Few people in Britain today can remember a time
before Prince Philip.
REPORTER: How are you, sir? Are you well, sir?
What, do I look ill?
Bluff, direct, sometimes tactless,
he is an apparently eternal fixture of the British landscape.
No, you idiots!
For nearly 70 years he's been at the Queen's side,
their marriage the bedrock of the monarchy.
But the road to marriage was anything but smooth.
As a young man, Prince Philip was seen as an outsider and a threat.
People felt this fellow's too good-looking,
we really don't know where he comes from.
He wasn't "one of us". He didn't go to Eton
and some of his family were married to Germans.
They were beastly to him.
This is the untold story of the high stakes, dynastic power struggle
that lay behind the Queen's marriage.
On the one side, the royal and political establishment...
Prince Philip was completely excluded.
Churchill really made him feel totally apart from the whole thing.
..on the other, Philip's uncle,
world-class charmer, and world-class schemer,
Lord Louis Mountbatten.
Mountbatten was ruthlessly ambitious
and the thing that he wanted more than anything else
was his nephew to marry the future Queen.
Dickie Mountbatten saw Philip as a kind of quasi-king.
It's a story of plotting and intrigue
that's only being pieced together now for the first time,
with the help of unpublished documents
and exclusive interviews with some of Philip's closest relatives.
The story of a penniless Greek prince from a family
with dubious German connections.
He talked a lot about the new political party
which he had joined, about a man called Adolf Hitler.
A young man who found himself at the heart of a ferocious struggle.
He said, "I don't know if I'm being very brave or very stupid
"going ahead with this wedding."
A struggle whose outcome would have profound implications
for the future of the monarchy
and even threatened to open a damaging rift
in the royal marriage itself.
The situation seemed very fraught indeed.
At one point she was even near tears.
On November 20th, 1947, the drab austerity of post-war Britain
was brightened by the pomp and glamour of a royal wedding.
The 21-year-old heir to the throne, Princess Elizabeth,
was marrying her third cousin, Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten.
'It was amazing'
cos it was the first bit of colour
that anybody had seen since the war.
It was unforgettable, like a fairy story.
But this was a fairy tale with a twist.
Many inside the Abbey
would rather the wedding was not happening at all.
'They thought that Philip was not a gentleman,'
they thought that he was rude, he was unmannerly, he was arrogant
and they suspected that he might be unfaithful to her.
Courtiers, politicians,
even members of the royal family all had their doubts.
And some were ferociously hostile.
But for one man,
this was the culmination of a decade-long campaign,
the dawn of a new era,
Philip's uncle, Louis Mountbatten.
The moment that Philip and Elizabeth
walked down the aisle as man and wife,
he felt that his lifetime's ambition had been achieved.
He truly believed that he was now the pater familias
of the royal family.
Louis Mountbatten and his wife Edwina
had been the golden couple of the pre-war era.
Their home videos from the 1920s and '30s capture their lifestyle.
Mountbatten and his wife lived the most extravagant life
that you could possibly imagine.
This is the jazz age, cocktails and laughter, what comes after.
This is the world of Noel Coward.
We all loved him.
He was a tremendous personality,
he had an enormous ego, which I think he'd admit to.
People, I know it, either they loved him or they hated him.
Really seriously. We all loved him.
Always known to his family as Dickie,
Philip's uncle was a great grandson of Queen Victoria.
His wife, heir to a fabulously wealthy financier.
They liked nightclubs and dances
and living it up with the best people
and particularly consorting with the top royals of their generation.
Here, the Duke of Kent, the younger son of King George V,
can be seen with Mountbatten's two daughters,
Pamela and Patricia.
Oh, yes. Well, they were very much of their generation
of bright young things. Yes.
And they were fortunate to be rich - polo ponies and fast boats
and things.
They certainly lived it up.
Mountbatten was a charmer and a bon viveur.
He was also a man of ferocious ambition,
an ambition that had its roots in childhood trauma.
