Tessa Dunlop

Elizabeth and Philip: A Story of Young Love, Marriage and Monarchy Tessa Dunlop

She was peaches-and-cream innocence; he was a handsome blonde war hero. Both had royal blood coursing through their veins. The marriage of Britain's Princess Elizabeth to Lt Philip Mountbatten in November 1947 is remembered as the beginning of an extraordinary, lifelong romance but success was not guaranteed.

Elizabeth and Philip: A Story of Young Love, Marriage and Monarchy plunges us back into 1940s Britain where fears of a flirtatious 'Greek' Prince stealing off with England's crown jewel saw a deliberate Establishment effort to reframe Philip and Elizabeth and young married love for a post-war generation.

Unprecedented newspaper polling on Philip's suitability was a harbinger of future media pressure for a couple whose image was transformed into a global fairy story. Wedding pin-ups Elizabeth and Philip led a record-breaking crash down the aisle in 1947 but theirs was a marriage like no other. Six years after Elizabeth promised to be an obedient wife Philip got down on bended knee and committed himself as the Queen's 'liege man of life and limb.'

Published to coincide with what would have been the royal couple's 75th wedding anniversary, this book will explore the affections and contradictions, the tensions and the faith that bonded and successfully held together this world-famous pair and inspired a generation of newly-weds.

The pressures inherent in this extraordinary relationship might have devoured a less committed pair - it did devour other couples in the Royal Court - but not Philip and Elizabeth. They shared a common purpose, one higher even than marriage, with roots much deeper than young love. Happy and Glorious, for better or for worse, they believed in a God-given mission.

Monarchy was the magic word.