In 1962, at a private dinner in Hampshire, the Duke of Edinburgh told a long-standing friend that his mother-in-law was, in his words, recorded the next day in the friend’s diary, “a tougher proposition than people thought.” He had been married into her family for 15 years. He had 39 more years of her to come.
By the time she died in March 2002, the Duke of Edinburgh would be the only member of the British royal family of whom it could accurately be said, she had tried to remove him, and she had failed. She had removed Wallace. She had removed Crawford. She had removed Townsend. She had removed Susan Barrantes.
She had removed Diana. The man she could not remove, and the way he stopped her, is the only complete story of the Marshmallow’s method we have. The phrase that Brandreth records as Philip’s in the friend’s diary on a single page dated to that Hampshire weekend, is the only quoted private remark on Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother that the Duke of Edinburgh appears to have made to anyone outside the immediate household in his entire 55-year marriage.
He did not speak about her in public. When biographers, late in his life, approached him on the subject, the most prolific of them, Giles Brandreth, would later write the same phrase about the encounter every time. He would not be drawn. The 1962 line in the friend’s diary is, in effect, the only door we have into what the Duke of Edinburgh actually thought of his wife’s mother.
The door is small. What is behind it is 50 years of slow institutional opposition that the public never saw, that the household never minuted, and that the official biography of the Queen Mother, published in 2009, runs to 1,096 pages and almost never mentions the opposition began in 1946. The Princess Elizabeth was 20 years old.
The young naval lieutenant she had set her mind on marrying was the son of a Greek prince who had abdicated in 1922, a Battenberg mother who had been committed to a Swiss sanatorium for a paranoid breakdown in 1930 and four older sisters, three of whom were married to German princes whose family papers contained correspondence that by 1946 the Foreign Office had reason to monitor closely.
The lieutenant’s name at that moment was Philip Mountbatten. The surname had been adopted on his naturalization as a British subject on the 28th of February, 1947. The original name on the Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glucksburg royal genealogy was different. The woman who would later become known as the Queen Mother at this point in 1946, she was simply Queen Elizabeth, the king’s wife and consort found the foreign background harder to accept than the king did.
Sarah Bradford, in her 1996 biography of Elizabeth II, records that the future Queen Mother privately referred to Philip in the 1946 to 47 period as the Hun. It was a tease, recovered late, and walked back in old age. Heald’s 1991 portrait records her telling him at the very end that Philip was an English gentleman. But the 1946 register and the 1991 register were 45 years apart, and the 45 years between them were the story.
In those years, late biographers have reconstructed the Queen and the household quietly canvassed the question of whether an English match might be preferable. The names that appear in retrospective accounts include long-standing family friends from the princess’s social circle.
Among them, Henry Herbert, then known by the courtesy title Lord Porchester, the heir to the earldom of Carnarvon, and the man the princess called Porchie. Whether the Queen ever advanced him as a serious candidate is undocumented. What is documented is that the princess had her mind set, and that her father, who liked Philip and trusted Lord Mountbatten’s recommendation, granted the formal engagement in private as early as 1946 on the condition that no public announcement be made until the princess turned 21 in April 1947.
The Queen, on the documentary record, did not openly oppose. She also did not openly assist. The institutional vocabulary the household had developed in 11 years of dealing with a king who did not enjoy public events was a vocabulary of quiet preference and quiet withholding. It was applied here for the first time on the man who was about to marry into the family.
The wedding took place on the 20th of November 1947 at Westminster Abbey at 11:30 in the morning. 2,000 guests, six kings, seven queens. The BBC’s first live radio broadcast of a royal wedding. Philip had been created Duke of Edinburgh the previous day. His three surviving German married sisters were not invited.
The Duke of Windsor, who had abdicated in 1936 and married Wallis Simpson in 1937, was not invited. The Queen Mother, at this point, again, still simply Queen Elizabeth, sat in the carriage procession with her younger daughter, Princess Margaret. Queen Mary, Philip’s grandmother-in-law to be, and the most powerful surviving voice of the Edwardian institutional consensus, sat in a separate procession.
