The quiet power behind the throne
PHILIP EXERTED AN ENDURING INFLUENCE ON THE MONARCHY
The death of Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, on Friday brings to an end one of the most remarkable partnerships in British history: he and the Queen were married for more than 70 years, longer than any other royal couple. They celebrated their 73rd wedding anniversary in November.
But like Queen Victoria's consort, Prince Albert, before him, Philip found there was little precedent for how he was to conduct himself as “First Gentleman.”
While his wife ruled, constitutionally, he had no official function. She did not even take his surname, Mountbatten, sticking with Windsor. He was forced to invent a role beyond being, as he once put it, a “bloody amoeba.”
The Prince's diminished status was apparent every time they appeared in public, with the monarch leading, he several paces behind. He also lost the job he loved, being forced to retire from the Royal Navy. “I'd have much rather stayed in the Navy,” he admitted decades later.
But in their private life, the Prince was definitely in charge. He needed to be “boss in his own home,” as his wife put it. When he barbecued at Balmoral, the family's Scottish home, in itself an amazing innovation, she donned rubber gloves to do the dishes.
One prime area for reform was the royal household. In one example, Philip asked why a new bottle of Scotch was placed in the Queen's bedroom every day (she doesn't drink it). It emerged that Queen Victoria had once asked for some to combat a cold. He would also stop people in the hallways and ask what their job was and did they like it.
Outside the domestic sphere, the Prince was interested in many different causes, being involved in more than 800 charities. They ranged from sports, youth and wildlife conservation to education and the environment.
His most important initiative was the Duke of Edinburgh's awards, started in 1956. They were intended to encourage young people to decide what they were passionate about, then help them to develop the skills to succeed in that field. The movement has now spread to more than 140 countries.
Under the Prince's guidance, the Queen and their children also became more open to public scrutiny — perhaps to their detriment. There was more access on royal tours and live television broadcasts.
The 1969 documentary The Royal Family is seen as the turning point. The BBC'S cameras were given unprecedented access, following the family for 18 months. The result was a then-unparalleled look into their daily life at Windsor, Buckingham Palace and Balmoral.
Though the film helped to humanize the participants and was a huge hit, it also tarnished the mystique of royalty, something Victorian commentator Walter Bagehot had warned against: “We must not let daylight upon magic.”
The experiment was not repeated. As Princess Anne said later, it was “a rotten idea” that she never liked. “The last thing you needed was great access.”
But even without the documentary, Philip was all too frequently making headlines. His often-irascible remarks were catnip to journalists, always on the lookout for a good quote.
They range from “I declare this thing open, whatever it is” to “If you stay here much longer, you'll all be slitty-eyed” (to British students in China, during the 1986 state visit).
Canada was the site of one of his most memorable gaffes. “The monarchy exists not for its own benefit, but for that of the country. We don't come here for our health. We can think of better ways of enjoying ourselves,” he said in Ottawa in the autumn of 1969.
In other cases, he had a point. “You have mosquitoes, I have the press,” he remarked during a tour of the Caribbean.
For Philip, it was a royal rags to riches story. The fifth child and only son of Prince Andrew of Greece and Princess Alice of Battenberg, he was born Philippos Andreou on June 10, 1921.
The Greek royal family had only recently returned from exile so the house — a holiday villa on the island of Corfu — was in such disorder that the doctor attending the princess deemed the only suitable spot for the birth was the dining room table.
Within 18 months, the family was once again homeless as the result of a coup.
His parents soon separated, with Andrew becoming an aging playboy on the French Riviera and Alice, who was deaf, turning to religion and good works. She also spent much time in sanitariums.
The homeless Philip was brought up by relatives in Paris, London and Germany — his four sisters had all married German princelings. Most influential were his Mountbatten grandmother and uncles, who lived in Britain.
The young man was also lucky enough to encounter Kurt Hahn, whose educational principles and defiance of the Nazis led him to be expelled from Germany.
