A royal ROMANCE
WHEN Princess Elizabeth first laid eyes on Prince Philip, she was immediately smitten.
The tall, handsome blond naval cadet was 18 years old and about to join the British Royal Navy. Like her, he was royalty, but unlike her family, he was penniless.
It was July 1939 and the princess had turned 13 only a few months earlier. Philip was also her third cousin – they shared the same great-great-grandparents, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert.
Philip’s parents were Princess Alice of Battenberg, a great-grandchild of Victoria and Albert, and Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark, the descendant of a Danish prince recruited for the Greek throne in the mid-19th century.
That crush blossomed into the British monarchy’s longest marriage despite their familial link, something that wasn’t uncommon in royal families. In fact, Victoria and Albert were first cousins who shared the same grandparents – Francis, Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, and Countess Augusta Reuss of Ebersdorf.
Elizabeth and Princess Margaret, accompanied by their parents, King George VI and Queen Elizabeth, were visiting the Dartmouth Britannia Royal Naval College, but an outbreak of mumps and chickenpox meant they had to skip the chapel service with potentially infectious cadets.
Elizabeth and Margaret were sent to the house of the college’s headmaster, which was where they met Philip.
In The Little Princesses, a memoir by the princesses’ governess, Marion Crawford, she describes Philip strutting into the house looking “less like a Greek god and more like a Viking” with his