Princess Alice of Battenberg, Philip’s mother, was the only member of his immediate family in the Abbey. She sat opposite the King and the Queen and Queen Mary. The cathedral was full of people who had been told in advance that the institutional welcome being extended to the bridegroom would be a public welcome only.
What that meant in private would be worked out over the next 55 years. It started, as so much of the Queen Mother’s institutional methods started, with a name. In the early hours of the 6th of February, 1952, King George VI died in his sleep at Sandringham of complications from the lung cancer that had been removed in surgery the previous September.
The Princess Elizabeth, who had been on tour in Kenya, was at the Treetops Hotel in the Aberdare Forest. The Duke of Edinburgh was with her. Mike Parker, the Duke’s equerry and his closest personal friend from his Royal Navy days, was at the lodge nearby when the call came through from the household in London.
The news reached Martin Charteris, the Princess’s private secretary, by telegram. Charteris told Parker. Parker, by his own account in the obituaries published when he died in January 2002, sat with the news for several minutes and then went to find Philip because he could not bring himself to tell the new Queen directly.
Philip received the information, sat in silence for several minutes more, and then walked with Parker through the lodge gardens to find his wife. He told her by the river. He was the one who told her. Parker’s account in the Telegraph and Independent obituaries is that Philip took it on. Those two words, the equerry’s own and that the new queen, after a moment, asked Philip whether they ought to go home.
Two months after that morning at Treetops, on the 9th of April 1952, the Privy Council, on the advice of Prime Minister Winston Churchill, declared in Council that the new sovereign and her children would be styled and known as the house and family of Windsor. The declaration was made over Philip’s documented objection, which had been carried into the cabinet through Lord Mountbatten and through the Lord Chamberlain.
Queen Mary, the new queen’s grandmother, who would die 11 months later, had strongly resisted any elevation of the Mountbatten name. The Queen Mother, on the documentary record, is not named as a participant in the cabinet’s deliberations. She held no constitutional role in the question. What she held, household witnesses would later confirm to Brandreth, was the same view as Queen Mary.
That the House of Windsor, established by George V in 1917, was the family her husband had served and died for and that the name belonged with the family her husband had built. Philip’s response, made privately and recorded later by Brandreth in 2004, from a witness Brandreth identifies as a close family friend, is the single most quoted line about Philip’s institutional position in the entire 55 years of his marriage.
“I am nothing but a bloody amoeba.” He is reported to have said. “I am the only man in the country not allowed to give his name to his own children.” The line is documentary, primary source attributed, and clean. It is the one moment in which the Duke of Edinburgh, who would not be drawn on the Queen Mother in interview, and who left no diary of his own, said out loud what the surname declaration of April 1952 had cost him.
The 8-year delay between that ruling and the next, the 8 years before the family found a compromise, is the longest single beat in the documentary record of Philip’s marriage to the institution. The compromise came on the 8th of February, 1960, in an order in council issued 11 days before Prince Andrew was born. The constitutional expert Edward Iwi had written to Prime Minister Harold Macmillan in late 1959, raising the prospect that a royal child given the mother’s maiden name, rather than the father’s name, would, in the technical heraldic vocabulary Iwi used,
bear the badge of bastardy. The Queen, who had had her heart set on a change that would recognize the name Mountbatten, advised Macmillan in January 1960 that she wished the family name amended. The order, published in the London Gazette on the 5th of February 1960, created the surname Mountbatten-Windsor, but only for those agnatic descendants who did not hold the style of royal highness or the titular dignity of prince or princess.
The direct line of succession, Charles, William, George, would still be Windsor. Philip had won, partially. The compromise belonged to the descendants who would never reign. For the descendants who would, the 1952 ruling stood. The Queen Mother in 1960 as in 1952 held no constitutional role. Her preference by the household record had been for no amendment at all.
