Lady Colin Campbell - The Queens Marriage

The Queens Marriage

LADY COLIN
CAMPBELL

Dynasty Press Limited

36 Ravensdon Street

London SE11 4AR

www.dynastypress.co.uk

First published in this version by Dynasty Press Ltd.

ISBN: 978-1-5272-0984-8

Copyright Lady Colin Campbell 2018

Lady Colin Campbell has asserted her right under the Copyrights, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the written permission of the publishers.

Typeset by Biddies Books Ltd., Castle House, East Winch Road. Blackborough End, King's Lynn, Norfolk PE32 1SF

Cover Design by Rupert Dixon

Contents

This book is dedicated to my beloved sons Dima and Misha, with the hope that they will one day enjoy the true blessing of good and durable marriages.

Acknowledgements

MANY OF THE MOST penetrating insights and information in this book were provided by people who had no idea, as they were providing them, that one day their comments would see the light of day in a written work. Others generously provided me with information in the knowledge that it would be used literarily, while still others have given me the benefit of their wisdom on terms of confidentiality. I would like to thank them all. They include my old neighbours at the Cundy Street Flats, Lord Charteris of Amisfleld and Lord Home of the Hirsel, the 3rd Lord Glenconner, HRH Princess Margaret of Hesse and the Rhine, Ned Ryan, the Hon. Shaun and Mrs Plunket, Robin Dalton, James Buchanan-Jardine, Anne de Courcey, Liz Brewer, Lady Sarah Spencer-Churchill, Lady Caroline Waterhouse, Peter Kares, Elaine Trebek Kares, Lady Jean Campbell, Margaret Duchess of Argyll, Clare Duchess of Sutherland, Major Ronald Ferguson, Helene Cordet, Larry Adler, Feliks Topolski, the Rajmata of Jaipur, the Hon. John Pringle, Mark Sykes, Dr. Michael Davies, Susan Grindling, Vida Menzies, Gary Pulsifer, Jacqueline Lady Killearn, Dr Michael Davies, Sonia Palmer, Diana Princess of Wales while still HRH The Princess of Wales, Richard Adeney, Burnet Pavitt, Dame Barbara Cartland, and all those still living whose positions and confidence I undertook not to jeopardise with revealing their identities.

I would also like to thank my publisher David Hornsby for his patience and editorial skills, as well as his understanding as the manuscript proved reluctant to emerge owing to ill health and the more immediately pressing demands of Castle Goring; to Rupert Dixon for the cover design; to David Chambers for the author photograph; and to Nigel Mitchell at Biddies for his care and attention to the book's production.

Introduction

WRITING BOOKS ABOUT any marriage is a difficult task. It has been said that the only people who might know the truth of a marriage are the two people in it, and even then, one or the other could easily be labouring under an illusion.

If one uses that hypothesis as the starting point, getting to the truth of any marriage is challenging. The Queens marriage is no exception. Indeed, because it is so public, and because there are so many rumours surrounding it, I have had to sift between fact and fiction, hoping, sometimes against hope, that I would hear when the truth bells ring.

I have always found that healthy open-mindedness allied to scepticism is an invaluable tool when dealing with human beings, whether it be in a personal, professional, or literary capacity. Possibly because my own life has been so filled with unexpected twists and turns, I have always found people to be the most fascinating thing on earth. Truth really is stranger than fiction and there is nothing more intriguing than the human condition. However, it is only worthwhile if you aim for the heart of the matter, if you reach as close to the truth as it is possible to get. That is possible only if you remember that all human beings are first and foremost human. That means they have an amalgam of traits and qualities, consisting in varying degrees of the emotional, spiritual, physical, intellectual and material.

Of course privilege, power and position - or their lack - all play their part as influences in the life of an individual, whether it be a public figure or a private person, and it does not behove a writer to forget that the people he or she is writing about are first and foremost human beings, with all the variability and uniformity attendant upon that innate and inescapable condition. I have read too many biographies of public figures that bury the subject in a wealth of trivial detail that obscures, rather than enlightens, the reader, as to the essence of the subject, to want to stray down that dead-end. For that reason, I have carefully chosen the facts which I convey, limiting them in the hope that the characters in the work which follows are illuminated, rather than providing a dazzling array of facts, some trivial, others less so, which would impress the reader with a cornucopia of facts that actually obscure the essence of the personalities being examined.

The Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh have led extraordinary lives. Their marriage has been at the core of their way of life since early adulthood. In their own way, each of them has become an extraordinary person. This did not need to be so. One or the other or both of them could have made much less of the hands destiny dealt them than they have done. The fact that they did not, that they chose a nobler path, lies not only in the conscious choices they made as adults, but also in the influences they had from childhood, and sometimes, from before birth. Being cousins several times over, both of them have common ancestors, some of whom were remarkable, others of whom were anything but, and these, together with the ancestors whom they did not share, but whose influence bore down so powerfully upon their lives, have helped to shape their characters, belief systems, and destinies.

I realised, while writing this book, that I had a choice. I could write yet another version of the many versions of the lives of the Queen and Prince Philip which already exist, focussing on what they did on, say, 27th February, 1957, as they went about their royal duties, or I could delve more deeply, trying to get a snapshot of the core of the woman and the man about whom so much has been written, but so little explained. I have deliberately taken a different path from any of the many books which have been written about them as individuals or a couple in the hope that, by ferreting out facts and travelling down byways and up highways that have seldom been explored, I will take the reader on a journey that is richer, fuller, and more interesting, and hopefully more enlightening, than the regular royal book. For instance, I have never read a book which details the undoubtedly important political factors which resulted in Prince Philip, born a prince of Greece and Denmark, becoming a French, British and German schoolboy. His checkered past, often remarked upon but seldom explored, actually dovetails with many of the important political features of European history in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Some of these events reverberated, sometimes tragically, into the latter twentieth century.

These events were not only important to Prince Philip, but to Western Civilisation as a whole, and I have therefore touched upon them. In so doing, I am not only laying the ground for the man Philip became, but also to give the reader a sense of the context of the world as it was, royalty aside, and how the past became our present. The past, it should be remembered, was once the present, and before that, the future, and the only way to make sense of our world today, and to get an idea of who the two individuals at the core of this work really are, is to travel far and wide enough to collate the influences that made them what they are, and, in so doing, show how the world into which they were born, and in which they have functioned, became their, and our, world of today.