At the start of World War I,
Dickie's father had been forced to stand down as First Sea Lord
at the Admiralty because of his German origins.
The family were originally called Battenberg.
Young Dickie never got over the humiliation.
He was terribly hurt
and I think my father unconsciously saw it as a target.
Don't you think that's right? Mm.
That he would want to try and get up as far as his father had
in order to vindicate him.
The young Mountbatten set himself the aim of becoming First Sea Lord.
He was ambitious too for his dynasty
and in 1936, a crisis in the monarchy
presented him with an opportunity.
Dickie had been close friends with King Edward VIII,
but when Edward was forced to abdicate
in favour of his younger brother George,
Mountbatten moved swiftly to ingratiate himself
with the new regime.
He's seen here at a naval review in 1937
with King George's daughter, Princess Elizabeth,
now heir to the throne,
whose position opened up intriguing possibilities.
'Princess Elizabeth is going to be the Queen,'
there's a limited pool of potential husbands,
really quite limited, a few senior aristocrats
and a few international princes.
Mountbatten had the perfect candidate -
his nephew, Prince Philip of Greece,
the son of his sister Alice.
Dickie saw Philip, his nephew, as the obvious consort
to the future Queen Elizabeth.
His looks, his ancestry qualified Philip for that role.
Philip had been at boarding school in Scotland.
In the spring of 1939,
he enrolled as a cadet at Dartmouth Naval College.
And it was there, on July 22nd, 1939,
that Mountbatten succeeded in engineering a historic encounter
between his nephew and Princess Elizabeth.
King and Queen are going to visit the Royal Naval College in Dartmouth
and they are to be shown round by Mountbatten
and Mountbatten has the idea
that if Philip is put in charge of the young princesses,
then who knows what might happen?
Philip is pushed to the fore,
he's constantly being shoved into the eyeline
of the extremely susceptible young princess.
The meeting was captured in these historic, grainy images.
Lord Mountbatten wanted to strike the spark that day and it worked.
There's no question that 13-year-old Princess Elizabeth
fell in love with the 18-year-old Adonis, Prince Philip.
Princess Elizabeth was completely smitten.
And as far as she was concerned, I think,
from then on he was the one for her.
Mountbatten had proved a superb Cupid.
But Philip and his uncle would soon discover many around the princess
were far less keen on seeing the romance flourish.
At Dartmouth Naval College in 1939, Louis Mountbatten had successfully
played Cupid for his nephew, Prince Philip, and Princess Elizabeth.
But not everyone was as impressed with Philip as she was.
The young pretender was impeccably royal.
But his background raised other, troubling questions.
Philip had been born in this house on the Greek island of Corfu
18 years before, in the summer of 1921.
Although his uncle was King of Greece, Philip didn't have
a drop of Greek blood, being descended from Danish
and German royalty, as well as Queen Victoria.
In September 1922, when Philip was just a year old, a revolution
broke out in Athens following defeat in a war against Turkey.
The King, Philip's uncle, was overthrown.
And Philip's father, Prince Andrea, was arrested.
Prince Philip's father was a scapegoat.
Accused - he was a soldier - of poor leadership, of disobeying an order.
Prince Rainer of Hesse in Germany is Philip's nephew,
the son of Philip's sister, Sophia.
In her old age, Sophia wrote a private memoir
which has never before been shared with the public.
In it, Philip's sister vividly describes
the family's trauma in 1922.
"My father's trial ended with him being sentenced to death.
"Many governments tried to save his life,
"including King Victor Emmanuel of Italy,
"King Alfonso XIII of Spain, and the Pope,
"but finally my father's first cousin, King George V of England,
"succeeded in having the death sentence remitted."
Andrea's family connections had saved his life.
But he was sentenced to perpetual exile.
Philip's family fled their home on Corfu aboard a British battleship.
But if they'd hoped for a welcome in Britain, they were disappointed.
This is only five years since the Russian Revolution,
European royalty is on the run.
I don't think the King was eager to have exiled royals
wandering around in London
spreading the idea that royalty can be overthrown.
