For more than 70 years, the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh lived inside one of the most heavily staffed households in the world. Footmen, dressers, valets, ladies-in-waiting, private secretaries, equerries, chauffeurs, cooks, pages, gardeners, and stable hands moved through the corridors of Buckingham Palace, Windsor Castle, Sandringham, and Balmoral every day.
Most of them never spoke a word about what they saw. Some of them did, and from the ones who did, a portrait has emerged of what life was actually like inside that marriage, told from the angle of the people who served the man, not the woman. Philip’s staff had a particular vantage point. They were close enough to him to see his moods.
They were close enough to her to see how those moods landed, and what they noticed, again and again across the decades, was that the woman married to their employer was not the cold figure the public sometimes imagined. She was something more complicated, someone the staff came to admire in a way that surprised even themselves.
To begin with the surface fact, Philip was not an easy man to work for. The royal historian, Dr. Williams, summarizing the consensus of those who served around him in the early years, has described him bluntly, “The courtiers, the household, the royal family, even government, there was a feeling that he just wasn’t the right character for the job.
It was said he was ill-tempered, that he was rough, and he was not inclined to be faithful.” Williams attributed much of this to his stubborn independence, the quality that a lot of the criticism of Philip was because they knew they couldn’t tell him what to do, that he was such an independent man. This was the man Philip’s staff worked for, independent, sharp-tongued, impossible to manage in the way courtiers had managed his father-in-law.
And yet, the same staff, almost without exception, came to feel something that no outsider ever quite grasped from the cartoons and the gaffes. They felt loyal to him in a way that defied his reputation. The journalist Philip Eade, who has written extensively on the Duke, captured the essence of it. According to those who worked with him, he was easy to talk to and encouraged dialogue.
It’s a mark of the man that he had tremendous loyalty from his staff. The Duke’s closest friend and former private secretary, Michael Parker, who knew him from their days together in the Royal Navy, and went on to serve him from 1947 to 1957, offered the line that has become the most quoted assessment of Philip’s character.
“No one has a kinder heart or takes more trouble to conceal it.” That single sentence is the key to everything Philip’s staff felt about him, and by extension, everything they came to feel about the Queen. Because if their employer was whose kindness was buried under layers of bluntness, then the woman he had married was the one person in the world who saw all the way through.
The staff understood this even when he did not say it. They saw her see him. They saw the way he behaved differently in her presence, even when he was being difficult. They saw a marriage that was not theatrical, but was at its core a deep and stubborn alliance between two people who had agreed long ago that they would face the world together.
To understand the Queen as the staff understood her, you have to begin with the woman who knew her longer than anyone in the household. The woman whose first name was, in many ways, the Queen’s first word, Margaret MacDonald was born in Scotland, the daughter of a railway worker. She joined the household of the Duke and Duchess of York, as Elizabeth’s parents were then called, when Elizabeth was an infant.
She was meant to be a nursemaid. She would still be working for Elizabeth 67 years later, when she died in her own apartment inside Buckingham Palace at the age of 89. Her name in the household was Bobo. The story of how she got it is one of the small founding myths of the Queen’s life.
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As a baby, Elizabeth would play hide-and-seek with her, with Margaret often calling “Boo!” Elizabeth would clap her hands and answer “Boo, boo!” And that is how Margaret got the name Bobo. She was called Bobo for the rest of her life, and she was the only person outside the immediate royal family permitted to call Elizabeth by her childhood name, Lilibet.
Some believed Bobo was Elizabeth’s first word. Whether that is true or simply a household legend that grew with the telling, what is certain is that the relationship between the two women lasted longer than nearly any other in the Queen’s life. Bobo took charge of Elizabeth and moved into her room to give her a stronger sense of security when Princess Margaret was born in 1930.
Elizabeth would share a room with Bobo until she was 13 years old, and Bobo developed a devotion to Elizabeth that would last until she died in 1993. For 67 years, Bobo loved, protected, and respected Elizabeth. She accompanied Elizabeth on her honeymoon and all her tours, and lived in style at Buckingham Palace.
Into her 80s, Bobo would still wake Elizabeth with a cup of tea, run her bath, and lay out her clothes for the day. In 1986, Queen Elizabeth II made Bobo a Lieutenant of the Royal Victorian Order. In her later years, Bobo held a unique position in Buckingham Palace. She had her own suite, no duties, and enjoyed a closer personal friendship with Queen Elizabeth II than nearly anyone else, including some of the members of the Royal Family.
There is a small detail recorded in her obituary that captures what she had become to the Queen. On Miss MacDonald’s each year, the Queen is believed to have returned the favor and took her dresser a cup of tea. Think about what that means. The reigning monarch of the United Kingdom, who could not pour her own water in public without staff scrambling to assist her, would once a year quietly carry a cup of tea to the rooms of the woman who had been carrying tea to her every morning for over six decades.
