In the early 1960s, a French-born cabaret singer named Helen Corde published a memoir in London. The book was called Born Bewildered. It was reviewed politely. It sold modestly. And somewhere in its pages, she addressed a question that London Society had been asking for nearly 20 years. Who was the father of her two children? She declined to say.
The children in question were Max, born in the early 1940s, and Louise, born on February 8th, 1945. Their documented father on the official record was Marcel Buaso, a captain in the free French Air Force who in 1940 flew a Marine 315 training aircraft without navigation equipment or maps from Morocco to Gibralar. Basau later became Hela’s second husband.
But there was another man in the picture. Philip had walked Hela down the aisle at her first wedding when he was approximately 16. Philip stood as godfather to both her children. Philillip sent Max Boaz to Gordon, the same Scottish school Philip himself had attended, and paid the fees directly.
The two children grew up calling him Uncle Philip. Anyone in London who knew the players in 1942 or in 1961 or in 1971 knew the shape of the question even without the answer. Max Baza when the question was put to him directly in later life gave a precise and on there the record denial. I have heard these rumors all my life but they are ridiculous.
My father, my real father, lives in Paris, and it’s silly to say otherwise. All this goes back to their childhood friendship, and there’s nothing more to it than that. He died on September 7th, 2011, having built a distinguished career as a professor of strategic management at the ESAD Business School in Barcelona. His sister, Louise Corde, is still alive.
Neither ever changed their stated position. We don’t know the full private nature of what Helen Corde chose not to say in that memoir. What we know is the silence itself and how long it lasted. Now move forward 60 years. April 17th, 2021. Windsor Castle, St. George’s Chapel. 30 mourners under CO 19 restrictions called from an original list of approximately 800.
The queen sat alone in her pew in black, masked the single most photographed image of that entire year. The coffin held the man she had been married to for 73 years. Among the 30 was one person who was neither immediate family nor a royal household official. The palace’s own commentary notes issued to the press that day described her attendance with visible care.
The Earl Mountbatten of Burma, they explained, was unwell and unable to attend. His wife was there as his representative. Her name was Penny Natchel. She had turned 68 the day before. The funeral fell one day after her birthday. When she arrived at Windsor, AIDS told the press she looked heartbroken when she arrived, and she is heartbroken.
She’s lost her best friend. Royal observers found the palace’s representational framing baffling and said so. One commentator described it as slightly demeaning to Penny as she was far closer to the Duke than her husband ever was. This is the story of the two women in Prince Philip’s life who weren’t his wife and what their existence tells us about a 73-year marriage that was presented to the world as devotion made permanent and which was in truth something more complicated, more adult, and far more honest than the version the
public received. To understand Philip’s adult emotional life, you have to understand what he had for a childhood, which was almost nothing. He was born on June 10th, 1921 at a rented summer villa called Mulrao on the island of Corfu. Born on the dining room table by most accounts, fifth child and only son of Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark and Princess Alice of Battenburg.
His ancestry was, by his own description, a complicated mix of Danish, German, Russian, and British bloodlines. He had no Greek blood at all, and he barely spoke the language. Greece at the time was in the middle of a catastrophic military defeat against Turkey. Philip’s father was a lieutenant general in the Greek army.
The blame landed on the officer corps. In December 1922, when Philip was 18 months old, the family fled Corfu aboard a British warship HMS Calypso dispatched by King George V. Legend holds that the infant Philip was carried to the ship in a cot fashioned from a fruit box, an image so tidy that biographers have been repeating it for a century, even as they note it was never formally confirmed.
What is confirmed is what came next. The family settled in a small house near Paris, loaned to them by Princess George of Greece, dependent on relatives for money. Philip’s mother, Princess Alice of Battenburg, began exhibiting signs of severe mental distress in the late 1920s. In 1930, she was forcibly committed against her will by a process that combined medical authority and family pressure to Ludvig Bins Vonger’s sanatorium at Crolingan in Switzerland.
