The Queen’s ‘strength and stay’
It was more than 80 years ago that a teenage Princess Elizabeth, future Queen of Canada, first laid eyes on a Greek royal who had ended up at the British naval college.
Prince Philip Schleswig-holstein-sonderburg-glucksburg was by that time stateless and had been trimmed down to just cadet Philip Mountbatten. He captured her heart then and there. Love at first sight — at least for the future sovereign — would last down the years, sustaining her until she buries her consort on Saturday, just four days short of her 95th birthday and a few months short of his 100th.
Her Majesty has preferred to grieve in a discreet manner. She has her faith, her family close by, and is comforted by the countless simple, decent people who pray for the repose of the soul of the late Duke of Edinburgh.
But there is a demand for statements, and so the courtiers artfully posted a few lines from her 1997 speech on the occasion of their golden wedding jubilee. She called Prince Philip her “strength and stay” and that was it.
That speech repays a careful reading; it is one of the more important of Elizabeth’s reign. Though it was delivered on the occasion of an already long marriage, it is not about marriage, save for the final paragraph about Philip. It’s about longevity.
The Queen makes a nod toward the march of time — the Beatles and mobile phones make the list — and notes that Tony Blair, then the incumbent prime minister and her 10th, was born in the year that she was crowned.
Having established that relevant datum, Her Majesty then dwells at some length on how democratically-elected politicians and hereditary monarchs both must listen to the people they lead. It was less than three months after Diana, Princess of Wales, and Dodi Fayed had died in the Paris traffic tunnel. Blair, elected prime minister just four months before that, had badgered the Queen to grieve in a more fashionably ostentatious manner. The Queen and the Duke gave in, but by their golden jubilee in November 1997, she was beginning to come around to her original instincts. Later, everyone else would, as recorded cinematically in the 2006 film The Queen.
Thus the Queen noted her gratitude for the advice of her prime ministers, delivered “without fear or favour.” But sovereigns, too, must sense what their subjects are saying.
“For us, a Royal Family, however, the message is often harder to read, obscured as it can be by deference, rhetoric or the conflicting currents of public opinion,” Elizabeth said. “But read it we must. I have done my best, with Prince Philip’s constant love and help, to interpret it correctly through the years of our marriage and of my reign as your Queen.” “But read it we must.” Prince Philip’s long life — he was born when the last Habsburg emperor, Blessed Karl of Austria, was still alive — was a series of variations on that theme. As an infant his father, brother to the deposed king of Greece, was sentenced to death and forced into exile. Hence the family’s famous fleeing to France, with the infant Philip stashed in a fruit box.
Those who only know Prince Philip from The Crown do learn at least one thing; he was mightily concerned with keeping the Windsors from following the fate of his cousins in the great royal houses of Europe.
That he would serenely spend nearly 70 years as consort to a sovereign who was never truly in danger would have been unthinkable when he fled Greece in 1922. His role in that reign was due to luck in large part. His grandfather Prince Louis of Battenberg decamped to London, entered the Royal Navy, and rose to First Sea Lord as a Mountbatten. That record provided a landing place and life plan for Philip. Fortune matters and Philip made the most of it.
The Windsors, too, were lucky; Edward VIII’S abdication spared Britain the spectre of war against Germany with a Nazi sympathizer as sovereign. That eventuality might have meant the Second World War would be for the King what the Great War was for the Kaiser, the Tsar and the Emperor.
Instead, Britain got a future consort in Lt. Philip Mountbatten bravely fighting the Axis, a rather timely addition to the family.
Fortune is fickle, though, and Edward’s abdication accelerated Elizabeth’s accession and the premature end of Philip’s naval career.
Thus began a long run that he would often deprecate as the “world’s most experienced plaque-unveiler.” Plaques record history, great and small, and Elizabeth and Philip were attentive to that — discerning what was needed of them and what was not, shifting when necessary but also refusing to shift. They were students of history in order to avoid repeating its mistakes.
Philip was likely the more attentive student. Exile and statelessness does that. He lived through too much history as a young man, and widely read it afterward. He brought all that to serve an institution that is as determined by history as any other. In the pleasant ways of monarchy, the institution is a person with a heart. He served that person very well for very long, since that heart first fluttered more than 80 years ago.
FOR US, A ROYAL FAMILY, HOWEVER, THE MESSAGE IS OFTEN HARDER TO READ ...