At Prince Philip’s funeral in April 2021, only 30 people were permitted to attend.

The country was still under CO restrictions.

The pews of St.

George’s Chapel at Windsor sat almost entirely empty.

Cameras captured a lone Queen Elizabeth sitting apart from her family, masked and quietly devastated.

But look carefully at those 30 people.

Among them, seated with the family, dressed in black, unmistakably present at one of the most restricted, intimate moments in modern royal history, was a woman who was not a relative.

Her name is Penelopey Natchbull, Countess Mountbatton of Burma, known to everyone as Penny.

She was given one of the 30 seats at Prince Philip’s funeral, above dozens of his own grandchildren, above friends of decades, above politicians and dignitaries who had known him their entire careers.

The palace offered no explanation.

And that in many ways is the whole story of Prince Philillip, a man who spent 73 years at the most photographed woman’s side, whose every public moment was documented and archived and analyzed.

and yet about whose private life an enormous and deliberate silence was maintained.

Today we’re going into Prince Philip’s secret life, the one the establishment NY5 and Fleet Street editors actively conspired to keep from the public.

To understand the double life, you first have to understand the official life and how suffocating it was.

Philip was born in 1921 as Prince Philip of Greece and Denmark.

The titles sound grand, but his actual circumstances were chaotic.

His family was exiled from Greece when he was just 18 months old.

He was shuttled between relatives across Europe.

His mother, Princess Alice of Battenburg, suffered a serious breakdown and was institutionalized when Philip was a child.

His father, Prince Andrew of Greece, retreated to a life of pleasure on the French Riviera, largely abandoning his family.

Philip was, in the most literal sense, a royal without a kingdom, without a stable home, and without reliable parents.

He was raised by relatives, educated at the unconventional Gordontown School in Scotland, a place that prized physical toughness over aristocratic softness, and found his footing in the Royal Navy, where he served with genuine distinction during World War II.

By all accounts, the young Philillip was brilliant, magnetic, and restless.

He was dashingly handsome.

He was witty in a way that could shade into cruel.

He had an energy and an impatience that made him difficult to contain.

When he married Princess Elizabeth in 1947, he was giving something up that few people fully acknowledged at the time.

His career, his independence, his name.

He surrendered his royal Greek surname and took the anglicized Mountbatton and then found even that was stripped from him when the queen’s advisers insisted the dynasty remain Windsor.

He once said bitterly that he was the only man in the country not allowed to give his name to his children.

He could not walk anywhere without a police escort.

He could not make a significant decision without palace approval.

He was expected to walk two steps behind his wife at all times in public for the rest of his life.

Now, whatever one thinks of the choices he allegedly made, and we are going to get to those, it is worth understanding the psychological pressure of that position.

Philip was a proud, vigorous, intellectually restless man who had been asked to spend his life as an accessory.

One of George V 6th’s advisers noted before the royal marriage that Philillip was unlikely to be faithful.

It was not a condemnation.

It was simply an observation about who Philillip was and implicitly about the deal that was being struck.

To give himself an outlet, Philip co-ounded one of the most exclusive and least discussed gentleman’s gatherings in postwar London.

It was called the Thursday Club.

The club met weekly for lunch at Wheeler’s Fish Restaurant in Soho.

The membership was carefully assembled.

Journalists, artists, actors, minor aristocrats, naval officers, men who were witty, well-connected, and crucially discreet.

The meetings were rowdy, rivaled, and entirely off the record.

The Thursday Club was described in a 1996 independent article as the gang of cronies that the Duke of Edinburgh used to gather around him in the 1950s to have a bit of fun away from his serious life at Buckingham Palace.

Among the Thursday Club’s members was a man who would later become one of the central figures in the most explosive political scandal of the 20th century, a society osteopath and amateur portraitist named Steven Ward.

Ward was the ultimate social fixer of his era.

He moved between worlds, between the aristocracy and the demand, between politics and pleasure.

He had a talent for collecting interesting people and introducing them to other interesting people and for creating environments in which the usual rules didn’t quite apply.

Before his marriage, Philip moved in a world of minor European royalty where discreet affairs were as customary as visits to a tailor.

Ward fit naturally into that tradition.

He was in his way providing a service social, creative, occasionally erotic to men who needed to exist outside their official lives.

Ward also kept a studio and was in the habit of hosting gatherings at the studio of Polish British artist Felix Topolski, whose famous studio on the South Bank became one of the great gathering points of London’s artistic and aristocratic worlds.

One journalist reported that Topolski was gregarious and famous for ripe gossip.

But when asked about Prince Phillip specifically, Topolski said only, “I can’t discuss Prince Philillip.

” That single sentence is remarkable.