The diagnosis was paranoid schizophrenia. Sigman Freud was consulted. Bins Vonger kept her for approximately 2 years. His father, Prince Andrew of Greece, settled in the south of France, specifically in Monte Carlo with a mistress named Andre Lafayette, who remained his companion until Andrew died there almost penniless in December 1944.
So by the time Philip was 9 years old, his mother was in a Swiss asylum. His father was in Monaco with another woman. His four sisters, Margarita, Theodora, Cecilia, and Sophi, had all married German princes and relocated to Germany. Lord Mountbatton, Philip’s cousin, became the adult who managed his future.
He attended Chim School in England, then briefly Salem School in Germany, founded by the Jewish educator Kurt Han, who fled as the Nazi apparatus tightened. Philip followed Han to Gordonston in Scotland where Han rebuilt the school on the Moray coast. Philip became head boy in his final term.
He captained the cricket and hockey teams. He was by his headm’s account confident, uncomplaining, and emotionally self-sufficient in the particular way that abandoned children sometimes become. He later told a biographer in a sentence that does a great deal of work. The family broke up. My mother was ill. My sisters were married.
My father was in the south of France. I just had to get on with it. You do. One does. Then on November 16th, 1937, Philip’s sister Cecilia died. She was 26, 8 months pregnant in a Sabina aircraft that crashed into a factory chimney in fog near Oend, Belgium. her husband, their two young sons, aged six and four, and her mother-in-law all died with her.
The plane was heading to London for a family wedding. A premature infant was found beside her body in the wreckage, apparently delivered on impact. Philillip was 16. He attended the funeral in Dharmmstat. Photographs taken at that funeral show him among grieving relatives wearing Nazi uniforms. His brother-in-law, Kristoff of Hessa, held the rank of Oberfur in the SS, serving in Herman Guring’s intelligence service.
His other brother-in-law, Berthold Margarave of Boden, had also served on the German side. Philip later wrote of Cecilia’s death, “I have the very clearest recollection of the profound shock with which I heard the news of the crash and the death of my sister and her family.” He described being called into his headmaster’s study at Gordonston to receive the news as one of the worst moments of his life.
By the time Philip was in his 20s, loss had become so familiar it barely left a visible mark. That capacity to absorb damage and keep moving was the central fact of his adult personality. It made him useful in a war. It made him difficult in a palace. And it was what in the mid 1940s drew him toward a woman who had known him before any of it had calcified into character.
Elen Fuunis was born in Marseilles on July 3rd, 1917. Her family was Greek with Paris connections and when the Greek royal family was exiled in 1922, the Fuuni’s family helped them. Philip’s parents, Princess Alice and Prince Andrew were among those they assisted in the displacement years in France. This is the documented route of the Philip Eln connection.
Not romance, not intrigue, but the practical solidarity of two Greek families stranded in Paris without a country. She was four years older than Philip. They grew up in the same exile circle, meeting in Lut and later in the suburbs of Paris. She knew him as a child and he knew her family as the family who had helped his when she married for the first time.
The sources are imprecise on the exact date, though she was around 20. Philip walked her down the aisle. He was approximately 16. It was an act sufficiently unusual that people noted it at the time and went on noting it for decades. Helen’s first marriage failed. She divorced in the early 1940s. During this period, she had two children, Max, born in the early 1940s, and Louise, born February 8th, 1945.
Their father, as accepted in official records and by the children themselves, was Marcel Buazo. Philip became godfather to both. He paid Max’s Gordon fees directly. Helen Corde. She adopted a professional version of her surname for her career. Became a television personality in postwar Britain. She hosted a show called Cafe Continental on the BBC, appearing as a cabaret hostess.
Getty Images holds photographs. She appeared in several British films in the early 1950s. She was, by the standards of postwar London television, a recognizable face. The rumors, according to contemporaneous reporting, surfaced as early as 1948. They were never confirmed. Max’s denial was on the record, and specific Helen herself throughout her public life, declined to address the question of paternity directly.
