Prince Philip and Queen Elizabeth, who always appeared to be poised in public, had a cheeky side to them that many had been unaware of.
The Duke of Edinburgh indulged in some erotic manuals from the ’70s while his wife, the longest reigning monarch had quite the colourful language.
Royal biographer Christopher Andersen told Fox News Digital that the late queen was not perturbed by swear words, rather had respect for the colourful language.
“After veteran British actor Brian Blessed blurted out the F-word while telling a racy story on BBC television,” Anderson recalled.
“The queen pulled him aside during a reception at Buckingham Palace, ‘That was a funny story you told, Mr Blessed,’ Her Majesty said. ‘What I would like to say to you is that the word ‘f---’ is an Anglo-Saxon word. It means ‘spreading the seed.’”
Meanwhile, royal photographer Julian Calder, who has taken several portraits of the royal couple in their later years, got candid about the personalities of the late monarch and her husband in Hello! A Right Royal podcast.
“I once did a portrait of Prince Philip in his office,” he told the podcast hosts. “And he was standing there, and I was quite young at the time.”
“And I’m looking through the lens, I thought, ‘God, just behind his right ear is a book – The Joy of Sex,” Calder relayed. “I had to say, ‘Prince Philip, should we move that?’ And he laughed, and he got his equerry to come and move it.”
“I’d have looked stupid!” Calder added.
Prince Philip appeared to take on a trait from his uncle Lord Mountbatten, with whom he was quite close, via Express.co.uk.
In Queen Elizabeth’s much-loved Royal Yacht Britannia, Philip kept a racy item on board which he did not even remove for state guests who came over to the vessel.
In her book, The Royals, author Kitty Kelley shared that Mountbatten hung a quite a racy picture of himself. Hung in Queen’s passageway, the photo had Mountbatten and actor Cary Grant standing next to two showgirls displaying their bare bottoms.
“Mountbatten found the picture of the amusing he had it blown up and hung in the Queen’s passageway on the royal yacht,” wrote Kelley.
Amused by the picture, Philip was delighted to keep it hanging despite a Queen’s private secretary being horrified by it.
“The Duke of Edinburgh is very lewd, very Germanic,” Kelley quoted the secretary. “The haughty courtier attributed ‘Philip’s vulgar preoccupation with nudity’ to his ‘Mountbatten origins.’”