Unwelcome in Britain, the family moved to Paris.
This recently discovered archive
shows Philip's parents with relatives.
Andrea and his family rented one house and then
they couldn't afford that, so they moved to another,
so there was always a sense of impermanence.
Under the pressure of exile,
Philip's parents' marriage deteriorated.
His mother, Princess Alice, began to show signs of mental illness.
On May 2nd 1930, Philip went on a family outing
and came home to find his mother had been hauled off
to a mental asylum.
He'd scarcely see her for the rest of his childhood.
As for his father, he moved in with his mistress.
Andrea said, "I'm not going to cope with this family,
"I'm not going to have anything more to do with it, I'm off."
He decided that the best place for him was the South of France,
Monte Carlo, somewhere where
he could sip Champagne and look at the waves bouncing along.
Just nine years old, Philip was effectively an orphan.
He was sent to boarding school in Britain,
and came increasingly under the wing of his uncle Louis Mountbatten,
whose country home at Adsdean in Sussex
he had first visited in the 1920s.
His cousin Patricia fondly recalls his visits.
He's three years older than me. He was very boyish, full of fun.
Up to pranks - quite nice pranks.
And just somebody that one welcomed,
rather than think, "Oh, it's a bit of a bore, so and so's coming,"
you thought, "How nice, he's going to come and enliven life."
But young Philip's destiny lay in the balance.
As third in line to the Greek throne,
he was torn between his English relatives
and his birthright as a Greek royal.
In 1935, the Greek monarchy was restored.
The body of Philip's uncle, King Constantine,
was returned to Athens for burial,
and the 15-year-old Philip can be seen in film of the ceremony,
shown here for the first time on British TV.
The question was, where did his future lie?
It was touch and go. I think that the King of Greece,
left to himself,
would probably have wanted Philip to come back to join the Greek Navy,
but his uncle had absolutely no doubt at all
that his career ought to be in Britain and in the British Navy.
Mountbatten was determined to keep his young protege under his wing.
He firmly steered him towards Dartmouth Naval College
and his fateful 1939 encounter with the future Queen.
Mountbatten would have told him straight away,
"Look, here's your best chance, son. Do what I tell you
"and you could become the husband of the future monarch."
A few weeks after Philip and Elizabeth's meeting,
the Second World War broke out
and the handsome young prince was sent away to sea.
Philip's first captain later wrote a revealing memoir -
a memoir that has never been published,
but that has been shown to this programme by his family.
It contains a snap of the 18-year-old Philip.
It also contains an account of a remarkable conversation
that suggests the young prince was already well aware
of Mountbatten's plans for him.
"My Uncle Dickie has ideas for me," the young midshipman confided.
"He thinks I could marry Princess Elizabeth."
"Are you really fond of her?"
the somewhat startled captain replied.
"Oh, yes, very. I write to her every week," said Philip.
Elizabeth was still just 13.
It's perfectly clear that this was a campaign
with Dickie Mountbatten as the general
and the key fighter in the campaign being Philip.
The prince would serve with distinction
through the Second World War.
And while he was proving his mettle on the High Seas,
Princess Elizabeth was growing up.
JAUNTY MUSIC
She spent the war years at Windsor.
Third cousin Philip was a regular visitor.
At Christmas 1943, he watched her play Aladdin
in a pantomime with her sister Margaret.
Her governess later described the event.
"I have never known Lilibet so animated.
"There was a sparkle about her none of us had ever seen before."
But the princess's parents, the King and Queen, were not quite as keen.
Exotic, mysterious foreigners generally hold more appeal
for teenage girls than their fathers,
as one courtier later recalled.
"The family were at first horrified
"when they saw that Prince Philip was making up to Princess Elizabeth.
"They felt he was rough, ill-mannered, uneducated,
"and would probably not be faithful."
The King and Queen had one reservation in particular -
Philip's Germanness.
Like the royal family itself,
Philip's ancestry contained much German blood.
But there was a second, more serious problem.
Philip's four older sisters, all of whom had married Germans.
