‘An awkward situation to be in’: Behind the scenes of Philip and Elizabeth’s 73-year marriage

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In 1947, then-Princess Elizabeth penned a letter to a royal historian describing how she had met the man who was set to become her husband. Although it’s subsequently been described as a record of how they fell in love, in truth the 21-year-old princess was careful to stick to only the most rudimentary details about her new lover.

“Philip likes riding but as yet, has not done much racing,” she wrote. “We both love dancing — we have danced at Ciro’s and Quaglino’s as well at parties.”

That letter, like so much of the couple’s private life, is now public record. It sold for the equivalent of CDN$25,000 at auction in 2016.

The British press has thrown all manner of whimsical titles on the couple’s marriage: A “fairytale romance,” “the love of her life.” The same pronouncements have been projected on any number of ultimately doomed royal couplings: Charles and Diana, Andrew and Sarah, Anne and Mark. But Philip and Elizabeth saw it to the end; at the time of Philip’s death their 73-year union ranked as one of the longest-lasting marriages in the United Kingdom.

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It’s almost impossible to know the true extent of the bond between the couple. Elizabeth and Philip inhabited a world tailor-made for transactional, chemistry-free marriages: They slept in separate beds, and had any number of ways to escape each other for days on end. Canada alone would see more than half a dozen solo visits from the Duke, the last coming in 2013.

Neither gave interviews in their latter years, and they certainly weren’t inclined to discuss their marital health in public. At their golden wedding anniversary in 1997, Elizabeth paid tribute to her husband with a speech that mostly abounded with references to British history. “He is someone who doesn’t take easily to compliments but he has, quite simply, been my strength and stay all these years,” she said. The line, one of the tenderest Elizabeth ever said about Philip, was splashed across British tabloids within the hours after Philip’s death. Left out is the less romantic addendum where Elizabeth says “this and many other countries owe him a debt greater than he would ever claim.”

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At the time of Philip’s death, most of the world knew the basic details of his marriage to Queen Elizabeth via its fictional depiction in The Crown, the smash hit Netflix series dramatizing the life of Queen Elizabeth II. Season two, in particular, catalogues a frayed marriage beset by resentment and infidelity.

There is no smoking gun that Philip was ever unfaithful to his wife and monarch. One of the most eyebrow-raising dalliances came only a year after their marriage when Philip took the British stage actress Pat Kirkwood out to dinner before taking her dancing into the wee hours. It was an extremely improprietous pursuit for a man with a pregnant wife at home (and one pregnant with the future King of England at that), but Kirkwood would go to her grave asserting that no affair was ever consummated.

“Because he was so handsome and because he was a flirt and because he was such a good dancer and because he didn’t give a damn, it just always looked like he was having affairs,” explained historian Ingrid Seward after the release of season two of The Crown.

Elizabeth was only 13 when she first remembered meeting the 18-year-old Philip at an event at Royal Naval College Dartmouth. It was 1939, and the uniformed men surrounding them were all mere weeks away from being engaged in a life-or-death struggle against Nazi Germany. During that war, like so many other girls her age, Elizabeth’s first intimate moments with her future husband would be by letter.

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They were married in 1947 in a bleak food-rationed London that still had whole neighbourhoods roped off due to bomb damage. A jubilant, war-weary public spent days camping out along the route of the wedding procession, politely ignoring the fact that the groom’s immediate family had been responsible for some of the blackened rubble surrounding them.

Philip’s sisters had all married German aristocrats who became enshrined with the country’s Nazi leadership. Philip, for his part, had broken dramatically with his family’s fascist leanings by joining the Royal Navy and seeing action against Axis forces several times during his wartime service in the Mediterranean. The Nazi branch of the family was not invited to the wedding.

Elizabeth and Philip were also cousins. Although an early understanding of genetic science had caused European royal families to stop betrothing first cousins, both Philip and Elizabeth share a common ancestor in Queen Victoria.

In the lead-up to the royal wedding, the rumour was that palace traditionalists did not like Elizabeth’s choice of an independent-minded alpha male to serve as her future prince consort. King George VI took six months to approve the union, reportedly to give Elizabeth lots of time to change her mind.

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Once she became Queen, it would be official protocol for Philip to stand like everyone else when she entered a room. At her coronation, it would be Philip’s duty to kneel before her and declare himself her “liege man of life andlimb and of earthly worship.”

At the precise moment when his countrymen were embracing a hyper-masculine culture of wide ties and brylcreem, Philip had to walk several paces behind his wife at official events and could not pass his name to his own children.

“Inevitably it’s an awkward situation to be in,” Philip told Barbara Walters in 1969 of his early adjustment to life as a prince consort, adding that it was an “attractive” prospect for his wife to consider early abdication.

Like thousands of young married couples at the time, whatever romantic spark inspired their postwar romance appears to have fizzled out quite quickly. Across the Commonwealth, war brides were waking up next to their demobilized, newly civilian husbands, and realizing they had married a stranger.

“The Queen switches off when the duke becomes difficult and walks away both physically and mentally,” is how royal biographer Ingrid Seward has described how the couple dealt with strife. Philip once alluded to the sometime tense state of their relationship by crediting their marriage’s longevity to the Queen’s “quality of tolerance in abundance.” “It may not be quite so important when things are going well, but it is absolutely vital when the going gets difficult,” he said.

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Elizabeth was never a fan of the more dyspeptic aspects of Philip’s characters, but in the style of her generation she simply saw it as something to be managed. “It’s a waste of time trying to change a man’s character,” the Queen reportedly told a friend.

To anyone who knew them, Philip and Elizabeth’s marriage could not be called an emblem of blissful romance. Rather, if their union attracted admiration, it was instead in how they were able to settle into decades of old-fashioned, complementary partnership.

In a world where everyone treated Queen Elizabeth as a demigod, it was only her husband who could speak freely. “He will feel perfectly able to say: ‘That was a bloody stupid remark you made about this,’” biographer Tim Heald said in 2008. In a life dominated by regimentation and ceremony, Philip was the Queen’s constant reminder that she was only mortal. Once when a palace visitor commented on the Queen’s fine complexion, Philip quipped in reply that “she’s like that all over.”

After the 2002 death of the Queen Mother, he became the only one in her circle to refer to her by her childhood nickname of “Lillibet.”

Said Lord Charteris, a courtier to Queen Elizabeth II, “Prince Philip is the only man in the world who treats the Queen simply as another human being.”

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