The Book of Royal useless information, one of dozens of light royal reference volumes published over the decades, put it bluntly. When Philip gave Helen away at her wedding and became godfather to both her children, it raised suggestions, not surprisingly. suggestions aren’t evidence, but the specific combination of facts, the Godfather role for both children, the direct payment of Gordonston’s school fees, the sustained connection through the post-war years, the years in which the engagement to Elizabeth was a private understanding and not yet a
public announcement, gives the long alleged question a gravitational pull that Max’s denial, however sincere, didn’t fully disperse. What the picture suggests isn’t necessarily a hidden scandal. It’s more precisely an extraordinarily close friendship between two people who had shared the same formless, parentless, stateless displacement of childhood and who maintained that connection long after Philip’s circumstances changed entirely.
Helen Corde died in Switzerland in April 1996. Her son Max died September 7th, 2011. Her daughter Louise is alive. No member of the family changed their stated position on the question that Helen chose consistently not to answer. On July 22nd, 1939, Princess Elizabeth, aged 13, met a naval cadet at the Bratannia Royal Naval College in Dartmouth.
Philip at 18 was tasked with entertaining the young princesses during a royal visit. He showed off, jumped over tennis nets by the most frequently cited account. Her governness, Marian Crawford, wrote afterward that Elizabeth never took her eyes off him. Elizabeth began writing to him during the war. Philip wrote back in 1946.
He wrote to the queen mother that Elizabeth was the only thing in this world which is absolutely real to me. He wrote to Elizabeth herself that falling in love with her completely and unreservedly had made all his past struggles and even the world’s troubles seem small and petty. It was a love story. The question was whether the institution surrounding it would allow it to remain one.
Lord Louie Mountbatton, Philip’s cousin, the man who had functioned as his surrogate parent since adolescence, had been working this match for years. Philip Ziegler’s official Mountbatton biography documents the effort in correspondence. Mountbatton wanted Philip positioned inside the British monarchy. Philip was the candidate.
Elizabeth was the position. The fact that both young people had independently arrived at the same conclusion was convenient for everyone and reduced no one’s sincerity. Before the wedding, Philip renounced his Greek and Danish titles, converted from Greek Orthodoxy to the Church of England, and became a British citizen on February 28th, 1947.
He took the surname Mountbatten. He married Princess Elizabeth on November 20th, 1947 at Westminster Abbey as Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten. That same day, he was created Duke of Edinburgh, Earl of Marionath, and Baron Greenwich. His mother, Princess Alice, attended in a nuns habit. His four sisters didn’t attend.
Anti-German sentiment made their invitations impossible. The years that followed included what Elizabeth later described as the happiest period of the marriage, Malta, 1949 to 1951. Philip was stationed there as a serving Royal Navy officer. Elizabeth joined him at a rented villa at Guardana. No full-time household, no ceremonial weight.
They were, by the accounts of people who saw them during that period, as close to private life as either of them would ever manage. On February 6th, 1952, Philip was in Kenya with Elizabeth. They had spent the night at Treetops Hotel. Word arrived in the early hours that King George V 6th had died during the night. Philip told Elizabeth.
The Malta period ended that morning, and so did his naval career. He had achieved the rank of commander. He never returned to active service. The institution had absorbed him and he had no standing to negotiate the terms. He later complained with a precision that does not soften over time that he was the only man in the country not allowed to give his name to his own children.
The Windsor name was retained by royal decree. Mount Batten disappeared from the family designation. A compromise. Mount Batton Windsor for descendants without royal titles was eventually reached years later after both Churchill and Queen Mary were dead and less able to object. Philip described himself privately as an amoeba.
I am nothing but a bloody amoeba. The man who had survived a stateless childhood, an absent mother, an absent father, a dead sister, a world war, and a Gordon winter, was now required to walk three steps behind his wife, carry her bouquet when she needed both hands, and under no circumstances give his own name to the children who looked like him.
