eye." During the years in Paris, Philip's mother and father drifted gradually apart, each tragically confused and lost in memories of a futile past that could not be regained. His mother retired to a sanatorium in Germany; his father moved to Monte Carlo to nurse bitter memories until his death in 1944. At the age of nine, because his ardently Anglophile father insisted his son should be brought up as a proper Englishman, young Philip was shipped off to England to be reared by his mother's mother, the Dowager Marchioness of Milford Haven. She was a granddaughter of Queen Victoria and the widow of Prince Louis of Battenberg, one of England's greatest naval commanders, who had Anglicized his name to Mountbatten during World War I.

The Mountbattens hustled Philip off to Cheam, a preparatory school that has been conscientiously toughening the hides and stiffening the backbones of overprivileged young Britons for 300 years. Young Philip's start there as a "mealy eye" or new boy was not entirely auspicious. "Do you like Mr. Taylor?'' he asked the headmaster's wife after an early taste of Cheam's stern discipline. The experienced Mrs. Taylor countered expertly: "Do you, Philip?" she asked. "No." said the young scholar with flat finality, "I do not."

As the weeks passed, however, Philip learned to like not only Mr. Taylor but everything else about Cheam. He thrived on its cold baths, slept soundly on its rock-hard mattresses, took his canings like any other boy, and distinguished himself on its playing fields as a first-class athlete. Last month, when the time came to start their own son's period of formal education, Elizabeth and Philip together delivered eight-year-old Prince Charles, Duke of Cornwall, into the care of Cheam--the first heir to the British throne ever to go away to school like a commoner.

The Nazi Ha-Ha. But the school that stamps an Englishman for life is not his ''preparatory" school but his "public" school. Philip's was Gordonstoun, a school as young and experimental as Cheam is old and tradition-encrusted. Its founder, a strong-minded German schoolmaster named Kurt Hahn, believed that education should provide "the moral equivalent of war" by facing boys with plenty of hard work, physical danger and a rugged regimen. Philip, whose four sisters had all married German princes, was originally entered at a similar school Hahn had founded in Germany, but his tendency to roar with uncontrollable laughter whenever he saw the Nazi salute soon decided the family to send him back to England posthaste. "We thought it better for him as well as for us if he left Germany," one of Philip's sisters explained nervously.

At Gordonstoun, Philip reveled in a rigorous routine that included' two icy showers each day, a long, bracing hike before breakfast, hours spent in the company of dour but expert Scots fishermen and boatbuilders. He became captain of the cricket and hockey teams, and "head boy" of the school in his final year. He was "often naughty, never nasty," pitched in at dirty jobs like anyone else (on one school cruise when everybody else was seasick, he did all the cooking and dishwashing). He early proved he could do most things with less effort than other boys, sometimes showed impatience and intolerance for those less gifted. In a letter of recommendation when Philip decided to enter the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth, stern Dr. Hahn wrote: "Prince Philip is a born leader, but he will need the exacting demands of a great service to do justice to himself. His best is outstanding; his second best is not good enough."

A Gawky Girl. The Royal Navy does not take kindly to pampered princelings. Tough instructors at Dartmouth went out of their way to prove the validity of Captain Bligh's legendary dictum that "a midshipman is the lowest form of life in the British Navy." But Phil the Greek (as he was sometimes called) weathered every storm. In two terms he received only one day's punishment, and might well have avoided a second rude admonition had it not been for a young lady who came to call.

The young lady, a gawky girl of 13, was a distant cousin whose father had recently become King Emperor. A devastatingly handsome young man of 17, Philip could not be expected to show any great interest in her as a woman, but he could scarcely duck entertaining her. As an officer and a gentleman, he did his best to please by leaping lithely over a tennis net ("How good he is. Crawfie. How high he can jump!" cried Lilibet to her governess), and spicing the conversation on the royal yacht with salty --though not too salty--anecdotes. Elizabeth was entranced, but if Philip remembered anything special about the visit, it concerned the following morning when, back on duty and too' sleepy to hop to at first call, he hit the deck with a resounding whack as a touchy petty officer slashed the cords on his hammock.

