20 Things You Didn’t Know About Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip’s Marriage
A look inside their 70-plus-year love story.
Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip were married in 1947, and their marriage went strong even 70-plus years later, prior to their deaths in September 2022 and April 2021, respectively. Here are 20 things you may not know about their royal relationship.
They’re actually related.
Both Elizabeth and Philip are direct descendants of Queen Victoria, making them third cousins. Queen Victoria is Elizabeth’s great-great-grandmother, and Prince Philip is linked to Victoria through his mother’s family. You can see a chart of their family tree here.
They started writing to each other when Elizabeth was 13 years old.
Even though they had met before at the wedding of Prince Philip’s cousin and at King George’s coronation, the former princess fell for Prince Philip during a weekend at the Royal Naval College in Dartmouth. The 13-year-old princess traveled there with her sister and parents, and during their visit, they were set to meet some of the cadets.
But there was an outbreak of the mumps and chicken pox while Elizabeth and Margaret were there, so instead of attending a chapel service like they were supposed to, Prince Philip came to the headmaster’s house to entertain the young princesses (he was one of the only ones who wasn’t sick). Tired of sitting inside, he brought the girls outside and amused Elizabeth by jumping over tennis nets. “How high he can jump,” Elizabeth is said to have commented.
Prince Philip tells the story of their first meeting a little differently.
People who spent that weekend with the future couple said Elizabeth came away from the experience totally smitten with Philip, but he tells it a little differently. “Well, we’d met at Dartmouth, and as far as I was concerned, it was a very amusing experience, going on board the yacht [the Victoria and Albert] and meeting them and that sort of thing, and that was that,” he told royal biographer Basil Boothroyd.
They couldn’t officially announce their engagement until the princess turned 21.
Princess Elizabeth’s father, King George VI, was hesitant about a marriage between the two, fearing Elizabeth was too young and settling for the first man she met. They waited until after she turned 21 to officially announce the engagement.
Their wedding wasn’t particularly glamorous or luxe, by royal standards.
Even though it was held in front of 2,000 people, Great Britain was in a tough situation economically at the time of the royal wedding (WWII had ended two years prior). Queen Elizabeth had to pay for her own wedding dress using ration coupons, and their wedding cake was made from donated baking supplies.
During the wedding, Elizabeth vowed to “obey” Philip, which caused a bit of controversy at the time because people thought a future queen shouldn’t vow to obey anyone.
They lived away from their children for a period of time.
While Prince Philip was stationed in Malta working for the Navy in the early years of their marriage, Elizabeth lived with him while their two young children Charles and Anne stayed in England.
Elizabeth and Philip also went on royal tours when their children were young, sometimes for months at a time, so the new monarch could have a presence throughout the Commonwealth. In his biography in 1994, Charles described his mother as “distant” and said it was his nursery staff, not his parents, who “taught him to play, witnessed his first steps, punished and rewarded him, helped him put his first thoughts into words.”
Prince Philip had to tell Elizabeth that her father had died.
Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip were on a royal tour in Kenya when her father passed away. Philip found out because a journalist told his private secretary and then had to tell her before anyone else could.
Prince Philip struggled with Elizabeth becoming the Queen.
When King George died, Prince Philip had to give up his naval career to assist Elizabeth in her royal duties now that she was Queen. They had to move from their family home (Clarence House) to Buckingham Palace, which Philip didn’t love.
He also wanted his last name, Mountbatten, to be the royal family name, but Elizabeth chose to use the name Windsor on the advice of her mother and Prime Minister Winston Churchill (later on, she made it so that the names were hyphenated to be Mountbatten-Windsor). All this, combined with his wife having the spotlight, angered Prince Philip. He complained about being “nothing but a bloody amoeba.”
Prince Philip is rumored to have had affairs during his marriage.
Prince Philip has been linked to multiple women throughout the years. There was a Russian ballerina, an English stage actor, and a writer, to name a few. None of these rumored affairs have ever been confirmed, but much of the British public sees Philip as a ladies’ man.
In response to the rumors, Philip told one reporter, “Have you ever stopped to think that for years, I have never moved anywhere without a policeman accompanying me? So how the hell could I get away with anything like that?”