The Queen Mother and Princess Margaret moved from Buckingham Palace into Clarence House in 1953. Shortly before the coronation on the 2nd of June, the standard institutional explanation and the one set down in the official biography William Shawcross published in 2009 is that the move was the orderly transition that constitutional convention required.
That the new Queen was needed at the principal royal residence and that the displaced Queen Consort moved as displaced Queen Consorts had moved for two centuries to the mall. Penny Junor writing in The Firm in 2005 makes the institutional record sharper. “None of them wanted to go,” Junor records, drawing on Mountbatten cousins and on Mike Parker’s recollections.
“They loved Clarence House. It was a family home. But Winston Churchill, who was then Prime Minister, insisted upon it.” On the Junor and Shawcross documentary record, the move was Churchill’s, not Philip’s. The Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh were the ones who had been moved against their wishes.
The Queen Mother, who had told her younger daughter on the morning after the King’s death, that they would now have to take her husband’s photograph off the mantelpiece, vacated Buckingham Palace 14 months later than the constitutional convention had suggested. There is, alongside this institutional account, a second account that lives in the audience’s memory.
The audience version surfaced in the comments on Gilded Daughters own coverage by viewers identified as Leslie Heavey and Irene 3196 with 34 and 35 likes is that Prince Philip was instrumental in extracting the Queen Mother from Buckingham Palace. That account does not appear in Junor, Shawcross, Brandreth, Heed, Vickers, Pimlott, Bradford, or Lacey.
It lives in household folk memory and it survives because the household saw enough of Philip’s quiet, persistent contribution to the management of the new Queen’s accommodation problem to credit him with the outcome. What is documented is Churchill’s insistence and the QM’s eventual departure in 1953. What is also documented is that Philip handled the move into Buckingham Palace differently from how George the VI had handled the equivalent transition in December 1936.
There were no public criticisms of the Queen Mother’s delay. There were no household memoranda demanding she go. There were instead the quiet repeated requests channeled through the household intermediaries the Duke of Edinburgh had begun to cultivate from the moment of his arrival in 1947. The Vanity Fair history of Clarence House written decades later would mark the departure of the Queen Mother from Buckingham Palace with a single editorial word.
Finally. The word covered the 14-month delay. It also covered the question of who on the institutional record had been the patient counter pressure. The Junor account names Churchill. The folk memory account names Philip. Both accounts are in the record. The script does not resolve them. What is documented beyond dispute in the years immediately following the move, is that the Queen Mother began to build at Clarence House an alternative court.
The household she assembled at Clarence House was substantially larger than the one she had inherited as Queen Consort at Buckingham Palace. The controller, the treasurer, the equerry in waiting, the lady in waiting, the page of the backstairs, the steward of the cellars. By 1960, the establishment at Clarence House ran to approximately 70 persons paid out of a civil list allowance that her daughter had quietly negotiated through the household at Buckingham Palace.
The dinners at Clarence House, the King George the VI Memorial Foundation dinners, the Cinque Ports Confederation dinners, the dinners for the racing set assembled by Lord Carnarvon became the alternative social calendar that the more conservative members of the institution preferred to the more modern engagements being scheduled by the new Queen and her husband.
This was the Queen Mother’s response to losing the dynastic name fight. She had been overruled in 1952 on the question of the surname. She had been displaced in 1953 from the principal royal residence. She had been replaced in the constitutional vocabulary by the daughter who had been her child. What she built in the 50 years that followed was a parallel social institution she controlled completely.
The Clarence House guest list was hers. The Birk Hall hosting schedule was hers. The racing set network through Lord Carnarvon was hers. The cocktail hour at 6:00 was hers. The household tone, formal, deferential, period accurate, fortified by gin, was hers. The institution she built at Clarence House was the institution the Buckingham Palace court was supposed to be, and under the modernizing direction the Duke of Edinburgh was now bringing to the new Queen’s establishment, had ceased to be.
