He was dynamic, irascible, exasperating, intriguing. And he was always three steps behind his wife, Queen Elizabeth, who utterly adored him throughout their 73-year marriage, flaws, faux pas and all.
Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, who died Friday at 99, may not have been warmly embraced by the British public — he was too prickly a personality for that — but he was widely respected for succeeding so well at the often-thankless job of being the Queen’s consort.
He was ever there for Elizabeth, standing just behind her; hands clasped in his signature style, firmly behind his back.
In the marriage’s early days, Philip balked at having to take a back seat in the royal scheme of things, and, after Elizabeth became monarch, suffered a painful period of adjustment. When he asked several people what he should do, there being no official role, much less power, attached to being consort, “they sort of looked down and shuffled their feet,” he said in a rare personal interview.
The formal demands were easy — “Any bloody fool can lay a wreath at a thingammy” — but finding personal fulfilment was a challenge. In the early 1950s, Philip scathingly described what it was like for him in Buckingham Palace: “I’m a bloody amoeba. I’m just a lodger there.”
It wasn’t the first time he’d felt that way.
He was born Prince Philippos on the island of Corfu in 1921, a grandson of the King of Greece, not in fact Greek, but German-Danish. Within 18 months, his immediate family was exiled and had to flee for their lives, their youngest child and only son hidden in an orange box.
Like Elizabeth, Philip was directly descended from Queen Victoria, but in his immediate family, silver spoons were conspicuous by their absence. His father, Prince Andrew, by all accounts a charming but aimless bon vivant, departed quickly for the Riviera, leaving his wife and five children to board with sundry relations in France and Germany.
A relative paid for Philip’s schooling at Gordonstoun in Scotland, which he loved as much as his son Charles later would loathe it. The headmaster’s final report presciently read: “His leadership qualities are most noticeable, though marred at times by impatience and intolerance. His best is outstanding, his second best is not good enough.”
In Britain, Philip was taken under the wing of his mother’s wily brother, Lord Louis Mountbatten, whose surname he adopted, eschewing his own overly Germanic one: Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glucksburg. Though technically still a prince, in reality, he was a penniless lieutenant in the Royal Navy, “a princeling of no consequence” as he once put it.
In 1939, when Princess Elizabeth, heir to the British throne, first met him, he was a self-assured 18, she, a prematurely serious 13-year-old. It’s always been said, however, that Elizabeth fell in love in an instant with the tall, strikingly handsome junior officer. Poor and exiled Philip may have been, but he was royal nonetheless, and magnetically confident.
Their wedding in Westminster Abbey on a rainy Nov. 20, 1947, brightened the gloom of post-war Britain. Philip was created Duke of Edinburgh just hours before the ceremony; a decade later, he was named a Prince of Great Britain. But curiously, he never would be granted the official title of Prince Consort, as Queen Victoria had insisted on for Albert.
Philip continued to serve in the navy and the couple enjoyed a short, happy period of near-normalcy in 1951, when he was stationed in Malta and Elizabeth could be just another officer’s wife.
But his naval career ended and both their lives changed forever on Feb 6, 1952, with the death of King George VI.
Elizabeth wouldn’t be crowned for another year, but the onerous transition of princess to sovereign began at once. Philip, to a large degree, was stuck on the palace sidelines. At 32, he had gained status and wealth, but soon realized he would have to pay a price.
“You’ve virtually got to say goodbye to innocence and your predilections in life,” he once said. “You haven’t got a choice, or anything like as wide a choice, because it could attract criticism …. You discover that you can’t have your cake and eat it.”
Philip learned that lesson the hard way. Reflexively acerbic and outspoken, he got off on the wrong foot with Britain’s merciless tabloid press, which soon began to play up his room-silencing gaffes and outright rudeness. A (very) few examples:
He once told a British student studying in China to be careful not to get “slitty eyes.” He thought it amusing to address the visiting German president, Helmut Kohl, as Reichskanzler — a title last used by Adolf Hitler. On one visit to Canada, he undiplomatically remarked to a local, “We don’t come here for our health. We can think of other ways of enjoying ourselves.”
He was dynamic, irascible, exasperating, intriguing. And he was always three steps behind his wife, Queen Elizabeth, who utterly adored him throughout their 73-year marriage, flaws, faux pas and all.
To a group at a Commonwealth reception, he asked, “Are you Indian or Pakistani? I can never tell the difference between you chaps.” And of a Scottish driving instructor: “How do you keep the natives off the booze long enough to get them through the test?” Introduced to the singer Tom Jones after a Royal Variety Performance, Philip greeted him with “What do you gargle with, pebbles?”
Philip resented the coverage he got and thought it unfair. But time and again, he made matters worse for himself.
While feeding the Barbary apes during a visit to Gibraltar attended by the usual gaggle of press, he dryly asked, “Which are the apes and which are the reporters?” After a photographer fell off a pole in Pakistan trying to get above-the-crowd shots of him, Philip snapped, “I hope he breaks his bloody neck.”
He would disingenuously complain that “I’m always getting my teeth bashed in over something I’ve said.” In his view, the media had “no sense of humour. Period.”
They returned the sentiment about the man they delighted in referring to as “Phil the Greek.”
