Queen Elizabeth has been a steady, stoic leader for some 63 years, making her the longest-reigning monarch in British history. But Netflix’s lavish new series The Crown pulls back the doors of Buckingham Palace to give viewers a rare glimpse of the ruler’s vulnerabilities—which were warranted considering she ascended the throne at 25, as she was already navigating two new roles as wife and mother. And while, in this ominous stage of life, Elizabeth struggled to strike a power balance with the far elder, far more experienced prime minister Winston Churchill, she similarly, according to the series, clashed with the other man in her life, Prince Philip, her husband and third cousin. Philip quickly found himself forfeiting his naval career to support his wife—an uncomfortably advanced spousal dynamic, especially for a headstrong officer in the 1950s.
If having to walk several paces behind his bride was not emasculating enough—a requirement that causes Philip to bristle in the series—the queen also rejected his request to give their children his surname on advice from Churchill. “I am the only man in the country not allowed to give his name to his children,” Philip said, according to a biography of Elizabeth by Sally Bedell Smith . “I’m nothing but a bloody amoeba.”
In the series, Elizabeth does her best to give Philip responsibilities—making him the chairman of her coronation committee, for instance. But at every turn, Philip is regularly reminded of his unique limitations. In The Crown, for example, the queen agrees to modernize the ceremony by televising it, as he suggests—on the condition that he kneel before his wife during the service. She also convinced governing bodies to let Philip learn to fly, but only after he agreed to take some risk-minimizing measures.
Courtesy of Netflix.
As The Crown suggests, Philip apparently found a distraction from his marital difficulties with his weekly gentlemen’s lunch club in the Soho area of London. In the 2011 book Prince Philip: The Turbulent Early Life of the Man Who Married Queen Elizabeth II, author Philip Eade described the Thursday gatherings as “rip-roaring stag parties” attended by editors of the Daily Express and the Daily Mail, British intelligence agent Kim Philby, and Oscar-winning actors Peter Ustinov and David Niven.
While The Crown is sympathetic to the royal couple, it does imply Philip had a wandering eye—showing the prince assessing the waitresses at his lunch club. When Elizabeth wonders whether the gentlemen spend their afternoons talking about women, her husband admits, “yes, a little bit about the fairer sex over coffee and brandy.” Prince Philip is shown carousing in a convertible filled with bottles of champagne on trips to charity events, the lunch clubs, and stag events. In the seventh episode of the series, when Prince Philip returns suddenly for a state dinner that had been canceled while he was away, Elizabeth makes a dig about him not being at the palace more. So what were those early years of marriage like, and what did the Prince do during those lunch clubs specifically?
Per an account written for The Independent in 1996 from one of the club’s surviving members Miles Kington:
On an average night of the Thursday Club there would be 10 or 15 members present. There would be Lord Louis Mountbatten, Arthur Koestler, Prince Philip, Cecil Beaton, and little Larry Adler playing his mouth organ in the corner, and maybe one or other of the Kray brothers. There would also be the ladies, whose names I remember as Flo, Loulou, Beryl, Gertie, Simone, Pat, and one or two others. To begin with, I puzzled over their presence there.
“You men are all distinguished people,” I remember saying to Lord Louis Mountbatten. “You are all distinguished in action, or thought, or culture, or in heredity. But these girls . . .” “These girls are all great ladies in their own right,” he said. “The Duchess of Northumberland, the Percy, the Lady Devonshire . . .”
“These are their titles?” I said, amazed.
“No,” he said. “They are the pubs they work at.”
Kington claimed the lunches were far more dull than one might think, consisting of conversation, drinking, and listening to the odd Joe Loss record. Kingston also alleged that Philip said dullness was “the whole point” of the afternoons—in that it might throw future biographers off any illicit scent, even allegedly suggesting that the luncheons were “a cover-up” for less innocent meetings.
In putting together his 2004 book Philip & Elizabeth: Portrait of a Marriage, author Gyles Brandreth traced some reports of Philip’s alleged affairs—one of which stemmed from The Baltimore Sun, which reported Philip was “romantically involved with an unnamed woman whom he met on a regular basis in the West End apartment of a society photographer.” According to a source close to the family, Philip “was incandescent”—“very, very angry”—and the Queen was so “dismayed” that they offered a rare denial to the claims: “It is quite untrue that there is any rift between the queen and the Duke.”
A documentary that aired in the U.K. this year called Inside Buckingham Palace alleges that Philip did indeed stray during this early period of marriage, with a voiceover saying, “Royal aids panicked as rumors grew about Philip having affairs. The affairs were denied and there was no evidence. But rumors persisted. Action was needed. In 1956 the queen was advised to let Philip go away on a long overseas tour which should keep him out of trouble.”
