Fit for a Queen: A finely toned Philip jumps from his water skis while on holiday in the Med

The young woman’s shrieking was loud and getting louder, but there was laughter in it. ‘Stop it! Philip, stop it, stop it stop it!’ accompanied by the scamper of feet on stairs.

A grinning man was reaching out and pinching her bottom repeatedly and growling: ‘Get up there, girl, get up there,’ forcing her up.

Chief Petty Officer William Evans, who had been coming down, had to get out of their way as the screaming and laughing Queen, in a blouse and skirt, was ushered by Prince Philip’s pinches and growls all the way to the top of the 80-tread staircase at Broadlands, in Hampshire, home of the late Earl Mountbatten.

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The royal couple were regular weekend guests at the home of Philip’s Uncle Dickie, and staff noted that only one of the two bedrooms in their suite was ever slept in. At the top of the stairs the noise suddenly subsided.

The door of their suite closed behind them, muffled giggling continued, and then there was silence. ‘They were like a pair of teenagers,’ recalls Evans, now 83, who was head of Mountbatten’s personal staff. ‘The Queen had a look of panic on her face that wasn’t really panic at all, if you know what I mean — she was loving it, and Philip knew that.

‘He was enjoying himself, and he wouldn’t stop, but just kept pinching her bottom all the way to the top, and it’s a lot of stairs. I wondered whether they ever behaved like that at Buckingham Palace.’

A remarkable vignette. But what is even more extraordinary is that the royal couple were not newlyweds when this highly charged, and clearly amorous scene was played out.

It was the early Sixties and Philip and Elizabeth had been married for getting on for 15 years, the Queen had been on the throne for the best part of a decade, and they already had three of their four children.

This was the Queen at play in a way the public could never imagine, especially as there had, by that time, been so much talk about Philip straying and spending endless weeks on trips that took him far from home, sometimes to the other side of the world.

Undoubtedly, being at Broadlands, away from the buttoned-up formality of the Palace, helped.

‘But this,’ says Evans, ‘is how they were. Whenever they came to stay they always had lots of fun together. She always looked at him with a glint in her eyes.’

Happy together: The Queen and Prince Philip are clearly enjoying married life as they step out in Malta in 1949

A magnetic attraction: Elizabeth, left, and Philip only have eyes for each other as they walk with Princess Margaret and the Queen at a wedding in 1946

And yet rumours about the Duke of Edinburgh and flings were never far away. There is still a long list of women with whom Philip, 95 in June, is alleged to have had affairs, from showgirls to duchesses, and even the odd princess.

Tales of illegitimate children have been amusing smart dinner parties for decades.

Princess Diana liked to play a mischievous parlour game with guests in which they had to guess how many women had been linked with him.

In fact, the Princess was fond of the man she called ‘Pa’. He was one of the few members of the Royal Family who exchanged affectionate letters with her when problems in her marriage surfaced. (In one of them, he memorably declared: ‘I cannot imagine anyone in their right mind leaving you for Camilla.’ He signed it: ‘Fondest, Pa.’)

But despite all the colourful and entertaining speculation, even Kitty Kelley, the hard-edged American biographer who claimed Nancy Reagan — who died on Sunday — had an affair with Frank Sinatra, failed to find any evidence when she came to London bent on proving the Philip stories true.

Chemistry: The spark between the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh is still obvious at a polo match in 1966

As glamorous as two Hollywood stars, the new Queen and her husband on a night out at a circus show in 1952

Certainly, in the years before marrying the Queen, Philip had a reputation as a ladies’ man. In parts of Buckingham Palace it was predicted the impecunious but handsome Prince was so attractive to women that he would find it virtually impossible to keep to his marriage vows.

Certainly, the 13-year-old Princess Elizabeth, on being introduced to the 18-year-old cadet on a visit with her father George VI to Dartmouth Naval College, later told her friends that he looked ‘like a Viking god’.

