The hit Netflix series The Crown has decided to tackle the touchy subject of Prince Philip’s rumoured affairs in its newest season.
The Queen and her husband, the Duke of Edinburgh, recently celebrated their 70th wedding anniversary, and for most of those years the couple have seemed picture perfect.
The Crown season 2 decides to look back on a period in history where the couple’s relationship was shrouded in rumours of infidelity.
Ingrid Seward, royal biographer and author of My Husband and I: The Inside Story of 70 Years of the Royal Marriage, told RadioTimes.com, ‘He [Philip] couldn’t even look at another woman without the press saying that he was probably having an affair.’
‘There is absolutely no proof that he was unfaithful,’ Seward adds. ‘But I imagine he might have been.’
Rumours of infidelity began to plague the marriage in 1956, the year Prince Philip spent five months away from his wife and children to travel the seas aboard the Royal Yacht Britannia to open the Olympic Games in Melbourne.
The Crown also depicts a scenario where the Queen discovers a picture of another woman in Philip’s suitcase before he is due to set off on the Commonwealth Tour.
The woman depicted in the photograph is revealed to be Galina Ulanova, one of the 20th centuries most accomplished ballerinas.
In the series, the Queen attends one of Ulanova’s shows as part of the Bolshoi ballet.
In the year of 1957, one of Her Majesty’s spokespersons released a statement that read: ‘It is quite untrue that there is any rift between the Queen and the Duke.’
Seward explains, ‘I think what people have to remember is that it was very different times and women were totally subservient – but of course the Queen wasn’t, by dint of who she was.
‘So there was already an element of her trying to make him feel better. She was very conscious of the fact that he had to walk two steps behind her, and I think as a result she was very forgiving of any of his little misdemeanours. You know, when he got drunk at the Thursday Club and when he came home late.’
He continues, ‘She was forgiving of him, because she felt that he’d been emasculated by her position, and he’s a very alpha male.’
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