By the mid 1950s, Philip’s emotional restlessness had become a persistent note in the palace’s background management. The first documented case involves Pat Kirkwood, a British stage actress, described at the time as Britain’s most glamorous wartime performer. In 1948, Philip visited her dressing room at the London Hippidrome during a performance.
They went to dinner at Lays Ambassador in Mayfair. The evening was observed and the rumor mills, as one private memoir put it, began to grind. Kirkwood denied any affair consistently for the rest of her life. Philip later wrote her a personal letter describing the allegations as the mythology of the press.
Kirkwood wasn’t satisfied. In an interview that is still quoted because of its cold precision, she said, “A lady isn’t normally expected to defend her honor. It’s the gentleman who should do that. I would have had a happier and easier life if Prince Philillip, instead of coming uninvited to my dressing room, had gone home to his pregnant wife on the night in question.
” Her memoir, published in 1999, was called The Time of My Life. The rumor outlasted the book and Kirkwood who died on Christmas Day 2007. In 1957, a piece appeared in American newspapers attributed by biographer Guiles Brandth in his 2004 book Philip and Elizabeth portrait of a marriage to the Baltimore son that alleged a rift in the royal marriage.
The palace’s response was methodical. Philip was sent on an extended solo voyage aboard the Royal Yacht Britannia, a 4-month circuit of the South Pacific to demonstrate publicly that the marriage was intact. Elizabeth met him in Lisbon in February 1957, boarding Britannia. The optics were managed.
Philip’s own responses to questions about his faithfulness were characteristically blunt. He told one journalist, “Good God, woman, have you ever stopped to think that for years I have never moved anywhere without a policeman accompanying me? So, how the hell could I get away with anything like that?” On another occasion, more broadly, every time I talk to a woman, they say I’ve been to bed with her.
It’s absolutely cuckoo. Ingred Seard, who knew Philillip and wrote the most current biographical account of his life in Prince Philip Revealed in 2020, described him across those decades as someone who can be rude and walks away from conversations midway and doesn’t listen to stupid people. a man of genuine intellectual restlessness who found the ceremonial obligations of his position genuinely constitutionally glawing and who conducted his emotional life in the space between public duties.
Pamela Hicks who served as lady in waiting and bridesmaid to the queen addressed the question of Philip’s female friendships directly in a conversation with biographer Sally Bedell Smith. She was very aware that Prince Philip liked to flirt and she didn’t mind. Hicks said of the queen. I think because she understood him very well and she recognized the friendships for what they were, that they were based on some element like carriage driving or a fondness for the work of Carl Young and that they weren’t affairs. She knew
it was absolutely nothing. Not naive, not willful blindness, understanding. Then on August 27th, 1979, an IRA bomb destroyed Mount Batten’s fishing boat, Shadow 5, in the harbor at Mullore in County Siggo. Lord Mountbatton was killed. So were his 14-year-old grandson, Nicholas Natchbull, a local teenage boat boy named Paul Maxwell, and the daager Lady Brabborn, Norton Natchel, Philip’s godson, the young man Philip had been closest to among the next generation of Mount Battens, survived. For Philip, it was the loss of
the only person who had ever functioned consistently and across decades as a parent. Mount Batton had managed his marriage into the monarchy, navigated his statelessness, served as his confidant through the decades when both were trying to figure out what Philip’s position actually was. His death at 79 on a boat in Irish coastal waters left Philip at 58 with an absence that the institution surrounding him couldn’t fill.
It would be 12 years before Philip found someone who came close. Penelopey Meredith Mary Eastwood was born on April 16th, 1953, the year of Elizabeth’s coronation. Her father, Reginald Eastwood, was a butcher who founded what became the Angus Steakhouse restaurant chain. She was educated in Switzerland and graduated from the London School of Economics in 1976.
friends described her as outgoing, well- read, and possessed of what multiple sources called a boisterous sense of humor. That was precisely Philip’s register. She entered the royal family’s world through connection. Around 1974 or 1975, while dating Norton Natchel, she was introduced to Philip and the Queen at a polo match. A royal insider remembered her as one of the most natural young women I have ever met. outgoing but not brash or flirty.