This is what the staff knew. This is what the cameras never caught. The Queen, as Bobo had known her, and as Bobo had taught her staff to know her, was not a remote figure, but someone capable of the small reciprocal kindness that defines a long household relationship. There is one more moment from the Bobo story that says something about the Queen and her father both.
When King George VI bade farewell to his daughter when she flew to Kenya in 1952, he said to Miss MacDonald, “Look after the princess for me, Bobo.” The King died while Elizabeth was away. Those were among his final words about his elder daughter, and they were directed not to a courtier or a member of the family, but to a Scottish woman who had started in the household as a nursemaid, and had become by then the closest thing the future Queen had to a private guardian.
Bobo was at Buckingham Palace when the news came. She was at Buckingham Palace when Elizabeth returned from Kenya as a Queen rather than a princess. She was at Buckingham Palace, in fact, until the day she died in September 1993, in her own suite, surrounded by the Queen’s dresses and coats and ceremonial outfits.
The Queen attended her memorial at the Queen’s Chapel at St. James’s Palace. The point of telling this story so fully is that it set the tone of every staff relationship the Queen ever had. She was a person who, once attached, did not let go. She was a person whose loyalty, when it formed, formed for life.
And the staff who came after Bobo, the men and women Philip would come to know as the household evolved across the decades, all served a Queen who had been shaped by Bobo’s example of devotion. They knew, even when they could not articulate it, that they were stepping into a tradition that had begun at the Queen’s cradle. If you’re enjoying this look behind the palace doors, hit that subscribe button right now.
To understand the Queen as the staff understood her, you have to begin with the most basic fact about how a royal household works. The staff did not gawk. They did not stare. They did not lean in. They moved through rooms with the practiced invisibility that the job required. There was, in fact, a strict rule about it. The Queen’s long-time footman, Paul Burrell, who entered royal service at age 18 and became one of her personal footmen within a year, recorded the rule in his memoir.
“We were always told never to look at the Queen or to stare at her. Never look her in the eye. Always look down.” This was the world the staff inhabited, a world of downcast eyes and careful footsteps, and the constant low hum of duty. And yet, paradoxically, it was also a world in which the staff noticed everything. They had to. The whole machinery of royal life depended on small adjustments, a change in the temperature of the room, a different brand of biscuit, a particular dress laid out for a particular occasion.
The Queen rarely had to ask for these things. The staff had been trained, often over decades, to anticipate her. The hierarchy among the staff was as elaborate as the hierarchy above them. Burrell described his early days at the palace with a kind of awe. He had grown up in a coal-mining in Derbyshire. His father was a lorry driver.
He had been expected by the standard course of his upbringing to go to work in the local colliery. He had decided at the age of eight that he wanted to work at Buckingham Palace. This was after a trip to London in which he witnessed the changing of the guard. 10 years later, against every reasonable expectation, he was there.
His memoir, A Royal Duty, published in 2003, describes a young man arriving at Buckingham Palace feeling overwhelmed and apprehensive, being fitted for his livery, and learning the strict hierarchy of the royal household. There were dining arrangements based on staff seniority. Where you sat in the staff dining hall depended entirely on how long you had been there and what role you held.
The senior dressers and senior butlers and senior chefs had their own table. The young footmen sat further away. Everyone knew exactly where they stood. Burrell shared a bond with the Queen’s corgis and described the warmth of their interactions during dog feeding. He outlined the Queen’s structured daily routine, her preferences for breakfast, her habits with the morning newspapers.
There was a memorable night at Buckingham Palace when he saw Queen Elizabeth II in the Imperial State Crown and pink mule slippers, an image that highlights the blend of majesty and intimacy that defined her private life. That image, the Imperial State Crown and pink mule slippers, is in many ways the perfect summary of what the staff saw and the public did not.
The Queen in full ceremonial regalia, weighing several pounds of jewels and gold and the symbolic weight of an entire constitutional history, walking around in the comfortable footwear of any woman of her age preparing for bed. The staff who witnessed such moments were not amused or scandalized. They were touched.
They were reminded, in the small way that these things remind you, that the figure who appeared on television was a person. What this hierarchy taught the staff week by week was that the household above them had an order of its own. The Queen and Philip were at the center of that order. Everything else moved around them. The staff observed the small daily proofs that the marriage at the center was holding, the way they walked together, the way they sat together at meals, the way they tolerated each other’s habits with the particular tolerance of long
married people who had stopped trying to change anything fundamental about each other, and had begun instead simply to live with what was there. When Bobo died in September 1993, the Queen lost the woman who had known her since infancy. She did not, however, lose the kind of relationship Bobo represented, because by then another Scottish woman had been in the household for 6 months.
