family information and letters, many fragments of which I have cited.
Among the biographies of Prince Philip himself, those that I found most useful were by Basil Boothroyd (Philip: An Informal Biography), Queen Alexandra of Yugoslavia (Prince Philip: A Family Portrait), Tim Heald (The Duke: A Portrait of Prince Philip) and Gyles Brandreth (Philip & Elizabeth: Portrait of a Marriage). I also relied heavily on several of Philip Ziegler’s books, principally his outstanding biography Mountbatten, and on the excellent royal biographies by Sarah Bradford (George VI and Elizabeth), Ben Pimlott (The Queen), Robert Lacey (Majesty and Royal), and William Shawcross (Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother). Other particularly useful books included Jonathan Petropoulos’s Royals and the Reich, a study of the relationship between the Hesse family and the Nazi regime, and Graham Turner’s Elizabeth: The Woman and the Queen.
My literary agent, Caroline Dawnay, was, as ever, a constant source of sound advice, excellent ideas and much needed encouragement. I was extremely fortunate to have as my editor at Harper Press Martin Redfern, who was a pleasure to work with and made numerous editorial suggestions which greatly improved the book. My thanks, too, to Richard Collins, for his painstaking copy editing, to Sarah Hopper, for her very willing and resourceful picture research, and to Christopher Phipps, for his exemplary index. I am particularly grateful also to Victoria Lane, who read and edited an early draft of the first half of the book, and did much to make it better, and to Robert Gray, who very generously agreed to read the whole manuscript, in the course of which he tightened a great many of my loose sentences and made countless perceptive comments.
Many thanks, too, to Oliver James, Robert Hardman, Richard Davenport-Hines, David Profumo, Abigail Napp, Anne de Courcy, Francis Wheen, Richard Ingrams, Lucy Cavendish, Annabel Price, Saffron Rainey, Violet Hudson, Kate Hubbard, Matthew Bell, James Owen, James Kidner, Jane Stewart-Lockhart, Richard Mead, Richard Rycroft, Miranda Seymour, Alex von Tunzelmann, Fiammetta Rocco, Chelsea Renton, David Ford, Dan Renton, Kim Reczek, Zara D’Abo, Tom Faulkner, Epoh Beech, Rodolf de Salis, John Lloyd, Giles Milton, John McNally, Joachim von Halasz, Eloise Moody, Stephen Birmingham, Kitty Kelley, Michael Bloch, John Parker, Gyles Brandreth, Janie Lewis, Olivia Hunt, Helen Ellis, Minna Fry, Nicky and Jasmine Dunne, Fiona and Euan McAlpine, Belinda and Patrick Macaskie, Jo and Richard Wimbush, my mother and father, and anyone else I may have forgotten to mention.
PROLOGUE
Autumn 1937
At around noon on 16 November 1937, Prince Philip’s heavily pregnant sister Cecile set off on the short drive through the woods from the Hesse family’s old hunting box at Wolfsgarten to Frankfurt aerodrome in order to fly to London for a family wedding. With her were her husband, George Donatus, or ‘Don’, who had recently succeeded his father as the Grand Duke of Hesse and by Rhine, his widowed mother, the Dowager Grand Duchess, their two young sons, aged six and four, who were due to be pages, a lady-in-waiting and the best man.1 The only member of the Grand Ducal family left behind at home was their baby daughter Johanna, who was too young to go to the wedding.
By the mid-1930s, air travel had become sufficiently popular for Bradshaw’s to begin publishing its monthly International Air Guide, looking much like a train timetable although unashamedly aimed at the travelling elite, with advertisements only for luxury hotels. However, it was still rare compared with travel by sea or rail and most Europeans considered it too risky and unpredictable, particularly in the high winds and dense fogs of late autumn. In December 1935, fourteen-year-old Philip’s grandmother had pleaded in vain with him before one of his frequent continental trips to visit relations: ‘This time I really think you had better not fly across, as it is such a stormy time of the year.’2 Philip’s sister Cecile shared their grandmother’s misgivings. She was reputedly so terrified of aeroplanes that she always wore black when she flew. However, Don Hesse was a dedicated and fearless flyer, like his young brother-in-law, and with an aerodrome so close to home, he was not one to be put off by the potential hazards.