The Queen was impressed. Philillip was impressed. Norton Natchel had attended Gordonston with Prince Charles, that connection ran deep, and when Penny and Norton married on October 20th, 1979 at Ramsey Abbey in Hampshire. Charles served as best man. The wedding came 2 months after Mount Batton’s assassination.
The royal family attended a ceremony that in that context must have felt like any gathering of the living was already something to be grateful for. The couple inherited Broadlands, the Mountbatten family estate in Hampshire, the same house where Philip and Elizabeth had spent part of their honeymoon in 1947. They had three children, Nicholas Alexandra and Leonora Louise Marie Elizabeth Natchbull, born June 25th, 1986.
In 1990, when Leonora was around four years old, she was diagnosed with kidney cancer. In October 1991, the Herald Scotland reported it in a brief, devastating paragraph. Leonora Natchel, 5-year-old great granddaughter of the late Earl Mountbatton of Burma, died in a London hospital yesterday. The date was October 22nd, 1991.
The battle had lasted 14 months. Ingred Seard in Prince Philip Revealed recorded what Philip did. Philip befriended her when her life began to fall apart following the death of her 5-year-old daughter Leonora from kidney cancer in 1991. Philip encouraged her to take up carriage driving and supported her when her husband Norton, his godson, left her in 2010 for a fling with Nassau based fashion designer Eugenie Nutall.
The grief entry point matters enormously. Philip had watched his mother confined to a Swiss asylum when he was eight. He had learned of his sister’s death at 16 from his headmaster. He had lived from childhood with the specific knowledge that devastating loss does not announce itself and does not negotiate.
When Leonora died, Philip understood something about Penny Natchbull that most people in her world, however sympathetic, however well-meaning, couldn’t have understood from inside their own unbroken lives. He suggested carriage driving as distraction and discipline. He enlisted his headgroom, Mickey Flynn, to teach her.
By 1994, Philip was teaching her himself. It became the center of their shared time. Over the following 25 years, Penny was photographed at the Royal Windsor Horse Show, at Sandringham, at Cow’s Week, at events major and minor across the calendar of royal life. Palace staff gave her a nickname both precise and affectionate, and also when Philip compiled a guest list, he concluded it the same way, consistently, predictably, and also Penny.
Household staff said it as if it were one word. Seward saw them together at the Royal Yacht Squadron ball during cows week. She wrote, “When I saw Philip and Penny gilding around the dance floor, neither of them gave a damn who saw them or what anyone might say. I noticed that Philillip, an excellent dancer, was completely in rhythm with the beautiful Penny.
He’s undoubtedly close to her and is a supportive friend and mentor. The nature of that closeness has never been confirmed and is disputed between biographers who knew Philip personally. Seward, who frames the relationship more directly than most, described Penny as Philip’s most recent playmate. Giles Brandth, whose 2004 portrait of a marriage is the earlier and more accessbacked account, approaches the Philip Penny relationship with considerably more caution.
Randreth acknowledges Philip’s consistent pattern of close friendships with women younger than himself, citing the Countess of West Morland and the Duchess of Abbercorn alongside Natchbull and declines to characterize the Natchel relationship as something categorically different from those. Sally Bedell Smith, who wrote authoritative biographies of both Philip and Elizabeth, told Vanity Fair that Sasha Abberorn, the Duchess of Apricorn, had explicitly said of her own close friendship with Philillip, “I didn’t go to bed with him. They shared this
passion for Carl Young.” The framing suggests that Philip’s female friendships occupied a register that was emotionally intense without necessarily crossing the physical line that the tabloid imagination always assumed they crossed. What isn’t in dispute is the queen’s acceptance, not tolerance, acceptance.
According to Seward’s account of the royal household’s attitude, the Queen and Philip both admired Penny for her indomitable spirit, dignity, and grace, and made sure she was included in their lives as much as possible. She stood on the Buckingham Palace balcony for trooping the color. She was invited to Windsor Castle weekends regularly enough that staff named her for the habit.