Three of their husbands became Nazis -
two of them from the aristocratic von Hessen family,
whose ancestral home at Wolfsgarten near Frankfurt
Philip had visited on family holidays.
Prince Rainer's parents were married nearby.
My mother, the youngest, was the first one to get married.
She was 16.
This is my father, Christoph of Hesse, and my mother, Sophia,
and, er, here we have the whole group.
Actually, Philip sitting here is the only person
still existing today. All the others have gone.
The private memoirs of Philip's sister,
Sophia, Prince Rainer's mother,
contain an account of a meeting with a family friend -
Herman Goering, some years before the Nazis seized power.
"He talked a lot about the new political party which he had joined,
"especially about the party leader, a man called Adolf Hitler.
"As Goering was insistent that we should meet Hitler personally,
"we decided to ask him to lunch at our flat.
"I have to say here that although Cre and I
"changed our political view fundamentally some years later,
"we were impressed by this charming and seemingly modest man."
Prince Rainer's parents later attended Goering's wedding,
where Philip's sister Sophia was photographed at the top table,
with Hitler.
By this time Prince Rainer's father was an SS colonel
and head of one of the Nazi intelligence agencies.
Prince Rainer has confronted unflinchingly his family's past,
and wrestled with it throughout his life.
It still continues to be haunting.
That is for sure.
During the Second World War, it was a problem, too, for Prince Philip.
In 1937, his sister Cecile and her husband, both Nazi members,
had been killed in a plane crash.
The pictures of Philip at the funeral in Darmstadt
made for uncomfortable viewing.
The Queen - who had lost a brother in the First World War -
was particularly hostile to Philip's German connections.
The story went that she used to refer to him
as "the Hun" at one point.
She would have preferred someone from her own
type of background, a member of the British aristocracy
and not a sort of foreign,
and worst of all, quite German prince.
Philip, though, still had one champion in his corner -
Uncle Dickie.
The war had launched Mountbatten on a meteoric rise,
and he was now Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in the Far East.
But the pushy newcomer at the top table aroused deep distrust.
Mountbatten definitely had infinite capacity
for kindling suspicion among those around him.
Suspicion because of his ambitions, suspicion of his cunning
and his capacity for manoeuvring.
General Sir Gerald Templar said to him once,
said, "Dickie, you're so crooked
"that if you swallowed a nail, you'd shit a corkscrew."
Mountbatten also had a reputation for being a dangerous radical.
The older members of the establishment
were very frightened of any fresh air coming along.
And he certainly produced a gale of fresh air with him.
They thought that change was never for the good.
My father thought change was nearly always excellent.
In the midst of the war,
Mountbatten continued to find time to press his nephew's case.
Dynastic ambition aside,
he believed a marriage between Philip and Elizabeth
would be an ideal arrangement for all concerned.
The characters of Prince Philip
and Princess Elizabeth matched extremely well.
And I think he genuinely thought
that this was something that should be really considered.
Might be a very good idea.
On a trip to London in 1944, Mountbatten suggested to King George
that they open talks with the Greek King about a possible marriage.
King George slapped him down.
"I know you like to get things settled at once,
"once you have an idea in mind,
"but I have come to the conclusion that we are going too fast."
Mountbatten, as ever, was proving over-enthusiastic.
He was beating the Japanese.
The royal family were proving trickier.
On May 8, 1945, the war in Europe came to an end.
On his return to Britain, Philip became an increasingly
regular visitor to the palace.
Elizabeth's governess was impressed by what she saw.
He came into the palace like a refreshing sea breeze. A forthright
and completely natural young man, given to say what he thought.
Philip was now an intelligent, worldly 24-year-old,
and was starting to sense his over-enthusiastic uncle
might be a double-edged sword.
He wrote delicately to the returning conqueror of Japan.
"Please, I beg of you, not too much advice in an affair of the heart,
"or I shall be forced to do the wooing by proxy."
Philip was taking charge.