It was Philip’s uncle, the scheming Earl Mountbatten, dreaming of the British Royal Family carrying his family name, who had arranged for the young Princess to meet his nephew, son of the dissolute Prince Andrew of Greece.

The Queen was in tears as Philip ranted at her

Clearly urged on by Uncle Dickie, Philip asked the King if he could correspond with her. This was a surprising request as the Princess was barely a teenager and the King might well have refused. But he had come from a line of princes whose marriages had been arranged, not always happily. He believed in marriage ‘of the heart’, according to a Royal Family cleric, as his had been to Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon — ‘and hugely successful, even though she at first rejected him.’

He could see the effect the young man had on his daughter, so he agreed. Eight years later, even though he had acquired that reputation as a ladies’ man, Philip’s boldness and Elizabeth’s infatuation led to their marriage at Westminster Abbey on November 20, 1947.

No one feared for Elizabeth more than her father’s private secretary Sir Tommy Lascelles, who felt Philip was ‘rough, ill-mannered, uneducated and would probably not be faithful’.

It was only natural that the Queen Mother — whose own husband, a shy and uncertain figure, had never had a wandering eye — should write to her new son-in-law, seeking an assurance that he would ‘cherish’ her daughter. Philip, then 26, wrote back: ‘Cherish Lilibet? I wonder if that word is enough to express what is in me.’

Family man: Philip and the Queen with Anne, Charles, a chubby Andrew and, seated, their youngest child, Edward, in 1968

He said he had ‘fallen in love completely and unreservedly’, adding: ‘The only thing in this world which is absolutely real to me, and my ambition, is to weld the two of us into a new combined existence that will not only be able to withstand the shocks directed at us but will also have a positive existence for the good.’

For her part, Elizabeth wrote happily to her parents while on honeymoon at Balmoral, saying that she and her new husband ‘behave as though we had belonged to each other for years! Philip is an angel’.

Their first marital home in those early days was Clarence House, later to be occupied by the Queen Mother and now by Prince Charles. Princess Elizabeth had her bedroom decorated in pink and blue, with drapes around the bed falling from a crown.

One room was set up as a cinema and when they watched a film — her favourite was the wartime drama In Which We Serve — all the staff were invited to watch it with them. But it was not always smooth sailing. They had to dismiss a girl on the domestic staff who hung out of a window to flirt with a guardsman below.

Another girl, who telephoned the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden asking to use the Royal Box while Philip and the Princess were away, was allowed to keep her job — Philip considered her too enterprising to sack.

And then Philip was posted to Malta and before long, Princess Elizabeth was living the carefree life of a young naval officer’s wife there. Carefree for her, that is. For the Princess rapidly came to realise something she has had to deal with throughout her marriage — that it could never be quite so carefree for Philip.

The Queen, pictured left, is said to have had a heart-warming change towards the late Princess Diana, right

Diana, right, was killed in a car crash in Paris in 1997 and the Queen, centre, was criticised over her response

One day in Malta, when they had been out, they got back late to the Villa Guardamangia, where they were living with the Mountbattens, and missed dinner.

In polite society, particularly when one was a guest in someone else’s home, this simply was not done. Philip was summoned by Lord Mountbatten.

Elizabeth Pule, now a retired nurse who was there with her mother, Jessie Grech, the housekeeper, still remembers it clearly, recalling Mountbatten shouting: ‘Philip, Philip, I want to talk to you, come to my office NOW.’

She says: ‘We could hear him — everyone could hear him. He was saying: “Don’t you dare do it again. Remember, she is the Queen of tomorrow and please never forget that.” ’

For Mountbatten this was just an old-fashioned bawling out for his naval officer nephew, but it was a chastening which hit Philip, and hit him hard. Was this how his life was going to be?

Elizabeth, then just 13, said he looked like a Viking god

A senior clergyman who has been involved with the Royal Family for many years picks up the story with an intriguing insight.

‘In the early days of the courtship, Philip certainly toyed more than once with throwing in the towel and returning to Greece,’ he says. ‘He could already see that the restrictions being placed on him could become suffocating. But he was dissuaded by Mountbatten.’