Her name was Angela Kelly. Kelly began working with Queen Elizabeth in 1993. She was the daughter of a dock worker from Walton, Liverpool, one of six children. She was not the kind of person by birth who would have been expected to become the closest woman to the Queen of the United Kingdom, but she was clear-eyed, talented, and possessed of the particular Liverpudlian directness that the Queen seemed to enjoy in her staff.
She started in the royal household as an assistant dresser. She would go on to hold a title that had never existed before her, personal assistant, advisor, and curator to her majesty the Queen, jewelry, insignias, and wardrobe. She remained in that role until the Queen’s death in 2022. That is 28 years of service, and the relationship that developed between them was, by Kelly’s own account and by the testimony of others around them, something far closer than employer and employee.
Royal staff members, according to one detailed report, often heard the two laughing together from down a hallway. Reportedly, the Queen also sometimes visited Kelly in her Grace and Favor house, a home on the Windsor Castle estate given to her by the Queen. Kelly herself described their rapport in characteristic understatement.
She called it a working relationship, but a close one, and said that like two typical women, they discussed clothes and jewelry together. The Queen gave Kelly permission before her death to publish three memoirs about their work together. The first major one came out in 2019. It was titled with a quiet appropriateness, The Other Side of the Coin, The Queen, The Dresser, and The Wardrobe.
The opening line of the book, given by Kelly herself, sets the tone of what she observed. When Angela Kelly and the Queen are together, laughter echoes through the corridors of Buckingham Palace. That sentence alone is worth pausing on. The popular image of the Queen, especially in the later years, was of a serious woman, composed, reserved, the face on the stamps, the figure on the balcony.
But the dresser who saw her in private, day after day for 25 years, described laughter ringing through the corridors. This is not the picture the public knew. This is the picture the staff carried. Kelly’s memoir is full of small, specific moments that would never have been visible from the outside. There is, for instance, the story of a 2008 trip to Australia, recounted by several outlets summarizing the book.
The Queen had told Kelly they would probably see many kookaburra birds on the trip. When they did not, Kelly bought a stuffed toy kookaburra and put it in a cage in the Queen’s room. The Queen was afraid the bird would fly out when Kelly opened the door, so Kelly held it and told her it was dead.
When the horrified Queen took it from her, she realized it was a toy and jokingly told Kelly, “You’re sacked.” That small exchange, preserved by the dresser herself, contains everything the staff knew about the Queen and that the cameras almost never caught. The willingness to play, the dry wit, the capacity to be teased by an employee, and to tease back, and to find the whole thing funny enough to be remembered for years.
This was the woman who, in the public imagination, was so disciplined that she barely seemed human. And here she was, accepting a stuffed toy from her dresser and pretending to fire her over it. Kelly herself, in her 60s, has spoken about the Queen’s wicked sense of humor, her uncanny ability to mimic accents, including her dresser’s own Scouse brogue.
“Fun and gaiety are never far away when Angela is around,” one report noted. “The Queen feels at ease in her company,” with the two women often heard laughing together. “I think we’re a good team,” the sovereign told her. The dresser’s role in the Queen’s life grew steadily more important across the years. Kelly was given the Royal Victorian Order, appointed as a member in 2006, and later promoted to Lieutenant of the same order in 2012.
During her 20th year of service, Kelly was also awarded the Queen Elizabeth version of the Royal Household Long and Faithful Service Medal in 2014. These were not idle decorations. They were the Queen’s way of saying, in the formal language she preferred, that this woman had become indispensable.
Her role went beyond the wardrobe. After the death of the Queen’s sister and mother in 2002, Angela became a day-to-day confidante. She speaks German and French from her time as housekeeper to the British Ambassador in Berlin, Sir Christopher Mallaby, and his French wife. She designed some of Her Majesty’s outfits. She went ahead of her on tours to check the backgrounds where the Queen would appear and any sartorial dos and don’ts in foreign countries.
The closeness was not without its complications inside the household. As one report noted, Queen Elizabeth’s relationship with her personal assistant reportedly made some other staff members at Buckingham Palace jealous. Kelly herself, in a 2007 interview with the Telegraph, addressed the resentment with the same dry humor the Queen seemed to have rubbed off on her.
“I don’t have any more room for knives in my back,” Kelly jokingly told the Telegraph. Speaking of her staff and her loyalty to the monarch, she added, “My loyalty is to the Queen and the girls I work with. If I died tomorrow, my girls have been trained to make sure that the Queen’s life carries on smoothly without me. But I hope the Queen and I grow old together.
” That last line is the one that lingers. It is not the language of an employee speaking about an employer. It is the language of a friend speaking about a friend in the careful, slightly formal cadence that royal staff have always used to express the depth of feeling they were never quite supposed to have.
And it tells you what the Queen had become to the woman who knew her best in the household, not just an employer, something far closer than that. Between Bobo and Angela, in the long sequence of women who had charge of the Queen’s domestic life, sat one more figure who deserves her own place in this story.