Philip wanted telephones installed at Buckingham Palace to replace the footmen who carried messages from one royal apartment to another. The Queen Mother thought the telephones intrusive. Philip wanted the 1953 coronation televised. The Queen Mother, by the household record carried in the documentary series The Royal House of Windsor, attempted to block the television cameras.
The coronation went out to 27 million viewers, the largest live television audience in British history at the time. On the policy disagreements between the modernizing court at Buckingham Palace and the traditional court at Clarence House, the modernizing court won. On the social register, on whose dinners were the prestige dinners, on whose guests were the inside guests, on which house was the house the conservative grandees still preferred, the traditional court at Clarence House held its position for 50 years.
The Cecil Beaton Diaries which Hugo Vickers edited and republished record the period with a phrase that has become in royal history shorthand the canonical description of what the Queen Mother actually was. Beaton did not call her a marshmallow made of steel, which is the version the public has remembered.
He called her a marshmallow made on a welding machine. The image is industrial. The mechanism that produced her was a working tool. The surface the public never stopped seeing. The mechanism only the household saw. The mechanism showed itself in the differentiation between Clarence House and Buckingham Palace in the management of the institutional problems of the first decade of the new reign.
The first of those problems was the Princess Margaret and Group Captain Peter Townsend matter. Margaret had accepted Townsend’s proposal in early 1953. Townsend was a divorcee and a commoner. The Church of England, under the constitutional understanding that had governed the abdication crisis of 1936, did not countenance the remarriage of divorced persons.
The Royal Marriages Act of 1772 required the sovereign’s consent. The cabinet’s view, carried by Anthony Eden after he became Prime Minister in April 1955, was that Margaret could marry Townsend only on condition that she renounce her place in the succession and her civil list allowance. Queen Mother, on the household record, was the most institutionally aligned of the family members in the discussion.
She had been Queen Consort during the abdication crisis. She had seen, in 1936, what divorce had cost the institution. Her position, by the household record, was hard. The Duke of Edinburgh, by contrast, was, as Brandreth would later read it, less hostile to the match than the Queen Mother. The press accused him at the time of being hostile, and Philip, characteristically, denied it.
“I haven’t done anything,” he told them. That is the only line on the public record from the Duke of Edinburgh on the Townsend matter. Brandreth reads it as a quiet differentiation from the Queen Mother’s harder line. The reading is inferential. What is documented is that the Queen Mother held the institutional line and Philip did not, in public, hold it with her.
Margaret’s renunciation statement was issued on the 31st of October, 1955. “Mindful of the church’s teachings that Christian marriage is indissoluble,” the statement read, “and conscious of my duty to the Commonwealth, I have resolved to put these considerations before others.” The Queen Mother, by Shawcross’s account, did not publicly comment.
The Duke of Edinburgh, by every account, said nothing further. What the moment cemented for the Duke was a working understanding of what the Queen Mother’s institutional method actually was. The method did not require argument. It did not require explicit instruction. It required the patient withholding of the institutional supports.
The household, the residence, the income, the public welcome, the sovereign’s consent, that the target of the method needed to remain inside the family. Margaret had needed the consent. She had not got it. She had, in due course, married Antony Armstrong-Jones in May 1960, and, in due course, divorced him in 1978.
The marriage produced the children whose surname, under the Order in Council that Philip had partially won earlier that same year, would be Mountbatten-Windsor. The Queen Mother had been correct, by the institutional logic she held, in withholding the consent for Townsend. The Duke of Edinburgh had seen the method work.
He would not, in any documented moment of the next 46 years, allow it to be applied to him. The defensive position the Duke of Edinburgh would adopt for the next four decades was tested less than two years after Margaret’s renunciation in the matter of Mike Parker. Parker had remained Philip’s closest personal friend and his private secretary since 1947.