And then, of course, came the moment when they were in Kenya and the King died. Suddenly, Philip’s wife was no longer ‘the Queen of tomorrow’ but the Queen of today.

Arriving back at Clarence House, which they were soon to leave for Buckingham Palace, Philip’s valet John Dean asked him if he should put his Navy uniforms away. ‘Yes, John,’ said the new Queen’s husband glumly, ‘you put them away. It will be a long time before I need them again.’

Having been forced to give up the Royal Navy career he adored, Philip became, as the clergyman puts it, ‘an increasingly irritable presence in the Palace as he sought to find his feet in a court that accorded him no status and attempted to bypass him at every stage’.

It didn’t help that he had also given up smoking on the day before their wedding because his bride didn’t like it.

When Diana, left, was alive the Queen felt she was a 'misfit', according to friends, who didn't contribute

The Queen, pictured with Princes William, Harry, Charles and Philip at the unveiling of a memorial fountain for Diana in 2004, was criticised for a lack of response after the Princess' death

Worse was to follow — their children would not bear his family name Mountbatten, but his wife’s, Windsor. The Queen was in tears as he raged: ‘I am the only man in the country not allowed to give his name to his children. I’m nothing but a bloody amoeba.’

As the new Queen was swept up into a blizzard of official duties, and having to learn on the job, she saw with alarm and dismay what such restrictions were doing to the husband she adored.

Says the cleric, a familiar figure in royal circles: ‘The Queen learned very quickly the balance between being a dutiful wife and doing her duty to the country. The constitutional nature of the monarchy was probably her salvation — perhaps even the marriage’s — so that as Queen she had to obey her Prime Minister.

Other women? He likes window shopping — but doesn't buy

‘As a bride she had promised to obey her husband, the only man that she has ever known intimately in all of her 90 years.’

She could do nothing about the sudden end of his naval career, one in which he could have scaled the heights.

As her lifelong friend and former fellow Girl Guide, Lady Butter explains: ‘He could have been an Admiral, anything you like, in the Navy.’

Decades later, knowing just how much it would mean to him, the Queen would give up one of her own lofty titles, that of Lord High Admiral, and touchingly, bestow it on him as a loving, 90th birthday surprise. He is said to have been ‘almost in tears’.

But in the early days of marriage, when she saw that Philip felt his restless energies were being largely wasted, and that he was frustrated at being subordinate to his wife, she couldn’t ease the problem with such a gesture, no matter how meaningful. Nor did it help when the young royal couple spent weekends in the country houses of close friends.

It is a tradition for guests to tip the domestic staff who have helped them, and normally it is the man who does it, especially if it has been a shooting party.

The Christening of Prince William, pictured centre with Diana, with, from left, the Queen, Prince Charles, Prince Philip and the Queen Mother

The Queen, pictured with much of the Royal Family in 1988, is said to have invited Diana out riding on several occasions as part of her efforts to involve her in royal customs

At one estate, a staff member recalls: ‘I always received £2 in an envelope with the royal crest on it. The butler always got £20. But what surprised us was that it always came from the Queen, and not from the Duke.’

Here, surely, was another subtle example of the secondary nature of his role alongside the Queen.

To friends, it offers the simplest explanation as to why, from time to time, he just had to get away. So began the many global journeys round the world that he made, usually with male friends and often aboard the Royal Yacht Britannia.

‘She missed him enormously,’ says one of her circle, ‘and sometimes his trips did go on for weeks and weeks. She loved him so much and just accepted that he needed to be away.

‘It seemed to me she was allowing him a kind of controlled freedom to compensate for the confining nature of royal life. Out of reach of the royal routine was the only time he could be truly independent.’

But could there have been an additional reason for this restlessness — its roots in his nomadic and lonely childhood? Born in Corfu, Philip’s parents divorced when he was a child (his mother became a nun and his father a compulsive gambler) and his childhood was spent being handed from one relative to another.