Mabel Anderson was nanny to all four of Elizabeth’s children. She arrived in 1949 to help look after Prince Charles, who had been born the previous year. She would stay for 32 years, until 1981, raising not only Charles, but Anne, Andrew, and Edward. The household of the young royal mother in the 1950s and 60s was not a place where the children were raised primarily by their parents.
Elizabeth was the Queen. Her time was claimed by red boxes and audiences and tours. Anderson was the constant. She bathed the babies. She fed them. She knew the small, particular ways each of the children calmed down at night. After Anderson retired in 1981 after 32 years of service, the Queen and Prince Charles secured her a lifelong grace and favor home in a wing of Frogmore House, Windsor Great Park, and the heir to the throne personally supervised its redecoration using his own designer.
Decades later, when she was 83, Anderson was invited to take a summer cruise with the Queen and Prince Philip, reportedly as a thank you for six decades of loyalty and discretion. Charles was especially close to her. He had been raised by her in many of his most formative years. The bond between them was, in many ways, the kind of bond Bobo had with his mother, transferred down a generation. The staff understood this.
They saw what Anderson had been to the children, and they saw, in the way she was treated in retirement, what the Queen and Prince Charles thought of those who had given their lives in service. Anderson was not the first nanny in the household. Helen Lightbody, Charles’s first Scottish-born nanny, had a different ending.
She ran the palace nursery for 8 years from 1948, when Charles was a month old, until she left in 1956. She was reportedly fired by Queen Elizabeth II because she overruled a dessert to the Queen ordered for Prince Charles’s dinner. After the dessert incident, she came to be known in the press as No-Nonsense Lightbody.
She had been warned about being too stern with Charles, then 7, and his younger sister Anne, 6. After she was dismissed, she returned to Scotland with a small pension. Charles continued to visit Miss Lightbody after she had left the palace, and she was invited in 1969 to his investiture as Prince of Wales and to his 21st birthday party.
That last detail, like the cup of tea Bobo received once a year, captures something the staff knew about the family they served. Even when a relationship ended, even when someone was let go, the bond, if it had been real, did not entirely break. Lightbody had been dismissed. She was still invited to the most important ceremonies of the boy she had raised.
This is the texture of the household life Philip’s staff were absorbed into when they came to work for him. A household with long memories, a household where decades of service produced grace and favor homes and Royal Victorian Orders and invitations to summer cruises, a household where the Queen, despite the relentless schedule of her public life, kept track of every member of her staff, knew their stories, knew their families, and knew how to thank them in the formal language of British royal honors that the rest of
the country still understood. Philip’s own staff existed in a slightly different world from the Queen’s. They were closer to the working military culture he preferred. They were drawn for the most part from the armed forces, particularly the Royal Navy, which had been Philip’s first home and the institution that had in many ways formed him.
His private secretaries and equerries were men he had often known beforehand, men he had served with or whose service records he respected. Michael Parker was the model. Parker first met the then Prince Philip of Greece and Denmark in 1942 when Philip was assigned to the destroyer HMS Wallace as a sub lieutenant. They became close friends.
Parker himself described what bonded them. “We were highly competitive. We both wanted to show that we had the most efficient, cleanest, and best ship and ship’s company in the Navy. And instead of pushing us apart, it drew us closer. That is the man Philip was, competitive, driven, loyal to those who could keep up with him.” And the marriage he made with Elizabeth was in its own way a continuation of that pattern.
He had married a woman who could keep up with him, not in volume, but in stamina, not in noise, but in nerve. Parker fought at the Battle of Narvik before serving in the Pacific Fleet. He was an Australian born in Melbourne in 1920 who had served in the Royal Australian Navy and the British Royal Navy between 1938 and 1947, reaching the rank of Lieutenant Commander.
He was, in other words, a serious man with a serious war record, the kind of man Philip had always preferred to be surrounded by. After the marriage to Elizabeth in 1947, Parker took on the role of private secretary. And he also took charge of modernizing the palace with modern amenities like electric telephones and dishwashers. Parker was one of the attendants of Philip’s stag night party at the Dorchester Hotel in London.
He stood beside Philip on the most important nights of his life and continued to do so in a private capacity long after his official role ended. Parker resigned in 1958, not in dramatic circumstances, but quietly, in part because of the breakdown of his own marriage and the awkwardness that came with it for the royal household at the time.
He remained close to Philip until his death in 2001, 43 years of friendship after his official service had ended. That kind of bond does not form between an employer and an employee unless something deeper is at work. This is the staff context Philip’s people inherited. They were not just servants. In the cases of the longest serving among them, they were collaborators in the project of the marriage.
