Elizabeth II had very little time to settle into her new role before being confronted with the first crisis of her reign. Not long after George VI’s funeral – he was laid to rest on 15 February at St George’s Chapel in the grounds of Windsor Castle – a family crisis erupted which greatly unsettled Elizabeth and shook her marriage to the very core.
The problem stemmed from the thorny issue of the family surname. Since their wedding, Philip had, not unreasonably, been under the impression that his children would bear the combined surname of Mountbatten-Windsor. It was only when Elizabeth ascended to the throne that senior members of the Government and the Royal Family, including the Prime Minster, Winston Churchill, and Queen Mary, began to contemplate the implications of this arrangement. Realizing that the double-barrelled surname would, in effect, ‘dilute’ the dynastic name of Windsor, they immediately campaigned against the ‘Mountbatten’ add-on.
Elizabeth was besieged on all sides with arguments for and against the issue. Eventually, having already rejected Philip’s suggested compromise of the name ‘Windsor-Edinburgh’, she decided to bow to the pressure from the old conservative stalwarts and retain the status quo. On 7 April 1952, she issued the following proclamation:
I and my children shall be styled and known as the House and Family of Windsor and my descendents who marry and their descendents shall bear the name of Windsor.
The Duke of Edinburgh, who was already having difficulty adjusting to the new order of things since his wife’s ascension to the throne, was devastated. He felt utterly betrayed and famously declared ‘I’m nothing but a bloody amoeba! I’m the only man in the country not allowed to give his children his name.’ It greatly pained Elizabeth to deny her husband his right to pass on his surname to his descendents, and it profoundly affected their marriage. Deeply hurt, Philip felt that his position within the Royal Family had been entirely undermined and he continued to harbour a certain resentment for years to come.