Sarah Bradford is one of the few biographers to outright claim Philip indulged in extramarital affairs—in her 2011 book Elizabeth II: Her Life in Our Times—while most others, in the careful words of The Telegraph, “dipped into [the subject] with a very long spoon.” During a conversation with fellow biographer Brandreth, Bradford insinuated that she had spoken to women who confirmed romantic relations. She added, “The Duke of Edinburgh has had affairs . . . full-blown affairs and more than one. He has affairs and the queen accepts it. I think she thinks that’s how men are . . . He's never been one for chasing actresses. His interest is quite different. The women he goes for are always younger than him, usually beautiful, and highly aristocratic.”
While the palace did not comment on the book’s claims, Brandreth did more digging—speaking to some of the women with whom Philip was linked, and failing to find concrete evidence of any philandering. Television personality Katie Boyle told him the reports were “ludicrous, pure fabrication.” Sacha Abercorn said, “He is a very special man,” but denied having “a full relationship.” Philip has been linked to companion Penny Brabourne, 30 years his junior, but her own aunt Countess Mountbatten told the author, “Philip is a man who enjoys the company of attractive, intelligent younger women. Nothing wrong in that. He’s always had somebody there, sharing one or other of his particular pursuits. He has special friends, like Penny. But I am quite sure—quite sure—absolutely certain he has never been unfaithful to the queen.”
Though she died in 2007, Pat Kirkwood, a British actress and perhaps the most famous woman Philip has been linked to, remained adamant that she did not sleep with the royal (even though Bradford alleged she did). They met in 1948, when the prince’s friend brought him backstage to her dressing room at the London Hippodrome, where she was headlining the revue Starlight Roof. Later that evening, they ate together publicly and danced through the night at a nightclub while Elizabeth, who was not yet a queen, was home, eight months pregnant with Prince Charles. Kirkwood consistently denied having an affair with the man whom she met on six other occasions. She did, however, receive letters from Philip which she passed along to writer Michael Thornton with the instruction “to show them to no one except the Duke’s official biographer, when one is appointed after his death.” Over the years, Kirkwood pleaded with Philip to issue a denial of their romance to no avail, later telling a journalist, “A lady is not normally expected to defend her honor. It is the gentleman who should do that. I would have had a happier and easier life if Prince Philip, instead of coming uninvited to my dressing room, had gone home to his pregnant wife on the night in question.”
Courtesy of Netflix.
Though Philip kept mum on the subject of that particular relationship, Brandreth quoted Philip as giving this blanket denial: “How could I? I’ve had a detective in my company, night and day, since 1947.”
While The Crown certainly shows Prince Philip’s wandering eye, brusque manner, and occasionally off-color remarks, the series does not rewind far enough to explain this background—which presumably only made the queen’s husband feel like more of an outsider in an already intimidating domestic situation. Although he was born the nephew of Greece’s King Constantine I, his family “was forced into exile just 18 months later when the Greek monarchy was overthrown by a military revolt,” according to CNN. Once smuggled out of the country by sailors, Philip is said to have flitted with his parents and four sisters between the homes of European family members, eventually settling in a rent-free home owned by a particularly wealthy relative while he and his family remained poor (at least compared to royal standards). When he was 9, The Telegraph reports that his mother was “committed against her will and under sedation, to a psychiatric clinic at Kreuzlingen on Lake Constance. The children had been taken out for the day and they returned that evening to find their mother gone.” Sometime afterward his father moved to Monte Carlo to live with a mistress, leaving Philip to be mentored by an uncle, Lord Mountbatten, and sent to a series of boarding schools. When Philip was 16, his pregnant sister Cecile, her husband, and their two young sons died in a plane crash—a tragedy that makes Philip’s decision to learn how to fly seem even more rebellious.
Although Queen Elizabeth is the star of Netflix’s The Crown, and the recipient of immense expectations and stress, the series also shows Philip struggling to pave a role for himself, especially as Elizabeth’s life takes new focus. Though as the monarch’s 69th marriage anniversary approaches later this month, the only certainty of Elizabeth and Philip’s marriage is that, publicly, it seems as strong as ever—fulfilling their foremost responsibility.
In recent years, Philip has joked, “You can take it from me the queen has the quality of tolerance in abundance.” But perhaps it was the queen’s former private secretary Lord Charteris who offered the best insight to the key to their long-lasting marriage: “Prince Philip is the only man in the world who treats the queen simply as another human being. He’s the only man who can. Strange as it may seem, I believe she values that.”
Tidak ada komentar:
Posting Komentar