They had been chosen, sometimes by Philip himself, to fit into a household that he and the Queen were building together. And they came to understand the Queen as the one fixed point around which the whole enterprise revolved. There was also Sir Martin Charteris on the Queen’s side whose career deserves its own paragraph because of how openly he expressed what so many of her staff felt and could not say.
A military man who had trained at Sandhurst and gone on to serve in the war as an intelligence officer, Charteris was invited to work for the Queen, then Princess Elizabeth, in 1949 and stayed in her employ until after the Silver Jubilee in 1977. In 1995, in an interview with The Spectator, Charteris said something that stunned the British public for its directness.
“I simply fell in love with her when I met her. She was so young, beautiful, dutiful, the most impressive of women.” A senior private secretary to the Queen of the United Kingdom in his 80s in print describing his employer in the language of romantic devotion. This was not metaphor. This was not embarrassment. This was the kind of feeling the Queen inspired in her closest staff over decades, and Charteris was one of the few who put it into words for the public to read.
He had been with her at the moment her father died and she became Queen. He had been with her, in fact, for one of the most extraordinary moments in modern royal history. He accompanied her on what must have surely seemed the longest journey of her life, back to London from Kenya, where the news of the King’s death had reached her.
The young woman of 25 who had flown out to Africa as a princess flew home as a queen. Charteris was with her on that flight. He observed at close hand his boss’s strength of character. Preparing and narrating this story took us a lot of time. So, if you are enjoying it, subscribe to our channel. It means a lot to us.
Now, back to the story. Philip’s own background made the household he and Elizabeth built into something he had never had as a child. The Duke of Edinburgh’s life had begun in a way that almost no one else of his rank had experienced. He was born in 1921 on the Greek island of Corfu, but his family was exiled from Greece while he was an infant.
His grandfather had been assassinated. His father had been arrested. His parents separated by the time he was 10. His mother, Princess Alice, struggled with her mental health and was eventually institutionalized before becoming a nun. His four sisters all married into German aristocratic families, three of them into families with Nazi connections, which created political problems for him later.
By the time he was a teenager, he had effectively been raised by his uncle, Lord Mountbatten, and by the boarding school system at Gordonstoun. The staff who came to work for him in adulthood inherited the consequences of all this. He was a man who had been taught early that the only person he could rely on was himself.
He had built his identity in the Royal Navy, where he had risen on his own merits and where the war had given him something he had never had before, the sense of a fixed institution that valued him for what he could do. When he gave that up to become consort to a young Queen, he gave up the one structure that had ever fully belonged to him.
The staff who watched him in the early years of his marriage saw the consequences of that loss. He pushed against the palace structure relentlessly, demanding changes to palace routines and protocols that had hardly changed since Victoria’s time. In the early years of Elizabeth’s reign, he antagonized senior courtiers by these demands.
That was the friction his staff observed. And on the other side of the friction stood the Queen. She had been raised, by contrast, in a stable and loving home. Brandreth’s biography emphasizes the contrast at the very heart of his book. The Queen’s childhood was loving and secure. The Duke’s was turbulent. They came from completely different emotional starting points.
They had completely different reactions to chaos. He moved towards it. She moved away from it. And the marriage they built had to absorb that difference every day for 73 years. The staff who served them across that span saw the difference play out in countless small ways. The way he would talk over a meal while she listened.
The way he would push for changes while she preserved continuity. The way he would joke and she would laugh and then quietly steer the conversation back to where it needed to be. They were, as Brandreth put it, an amazing double act, and the staff were the audience that saw it most often, the one set of witnesses who watched the act day after day, year after year, without ever needing to be entertained.
Philip himself acknowledged this difference openly. He once described himself in a quote preserved in Brandreth’s biography of the marriage with a self-awareness that surprised “And because I don’t see things as a romantic would, I’m unfeeling.” This is Philip’s own assessment of how he came across to others, unfeeling, unromantic, a man who saw the world in practical terms and was sometimes accused of cruelty when really, in his view, he was simply being clear-eyed. His staff understood this.
They worked for it. They learned to read his moods and to absorb his sharper remarks without taking them personally. And they learned, watching him with his wife, that the woman who had married him was the one person who could absorb that sharpness without flinching and somehow turn it into something that worked.
The Yorkshire Post, in its assessment of his life and personality, captured the way the staff and his close friends came to understand him. Philip was characterized and satirized as irritable and brusque, but his true nature was far more complex than his public image suggested. The article continued, “Philip did have a crusty exterior and could be irritable, not least with his own family.
Those who disagreed with his forthright views also found him daunting, not least with his own family.” That phrase deserves attention. The staff who worked for Philip noticed that he could be hardest on the people closest to him. He was famously demanding with his children, particularly with Charles, where his expectations of toughness sometimes left scars that the elder son would still be writing about in adulthood.