Bolted Privacy. Soon Elizabeth was peppering her handsome cousin with letters. On the rare occasions when he would deign to reply, she would race to the nearest lavatory in search of the only guaranteed privacy available, bolt the door, and read her letter in ecstatic solitude. Philip went on to graduate (in 1939) from the Naval College at the top of his class and to win a coveted prize as the best all-round midshipman. Thirteen months later he handled a searchlight battery so alertly in a point-blank naval engagement between British and Italians that he earned a mention in dispatches.

Good-looking young naval officers are seldom left long to twiddle their thumbs in loneliness ashore, and it is certain that Philip was no exception. "He was adorable," says one of the dozens of young Australian girls Philip met when he was executive officer of the destroyer Whelp on duty in the South Pacific. "We were all absolutely crazy about him." But it is equally certain that, during the same period, Philip's manly face, adorned with a full foliage of whiskers, was framed in silver in a prominent spot on Elizabeth's dressing table back home. Back in England at war's end, like many another Navy regular, Philip was put on shore duty. His small black M.G. with its green seats was soon setting new records for the gS-mile trip from Corsham, Wilts, to London, and between a bachelor's gay rounds 'of West End's nightspots, its destination was often Buckingham Palace.

Life with Father. Under such garish headlines as WAS IT A LOVE MATCH? and WHO ASKED WHOM?, the sob sisters of two continents have been making foolish speculations about Philip's and Elizabeth's romance ever since. It is obvious that the elder daughter of Britain's King could not sit around her palace all day like, a college girl in a dormitory, hoping somebody would call for a date. It is equally obvious to anyone who knows Philip that he is not the type to submit meekly to the dictates of a dynastic manage de convenance. "This young couple," wrote Philip's ex-valet John Dean, who may or may not know, "were in love." Whatever the truth of that, it is known that Philip and Elizabeth decided to marry after a weekend spent together with her family at Balmoral Castle, and that Elizabeth's father strongly disapproved.

Despite Philip's British background and his fine war record, George VI was deeply worried about how British opinion, particularly its left wing, would take to a Greek Prince as the husband of the heiress presumptive. There was also something about his daughter's brash young man with his loud, boisterous laugh and his blunt, seagoing manners that irritated the gentle King. Besides, the fellow couldn't shoot.

There was many a tense moment for George as Elizabeth moped about in tearful martyrdom while her mother and grandmother, the doughty old Queen Mary, fought her battle for her. At last George decided that the young couple (she was 20, he 25) should wait six months to make sure of each other. Philip's uncle, Lord Louis (now Earl) Mountbatten, who had hoped for the marriage all along, got busy at the King's request, sounding out public opinion and smoothing the political path to romance. A public-opinion poll of the Sunday Pictorial soon showed 64% of its readers in favor of the marriage.

In July 1947, newly naturalized as plain British Lieut. Philip Mountbatten, the ex-Prince of Greece, a relatively poverty-stricken sailor with only one suit of civvies to his name, moved into Kensington Palace to await the ordeal of becoming a bridegroom. "That poor young navy officer," moaned a royal valet, " he don't even have no hairbrushes."

First Gentleman. In the decade since that decorous orgy of sentimentality and ceremonial that was Britain's Royal Wedding, old colonies have become new nations. Elizabeth herself has become a mother twice over, a Queen and the first citizen of a free association of nations unlike anything in the world before. The angry towhead who once screamed to the world that he was "Philip--just Philip" has not only acquired a hairbrush, but a sonorous list of ranks and titles--he is a Knight Commander of the Garter, the officially designated "First Gentleman of the Realm,"* His Royal Highness the Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, Earl of Merioneth. Baron Greenwich, Field Marshal, Air Marshal and Fleet Admiral of the Royal Navy--and an allowance of pocket money from the privy purse sufficient ($112,000 yearly) to maintain his position in style.