They took off just before two o’clock in bright sunshine in a three-engine Junkers monoplane operated by the Belgian airline Sabena and captained by one of its most experienced airmen, Tony Lambotte, the personal friend and pilot of King Leopold III, assisted by an engineer, wireless operator and mechanic. The plane had been scheduled to land en route near Brussels, but thick fog had swept quickly in from the North Sea and so they were instructed by wireless to proceed instead to Steene aerodrome on the coast near Ostend. There, too, fog had reduced visibility to a few yards, yet the pilot nevertheless went ahead with his descent, flying blind. The aerodrome staff fired three rockets to help him find his way, but only the first one worked.3
An eyewitness later described having seen the aeroplane coming down out of the fog and hitting the top of a brickworks’ chimney, 150ft high, ‘at about 100 miles an hour. One wing and one of the engines broke off, and both crashed through the roof of the works. The remainder of the aeroplane turned over and crashed to the ground in the brickfield about 50 yards further on, where it at once burst into flames.’4 Fire engines and ambulances raced to the scene but they could not get near the burning wreckage until there was no hope of there being any survivors. Additional news from Ostend later added a poignant footnote to the tragedy. Firemen sifting through the charred wreckage of the plane had stumbled upon the remains of an infant, prematurely delivered when the plane crashed, lying beside the crumpled body of Cecile.5 The discovery gave rise to the theory that the pilot had only attempted to land after he became aware that the Grand Duchess had begun to give birth.6
At Gordonstoun School in Morayshire it fell to the German émigré headmaster Kurt Hahn to break the terrible news to sixteen-year-old Philip, who would never forget the ‘profound shock’ with which he heard what had happened to his sister and her family.7 Even before this latest tragedy, the young prince had suffered more than his share of blows during his short life and, perhaps thus fortified, he ‘did not break down’, so his headmaster later recorded. ‘His sorrow was that of a man.’8
The next week, Philip travelled alone to Germany for the funeral at Darmstadt, the Hesse family’s home town south of Frankfurt. As the coffins were borne through streets festooned with swastikas, he cut a distinctly forlorn figure walking behind them in his civilian dark suit and overcoat, his white-blond hair standing out against the surrounding dark military greatcoats. Beside him marched his surviving brothers-in-law – Prince Christoph of Hesse, the husband of Philip’s youngest sister Sophie, the most conspicuous in his SS garb; and Christoph’s brother Prince Philipp of Hesse walking alongside in an SA brown shirt. Philip’s uncle Lord Louis ‘Dickie’ Mountbatten followed just behind in British naval dress.9
The streets of Darmstadt were lined with detachments of soldiers in Nazi uniforms and, as the procession passed, many in the crowd raised their outstretched arms in a full ‘Heil Hitler’ greeting10 – a gesture that Philip had become accustomed to seeing as a schoolboy in Nazi Germany four years earlier and on regular visits there ever since. Don and Cecile had recently joined the Nazi party themselves. Hitler and Goebbels had sent messages of sympathy; Goering attended the funeral in person.
This strange and desperately sad occasion was also the first time that Philip’s parents had seen each other since 1931, when his mother, who had been born deaf, had been committed to a secure psychiatric sanatorium after suffering a nervous breakdown. Shortly afterwards his father had closed down the family home near Paris and taken himself off to live in the South of France, leaving ten-year-old Philip to be brought up in Britain by his wife’s family, the Milford Havens and Mountbattens. For almost five years he had heard nothing from his mother and he had become reacquainted with her only shortly before the disaster that befell Cecile.
Almost exactly a decade after the tragedy, Prince Philip married the most eligible young woman in the world, heir to the British throne. As he approaches his ninetieth birthday – two years after surpassing the record of George III’s Queen Charlotte as