The staff observed this, and they observed how the Queen handled it. She did not openly contradict him in front of others. That was not her way. But the Queen’s containment was not coldness. The same staff who described her discipline also described her warmth. The point that comes through again and again is that these two things existed in the same person.
She was capable of remarkable self-control in public and remarkable softness in private. Princess Diana, of all people, gave one of the most striking corroborations of Philip’s private warmth. According to letters Philip wrote to Diana during the breakdown of her marriage to Charles, letters Diana showed to her close friend Rosa Monckton, Monckton described them as thoughtful and wise and said their tone was kind and compassionate and understanding.
They were written as the marriage of the Prince and Princess of Wales was disintegrating and about to plunge the House of Windsor into crisis. This is significant for what it reveals about Philip’s private nature, but also for what it implies about his marriage. The man who could be sharp in public, the man whose remarks scandalized press officers and made cartoonists rich, was the same man who sat down at his desk during the worst family crisis of his lifetime and wrote letters to his daughter-in-law that were thoughtful, wise, and compassionate. The staff who
served around him knew this side of him existed. So did the woman he had married. Brandreth’s biography also captured something important about the rumors that had followed Philip throughout his life. The book devoted an entire chapter, around 50 pages long, to the question of whether Philip had ever been unfaithful.
Brandreth’s conclusion, after extensive interviews with the people most likely to know was that he had not. He acknowledged that Philip likes the company of pretty younger women who are flattering, intelligent, and fun. But on the question of actual infidelity, the evidence was thin. Brandreth even tracked down one of the women most often named in the rumors, the Duchess of Abercorn, and asked her directly.
She refuted the claim, explaining that one can have a deep friendship with somebody, even be photographed holding hands without having to hop into bed with him. What is more telling, perhaps, is what one of the women rumored to have been close to Philip said about the Queen. She gives him a lot of leeway. Five words, and they capture something that the staff observed across the decades.
The Queen’s marriage was not built on rigid possessiveness. It was built on a confidence that was both political and personal. She knew who she was. She knew who he was. She knew that the energy he expended on his many friendships, his many causes, his many projects, was energy that ultimately came back to her. And she gave him the leeway to spend it.
Giles Brandreth, who knew Philip for 25 years through their shared involvement in the National Playing Fields Association, where Philip was president and Brandreth a long-time committee member, captured the essential dynamic of the marriage in a phrase that has become widely quoted after his book, Philip and Elizabeth: Portrait of a Marriage was published in 2004.
One of the Queen’s friends who had been at her wedding wrote to Brandreth and told him, “I think you’re the first person to get them right.” What Brandreth got right, by the assessment of someone who had known both of them for decades, was the durability of what they had built together.
As he later put it, “To live with the same person for so long and to get along so well is extraordinary. They were an amazing double act, a double act.” That is exactly the language Philip’s staff would have recognized, because what they witnessed daily was two people performing in tandem, each playing a part the other could not. He was the foil, she was the center.
He could say the thing she could not. She could maintain the dignity that he, by his own nature, could not have sustained. Philip himself, in old age, became increasingly aware of how he was perceived. Brandreth recorded a striking quote from him about his own reputation. He told his old friend, with characteristic directness, “I have become a caricature. There we are.
I’ve just got to live with it.” The same conversation produced another remark that captured something the staff had always known about him. About his ability to perform, to charm, to win a room. “I don’t think I have ever got up to make a speech of any kind anywhere, ever, and not made the audience laugh at least once.
You arrive somewhere, and you go down that receiving line. I get two or three of them to laugh, always.” His staff would have nodded at that. They had watched him do it for decades, and they had watched, just as often, the woman beside him watching him do it with that small, almost private expression that a long-married wife reserves for the husband she has heard get the same laugh out of the same line for the 40th time.
Robert Hardman, in his authoritative biography Queen of Our Times, published in 2022, described the Queen with the kind of nuance that staff would have recognized immediately. He called her shy, but with a steely self-confidence, inscrutable despite 10 decades in the public eye, unflappable, devout, indulgent, outwardly reserved, inwardly passionate, unsentimental, inquisitive, young at heart.
That string of contrasts captures what the staff saw daily. The shyness alongside the steel, the reserve alongside the passion, the unsentimental practicality alongside the indulgence she would show her dogs and her grandchildren. She was not a simple person. She was, in fact, one of the more complicated figures of the 20th century, hidden in plain sight behind a public persona of unwavering steadiness.
Hardman, drawing on his peerless access to members of the royal family, staff, friends, and royal records, came to understand her by the maxim she herself often repeated, “I have to be seen to be believed.” That phrase captured something important. The Queen understood that her job was not to be liked. It was not to be charming.
It was not to be a celebrity. Her job was to be visible, to be present, to be the fixed point in a changing world. And the staff who served her understood that this, more than any of the personal warmth they witnessed in private, was the core of her identity. To understand the marriage as the staff would come to know it, you have to begin where it began.