A man famous for gossip who would talk about almost anyone who drew pleasure from his proximity to power, refusing entirely to discuss one person.

When a journalist later investigated this refusal, a man identifying himself as working for M.

I5 contacted him and requested a meeting specifically to find out what Topolski had shared about Prince Phillip.

Think about what that tells us.

The British Security Services, already managing one of the biggest political scandals in living memory, were specifically monitoring what Philip’s name was attached to and actively intervening to contain it.

The question, of course, is what was there to contain? In 1963, Britain was rocked by the Proffumo affair, a scandal involving government minister John Proffumo, a 19-year-old model named Christine Keeler, and a Soviet naval attache who was simultaneously her lover, and it emerged a spy.

The scandal was explosive, not just because of the sex, but because of the security implications.

Kela had been sleeping with both a senior British minister and a Soviet intelligence officer at the same time.

The potential for classified information to have passed through her, even unknowingly, was terrifying to the establishment.

Steven Ward, the man who had introduced Keela to Profumo, was at the center of everything.

And Steven Ward, as we’ve established, was connected to Prince Philip through the Thursday Club and through London’s overlapping social circuits.

The Ward case prompted the Daily Mirror to run a headline reading Prince Philillip and the Profumo scandal in which it dismissed what it called the foul rumor that the prince had been involved without notably specifying what the rumor actually was.

This is a classic establishment maneuver, one that journalists and historians have noted time and again.

You don’t suppress a rumor by naming and denying it.

You suppress it by keeping it vague, by dismissing it without details so that people don’t even know what they should be looking for.

FBI director J.

Edgar Hoover sent a cable to the American embassy in London in June 1963, revealing that an American businessman had told the FBI there was a rumor that Prince Philip was involved with Christine Keeler and Mandy Rice Davies.

the FBI.

The Americans were hearing Philip’s name in connection with this scandal.

When the Profumo scandal broke, Philillip was, by one account, never quite discreet enough or careful enough in the company he kept, and may have assumed, not incorrectly, that the palace’s considerable powers to suppress public scandal would protect him.

There is a

further deeply strange coder to this story.

After Ward’s death, he committed suicide by overdose before the jury in his trial had delivered its verdict.

123 of his portrait sketches were sold.

The collection included portraits of Prince Philillip and Princess Margaret.

The purchase was made by a man who refused to give his name and paid with a bank draft, a fortune at the time.

The anonymous buyer spirited the images away and they have never been publicly exhibited since.

Who bought them? Why the anonymity? Why were the royal portraits so important to acquire and suppress? These questions have never been officially answered.

Over Philip’s 73-year marriage, a series of women were linked to him by biographers, journalists, and royal insiders.

It is important to be careful here.

Philip denied affairs throughout his lifetime.

The palace never confirmed any romantic involvement beyond his marriage, and several of the women named have themselves denied any impropriy.

We are in the territory of allegation, rumor, and historical inference, and that needs to be stated plainly.

That said, the pattern of names, the persistence of the accounts, and the seriousness of some of the biographers involved make it impossible to dismiss the subject entirely.

Philip was linked over the course of his life to a Greek cabaret singer, several actresses, three puresses of the realm, a famous television personality, a renowned female novelist, the queen’s own cousin, Princess Alexandra, and others.

One of the most consistently cited names is Helen Corde, a Greek cabaret singer and television personality who had known Philillip since childhood.

They had grown up together in Europe’s displaced royal circles, and their friendship continued long after his marriage.

The suggestion that it became something more was persistent enough that Corded herself was required to deny it publicly on multiple occasions.

Her son Max Buazo was the subject of paternity speculation for decades.

Both Corde and Buazo denied any connection to Philillip.

Another name that appeared frequently in the early years was Pat Kirkwood, a celebrated West End star of the 1940s whose legs were once famously described as the eighth wonder of the world.

Philip and Kirkwood allegedly met on several occasions, and the rumors attached to those meetings were stubborn enough that Kirkwood spent decades attempting to get Philillip and the palace to publicly deny them.

He never

obliged, reportedly, saying, “Short of starting liel proceedings, there is absolutely nothing to be done.

” Kirkwood died in 1997, still frustrated by the cloud that had followed her career.

Biographer Sarah Bradford, who wrote the definitive biography of Queen Elizabeth II, was characteristically direct about her conclusions.

The Duke of Edinburgh has had affairs, full-blown affairs and more than one, she wrote.

He has affairs and the Queen accepts it.

I think she thinks that’s how men are.

She went further.

He’s never been one for chasing actresses.

His interest is quite different.

The women he goes for are always younger than him, usually beautiful and highly aristocratic.

This is a specific and detailed description, not the vague kind that attaches to general reputation, but the kind that comes from specific knowledge.

Now, we arrive at the claim that Andrew Looney made in his 2025 biography of Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson.

