Philip keeps calm but won’t carry on
After a media feeding frenzy, Buckingham Palace reveals anticlimactic news: the Prince is retiring
After a frenzied, middle-of-the night scramble by the global news media for strategic real estate outside Buckingham Palace and an hours-long wait in the cold, the announcement finally came: A 95-year-old man was retiring.
That would be Prince Philip, also known as the Duke of Edinburgh, the gaffeprone but grumpily endearing and loyal husband of Queen Elizabeth II, who has been her consort for 70 years — the longest royal union in British history — and has served the country for nearly as long.
“His royal highness the Duke of Edinburgh has decided that he will no longer carry out public engagements from the autumn of this year. In taking this decision, the duke has the full support of the Queen,” read the terse statement from the palace.
The statement gave no reason for the retirement. It added that the Queen’s role would be unchanged, and that while Philip would retreat from public view he may occasionally attend public events.
Minutes earlier, outside the palace, more than a dozen television crews and assembled journalists from Britain, the United States, France, Japan, Canada, New Zealand and Australia had been watching for even the slightest clue about what was happening. Speculation was rife — unfounded — that either Philip or the Queen might be dead.
The media scrum was touched off by a report in the Daily Mail, a British tabloid, that all members of the Queen’s staff had been ordered to a meeting in London, and that employees from royal residences across the country would be in attendance.
The Daily Mail described the meeting as “highly unusual,” and Buckingham Palace’s silence on the matter early in the morning allowed rumours to flourish. A palace official said such gatherings happened every now and then, and that there was “no reason for alarm.”
The Sun, Rupert Murdoch’s British tabloid, erroneously published an unfinished obituary of Philip on its website for a few minutes Thursday morning. The headline read: “Prince Philip dead at 95, how did the Duke of Edinburgh die, etc etc.”
“We are mortified this happened,” a Sun executive later said.
Members of the royal family are beloved fixtures in Britain and speculation about royal health has been simmering for months. The prince was ill during the holiday period while the Queen, who is 91, was not seen in public for nearly a month after missing church services on Christmas and New Year’s Day because of what Buckingham Palace described as a persistent cold.
A former naval officer, Philip has earned a reputation as a royal workhorse and a steadfast spouse to the Queen, even as he has sometimes come under criticism for making rude and out-of-place remarks.
During a trip to Canada in 1976, he had this to say: “We don’t come here for our health. We can think of other ways of enjoying ourselves.”
In1995 on a visit to Scotland, he met a driving instructor. “How do you keep the natives off the booze long enough to pass the test?” he asked.
Despite his propensity for political incorrectness, on Thursday he came in for praise, the memory of earlier embarrassments perhaps blunted by the sheer stamina and longevity of the foreign-born prince as he gets closer to 100. British Prime Minister Theresa May offered him “our deepest gratitude and good wishes.”
Philip’s essentially diplomatic role as royal consort did not come naturally, even as he has served as a patron, a president or a member of more than 780 organizations. When interviewed by the Independent in 1992, he reflected with characteristic bluntness on his various honorary functions, including roles on a committee on coinage and at the wildlife charity WWF.
“It was not my ambition to be president of the Mint Advisory Committee. I didn’t want to be president of WWF. I was asked to do it,” he said, before adding: “I’d much rather have stayed in the navy, frankly.”
A nephew of King Constantine I of Greece, Prince Philip was born in 1921 on the dining room table of a villa on the Greek island of Corfu. Known for his passion for the rugged outdoors, he represents an era when Britain ruled large parts of the world and gentlemen wore their lack of visible emotion like a badge of honour.