Westminster Abbey, November 20th, 1947. Britain was still in austerity. Rationing was in effect. Bombed-out neighborhoods still dominated London. And in the middle of all that, a young Princess Elizabeth, 21 years old, married Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten, Duke of Edinburgh, 26 years old, in a ceremony that was watched by 200 million people around the world on radio, and seen in person by 2,000 inside the Abbey.
Philip had renounced his Greek and Danish royal titles. He had become a naturalized British subject. He had taken the surname Mountbatten, Anglicizing his maternal family’s German name of Battenberg. He had converted from Greek Orthodoxy to the Church of England. He had agreed, in short, to remake himself entirely for the woman he was marrying.
The staff who would come to serve them would inherit the consequences of all this for decades. The man Philip had been before the wedding, the impatient young naval officer with no money, no fixed address, and little in the way of conventional aristocratic security, was the man underneath the husband he became.
The bluntness was the bluntness of a man who had been shaped by exile and war. The independence was the independence of a man who had learned very early that no institution could be trusted to protect him. The Queen, by contrast, came to the marriage with the full weight of British constitutional history on her shoulders. Her father was already king.
Her grandfather had been king. Her great-grandfather had been king. She had been raised, since the abdication of her uncle in 1936, with the certain knowledge that she would one day be Queen. She had known Philip since she was a girl. She had decided, by some accounts, as early as her 13th year, that he was the man she would marry.
She had pursued him gently and patiently until the marriage happened. This is sometimes forgotten in the popular accounts. Elizabeth was not a passive bride. She was a determined one. She had known her own mind from a young age, and she had stuck to it, even when her parents had reservations about Philip’s family connections, even when courtiers worried about his German sisters and his lack of money.
She had wanted him, and once she had decided, she did not waver. The staff who served them in the early years of the marriage saw two young people who were, in many ways, more in love than they would ever publicly admit. There was a passion at the center of the early household that the older courtiers found slightly bewildering, and that the younger staff found inspiring.
Philip, the staff recalled later, was attentive to her in the small ways that people who have been alone for too long are attentive to the first person who has properly chosen them. Elizabeth, the staff recalled, was happier in those years than at almost any time afterwards. She had married the man she had wanted. She was, briefly, simply a young wife and not yet a young Queen.
That brief period, the four and a half years between the wedding in 1947 and her father’s death in February 1952, is sometimes called the happiest stretch of the Queen’s life. They lived part of the time in Malta, where Philip was stationed as a naval officer. She drove herself around the island. She shopped in local markets.
She lived something close to the life of an ordinary naval officer’s wife, which was, by all accounts, what she would have chosen if the throne had been allowed to skip her. The staff who served them in Malta were a different staff from the staff who would later surround them at Buckingham Palace. They were smaller in number. They were more informal.
They saw the young couple at their most relaxed, and they witnessed something that the staff at the great palaces would only rarely glimpse afterwards. The Queen, in those Maltese years, was fully Princess Elizabeth, a young woman in her mid-20s, in love with her husband, free of the relentless visibility that the throne would bring.
When King George VI died in February 1952, Elizabeth was on a tour of Kenya. The news reached her in Treetops Lodge in the Aberdare Forest. She had gone up the tree in Africa as a princess. She came down, by the most famous formulation of the moment, as a Queen. The staff who traveled with her had to manage the news, the logistics, the immediate flight back to London, all while the new sovereign herself was processing the death of the father she had adored.
Martin Charteris, who was with her, captured what those days had been like. He had been her assistant private secretary. He observed at close hand his boss’s strength of character on what must have surely seemed the longest journey of her life, back to London from Kenya, where the news of the King’s death had reached her.
The young woman of 25 who had flown out to Africa as a princess flew home as a Queen. Philip was the one who told her. By the accounts that have come down to us, he took her aside in the gardens at Treetops and broke the news himself. He had been a naval officer. He had broken bad news before, but this was different. This was telling his wife that her father, whom she had loved deeply, was dead, and that her own life, as both of them had known it, was over.
The marriage that the staff would observe for the next 70 years was, in many ways, sealed in that moment. Whatever Philip might be afterwards, however difficult he could be, however much he chafed at his role, he had been the one beside her at the moment her life pivoted. He had told her. He had supported her.
And from that moment forward, she could never quite imagine doing the job without him. For 73 years, the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh lived inside one of the most heavily staffed households in the world. Footmen, dressers, valets, equerries, chauffeurs. Most never spoke. Some did. And from the ones who did, a portrait has emerged of the woman they served, told from the angle of the people who watched her closest.
