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LONDON The death of Prince Philip has left a huge void for his wife Queen Elizabeth and Britain has lost its “grandfather”, his son Prince Andrew said on Sunday, as tributes poured in and the royals thanked the public for its support. Prince Andrew joined his siblings Prince Charles, Princess Anne and Prince Edward in saying they had taken strength from the outpouring of affection and would rally around their mother in her time of grief.

“You know it’s going to happen but you are never really ready,” Princess Anne said in a statement.

Prince Andrew called his father a “remarkable man” after he left a private church service in Windsor, near where Prince Philip died on Friday aged 99.

“It’s a great loss,” he said. “I think the way I would put it is we’ve lost almost the grandfather of the nation.”

Prince Edward echoed that, saying: “He might have been our father, grandfather, father-in-law but he meant so much to so many other people”.

Prince Edward’s wife, Sophie, told wellwishers of Prince

Philip’s final moments.

“It was right for him. It was so gentle. It was just like somebody took him by the hand and off he went,” she said.

“Very, very peaceful. And that’s all you want for somebody isn’t it?”

Prince Andrew said of his 94-year-old mother that the queen was stoical in the face of a loss that she had described as “having left a huge void in her life”.

Prince Andrew has rarely been seen in public since he stepped down from official duties in 2019 over the controversy surrounding his association with the disgraced late US financier Jeffrey Epstein.

The prayers for Prince Philip at the service in All Saints Chapel in Windsor Great Park west of London echoed church services