The claim that generated the most immediate shock and the most vigorous denials.

Looney alleges that Prince Philillip had an affair with Susan Barantes, the mother of Sarah Ferguson, who would later become his daughter-in-law.

Looney presents the affair as fact, not hedging his language with qualifiers.

He places the beginning of the relationship in 1966, a full 20 years before Sarah Ferguson married Prince Andrew.

The book opens its account of the 1986 wedding with the line that the father of the groom and mother of the bride, lovers 20 years earlier, sat in the third carriage waving.

The visual is almost cinematic in its implication.

Two people sitting in a royal carriage, waving to cheering crowds, carrying a secret that would reframe the entire occasion.

How does Looney know this? He is specific about his sources.

He cites his wife Angela, who grew up near the Fergusons in Ascot and heard the story firsthand from someone with direct knowledge of the royal social circles of that era.

And crucially, there is a supporting voice from an unexpected direction.

In his 1994 memoir, The Galloping Major, Susan’s first husband, Ronald Ferguson, Philip’s friend and polo associate, wrote, “Prince Phillip usually made a beline for the prettiest girl on the dance floor.

He certainly found Suz’s

company much more enticing than mine.

” a man writing about his ex-wife and his friend, hinting with barely concealed bitterness at something he clearly believed had happened.

When Looney appeared on GB News to discuss the claim, conservative commentator Jacob Reese Moog dismissed it as just gossip.

Looney’s response was measured but firm.

He had interviewed over 300 people for the book and stood by his sources.

The claim has extraordinary implications.

If true, it would mean that when Philillip sat at his son’s wedding, he was not simply the proud father of the groom.

He was a man looking at the mother of the bride, a woman he had been intimate with two decades earlier.

It would add a layer of extraordinary complexity to the family dynamics of the York marriage, to Philip’s relationship with Sarah Ferguson, and to the question of how and why Philillip reportedly had Sarah’s communications monitored during her troubled marriage to Andrew.

According to Looney’s reporting, Prince Philillip had Sarah Ferguson followed and her communications wiretapped during her marriage to Prince Andrew.

Whether this was paternal protectiveness toward his son, institutional management of a problem duchess, or something more complicated and personal is a question the historical record cannot yet fully answer.

And then there is Penny.

Penelopey Katchbull, now Countest Mountbatton of Burma, is the woman who has generated perhaps the most sustained and serious speculation about Philip’s private life because her connection to him lasted longest, ran deepest, and ended only with his death.

Penny was born Penelopey Eastwood in 1953, the daughter of the founder of the Angus Steakhouse restaurant chain.

She met Prince Philip when she was around 20 years old and Philip was in his 50s.

She later married Norton Natchel, the grandson of Lord Mountbatton, Philip’s beloved uncle and mentor who was killed by an IR bomb in 1979.

The connection to the Mountbatton family was itself significant.

Philillip had been devastated by Dicky Mountbatton’s murder.

Penny, as part of the Mountbatton family by marriage, offered a connection to that loss.

The shared grief of Lord Mountbatton’s murder is often cited as one of the foundations of Philip and Penny’s closeness.

Their relationship was built around horses and carriage driving, a passion Philip maintained into his 90s.

They were photographed together regularly at equestrian events.

She accompanied him and sometimes the queen to the Royal Windsor Horse Show over many years.

Philillip, by accounts from those in his circle, was happiest in the saddle, and Penny was part of that world.

There has never been any doubt that Philip and Penny were close friends, and rumors of an affair long dogged them despite the 30-year age gap between them.

The nature of that closeness was publicly debated when the crown season 5 depicted their relationship in romantic terms.

Dicky Arbiter, who served as the Queen’s press secretary for 12 years, called the portrayal cruel rubbish.

Other royal insiders insisted their relationship was deep but platonic.

A meeting of two people who shared specific passions and a specific history of grief and nothing more.

But consider the evidence again.

Penny was one of only 30 mourners invited to Prince Philip’s private funeral in April 2021.

That funeral was so restricted by CO rules that many of Philip’s own grandchildren were not present.

His children were there, his closest personal staff and Penny.

Not the spouse of a family member, not a long-erving aid.

Penny Natchel, the Countess, at one of the most intimate and controlled gatherings the royal family has ever held.

The palace made no comment then, and has made none since.

What we can say with certainty is this.

Whatever the precise nature of their relationship, it was important enough to Philillip and accepted enough by the Queen that she was considered family in the most private and painful of moments.

That is not nothing.

That is in fact quite extraordinary.

Here is the question that Andrew Looney and others keep returning to.

If these stories existed, if journalists knew about them, if foreign intelligence services were tracking them, if biographers were documenting them, why did none of it reach the British public for so long? The answer is a story of deliberate coordinated suppression and it involves institutions at the very heart of British public life.