Prince Charles gave away Penny’s daughter, Alexandra, at her wedding in 2016. A gesture of family level intimacy that speaks directly to how thoroughly embedded in the royal world Penny had become. When Norton Natchel left in 2010, he fled to the Caribbean to live with a fashion designer named Eugenie Nuttall.
Penny responded by gathering the Broadland staff while her husband was still mid-flight and informing them that he had gone, but that everything else would remain exactly the same. Not for a moment, one source said at the time, would Penny allow her husband’s departure to interrupt the smooth running of the estate. The Queen and Philip, by multiple accounts, couldn’t forgive him for what he did to Penny.
Norton eventually returned to Broadlands in 2014, not to the main house, but to a converted barn on the grounds. Philip retired from public duties in August 2017. He moved to Wood Farm, the five-bedroom cottage on the Sandrreenum estate. The Queen remained primarily at Windsor, coming to Norfolk by train on weekends.
Hugo Vickers in his biography Queen Elizabeth II: A personal history describes the arrangement plainly. In a sense, they separated. Penny Ramsey, the new countest Mountbatton, often stayed with him there. Often at Wood Farm in the years when Philip was 96, 97, 98, 99. When Philip crashed his Land Rover near Sandringham in January 2019, blinded by the low winter sun, he said it was Penny the Queen asked to persuade him to surrender his driving license.
Not a doctor, not a senior cordier, Penny. She did. 3 weeks after the accident, the announcement came that Philip had stopped driving. Seward’s summary of the relationship carries the weight of 30 years of documentation. They were brought together by tragedy but were there for each other through thick and thin.
He trusted her implicitly and she adored him. She never betrayed him. She was a keeper not only of his secrets but those of the family. Philip died at Windsor Castle on April 9th, 2021. He was 99 years old. The queen wasn’t in the room. Pull back from the carriage rides and the cow’s week dances and look honestly at the structure of what this marriage was. 73 years isn’t a sham.
Philip wrote to Elizabeth during the war in words that are still striking in their directness. That she was the only thing in this world which is absolutely real to him. that loving her completely had made his past struggles and even the world’s troubles seem small and petty. At their 1997 golden wedding anniversary, Elizabeth described Philip as her strength and stay.
At her diamond jubilee in 2012, she said it again, her constant strength and guide. These aren’t the words of a marriage organized purely for a constitutional convenience. But Philip wasn’t a simple person, and Elizabeth had understood that from the beginning. Marian Crawford, the governness who watched a 13-year-old Elizabeth fall quietly in love at Dartmouth in 1939, also noted what she observed of Philip’s character.
Restless, energetic, impatient with the wrong kinds of attention. Some of the king’s advisers doubted him. Harold Nicholson documented court opinion that he was rough, ill-mannered, uneducated. Elizabeth’s mother initially called him the hun. She later described him to biographer Tim Heield as an English gentleman.
Both observations were probably accurate about different aspects of the same person at different stages. What Philip was structurally was a man who had arranged himself to survive without requiring much from the people around him and who then found himself needing a great deal from a woman who was about to become the most ceremonially burdened person on the planet. He lost his naval career.
He lost his name on his children’s birth records. He walked three steps behind her in public for the rest of his working life. He was, as he put it himself, the only man in the country not allowed to give his name to his own children. The private man and the public position were in sustained quiet tension for 69 years from the morning Elizabeth became queen in Kenya until his retirement to Wood Farm in 2017.
Elen Corde at the beginning of that span was someone who had known him before the institution claimed him. The long alleged question of what their connection was in the years before the 1947 engagement remains accurately unresolved. What is documented is the Godfather role, the school fees, the sustained friendship through the years when those facts were already conspicuous.
She represented for Philillip a form of life that existed before the decision to become Elizabeth’s husband. The institution could rearrange it. It couldn’t simply end it. Penny Natchel at the end of that span offered something more specific. A companion in grief and companionship who didn’t require him to be what the institution needed him to be.
