Review: Gyles Brandreth’s “Philip and Elizabeth”

Gyles Brandreth's "Philip and Elizabeth"

Review: Philip and Elizabeth: Portrait of a Royal Marriage by Gyles Brandreth

(Buy it at Amazon.com)

One of my primary scholarly interests as a graduate student is the genre of biography. As much as I love reading and dissecting them, I’ve often found that when I’ve attempted to write biographical sketches, there’s a fine line between sounding too dry and academic and sounding too much like a sensational tabloid or a chatty friend.

Gyles Brandreth manages to balance these two extremes quite brilliantly. His Philip and Elizabeth: Portrait of a Royal Marriage is the kind of biography that I love to read and that I’d someday like to write. He has a warm and approachable tone that still maintains an air of authority. He handles his subject matter sensitively and appropriately, but he doesn’t shy away from talking about subjects that are sometimes difficult and potentially scandalous.

In short, I have to admit that Philip and Elizabeth is perhaps the best royal biography I’ve read yet – and I’ve read quite a few of them.

It helps, I think, that Brandreth has chosen to explore the life of a couple rather than a single person. The Queen and The Duke of Edinburgh are so intertwined in life that it would really prove impossible to write a book about one without essentially writing a book about the other. By choosing to cover both famous figures, Brandreth opens up a world of available material to discuss. He covers areas familiar to those who enjoy reading about the Windsors: the lives of The Queen’s parents, King George VI and Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, the abdication crisis, the monarchs during the war, and The Queen’s childhood alongside Princess Margaret and their caretakers, Bobo and Alah.

But he also brings us into a lesser-known part of the Windsor family history – that of Prince Philip’s tumultuous family. I think perhaps my favorite sections of the book were the ones that focused on Prince Andrew of Greece, Philip’s father, and his mother, Princess Alice of Battenberg. The Duke of Edinburgh, though his family was certainly complicated and fractured, has a fascinating pedigree. The descriptions of Andrea’s trial for war crimes had me on the edge of my seat, and the story about Alice’s efforts to save a Jewish family during the Second World War was extremely moving. The recounting of his sister’s death in a tragic plane crash had me weeping, as did the stories of his murdered aunts and uncles and the tale of his mother’s slide into mental instability. This is a family that has seen an almost unbelievable number of tragedies tracing through the branches of its tree, and Brandreth uses the vivid stories of these low points as well as moments of triumph to give his portrait of Philip a real depth – much more than we’d ever know from the placid and sometimes smirking face of the man who walks behind The Queen.

I’m always surprised (though I really shouldn’t be at this point) at how intertwined the families of the current crop of European royals are via their common ancestors, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. Brandreth does an excellent job of continually reminding the reader of how interconnected all of these people are; Queen Margarethe of Denmark reminds him, “You think of us as European royalty … We think of ourselves as ‘family.’ We are all cousins. That’s why we are easy together.” Gems like this quote, and many others, are tucked away in Brandreth’s footnotes – you sometimes get the feeling that he was just bursting at the seams with all of the information he had to offer on his subjects, and the footnotes are chock full of little bits both of important clarification and fun trivia.

One of the greatest strengths of Brandreth as a biographer is his ability to pain fascinating character sketches of all of the major parties involved as well as the minor, colorful characters that have populated the lives of The Queen and The Duke of Edinburgh. I loved Brandreth’s description of Prince Louis of Battenberg, Prince Philip’s grandfather: “…he was noted for his virility, energy, charm and fondness for uniforms. Like his younger son, Louis Mountbatten, and, to a degree, his younger grandson, Prince Philip, Louis of Battenberg enjoyed dressing up. He had a variety of uniforms and an array of medals and, in public and in private, he relished parading in both. He also had an extravagant tattoo of a rampant dragon emblazoned across his chest and trailing down his legs. He lived life to the full.” How can you not be fascinated when presented with characters like that?

Some of our more familiar subjects are also present here: we meet The Prince of Wales and Lady Diana Spencer, The Duke of York and Sarah Ferguson, The Earl of Wessex and Sophie Rhys-Jones. Their stories seem a little different when seen through the lens of a parent’s understanding of their children’s love lives – and when recounted by a person who is acquainted with those involved but peripheral enough to have a seemingly observational stance on the matters. If Brandreth picks a side in these affairs, he does a good job of at least appearing objective in his text. Like Sarah Bradford, Brandreth is good at writing about humans rather than heroes and villains, though he is more frank and conversational about their lives than Bradford is.

Brandreth is familiar with the foibles and figures here, but he rarely seems to have a horse in the race. Instead, he presents anecdotes about them based on his own experience but designed to keep the reader entertained. Case in point: his description of Princess Anne’s husbands. Mark Phillips “was from solidly middle-class stock, thoroughly respectable, if a little unexciting. When I met him I liked him. He seemed on the shy side and sparing with the small talk – but what do I know about dressage?” And Tim Laurence “is also from solidly middle-class stock, thoroughly respectable, if a little unexciting. When I met him I liked him. He seemed on the shy side and sparing with the small talk – but what do I know about nautical manoeuvers?” Toss in a story about Brandreth spending an entire dinner with his leg inadvertently pressed against Princess Anne’s, and you’ve got quite a fun view on the family.

And the fact that the book is, if not officially, then seemingly tacitly endorsed by The Duke of Edinburgh makes it an even more solid read. When Brandreth has a question about one of the people involved, he goes and asks them to answer it. We hear from Prince Philip himself, the above-quoted Queen of Denmark, the Mountbattens, close friends of Philip and of Elizabeth, and more. Brandreth even has a fascinating sit down with Paul Burrell. It’s not the most academic approach to the book, and at times it feels a little gossipy, but I’ve got to admit, I had much more fun reading it than I have in the past when reading those academic biographies.

So, in short, this is definitely the most enthusiastically recommended book to cross my desk yet for this blog. And, even more than that, I’m hoping to learn a little from it about how to write a book that is sensitive and measured but still loads of fun.

Buy Philip and Elizabeth by Gyles Brandreth at Amazon.com!

© 2008 The Royal Reader