And in August 1946, he was invited to holiday with the royal family
at Balmoral - a traditional ordeal to be endured
by prospective royal in-laws.
By now the King was beginning to be won over
by Philip's breezy naval charm.
Others around the royal family remained deeply hostile,
as one courtier noted.
MAN: Lords Salisbury, Eldon and Stanley think him no gentleman,
and in a sense they are right.
They also profess to see in him a Teutonic strain.
They were beastly to him. They didn't like him.
He was rather like Princess Diana
when she first came into the royal compound.
He wasn't one of us. He didn't go to Eton, he didn't shoot.
And you couldn't be certain, because he was Greek,
or Greek/German, you couldn't be certain
he wouldn't do something wrong at the wrong moment.
It was at Balmoral Philip committed one of his earliest gaffes.
MAN: Everybody there wears the kilt and Philip had to borrow one.
Didn't really want to do it,
and wanted still to show his independence, and went
into the room where the King stood and dropped into a deep curtsy.
The King was not amused.
But for the Princess, none of this mattered and Philip knew it.
MAN: He has absolutely captured the Princess's heart.
She was infatuated with him,
she was absolutely besotted with him.
MAN: At Balmoral that year, Prince Philip simply proposed to her.
He didn't go to the King first of all
to say, "I'm going to ask for your daughter's hand in marriage,"
He actually checked it out with her, what did she think,
and of course she thought yes.
But the King was still not convinced
and insisted on a year's delay before any announcement
was made, to give the Princess time to reflect.
Two months later, at the wedding of Lord Mountbatten's daughter
Patricia, the world's press began to sense something was brewing.
NEWSREEL: Then Lord Louis himself arrived, escorting his daughter.
And I'm sure you'll agree with me
that Miss Patricia was the loveliest bride of the year.
Princess Elizabeth was a bridesmaid
and Prince Philip was filmed taking her coat.
I don't think anyone thought anything about it.
But the next day there was a picture, I think, of it
and somehow that I think was the first intimation that
the press had that this might be something interesting.
As press speculation began to mount, the royal family whisked
the young princess off on a tour of South Africa.
For four whole months, she would be away from her secret fiance.
But if her parents had hoped separation might weaken her resolve,
they were disappointed.
FANFARE
On my 21st birthday, I welcome the opportunity to speak to all
the peoples of the British Commonwealth and Empire.
As she turned 21, the future queen's attachment to Prince Philip
remained firm and unshakeable.
And while she gained experience of her first major foreign tour,
back in London, Philip's Uncle Dickie was once more able
to make himself useful.
There's no doubt that in this affair, Mountbatten saw
himself as Mr Fix It. He'd be able to sort everything out.
"Got reservations about Philip? Totally sound,
"totally sound fellow. Don't you worry, we'll get it sorted."
A superb networker, Mountbatten had close relations
with both the press and the new Labour government.
A letter from Mountbatten to the journalist
and Labour MP Tom Driberg survives, stressing Philip's Britishness.
"He left Greece at the age of one and has only spent three months
"of his entire life since in Greece and cannot even speak the language."
But in his campaign to rebrand Philip as a dyed-in-the-wool
Englishman, Uncle Dickie still confronted one problem -
his nephew's slightly awkward surname.
His father, Prince Andrea, descended from the line
of Schleswig Holstein Sonderburg Glucksburg - not really a very easy
name to trip off the tongue and one with a rather Germanic feel to it.
As ever, Mountbatten had a suggestion.
Mountbatten sort of said,
"Well, why don't you why don't you call yourself Mountbatten?
"I mean, that's your mother's name, after all."
Philip agreed.
When he was finally granted British citizenship in February 1947,
he had been miraculously transformed from Prince Philip of Greece
to Lt Philip Mountbatten.
A few months later the engagement was finally announced,
the newsreels portraying Philip as a thoroughly British naval officer.
NEWSREEL: Off duty, Lt Philip describes highlights
of the royal review to his wardroom companions.
Until the royal wedding in November, it's the Navy first.
Uncle Dickie's spin had worked.