On the 6th of February, 1957, by a coincidence of the institutional calendar, the 5th anniversary of George the 6th’s death, Parker resigned aboard the royal yacht Britannia in Gibraltar after his wife Eileen filed for divorce citing his adultery. The press surrounded him on his return to London.
The scandal was treated in the household register of 1957 as the kind of personal life incident that would normally end an association with the sovereign’s husband. The Queen Mother’s household, by the institutional record, regarded Parker’s social circle around Philip, the so-called Thursday Club at Wheeler’s restaurant in Soho, the loose set of equerries and naval friends, with the same disapproval the household had directed at the Mountbatten circle a decade earlier.
16 days after Parker’s resignation, on the 22nd of February, 1957, the Queen issued letters patent creating the Duke of Edinburgh a prince of the United Kingdom in his own right. The institutional reading of the timing, recorded by Brandreth among others, is that the elevation served partly to place the Duke beyond the reach of a subpoena in the Parker divorce proceedings and partly to make the institutional point that the Queen Mother’s household disapproval of Philip’s social circle was not the household opinion that would govern the
matter. Philip had been promoted. The friend had been protected from the consequences his association with Philip would otherwise have carried. The Queen Mother’s view on the documentary record was not consulted in the decision. The application was attempted. household witnesses would later tell Brandreth in the 1980s.
The Queen Mother, who by then was in her 80s and the most popular member of the institution, had taken into her social circle the parents of the young woman who was in 1986 marrying her grandson, Prince Andrew. The bride was Sarah Ferguson. Her father, Major Ronald Ferguson, was a former lifeguard officer and the manager of the Prince of Wales’ polo team at Smith’s Lawn.
Her mother, Susan Ferguson, by the time of the wedding remarried to the Argentine polo player, Hector Barrantes, and known by that surname, had moved in 1975 with her second husband to Argentina and from there visited Britain regularly. The Queen Mother knew the Fergusons through Smith’s Lawn and through the Berkshire racing set.
The household chronology is not in dispute. What is in dispute, and what enters the historical record only in the 2000s, is the claim that during these years a quiet undercurrent of social circle rumor, of the kind the Queen Mother had been administering for half a century, attached itself to the relationship between the Duke of Edinburgh and Susan Barrantes.
The primary source ceiling on the question is a single sentence from Susan’s first husband, Major Ronald Ferguson, in his 1994 memoir, The Galloping Major. “I always suspected that Prince Philip had an eye for Susie,” Ferguson wrote. “Certainly, they remained friends to this day.” The word in the sentence that does the work is suspected.
Ferguson did not assert a fact. He recorded a suspicion. The closer assertion enters the record in 2024 when the royal biographer, Andrew Lownie, publishes the book entitled The Rise and Fall of the House of York and asserts that an affair between the Duke of Edinburgh and Susan Barrantes began in 1966, 20 years before the wedding of her daughter into the royal family.
Lownie’s source, named on GB News and in the book’s apparatus, is his own mother-in-law, who was, he says, Susan’s closest friend. The sourcing chain is single, author’s mother-in-law to author to publication. And Lownie has defended it against the press by pointing to the 300 interviews conducted for the book.
Whether the affair occurred is contested, whether the Queen Mother had any documented role in spreading rumor about it is not contested. There is no documentary evidence that she did. The framework the audience attaches to this episode, in which the Queen Mother is read as deploying her institutional method against the Duke of Edinburgh in the late period of her life by way of the Berkshire racing set, is interpretive, not documentary.
What is on the record is that the strongest move the Queen Mother’s institutional method had ever made against the Duke of Edinburgh, if it ever made one, was the one move that left no household trace. The Duke of Edinburgh did not respond. He did not, by the public record, ever speak about Susan Barrantes after her death in a car accident in Argentina in 1998.
His silence on this, as on every other private matter, was the response. It was also, as it had been for 50 years, the answer to the technique. What the Duke of Edinburgh understood by the time of the Susan Barrantes period was the structural difference between himself and the other five names on the list the Queen Mother had built across her widow decades.