They have four children.
The couple had two children before Elizabeth became Queen, Charles and Anne, and two children after, Andrew and Edward (pictured). She waited more than a decade to have more children after she gave birth to Anne—some say it was because she was settling into her role as the Queen; others say it was because of the last-name dispute with Philip.
People called Andrew and Edward her “second family.” They also have eight grandchildren, including Princes William and Harry.
They’ve always had connecting bedrooms.
Elizabeth and Philip do not share the same bedroom, but rather, they have connecting bedrooms—even when they lived in Clarence House. According to their cousin Lady Pamela Mountbatten, “In England, the upper class have always had separate bedrooms. You don’t want to be bothered with snoring or someone flinging a leg around. Then when you are feeling cozy, you share your room sometimes. It is lovely to be able to choose.”
They had plenty of thoughts on Prince Charles marrying Lady Diana.
By the summer of 1980, Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer were seeing an awful lot of each other. The media was starting to pick up on this, and Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip were worried about the attention. Philip wrote Charles a letter basically saying he needed to make a decision about whether he’d marry Diana or not. Later on, Prince Charles used this letter as proof he’d been pressured into marrying Diana, but people who have read the letter say it was more constructive than he makes it seem.
They had differing opinions on how to handle the problems in Charles and Diana’s marriage.
When it became apparent that Diana was struggling in her role as princess, Elizabeth and Philip had different ways of handling it. Elizabeth told the young mother to “just wait” and see what happened. Philip, on the other hand, wrote Diana dozens of letters encouraging her to stay in the marriage. He said he knew how hard marrying into the royal family could be.
And they were criticized after Diana’s death for not immediately returning to London.
When Princess Diana died, William and Harry were spending the summer at Balmoral Castle, the royal family’s Scotland estate. Upon hearing the news, the Queen did not immediately return to London to be with her people but stayed in Balmoral to help Harry and William deal with the tragedy there. People still criticize the Queen for staying out of the public eye immediately after Diana’s death.
Prince Philip believes the key to making their marriage work is tolerance.
In honor of their 50th wedding anniversary, the Duke of Edinburgh gave a speech saying that what’s made their relationship work is being tolerant of each other. “I think the main lesson that we have learnt is that tolerance is the one essential ingredient of any happy marriage. It may not be quite so important when things are going well, but it is absolutely vital when the going gets difficult. You can take it from me that the Queen has the quality of tolerance in abundance,” he said.
Prince Philip has a nickname for the Queen.
According to Elizabeth the Queen, by Sally Bedell Smith, he calls his wife “Sausage.” The story behind the name? Quite humorous. Allegedly, the Queen doesn’t have a naturally smiling face, so when she meets people, she often looks grumpy. At one formal occasion, Philip said to her, “Don’t look so sad, Sausage.” The rest is history.
Philip gave up smoking for Queen Elizabeth.
According to Prince Philip’s valet John Dean, the prince quit smoking “suddenly and apparently without difficulty” on the day of his wedding because he knew how much Queen Elizabeth despised her father’s cigarette addiction.
They celebrated their 60th anniversary with 10 other couples.
The couple celebrated their 60th wedding anniversary in a 2,000-person church service. Thirty family members were present as well as 10 other couples who also got married on the same day in 1947. When Philip and Elizabeth walked out of the ceremony, they were able to meet all 10 couples, who didn’t know about this plan ahead of time. One of the men who met the Queen said it was “icing on the cake.”
Elizabeth calls Philip her “strength and stay.”
In honor of her 90th birthday and Philip’s 95th, Vanity Fair commissioned a set of portraits of Elizabeth and Philip. When Kensington Palace released the final portrait of the set, they quoted the Queen saying, “He has quite simply been my strength and stay all these years.”
They have different opinions of their portrayal on The Crown.
Queen Elizabeth reportedly loves the Netflix drama, even though some of the historical moments are too dramatized for her taste, and she watches it on occasion with her son Edward and his wife, Sophie. Matt Smith, who plays Prince Philip on the show, told The Observer that the IRL prince said he doesn’t watch.
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