In the weeks before the wedding, Philip posed happily
for the cameras with his fiancee and her family.
But behind the scenes, tensions remained.
Philip's politics were one source of friction with his new in-laws.
Philip's political views were influenced by his progressive uncle,
Mountbatten, who was now serving as viceroy in India for the Labour
government, organising the country's transition to independence.
Mountbatten had become close friends with Indian
Independence leader, Mahatma Gandhi.
Gandhi was very excited about the wedding.
He said, "I would like really to have sent a gift,
"but as you know, I have nothing.
"I have given away all my earthly possessions."
Mountbatten had a solution.
"Why not send a piece of cloth woven on your famous spinning wheel,"
he suggested to Gandhi.
Unfortunately, when it arrived, the Queen's grandmother,
Queen Mary, mistook the gift for Gandhi's famous loin cloth.
And she said that this was most indelicate,
what a horrible thing, a most indelicate present.
And the funny thing was, and to Philip's great credit,
he stuck up for Gandhi.
He said, "No, Gandhi is a great man.
"You shouldn't be criticising him."
And Queen Mary gave him a sort of royal glare
and marched on.
With the wedding day looming,
Mountbatten flew home to be guest of honour at his nephew's stag do.
For him, this was the culmination of a decade's dreaming and scheming.
But as the wedding day dawned on November 20, 1947,
Mountbatten's young protege was anxious.
That morning, Philip had a revealing conversation with his cousin Patricia.
We were sitting having breakfast at Kensington Palace
and he said, "I don't know if I'm being very brave or very stupid
"going ahead with this wedding."
And I said, "Well, I'm quite sure you're being very brave."
I think was well aware that he wasn't just taking on an immediate family,
he was taking on all the outer aspects of the court life.
I mean, he was really well aware, I think.
that there were going be difficulties.
The fairytale wedding went ahead,
Philip and Elizabeth swearing their vows in Westminster Abbey
before the great and the good of the British establishment.
But Philip and his uncle were painfully aware that key battles
lay ahead over the question of what Philip's role
would be as husband to the future Queen.
Battles that would threaten to drive a wedge between the young couple
and would shape the future of Elizabeth's reign.
NEWSREEL: Hemmed in by well-wishers, the royal car had great difficulty
in getting back to Broadlands, the honeymoon retreat of the royal pair.
Following their wedding in November 1947,
Philip and Elizabeth spent the first part of their honeymoon
at Dickie Mountbatten's country residence
at Broadlands in Hampshire.
But behind the images of young love, tensions bubbled.
There had been no prince consort since the days of Queen Victoria
and her "meddling" German husband, Prince Albert, a century before.
Many feared Mountbatten would encourage his nephew to play
a similar role once his wife sat on the throne.
Dickie Mountbatten saw Philip as a kind of quasi-king
wielding enormous influence.
It was hitting the dynastic jackpot as far as Mountbatten was concerned.
These fears came to the fore at the end of 1948
when King George VI fell seriously ill.
The King's illness raised the possibility
a regent might be required to reign on his behalf.
The obvious candidate was the Princess.
It was assumed that she would be under the control
of her husband and his uncle.
The fear of Mountbatten sparked an extraordinary plot
involving the exiled Duke of Windsor, formerly King Edward VIII,
who had abdicated in 1936, and his wife, Wallis Simpson,
a plot only recently uncovered by historian Christopher Wilson.
At that time
a minor aristocrat and complete scoundrel
called Kenneth de Courcy,
was cruising around the Duke of Windsor, who was exiled in Paris.
De Courcy suggested to the Duke of Windsor
that if he played his cards right he could come back to Britain,
sit on the throne as regent.
De Courcy wrote to the Duke's wife.
"I may tell you most confidentially that a regency
"has already been discussed.
"I don't think it too much to say that if the regency should be one
"primarily influenced by the Mountbattens
"the consequences for the Dynasty might be fatal."
