As cousins, Philip and young Elizabeth had crossed paths twice, first at a family wedding in 1934 and then at the coronation of King George VI in 1937. But it wasn’t until July 22, 1939, when the King and Queen took their daughters to the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth, that the 13-year-old princess spent any time with 18-year-old Philip, who was a cadet in training at the school.

At the behest of Dickie Mountbatten, an officer in the Royal Navy, Philip was invited to have lunch and tea with the royal family. Marion “Crawfie” Crawford, Princess Elizabeth’s governess, observed the sparks, later writing that Lilibet, as she was called, “never took her eyes off him,” although he “did not pay her any special attention”—no surprise, since he was already a man of the world, and she only on the cusp of adolescence. While everything else in the life of Lilibet was laid out for her, she made the most important decision on her own. “She never looked at anyone else,” said Elizabeth’s cousin Margaret Rhodes.

During the war years, Philip came to visit his cousins occasionally at Windsor Castle, and he and the princess corresponded when he was at sea, serving with the Royal Navy in the Mediterranean and the Pacific. Friends and relatives detected a flutter of romance between Philip and Elizabeth by December 1943, when he was on leave at Windsor for Christmas and watched Elizabeth, then 17, perform in the “Aladdin” pantomime. The King was quite taken by Philip, telling his mother the young man was “intelligent, has a good sense of humour and thinks about things in the right way.” But both the King and Queen thought that Lilibet was too young to consider a serious suitor.

Philip visited Balmoral, the royal family’s estate in the Scottish Highlands, in the summer of 1944, and he wrote Queen Elizabeth about how he savored “the simple enjoyment of family pleasures and amusements and the feeling that I am welcome to share them.” That December, while Philip was away on active duty, his father died of cardiac arrest at age 62 in the room where he lived at the Hotel Metropole, in Monte Carlo. All he left his 23-year-old son were some trunks containing clothing, an ivory shaving brush, cuff links, and a signet ring that Philip would wear for the rest of his life.

While Philip was completing his deployment in the Far East, Lilibet enjoyed the freedom of the postwar period. At a party given by the Grenfell family at their Belgravia home in February 1946 to celebrate the peace, the princess impressed Laura Grenfell as “absolutely natural … she opens with a very easy and cosy joke or remark She had everyone in fits talking about a sentry who lost his hat while presenting arms.” Elizabeth “danced every dance Thoroughly enjoying herself” as the “Guardsmen in uniform queued up.”

Philip finally returned to London in March 1946. He took up residence at the Mountbatten home on Chester Street, where he relied on his uncle’s butler to keep his threadbare wardrobe in good order. He was a frequent visitor to Buckingham Palace, roaring into the side entrance in a black MG sports car to join Lilibet in her sitting room for dinner, with Crawfie acting as duenna. Lilibet’s younger sister, Margaret, was invariably on hand as well, and Philip included her in their high jinks, playing ball and tearing around the long corridors. Crawfie was taken with Philip’s breezy charm and shirtsleeve informality—a stark contrast to the fusty courtiers surrounding the monarch.

During a month-long stay at Balmoral late in the summer of 1946, Philip proposed to Elizabeth, and she accepted on the spot, without even consulting her parents. Her father consented on the condition that they keep their engagement a secret until it could be announced after her 21st birthday, the following April. Like the princess, Philip didn’t believe in public displays of affection, which made it easy to mask his feelings. But he revealed them privately in a touching letter to Queen Elizabeth in which he wondered if he deserved “all the good things which have happened to me,” especially “to have fallen in love completely and unreservedly.”

A Royal Wedding

Palace courtiers and aristocratic friends and relatives of the royal family viewed Philip suspiciously as a penniless interloper. They were irked that he seemed to lack proper deference toward his elders. But mostly they viewed him as a foreigner, specifically a “German” or, in their less gracious moments, a “Hun,” a term of deep disparagement after the bloody conflict so recently ended. Even though his mother had been born in Windsor Castle, and he had been educated in England and served admirably in the British Navy, Philip had a distinctly Continental flavor, and he lacked the clubby proclivities of the Old Etonians. What’s more, the Danish royal family that had ruled in Greece was in fact predominantly German, as was his maternal grandfather, Prince Louis of Battenberg.