Wallis Simpson had needed an institutional title. The Queen Mother had withheld the style of Royal Highness. Wallis had spent the next 50 years in Parisian exile and had died in 1986 without ever having been received in Britain. Marion Crawford had needed the household. The Queen Mother had cut her off in 1950 after Crawfie’s book in the Ladies’ Home Journal.
No member of the royal family had ever spoken to her again. Peter Townsend had needed the sovereign’s consent. The Queen Mother had held the institutional line. The consent had not come. Margaret had renounced. Townsend had spent the rest of his life in France. Susan Barrantes, to the extent the framework even applies, had needed a social circle.
The social circle had quietly tightened. She had been in Argentina at her death. Diana, Princess of Wales, had needed the institution’s public welcome for the post-divorce decade she would not live to complete. The welcome had not been there. The documentary record is that the Queen Mother, in a private letter to a friend written in early September 1997, registered Diana’s death principally as an inconvenience to the schedule of the Queen’s holiday at Balmoral.
Five people. Five different things they had each needed. The Queen Mother had withheld each one. Five had lost. The Duke of Edinburgh had needed none of them. He had a navy career he had loved and surrendered, a marriage that had cost him his name, an institutional role he had quietly defined himself, and a social circle that included Mountbatten and Parker, and the friends of his Greek childhood.
He had not needed her approval, and so he had not been moved by its absence. He had not needed her household, and so he had not been weakened by its withdrawal. He had not needed her support, and so he had not been ruined by its silence. The method, simply, could not find a handle on him. It tried, and there was nothing for the technique to grip.
She died on the 30th of March 2002 at the age of 101 years and 238 days in her own bed at Royal Lodge, Windsor. She had outlived her husband by 50 years and 7 weeks. She had outlived Wallis Simpson by 15 years and 11 months, Marion Crawford by 14 years and 1 month, Peter Townsend by 6 years and 9 months, Susan Barrantes by 3 years and 6 months, Princess Diana by 4 years and 7 months.
She had outlived her younger daughter Margaret by 7 weeks. She had not outlived the Duke of Edinburgh. He would outlive her by 19 years and 10 days, dying at Windsor Castle on the 9th of April 2021 on the precise calendar date, by coincidence, but the kind of coincidence the institution noted, that her funeral had been held in Westminster Abbey 19 years earlier.
She lay in state in Westminster Hall for 3 days. Some 200,000 mourners filed past. The Duke of Edinburgh, by the public record, walked behind the casket in the procession. He stood through the funeral. He observed the departure of the coffin by road for Windsor. He said nothing publicly about her at any point in the period of mourning.
He said nothing publicly about her in the 19 years that followed. What he said privately, as Brandreth would later record from his own conversations with the Duke of Edinburgh in the years before Philip’s own death, was one sentence. Brandreth, who had known Philip personally for decades, who had been heckled by him from charity event audiences, and who had been told by him, “I have become a caricature.
” recorded the sentence in a single line. The Duke of Edinburgh, asked about the Queen Mother in the days after her funeral, said, by Brandreth’s record, “She was a great institution. She was also exhausting.” That is the entire on-record assessment from the man who had survived her of the woman who had spent 50 years on the project of, by varying accounts, either tolerating his marriage to her elder daughter or quietly attempting to undo it.
The first half of the sentence is the public Queen Mother. The second half is the private one. Brandreth recorded both. He recorded nothing further. The Duke of Edinburgh did not elaborate. He did not, in the 19 years he would still live, make a second remark. “She tried it on Wallace and it worked. She tried it on Crawford and it worked.
She tried it on Townsend and it worked. She tried it on Susan Barrantes and it worked. She tried it on Diana and it worked. She tried it on the Duke of Edinburgh and for the only time in her life, the method failed.” The reason it failed is the reason Philip walked into Westminster Hall in April 2002 behind the casket of a woman he had outlasted and said to a friend in private, quoted later by Brandreth, only one full sentence about her.