But Philip was interested in more than titles. Appalled by the bumbling management of the royal household, he filled the palaces with labor-saving devices, radiotelephones, central heating, electric dishwashers and intercoms, removed unnecessary flunkies right and left to more useful work elsewhere. He boned up on modern farm technology to put the vast royal estates at Windsor and Sandringham on a paying basis, and even, according to one weary farm worker at Windsor, "told us where to plant the marrow."

Betweentimes, he slipped out of the palace to play polo and cricket, to take his young son sailing. Not even the Queen herself was immune from her husband's restless energy. "I think Prince Philip is mad," she once exclaimed to a palace servant, as her husband, bored stiff with a moment of inactivity, darted out of the palace door in a cocoon of sweaters, to "work up a sweat." During their marriage, Elizabeth has succeeded to some extent in calming her impetuous husband, restraining his often explosive impatience ("Philip," she is often heard to remonstrate, "don't get so annoyed!") and curbing his quarterdeck vocabulary. By way of return, Philip himself can be credited for the fact that his mousy, slightly frumpy and occasionally frosty bride has blossomed into a self-confidently stylish and often radiantly warm young matron.

Navy Wife. Early in their marriage, after persuading his father-in-law to return him to active naval service, Philip insisted that Elizabeth join him in Malta and live like any other officer's wife. For the first time in her life, the future Queen really saw how the other half lived. She drove her own Daimler, went shopping and danced with her husband and his friends till the early morning. Readers of Britain's Sunday supplements nodded in approval as they noted the new slim dimensions of her figure and the sharper, smarter cut of her clothes.

Some sailors in the Royal Navy were not so approving when Philip was given command of the frigate Magpie. It was his first command, and Philip was eager to make good. "I'd rather die than have to serve on that bloody ship again," said one sailor. "A man'd thought it was some big bloody battleship, the way he walked around giving orders." By the time Philip's tour ended, the Magpie was not the happiest ship in the Royal Navy, but it was among the best, got top marks for efficiency during the Mediterranean Fleet's summer exercises.

For all his talent at leadership, Philip neither has nor wants a key to the Queen's crested dispatch boxes, and beyond some cordial chitchat when the work is done, he is careful not to intrude when her ministers come for consultation. But to the increasing number of royal chores he himself is called upon to perform, Philip has brought an individual approach--often to the consternation, sometimes to the grudging approval of the kingdom.

The Shut-Eyes. Philip struck terror into palace officials by refusing to let them vet his speeches, or even read them. What was worse, he did his level best to say something. In his inaugural speech as the president of the complacent British Association for the Advancement of Science, he startled both his listeners and the world by telling the learned gentlemen assembled, in well-informed and vigorous terms, to get cracking. "It's no good shutting your eyes and saying 'British is best' three times a day after meals and expecting it to be so," he told another group of smug Britons in the same tone.

For more than two years, Philip was the prime mover in an effort to get industrialists, labor leaders and workers from all over the Commonwealth together over a round-table conference. "He's the sort of young fellow who tries to teach his grandmother how to suck eggs--if you know what I mean," huffed at least one of Britain's great magnates. Explained a British newsman: "Philip puts their backs up because he asks one question too many. He will say to a man on the bench: 'What's your job? How is it done?' But then he always goes on to say, Isn't there some way of doing it better?' The workman is pleased as Punch--but the boys upstairs feel like telling him to go home and play bridge with the Queen."

Meanwhile, omnipresent Mrs. Grundys were busily clacking their sharp tongues over their suspicion that "this foreign Prince spends all his time roistering about town, playing polo on Sundays or sailing boats, when he should be in church." Philip is unmoved. "I am completely stoic," he once told a gathering of newspaper publishers. "I now read about myself as if I were an animal at the zoo."

Bloody Rude. His sharpest critics are not those who view him in ignorance, from afar, but those who struggle in vain to keep up with his exacting demands.

Philip, whose duty often calls on him to make up to three speeches a day, was once outraged when an aide suggested he beg off an engagement on grounds of fatigue. "That's what they pay me for, isn't it?" he snapped in rebuke.