He moved to Britain and set up Gordonstoun on the east coast of Scotland, a school notorious for its toughening regime of cold showers and morning runs. Philip was one of his early pupils and thrived on its Spartan discipline.
Next, at the prodding of Uncle Louis — Lord Louis Mountbatten — the young man became a British naval cadet, where he was known as Philip Mountbatten. He had turned into a handsome blond six-footer with blue eyes — one observer called him “a young Viking” — but without a penny to his name. To others, he was simply “Phil the Greek.”
It was at this stage that he caught the eye of his distant cousin, Princess Elizabeth, heiress presumptive to the British crown — they were both descended from Queen Victoria. The two are known to have met in the 1930s during family parties and weddings, but there is no record of their reaction, if any.
Elizabeth's parents, George VI and Queen Elizabeth, thought their daughter much too young to have made up her mind. They also hoped she would marry a British aristocrat, rather than another German — the Greek royal family were of Danish, German and Russian descent, without a drop of Greek blood. In addition, there was the problem of Philip's relatives. Two of his brothers-in-laws and several other family members were Nazis.
The Second World War effectively shelved any decision, but Philip continued to be invited to family gatherings when not on naval duty. His uncles — the king of Greece and the ambitious and pushy Lord Louis — were also lobbying for their boy.
By the end of the war, Elizabeth had grown into a strong-willed and independent young woman who had effectively made her choice.
In the summer of 1946, Philip was invited to Balmoral and the couple became unofficially engaged.
Their wedding in November 1947 provided a rare moment of celebration for a nation exhausted and impoverished by war. Philip became HRH the Duke of Edinburgh, the title by which he is known today, along with Earl of Merioneth and Baron Greenwich.
The newlyweds enjoyed as a normal an existence as was possible for royals. When Philip was deployed to Malta, Elizabeth joined him and was able to live as an officer's wife, even doing her own shopping and going to the hairdresser.
But George VI was deathly ill with lung cancer and she was increasingly called on to stand in for him. In February 1952, she became Queen.
The succession was quickly assured by the birth of a son, Charles, in 1948, followed by Anne (1950), Andrew (1960, named for Philip's father) and Edward (1964).
The children were brought up in the old way, with nannies and intermittent contact with their parents; an innovation was boarding school. Charles was sent to Gordonstoun, Andrew to Lakefield College in Ontario.
In supervising their upbringing, Philip sought to impose the same kind of Spartan regime he had flourished under. As one wit noted, he managed to find the only German school in Britain. This failed spectacularly in the case of his oldest son, a more sensitive boy, with interests in watercolours and the environment, though he did take up polo, a sport at which Philip excelled.
Meanwhile the Prince was indulging his taste for fast cars, boats and planes. He belonged to a rather louche men's club and there were the inevitable rumours of womanizing, but this has never been proved despite the media's best efforts.
His children were not so lucky. Their marital misadventures became tabloid fodder, with three out of the four getting divorced. Philip proved remarkably tolerant of Charles's wife Diana, writing long letters of counsel to her. He was less so of Andrew's wife, Sarah Ferguson, whose many indiscretions earned her his enduring enmity.
Throughout it all, the parents persevered.
In a speech to mark their 50th wedding anniversary, Philip said, “I think the main lesson we have learnt is that tolerance is the one essential ingredient in any happy marriage ... You can take it from me, the Queen has the quality of tolerance in abundance.”
But even a man as active and determined as Philip has had to slow down, thanks to old age and a hip operation. However, he did not withdraw from public life until the age of 96 — only 31 years after the official British retirement age of 65 — when he described himself as “the world's most experienced plaque unveiler.”
In total, he undertook 22,191 solo engagements and gave 5,493 speeches.
On June 9, 2020, on the occasion of his 99th birthday, Prince Philip posed with the Queen on the grounds of Windsor Castle, where the royal couple were isolating during the pandemic. It was the first public photo of the Duke of Edinburgh since he was last photographed leaving a London hospital after a four-day stay in December 2019. It was a sunny day.