Start with the press.

Fleet street editors in the postwar decades operated under a set of informal but very real constraints regarding the royal family.

Critical royal coverage was considered unpatriotic.

Editors who pushed against those constraints found themselves subject to pressure, calls from palace officials, withdrawal of access, suggestions from proprietors that the story wasn’t worth the trouble.

The dynamic was different to censorship in the formal sense.

No law prevented newspapers from writing about Philip’s alleged affairs.

But the combination of liel risk, these were by definition allegations, the social networks that connected Fleet Street to the establishment, and the cultural assumption that the royals were a subject requiring a particular kind of deference created an effective, if informal, wall of silence.

As one journalist who investigated Philip’s activities in the 1960s noted, when his team was making inquiries about Philip’s connection to Felix Topolski’s studio, somebody knew about those inquiries within hours.

He received a visit from men identifying themselves as MI5 agents who were specifically interested in what Topolski had said about Philillip.

The British security services monitoring journalist inquiries into a member of the royal family, intervening to find out what had been said and what was going to be published.

This was not an isolated incident.

The pattern repeated itself across decades.

Whenever a thread led toward Philillip’s private life, something intervened.

A legal threat, a quiet phone call, a withdrawal of cooperation that made the story impossible to stand up to the standards required for publication.

There was also a more structural reason why Philip’s stories were suppressed.

As Andrew Looney has explained in multiple interviews, attacking Philip was understood in palace circles and in Fleet Street editorial offices.

as an attack on the queen herself.

Elizabeth II’s entire identity was built around her marriage.

She was not merely a monarch.

She was publicly and persistently a wife, the dutiful, devoted wife of Prince Philillip, a partnership that was presented as the bedrock of the monarchy’s stability and moral authority.

To suggest that Philip was not in fact faithful, that the partnership was not what it appeared would be to undermine the queen, and that the establishment had decided was simply not permissible.

The result was a conspiracy of a silence that lasted largely intact for over 70 years.

Stories were known, photographs existed, sources could be named.

And yet within Britain, the silence held.

It is only now, with Philip dead, the queen dead, a new reign begun, and a new generation of royal biographers, less constrained by the old differences, that the full shape of the hidden story is beginning to emerge.

Before we draw any conclusions, a note of important caveat.

Much of what we’ve discussed in this video is alleged, claimed, strongly suggested by people with serious credentials and solid sources, but not confirmed by documents, not admitted by the parties, not established beyond reasonable doubt.

Prince Philip denied affairs throughout his lifetime.

He was by many accounts a man of considerable honor in other respects, a devoted father in his own complicated way, a genuinely hardworking public servant, a man of intellectual curiosity and physical courage.

The full complexity of any human life resists the neat narrative of simply good or simply bad.

What Andrew Looney and others are doing and what history demands is not a condemnation of Philip, but a reckoning with a system.

A system that decided some people were too important, too central, too symbolically necessary to be subjected to the same scrutiny as everyone else.

A system that bent the press, involved the intelligent services, and relied on the social solidarity of an elite to keep certain truths from the public that the monarchy was supposed to serve.

Looney himself has said about the upcoming Philip biography.

People might be ready to hear some of the stories about his private life.

People expect more transparency from the monarchy.

Now that expectation of transparency is new.

It is a product of the years of scandal, of Diana’s panorama interview, of the Andrew Epstein catastrophe, of Harry and Megan’s departures and declarations.

The wall of silence that protected Philip for seven decades has been structurally weakened.

And in its weakening, the real history of the man is starting to surface.

Whether that history ultimately confirms the allegations, complicates them, or reframes them entirely, we will have to wait for Looney’s full biography to begin to know.

What we know now is this.

There was a double life.

There were people who knew.

There were institutions that intervened.

And for decades, the British public was told a version of their most famous marriage that was at best incomplete.

The story of Prince Philip’s private life is ultimately the story of how power protects itself.

How institutions decide which truths are permissible and which are not.

How the people at the center of national life, the people who are supposed to be most accountable are often in practice the least so.

Andrew Looney’s Philip biography is still 4 years from completion.

When it arrives, it may be the most consequential royal biography of the modern era.

We will be covering it here as the research emerges.

If this video made you think about Philillip differently, not as the stern figure two steps behind the queen, but as a full complicated secret carrying human being.

Then please leave a comment below.

We read every one of them.

Subscribe to Regal Chronicles for more deep dives into the hidden stories behind royal history.

And if you want to understand more about the woman who sat next to Philip in that near empty chapel, the woman the world saw at the wedding as his wife, our full video on Queen Elizabeth and the private cost of her public marriage is right here.

Thank you for watching.