De Courcy here is playing on fears,
and they're fears expressed by courtiers
and those who surround the royal household
and they're very real fears. They were very worried
that the Mountbattens would suddenly take the House of Windsor
by the scruff of its neck and turn it into something else altogether.
Shortly afterwards, the King recovered
and the near-treasonable plot was dropped.
But the hostility towards Mountbatten and his nephew
within the Establishment worsened in 1951,
with the return of the Conservatives to power.
During the war, Churchill and Mountbatten had been close.
But the relationship soured over Mountbatten's role
in Indian independence.
Unfortunately, Winston had allowed his emotions to rule his head.
He said to my father, you know,
"You gave away India," which was a marvellous idea -
as though my father had woken up one morning and thought,
"I know what I'll do - I'll give away India."
He really couldn't forgive him for quite a long time.
He said to Dickie Mountbatten, "What you did in India
"is as though you slapped me across the face with a whip."
Churchill's hostility to Mountbatten extended to his nephew, Philip.
Churchill apparently disliked and distrusted Prince Philip.
I think he thought him too brash, too arrogant, too pushy,
not quite English.
Many other conservatives also viewed Philip, like his uncle,
as a dangerous idealist.
We all know that utopia is unobtainable,
but if we know the world that we want,
then at least we can work for it.
In his private diaries,
the future Conservative Prime Minister Harold Macmillan
was contemptuous.
"I fear this young man is going to be as big a bore as Prince Albert
"and as great a trouble.
"Let us hope that the King may live to be a great age
"and the power of the Mountbattens be cached accordingly."
It proved a forlorn hope.
NEWSREEL: The passing of King George VI
came as a sudden and most grievous shock to his people
all over the world.
The death of the King in February 1952, aged just 56,
came as the Prince and Princess began a tour of Kenya.
With them, serving as Princess Elizabeth's lady-in-waiting,
was Mountbatten's daughter Pamela.
More than 60 years on, she vividly recalls the moment
Philip informed Elizabeth that the King had died.
He gets up and goes out into the little sitting room
and, you know, obviously says to her
something like, you know, "Come for a walk in the garden."
And they go together.
And we peep through the window the whole time.
And you could tell from the body language
the moment that he tells her, you know.
And, um, she comes...they come in
and, er, I think then I...I went up and gave her a hug,
you know, about her father,
and then I thought, "My God, of course she's Queen,"
so then I drop into a curtsey.
The royal couple dashed back to a cold, grey England for the funeral.
While the new Queen grieved, Philip - seen here on the left -
had his own anxieties.
Although he hadn't lost a beloved father...
..it meant the end... the end of his career.
He would have been at the head of the Navy in no time.
Everything has to be given up.
From now on, being husband of the Queen would be a full-time job.
But if Philip had doubts about his future role,
Uncle Dickie had no such reservations.
A few days after the King's death, Mountbatten gave a dinner party
at Broadlands in Hampshire,
and let slip the mask of his own dynastic ambition,
fuelling the darkest fears of his enemies.
During the course of the evening he said,
"The House of Mountbatten now reigns."
A very indiscreet thing,
and characteristically indiscreet thing, to say.
It was almost treasonable in a way,
and certainly it shocked the people who heard him speak.
One of the people who was there was so shocked
that the next morning he went to see Queen Mary.
The Queen's grandmother was appalled at the suggestion
the dynasty's name would change from Windsor to Mountbatten,
and reportedly turned her anger on Prince Philip.
"What the devil does that damned fool Edinburgh think
"that the family name has got to do with him?"
After a sleepless night,
Queen Mary contacted Churchill - not Philip's greatest fan.
He immediately brought pressure on the young Queen,
who found herself torn between her husband
and the combined weight of the political and royal establishment.
Here was her Prime Minister
coming to see her about a matter that he considered very important.
And the Prime Minister being Winston Churchill
and she's a girl of 25... Yes. ..competing with Winston.
Yes. Here was a very, very young monarch
and a very old Prime Minister,
and she felt, I think, she couldn't go against
the first sort of constitutional advice she was being given.