Over the years, he was described by critics as everything from “the best argument for Republicanism since George III” to “a mixture of bluff affability and utter disdain.” But his one-time equerry, Michael Parker, countered that “no one has a kinder heart, or takes more trouble to conceal it.”
A conundrum was what he was, concluded biographer Tim Heald: “Real humility sits uneasily alongside apparent arrogance, energy and optimism co-exist with sudden douches of cold water, real kindnesses are mingled with inexplicable snubs.”
As the decades passed, however, the duke did learn to think before speaking when out and about in public: “I reckon I have done something right if I don’t appear in the media,” he told an interviewer. “I’ve retreated quite consciously, so as not to be an embarrassment.”
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That meant that much of the serious work Philip did went unrecognized. He played a large part in dragging the royal institution into the modern age by organizing an efficient family “firm.” He was instrumental in the making of a veil-lifting, 1969 documentary on the Windsor family’s day-to-day lives, though constantly interrupted filming by shouting, “Keep those bloody cameras away from the Queen!” Had he realized then the amount of media intrusion the groundbreaking TV program would lead to, Philip unquestionably would have halted it all there and then.
The duke’s early advocacy of environmentalism was little known outside conservation circles, but back in 1969, he was already sounding the alarm:
“Everything in nature is completely interdependent,” he said in one little-covered speech. “Tinker with one part of it and the repercussions ripple out in all directions. The process of destroying our natural environment is gathering speed and momentum.
“If we fail to cope with this challenge, all other problems will pale into insignificance.”
He installed some of Britain’s first solar panels at Sandringham, the Windsors’ country house in Norfolk, and was driving around in an electric van decades before they became popular.
Philip could have, and perhaps should have, gone louder and wider in his prescient environmental warnings. But unlike his eldest son, Prince Charles, he was still an old-style royal, unwilling to lobby too loudly for his causes in the public sphere.
For decades, he was the unsung workhorse of the House of Windsor, logging 120,000 kilometres a year, and, until his mid-70s, often piloted the plane when flying to engagements. He was much more than a nominal patron to more than a score of diverse organizations, among them the World Wildlife Fund, whose presidency he held for 21 years (despite regularly going hunting and shooting); the Duke of Edinburgh Awards for young people; and the British Association for the Advancement of Science.
Philip painted and was an avid sailor, a high-level polo player until age 50, and a competitive carriage driver well into his 80s (“You bloody twits,” was his term of endearment for his horses).
Although several observers over the decades hinted that Philip was rather “more loyal than faithful” in his marriage to the Queen, persistent rumours of affairs with various aristocrats and actresses never yielded much in the way of evidence, let alone proof. When a British TV interviewer plucked up the courage to raise the issue, Philip sidestepped: “Every time I talk to a woman, the papers say I’ve been to bed with her. It’s cuckoo!”
Perhaps as compensation for his secondary public role, the Queen handed over to him the family’s domestic arrangements, the four children’s schooling in particular. Philip found Prince Charles’s childhood sensitivities irksome. Time and again, he tried to toughen up the heir to the throne, verbally belittling him, often in front of others. It went on for years. At university, when Charles played the tortured Macbeth on stage, he sat in the audience, hooting with derisive laughter.
The Prince of Wales told his own biographer that Philip had been a domineering, bullying father who pressured him into marrying the ineffably wrong person, Lady Diana Spencer. But the other royal children, Anne, his acknowledged favourite, Andrew and Edward never publicly uttered a critical word.
At the royal couple’s 50th-anniversary lunch in 1997, the person who had known Philip longest and best thanked him publicly. “He is someone who doesn’t take easily to compliments,” said the Queen, “but he has quite simply been my strength and stay all these years, and I, and his whole family, owe him a debt greater than he would ever claim or wish to know.”
Philip suffered a series of medical issues in his later years. During the June 2012 celebrations of his wife’s Diamond Jubilee, he was admitted to hospital with a bladder infection. As a result, he missed both a celebratory concert — which he probably would have loathed — and a service of thanksgiving at St. Paul’s.
As a result, the Queen walked alone down the aisle of the great cathedral, cutting, as one newspaper put it, “a rather solitary figure.”
Philip retired from solo public appearances in August 2017, at the age of 96. Months earlier he had joked that after more than 22,000 public engagements, he had become “the world’s most experienced plaque-unveiler.”
The following year he was hospitalized for 10 days to undergo hip replacement surgery.
He made headlines in January 2019 when he flipped his Land Rover near the Queen’s Sandringham estate in Norfolk after colliding with another car. Two of the occupants of the other vehicle were injured, but Philip was unharmed.
Two days after the crash he was photographed driving without wearing a seatbelt, and after the ensuing controversy he voluntarily surrendered his driver’s licence.
For the four days leading up to Christmas 2019, then 98 years old, Philip was in the hospital for a “pre-existing condition,” but left in time to spend Christmas Day with Elizabeth; the BBC noted that he hadn’t been seen in public since Lady Gabriella Windsor’s wedding in May.
Philip celebrated his 99th birthday in June 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, and a photo of him standing next to Elizabeth was released to celebrate the occasion.
After the deaths of the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret in 2002, Philip was the only person left who could call Elizabeth by her childhood nickname, Lilibet. Only he knew what she had undergone to grow from a shy princess to a serene monarch to a royal matriarch.
Philip knew, because he had been there for her every step of the way.
—with files from Rosa Saba
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