On the anniversary of Bobo’s fifty years’ service, the Queen had a special commemorative brooch made for her by Garrard, the crown jewellers. Mr Summers, who then held the royal warrant, was sent for and smuggled in and out of the palace behind Bobo’s back to help the Queen choose assorted designs. The final gift was in the shape of a flower. It had twenty-five diamonds, which represented the crown, and twenty-five gold stamens, which represented the good that Bobo had brought into the Queen’s life.

It was a token of love and respect for a woman who was quite simply the Queen’s last link with childhood. She had given her life selflessly in service and never expected anything in return. Despite his irritation with her constant presence, Prince Philip knew and respected that sentiment more than he would ever admit.

For the truth of the matter is that socially they still rely on each other, and after seventy years of marriage that will never change. On the weekend of the Diamond Jubilee, when Prince Philip was taken ill during lunch at Windsor Castle after his marathon stint at the cold, wet and windy river pageant the day before, the Queen was heard to say as her husband was taken into the King Edward VII hospital as a ‘precautionary measure’ for a bladder infection: ‘Don’t die on me. Not now anyway!’

Of course, she was being facetious and making light of the situation, but it is part of the affectionate and light-hearted relationship they have always had since the days the young Prince Philip used to chase her along the Buckingham Palace corridors wearing an enormous set of false teeth.

That evening, the Queen attended the jubilee concert outside Buckingham Palace without him. She has never panicked or stumbled, and she was not going to start then. But it was a worry for her and when she arrived at the Service of Thanksgiving at St Paul’s Cathedral the following day, she looked very alone. It was something she was going to have to get used to as the decade wore on. However together they are as a couple and however much they help each other socially, there will unfortunately come a time when one of them will have to go it alone.

Chapter 14

DEFENDER OF THE FAITH

Throughout their long marriage, the Queen and Prince Philip have shared a life as practising, church-going Christians, but the origins of each of their faiths is very different. Prince Philip was baptised into the Greek Orthodox Church and, although he was educated through the English school system that includes chapel attendance, he was not received into the Church of England until shortly before his marriage to Princess Elizabeth. According to the then Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Geoffrey Fisher, Lieutenant Mountbatten RN, as he then was, ‘always regarded himself as an Anglican’.