Many another co-worker has felt the bite of Philip's sarcasm. Said one of his close associates: "He doesn't mind putting himself out for people it's his duty to entertain. But when he wants facts from someone who is supposed to have them and he finds out they don't or are indifferent--well, then he can be bloody rude." He once interrupted a long-winded scientist in the midst of a long lecture, to remark: "That's all very well, but you still haven't found out what makes my bath water gurgle." On another occasion, he snapped at an admiral whose demeanor indicated he had drunk his lunch: "Well, Admiral, what do you think--that is, if you are still capable of thinking?"

Steady, Now. But when he likes, Philip can turn on a charm that is dazzling, does it with an easy irreverence royalty seldom achieves. Walking down a line of spectators, he noticed a young girl pretending to swoon as he passed. Philip grinned at her: "Steady, now." On another occasion, a young matron took a look at him and murmured: "Mmmmm." Philip heard her, looked her up and down, and said: "MMMMMMmmm." He may examine a Buckingham Palace menu in elaborate French, remark cheerily to the guests: "Ah, good. Fish and chips again."

Last year he persuaded the Queen to let him take the royal yacht Britannia on a four-month tour of the Antarctic and the lesser British island possessions in the Indian Ocean. This was the separation that later set off the rumors in the U.S. press of a royal rift. Elizabeth's subjects, however, were more sensible. Australians were charmed when he talked to wharf laborers, called in small groups of representative citizens for cocktails and dinner and quizzed them on Commonwealth affairs. New Zealanders remember him fondly at a lunch in Christchurch, breaking into the speeches in his own honor to propose a toast to the mayor, who, Philip had discovered, was celebrating his wedding anniversary, remember still more fondly a reveler shouting a last farewell as the royal yacht left the wharf: "See you later, alligator." Amid the hushed silence from officialdom, Philip's final message to the loyal citizens of New Zealand came clearly across the still water: "In a while, crocodile." Wrote the Sydney Daily Telegraph: "The Duke has given a new conception of monarchy to Australia by his easy camaraderie and complete informality. He has made it a more tangible, more personal and more folksy institution than it has ever appeared to us before."

TV Star. Back in Britain, the Prince became a TV star overnight when the BBC asked him to drop by and give the kids a talk on the tour. Philip took a full 52 minutes telling about it (and thus set a new record for the longest ad lib broadcast ever made on the network). Skillfully cutting in films and slides on cue, the Prince rambled on about anything and everything. "I'm not surprised it was forbidden," he said, describing the horrid taste of a vegetable believed by those in the Seychelles Islands to be the original forbidden fruit of Eden. "They must have had a good stiff neck in the morning," he reflected on some New Guinea native dancers. And for one indifferent shot of a penguin rookery, he apologized: "I really had to include this because I think it's the only one of the lot that I took myself."

"Our Job." As Britain's busiest married careerists. Elizabeth and Philip are often forced to pursue their duties separately, but at the start of each busy day, the door between their adjoining bedrooms at the palace is invariably open to permit them to chat while dressing. Even on the most crowded days they try to keep the time between 5 and 6:30 each evening free for a family romp with seven-year-old Anne (and Prince Charles when he is not at school); the rare evenings they can spend alone together are frequently devoted to television and an exchange of mocking criticism when one or the other of them appears on the screen.

"It's our job," Philip has said, "to make this monarchy business work." Last week, as BOAC's U.S.-built DC; put down at Ottawa, Philip and Elizabeth stepped out to face still more newsreel and TV cameras with inquisitive eyes, still more thousands of eager and curious subjects. Standing at his wife's side, the Queen's husband was ready as ever for the job that is always with them--to bind together the people of not only a nation but an entire Commonwealth of Nations in an atmosphere of mutual trust, respect and affection.

To give him precedence next to the Queen, when he is with her. When he is not, he ranks merely as the Duke of Edinburgh, behind archbishops, all other members of the royal family, and all other Dukes of the Realm.

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