The Duke of Edinburgh had wanted the Royal family to be known as the House of Mountbatten when the Queen came to the throne in 1952.
The Queen was moved to tears by Prince Philips’ ‘brutal’ behaviour, when she refused to accept his surname of Mountbatten, a new biography has revealed.
Sally Bedell Smith in her book ‘Elizabeth the Queen’ has even suggested that the ten-year delay between the births of the Princess Royal and the Duke of York was a consequence of “Philip’s anger over the Queen’s rejection of his family name”.
Her book to be published in January, details the Duke’s deep-rooted irritation over the monarch’s decision to accept the advice of the then prime minister, Winston Churchill, by keeping the family name Windsor, the Telegraph reported.
The Duke of Edinburgh had wanted the Royal family to be known as the House of Mountbatten when the Queen came to the throne in 1952.
He even complained to his friends that he was the only man in the country not allowed to give his name to his children.
“I’m nothing but a bloody amoeba,” he said.
In an article for the current issue of Vanity Fair magazine, the author mentions about an entry in Macmillan’s diary, in which he wrote: “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.”
“I shall never forget what she said to me that Sunday night at Sandringham.”
Macmillan passed the problem on to his deputy, Rab Butler, and the lord chancellor Lord Kilmuir. Butler told Macmillan in a telegram that the Queen had “absolutely set her heart” on making a change for Philip’s sake.
“By one account, Butler confided to a friend that Elizabeth had been ‘in tears’,” Bedell Smith writes.
A compromise was reached in which any descendants not entitled to the designation of ‘royal highness’ would be called Mountbatten-Windsor.
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