What is inescapable is that over many decades of marriage, until age restricted his travel, the Queen and her Prince were spending nearly six months of every year apart. In the main, the Queen ignored the gossip that this was bound to generate.

While Philip was away, Broadlands became her most frequent sanctuary. There she would unburden herself, talking endlessly while walking along the bank of the River Test with Uncle Dickie, and also with his perceptive daughter Lady Patricia, now the Countess Mountbatten.

Patricia was the first person the Queen told about Philip threatening to put her out of the car when she complained that he was driving too fast on the Sandringham estate.

For her part, the Queen (pictured earlier this month) has glided through the gossip with an outward show of dignity. Long ago friends learned of her patient, wifely view that: ‘Philip needs a lot of amusing'

‘He wouldn’t dare stop the car and put you out,’ was Patricia’s response. ‘Oh, yes, he would,’ said the Queen.

One of Her Majesty’s equerries, who served her for three years, says: ‘You didn’t get in Prince Philip’s way when he was in a bad mood. I sometimes heard him and the Queen having terrific, rather emotional arguments, but that’s fine because it’s what married couples do.’

Only once does the rumour-mill appear to have got to her. That was when the Duke, with his old naval chum and equerry Mike Parker, embarked on the Britannia on October 15, 1956, and were still away the following February.

What hurt the Queen was speculation about a marriage rift appearing in the American newspapers. It even led to questions being asked in the House of Commons amid reports, also in America, of women smuggled aboard the royal yacht.

She took the painful step of authorising an official denial of any marital problems. It said curtly: ‘It is quite untrue that there is any rift between the Queen and the Duke’.

Then she flew out to meet her husband, who was by then in Portugal. They had been apart for 124 days.

During this time pictures of him in what the Navy calls a ‘full set’ — moustache and beard — had been appearing in the newspapers. The Queen used this to show, in her own amusing way, what she thought of the rumours: she decided to wear a false beard for their reunion. Came the moment, and there she was be-whiskered, and there was the suntanned Prince — clean shaven.

But such staged reunions among the famous seldom work in stemming gossip. And as the decades have passed, without a shred of evidence, it must be said, speculation about other women, instead of fading, became almost a national pastime.

The names have passed into the folklore of royal gossip — society beauties such as actress Pat Kirkwood, singer Helen Cordet, and TV personality Katie Boyle.

Others were drawn from aristocratic circles such as Jane, Countess of Westmorland, Sacha Abercorn, wife of the fifth Duke of Abercorn, the Queen’s (and his) cousin Princess Alexandra and his long-time carriage driving companion Lady Brabourne — the former Penny Romsey.

All of them talk of close friendship, but no sex. As the Duchess of Abercorn told Giles Brandreth, the former Tory MP and Philip’s biographer: ‘It was a passionate friendship, but the passion was in the ideas. It was certainly not a full relationship. I did not go to bed with him.’

In the words of former Palace press secretary Dickie Arbiter: ‘Prince Philip has always liked window shopping, but he doesn’t buy.’

Margaret Rhodes, the Queen’s cousin and one of her oldest friends, is clear. ‘The Queen has been very wounded by hearing and reading of Philip and women,’ she says. ‘I think honestly it must have hurt her terribly, especially as she is a one-man woman who has never looked at anyone else.

‘I don’t put it past anybody to do something a little bit wrong, but I don’t think there’s ever been a real glitch in the marriage. If something positive had been discovered, it would have been difficult for Philip to carry on. Their marriage is solid.’

For her part, the Queen has glided through the gossip with an outward show of dignity. Long ago friends learned of her patient, wifely view that: ‘Philip needs a lot of amusing.’ She has always accepted that her handsome husband not only attracted pretty women but enjoyed their company.

She ensures that Penny Brabourne — the most persistent name of recent years — tops every Palace party guest list.

She remembers, according to one friend, a piece of marital philosophy given her by the ubiquitous Uncle Dickie — ‘Some men have certain needs which doesn’t mean they love their wives any less.’