Prince Philip’s ‘rapid transformation’ before engagement to the Queen,
Prince Philip’s mother claimed that her son underwent a rapid transformation days before his engagement to Elizabeth was announced as he prepared for his new life in the Royal Family.
It’s 78 years today since the then-Princess Elizabeth and Philip Mountbatten announced their engagement.
According to Philip’s mother, Princess Alice, Philip was not the same man before and after the announcement.
Writing in her book ‘Elizabeth and Philip’, Tessa Dunlop claims that Alice witnessed a ‘rapid transformation in her son’.
Dunlop wrote: ‘Alice witnessed a rapid transformation in her son. Two days earlier she’d help him pack, and then his levels of excitement had been reminiscent of Philip’s “eager tail-wagging days” as a schoolboy, when he moved from pillar to post.
‘Overnight her son made the transition and it was with a note of satisfaction that Alice wrote to her brother Dickie [Lord Mountbatten] in India: “It amused me very much to be waiting with the rest of the family, for Philip to come down grandly with Bertie, Elizabeth and Lillibet”.’
However, Philip’s sudden transformation had been a year in the making after the couple secretly got engaged in 1946 but waited until Elizabeth was 21 to make a formal announcement.
So when the happy couple emerged from Buckingham Palace to wave at cheering well-wishers on the Mall, Elizabeth and Phillip – unsurprisingly – looked every bit like the dutiful public servants they would become in the decades after their marriage.
Royal aides spun the fairytale story of the beautiful 21-year-old heir to the throne and the ruggedly handsome war hero who – as a member of the Greek royal family – had renounced his own princely titles to serve with distinction as a British officer in the Royal Navy.
And following a period of crisis for the Royals – with the abdication crisis that saw Elizabeth’s father become king – Elizabeth and Philip proved that the future of the crown was in safe hands.
But while ‘Lilibet’ and Philip – now the most ‘in-demand’ couple in London – embarked on a round of celebratory balls and parties, not everyone at the Palace was quite so delighted.
Sir Alan Lascelles, her father George VI’s private secretary, spoke for many courtiers and some in the Royal Family when he wrote of Philip: ‘They felt he was rough, uneducated and would probably not be faithful.’
Elizabeth’s father King George VI was so concerned that the couple’s burgeoning romance may be a short-lived teenage infatuation that when Philip asked for her hand in marriage in 1946, he insisted they wait a year until after Elizabeth’s 21st birthday before making any public announcement.
By modern standards, the couple’s engagement was short. After a courtship that spanned eight years and a global conflict, they were married on November 20, 1947 at Westminster Abbey, just four months after the Princess first showed off her engagement ring.
The ring had special symbolic value that speaks volumes about their respective backgrounds.
It was specially made from a platinum band set with diamonds taken from a tiara Alice had worn on her wedding day.
Hosted by Royal Historians Robert Hardman and Professor Kate Williams, Queens, Kings, and Dastardly Things looks at the Royal Family – the secrets, the palace intrigues, and the Crown’s bloodiest moments.
Listen wherever you get your podcasts now.
Princess Alice’s life is one of the most remarkable in the history of the Royal Family.
She was born Victoria Alice Elizabeth Julia Mary on 25 February 1885 at Windsor Castle in the presence of her great-grandmother, Queen Victoria.
Shortly after her birth it was discovered that Alice was congenitally deaf but could speak clearly and lip read in several languages.
While at the Coronation of King Edward VII in 1902, she met and fell in love with Prince Andrew, a younger son of the King of Greece – a year later the couple were wed.
Alice married into the Greek Royal Family at a tumultuous time with the family exiled from the country in 1921, the same year Prince Philip was born.
By 1930 she was hearing voices and believed she was having intimate relationships with Jesus and other religious figures. She was diagnosed as schizophrenic before being treated by Sigmund Freud at a clinic in Berlin.
When Charles’ grandmother was released from the the sanatorium in 1932, she drifted between modest German B&Bs before she eventually returned to Athens following the restoration of the Greek monarchy.
Alice then found herself stranded in Nazi-occupied Greece throughout WW2.
Due to her links to Germany, with her cousin serving as German ambassador to Greece until the start of the occupation, the Nazi soldiers wrongly assumed Alice was sympathetic to their cause.
Instead when a general asked Alice if there was anything he could do for her, she bravely responded: ‘You can take your troops out of my country.’
During the war, she was instrumental in aiding the escape from Greece of several Jews. Alice even hid the Cohen’s, Jewish family, on the top floor of her home, just yards away from Gestapo headquarters.
When the Gestapo became suspicious and questioned the Princess, she used her deafness as an excuse not to answer their questions and prevented them from entering her property.
Following the war, diamonds were used from Alice’s tiara so Philip could present a ring to Princess Elizabeth, the future Queen.
Alice sold the rest of her jewels to create her own religious order, the Christian Sisterhood of Martha and Mary, in 1949, becoming a nun.
When the future King Charles III was born in 1948, Alice was living on the remote Greek island of TInos.
According to Ingrid Seward, a royal biographer, she heard the news of the birth of her grandson via a telegram.
In response she wrote: ‘I think of you so much with a sweet baby of your own, of your joy and the interest you will take in all his little doings.
‘How fascinating nature is, but how one has to pay for it in the anxious trying hours of confinement.’
She went on to build a convent and orphanage in a poor suburb of Athens.
The royal remained in Greece until 1967, when there was a Greek military coup. Alice refused to leave the country until Prince Philip sent a plane and a special request from the Queen to bring her home.
She spent the final years of her life living at Buckingham Palace with her son and daughter-in-law before she died in December 1969, aged 84.
The last few months of her life were fictionalised in the third season of Netflix’s The Crown, played by Jane Lapotaire. The series incorrectly suggested she gave a tell-all interview with the Guardian, covering topics about her mental health condition.
Shortly before her death, she wrote a heartbreaking letter to her only son, that read: ‘Dearest Philip, Be brave, and remember I will never leave you, and you will always find me when you need me most. All my devoted love, your old Mama.’
In 1994, 25 years after Alice’s death, her son attended a ceremony in Jerusalem to honour his mother, who is buried in a crypt at Gethsemane on the Mount of Olives.
In honour of her courage during the war, when she saved her friends, the Cohen family, from certain death, she was given the title of Righteous Among The Nations.