The Queen Mother, too, opposed any name change.
Faced with this united front, the young Queen did as she was told.
Within days of Mountbatten opening his mouth at his dinner party
publicly it was announced that the House of Windsor
would remain the House of Windsor.
The Windsor dynasty had closed ranks.
Mountbatten's quip had backfired disastrously.
Philip was furious, reportedly venting his anger in private.
"I am the only man in the country
"not allowed to give his name to his children.
"I'm nothing but a bloody amoeba."
Naturally it upset Prince Philip, because I think the thought
that your own child is not going to have your name,
to any man would be very upsetting.
I think that was probably the only thing between them
that did cause hurt for quite a long time.
As the young family moved into Buckingham Palace,
it was soon clear the family name was not the only issue
where the Prince was going to be sidelined.
Prince Philip once said to me, "The King died
"and everything changed."
Suddenly...his wife was his wife
but she was also the Queen.
And I said to the Duke of Edinburgh,
"Were there people there telling you what to do?"
He said, "No, there were people there telling me, 'Keep out.'"
Prince Philip was completely excluded
and unwelcome at court, unwelcome at Buckingham Palace.
You know, everybody closed ranks.
"No, no need to tell you, no."
And Churchill would advise that he couldn't take part.
Yes, yes.
You know, Churchill really made him feel totally apart
from the whole thing.
He was certainly, I think, kept down I think by everybody
as much as possible, really.
ALL: God save the Queen!
Philip had never expected to be a king,
but nor had he expected to be so brutally and crudely sidelined.
I think that Philip felt emasculated by the position
that he had to occupy.
The Queen, in effect, was wearing the trousers.
But there would be an unexpected twist in the saga
of the royal surname.
In 1960, at the time of the birth of Prince Andrew,
a surprise announcement was made.
In future, the Queen's non-royal descendants would be known as
Mountbatten-Windsor - a compromise proposed by the Queen herself,
as Harold Macmillan, now Prime Minister, made clear in his diary.
"The Queen only wishes, properly enough,
"to do something to please her husband,
"with whom she is desperately in love.
"What upsets me is the Prince's almost brutal attitude
"to the Queen over all this."
Macmillan's deputy, Rab Butler,
also reported the Queen to be close to tears when discussing the issue.
That certainly indicates to me
that in the presence of both the Prime Minister
and the Deputy Prime Minister,
the situation had seemed very fraught indeed.
13 years later, the new name appeared for the first time
on the wedding certificate of Princess Anne.
The irrepressible Mountbatten, now in his 70s, was delighted.
CHRISTOPHER WILSON: I remember going to see him at Broadlands,
after Princess Anne had married.
I went in and, er...
it was his tie I noticed first of all,
and, erm, I said, "Oh, look!"
And it was a sort of "M" up this way and then a "W" down that way,
a mirror image.
I said, "Oh, oh, that's rather wonderful. 'M' for Mountbatten?"
He said, "No, no. 'MW' for Mountbatten-Windsor."
And then he pointed to the carpet,
and there it was embroidered with Ms and Ws all over.
Mountbatten had outlived many of his enemies,
and he had his own small victory.
He remained close to the royal family
and became a mentor to Prince Charles in particular.
In 1979 he was murdered by the IRA while on holiday in Ireland.
A few years before his death he wrote, kindly,
to his nephew, Philip.
"I've always been very fond of you from a small boy upwards.
"You sometimes seemed rather disappointed -
"perhaps frustrated would be a better word -
"but I feel you underestimate your effect on the UK,
"and especially the Commonwealth."
Philip's has been a life spent walking two steps behind his wife.
It wasn't quite the role he'd envisaged for himself.
And it's perhaps not surprising that at times his temper has flared
and his irritation has shown.
But he's survived.
GYLES BRANDRETH: I think a lot of people don't realise the skilful way
he has coped with the inversion of the traditional structure
of a husband and wife.
He's made it work. He's made it work for the monarchy
and I think in the long run he's made it work for himself.
Subtitles by Ericsson