Philip had spent his adult life being required. Required to walk behind required to stay in role. required not to give his name to his children. In the years after Leonora’s death, and for three decades thereafter, Penny was simply present at carriage events in Norfolk, at horse shows at Windsor, at Wood Farm during the long, quiet afternoons of a retirement.
He had not fully chosen, but had finally, at 96, been permitted. The Queen wasn’t blind to either woman. Pamela Hicks, lady in waiting and lifelong friend to Elizabeth, told Sally Battle Smith that the Queen understood Philip’s friendships precisely and didn’t resent them because she understood him very well.
Not because she was naive about his nature, because she had decided at 13 that this was the man, and had organized the rest of her life around that decision with the same discipline she brought to every other responsibility she held. The marriage she ran wasn’t the marriage she advertised. It was a working partnership with accommodations built into it.
Accommodations the palace managed. The queen accepted and the public was never asked to know about. What the public was asked to know was the official version, the matching outfits, the shared laughter, the 73 years of side byside appearances, the gold and silver and diamond jubilees, two people at the center of British life for so long that most of their subjects had grown up and grown old alongside them. That version was real.
It simply wasn’t complete. St. George’s Chapel, April 17th, 2021. 30 mourners. Philip had planned aspects of his own funeral, including the specially modified Land Rover that carried his coffin, a vehicle he had helped design himself. The service lasted approximately 50 minutes. The Queen sat alone in her pew in black, masked, no hand to hold, 2 m from anyone not in her household.
The isolation was the pandemic’s rule and no one’s choice. But the image it produced seemed to say something true about 73 years of enduring in public with the particular discipline of not letting anyone see the cost. Penny Natchel was among the 30. The day before had been her 68th birthday. When she arrived, aids described her as heartbroken.
The palace’s official commentary notes described her attendance as representational. She was there as her husband’s standin, the notes explained, because the Earl Mountbatton was unwell and unable to attend. Royal observers found this framing, in the words of one contemporary account, baffling and slightly demeaning to Penny, as she was far closer to the Duke than her husband ever was.
Two women who had each been in their own way essential to Philip’s life were present in that chapel. Elen Corde was 25 years gone. But she bracketed the story from the beginning. The childhood friend, the exile connection, the godmother role reversed. The question she chose not to answer. Penny Natchbull was there in person, not in her husband’s seat, whatever the palace’s notes suggested, but in her own.
Neither woman needed to look at the other. They had each arrived at their position in his life through entirely different decades and entirely different kinds of loss. And they had each in their own way made room for the institution, for the queen, for the complicated private person the official account had always described in simpler terms than the facts supported.
At St. George’s Chapel on April the 17th, 2021. 30 mourners attended a private funeral for the longest serving consort in British history. The queen was alone in her pew in black. Among those present was Penny Natchbull. They didn’t look at each other. They didn’t need to. They had been for 30 years two of the three people who had loved this man, who had each loved him in different ways, and who had each somehow made room.
The man in the coffin was 99 years old. He had been, in every public account of his life, a difficult husband, a complicated father, a tireless consort, and a faithful Englishman by adoption rather than by birth. He had in every private account been something more honest and more human than any of those public descriptions.
He had been for 73 years a man who married a queen and never quite belonged to her and who never quite stopped belonging in equal pieces to the women who had known him before and to the woman who was in the end with him at the end. The Queen died in September 2022. She is buried beside Philip in the King George V 6th Memorial Chapel at Windsor alongside her father, her mother, and her sister.
The arrangement she had organized for 73 years extended finally into the ground. Penny Natchbull has given no public interview about Philip since his death. She has said nothing in public about their relationship, the years at Wood Farm, or the funeral where she arrived heartbroken on the day after her 68th birthday. She is alive.
She is in her 70s. The silence itself, careful, sustained, complete, is a form of fidelity, just not the kind that was ever in the official account. Subscribe for more stories like
