‘I suppose I won’t be having fun any more,’ Prince Philip told his friend Larry Adler as the implications of marrying the heir to the throne began to sink in. He was then twenty-six; the war had ended two years earlier, but he was still in the Navy, and enjoying life despite being – according to his uncle ‘Dickie’ Mountbatten – ‘almost entirely dependent on his Naval pay which is slightly under £1 a day’. ‘He was beginning to realise what he had let himself in for,’ Adler recalled; devoted as he was to Princess Elizabeth, he was ‘scared’ by what lay before him.

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