Philip was not an easy man to work for. The royal historian, Dr. Kate Williams, put it bluntly, “It was said he was ill-tempered, that he was rough, and yet his staff, almost without exception, were fiercely loyal to him.” His closest friend and former private secretary, Michael Parker, gave the line that has become the most quoted assessment of the Duke’s character, “No one has a kinder heart or takes more trouble to conceal it.
” That sentence is the key to everything, because if Philip’s kindness was buried under bluntness, the woman he had married was the one person who saw all the way through. The staff understood this. They saw her see him. The coronation in 1953 produced one of the most extraordinary moments of the marriage. Philip knelt before his wife at the altar and swore the oath of fealty. He kissed her cheek.
He stepped back. He left his wife, 27 years old, sitting alone on the throne of Britain. From that day forward, he was her subject as well as her husband. In public, he accepted it with grace. In private, he chafed. The 1969 documentary Royal Family showed the Queen and Philip at home for the first time. 30 million people watched in the UK.
The Queen later regretted it. The film was withdrawn in 1972 and has never been officially shown again. The barrier of mystique had been visibly lowered, and once lowered, could not be raised again. In 1979, Lord Mountbatten was assassinated by the IRA off the coast of Ireland. Mountbatten had been the closest thing Philip had to a father.
The Queen was at Balmoral when the news came. She did not cry. She simply went very quiet. Philip began making phone calls. He carried the logistics so his wife could process the personal grief. A surviving letter Philip wrote read, “Let us hope that the great wave of revulsion against this senseless act of terrorism may yet bring a change of heart.
” This is Philip in private, not the bluff naval officer, but a thoughtful man looking for meaning in the loss. If 1979 wounded the Queen, 1992 nearly broke her. She called it her annus horribilis. The marriages of three of her four children ended. Windsor Castle burned for 15 hours. In Queen of Our Times, Robert Hardman recorded what the household saw.
Outwardly stoical as ever, the Queen was finding the divorce talks deeply upsetting. A former member of the household recalls that “Every now and then, there would be a glimpse of her despair. A glimpse of her despair.” That phrase is what the staff saw. Philip did what he had always done. He was the practical one.
He wrote those long, careful letters to Diana that Rosa Monckton would later describe as thoughtful and wise. He absorbed what his wife could not absorb. She held what he could not hold. In 1997, Diana died in Paris. The Queen remained at Balmoral with William and Harry, 15 and 12, deciding her duty was as a grandmother. The country demanded otherwise.
“Where is our Queen?” demanded the Sun. Philip was the one who saw it most clearly. The family came down to London. The Queen broadcast a tribute to Diana that bent the institution to meet the moment. The next day at Westminster Abbey, the Queen broke royal tradition by bowing her head as Diana’s coffin passed.
It was one of only two such bows the Queen ever performed in her entire reign. The other would come 24 years later at her husband’s funeral. If there was one place where the staff saw the Queen most fully as herself, it was Balmoral. She wore tweeds and head scarves. She drove herself in old Land Rovers, corgis in the back.
Philip fished and shot and drove around the estate in his own battered Land Rover. The staff would observe them at the end of a long day, sitting by the fire with whiskey and dogs and the particular ease of a couple who had been together so long that they did not need to fill the air with conversation.
According to the biographer Hugo Vickers, Philip had battled inoperable pancreatic cancer for eight years before his death. He continued his role as the Queen’s husband while carrying that diagnosis. When he died on April 9th, 2021 at 99, he had been married to the Queen for 73 years. The funeral was small. By his request, the buglers of the Royal Marines sounded action stations.
Right to the end, he had wanted his send-off to feel like a navy ceremony. The image of the Queen sitting alone at his funeral, masked, head bowed, became one of the most recognizable photographs of any monarch in modern history. She sat alone because COVID rules required it. She insisted, as she always had, on doing things by the rules, even when the rules cost her.
What did Philip’s staff really think of the Queen? They thought she was the steadiest person they had ever met. They thought she was kinder than her public face suggested. They thought, with Michael Parker’s old phrase ringing in their memories, that the woman who had spent 73 years married to the Duke had been the kindest thing in his life.
The one person he never had to conceal anything from. The one person he did not have to perform for, because she had seen him perform for so long that she knew exactly when he was doing it and exactly when he was not. The Queen drew people in and kept them. Bobo McDonald served her for 67 years. Angela Kelly for 28. Michael Parker remained Philip’s friend for 59 years.
The Queen had named the bond herself in 1997 at their 50th anniversary. “He has quite simply been my strength and stay all these years.” Five words. The same number that one of his rumored friends had used to describe what the Queen gave him in return. “She gives him a lot of leeway. Strength and stay. Leeway.
” Two short phrases summing up a marriage of 73 years. The staff who served that marriage did not need any more words than that. They had seen it for themselves every day for as long as they had been allowed to look. If this story moved you the way it moved me while researching it, do three small things before you go. Hit the like button so more people can find this story.
