As soon as the engagement was announced, Pamela’s father, Lord Mountbatten, started giving Philip the benefit of his views on how the wedding should be arranged and how the couple’s new household should be run. Elizabeth was aware of Mountbatten’s interferingly ambitious plans and did not like it. This was a view shared by her mother, though not necessarily by her father.

Philip knew how to respond and cautioned his pushy uncle by letter: ‘I am not being rude but it is apparent you like the idea of being General Manager of this little show, and I am rather afraid she might not take to the idea quite so docilely as I do. It is true I know what is good for me, but don’t forget she [Elizabeth] has not had you as uncle loco parentis counsellor and friend as long as I have.’

By mid-October the wedding invitations to over two thousand guests had been sent out bearing the distinctive royal postmark, the cypher of the King. The most important invitees were, and still are, those known as ‘the magic four hundred’. These consist of royalty from all over Europe, who must be invited regardless of whether they are still throned or deposed. And of course, there were their personal friends who make up the intimate circle.

As it was only two years after the end of the war, the King decided that there was no question of Prince Philip’s sisters being invited, as their German connection was still too shaming (they had moved to that country from Paris in the early 1930s to marry German aristocrats and stayed there during the war). ‘So soon after the war, you couldn’t have “the Hun”,’ Lady Mountbatten recalled. ‘I think Philip understood, but the sisters certainly didn’t. For years afterwards, they’d say: “Why weren’t we allowed to come to your wedding?” They weren’t exactly Stormtroopers.’

It remained such a sensitive topic that it wasn’t until 2006 that Prince Philip broke a sixty-year public silence about his family’s Nazi ties, when he gave an interview for a book entitled Royals and the Reich and explained how, like many other Germans, his family found Hitler’s early attempts to restore Germany’s power and prestige positive.

‘There was a great improvement in things like trains running on time and building,’ Philip explained. ‘There was a sense of hope after the depressing chaos of the Weimar Republic. I can understand people latching onto something or somebody who appeared to be appealing to their patriotism and trying to get things going. You can understand how attractive it was.’ He stressed, however, that he was never ‘conscious’ of anybody in the family expressing anti-Semitic views.