The surprising literary passions of Prince Philip
The Duke’s rapacious appetite for reading – and writing – proved he was more than just a bluff man of action, says Jake Kerridge
When Prince Philip stepped down from official duties in 2017, it was announced that he would spend his retirement carriage driving and reading. The former was a given; but, where the latter was concerned, one couldn’t help wondering if he was doomed to the same fate as Sir Robert Walpole, who picked up a book on his first day of retirement, burst into tears and declared: “I have led a life of business so long that I have lost my taste for reading, and now – what shall I do?”
But in fact, by all accounts, the Duke made considerable inroads into his library at Wood Farm, his retirement bolthole at Sandringham. Unlike Walpole, he had been wise enough never to stop cultivating the habit of reading, despite the demands of his prolonged working life.
And he managed to find time not only for reading but for writing, too. He wrote 14 books on subjects ranging from birds and conservation to religious philosophy and – yes – carriage driving.
The Duke’s literary and intellectual achievements have tended to be underrated. This is partly because his manner of expressing himself, entirely shorn of pretension, was far removed from the typical discourse of professional intellectuals; and partly because the world saw him primarily as a dashing man of action, who looked perfectly at home in a not conspicuously intellectual family. The wide range of his interests may also have suggested a dilettante. But in fact he thought deeply, as well as reading widely.
One of his biographers, Tim Heald, reported that his library at Buckingham Palace held 8,385 books as of November 1990, including “560 books on birds, 456 books on religion (ammunition with which to confront preachers after morning service!), 373 on horses and other equestrian matters, 352 on the Navy and ships”. There were also 203 volumes of poetry and rather less of fiction (to Heald, the choice of novels – RM Ballantyne, Conan Doyle, CS Forester – suggested “formative rather than mature tastes”). But then, the Duke had little time to waste on novels.
As he told Heald: “I think that you would be right to say that I read more for information and instruction than indulgence.”
Yet the Duke read everything he could get his hands on about the subjects he was most interested in, and in many cases added his own volume to the shelves. His own contribution to his library’s groaning ornithology section, for example, was Birds from Britannia (1962), an account of how he came to fall in love with wild birds during his famous round-the-world trip on the Royal Yacht Britannia in 1956-57. The book was illustrated with his own photographs. One of his biographers, Denis Judd, reported that “his favourite photograph from the book, and one which illustrates his particular brand of humour, was placed on the inside of a lavatory door at Sandringham, showing ‘a bird squatting low with an expression of great strain’”.
His next major book, Wildlife Crisis (1970) – a collaboration with the naturalist James Fisher – reflected this new concern. The Duke admitted that his interest in the natural world had come relatively late in his life. But this apologia for the then unfashionable cause of wildlife conservation is written with the zeal of a convert.
Unsurprisingly for a man who was calculated to have delivered 5,493 speeches by the time he retired, many of his books were collections of his speeches and lectures. A volume such as Men, Machines and Sacred Cows (1984) reminds us that his royal status never impeded him from expressing controversial opinions.
Although he avoids criticism of specific people, those who get it in the neck as a class include politicians (“I have no sympathy with people who claim to know what is good for others”), the clergy (“almost without exception they preach peace, goodwill and the brotherhood of man, and yet many of them have been used by the unscrupulous to cause more human conflict and misery than any other system, save perhaps Communism”) and polo umpires (“muttonheaded dolts totally ignorant of the simplest rules of the game”). There are further reflections on conservation, but the Duke also conveys his scorn for those who think that the championing of technological progress is incompatible with environmentalism. One piece takes the Swiftian form of an ironic plea to ban helicopters: “If I can persuade you to join me in this campaign, the disappearance of the helicopter is assured and then we shall all be able to hold our heads high – as we march steadily back towards the caves our ancestors so foolishly vacated such a long time ago.”
There is a genuine epigrammatic wit to his writing (“I am interested in leisure in the same way that a poor man is interested in money. I can’t get enough of it”) and he writes eloquently about the importance of using humour in the discussion of serious issues. Those who seek to get to the heart of what Prince Philip thought and believed, however, are advised to read three books that he published in the 1980s, which attempt to marry his spiritual and philosophical views. The first is A Question of Balance (1982), about the question of how to live a fulfilling life: he advocates a sort of spiritual individualism. “Religious conviction is the strongest and probably the only factor in sustaining the dignity and integrity of the individual,” he concludes.
“He was a very religious man and very questioning when it came to religion,” the royal biographer Christopher Warwick tells me.
“It wasn’t a case of just accepting things blindly. Once, when he was discussing Christ turning water into wine, he asked if it was like Uri Geller bending spoons. But although he was a man’s man and he wasn’t a pussycat, there was this caring, sensitive, intellectual, very religious side to him, a humanity that perhaps isn’t something that people would automatically associate with him.”
Indeed, this was a man as stimulated by new ideas as he was by sailing, riding and shooting; not a mere busybody but somebody who thought carefully and intelligently about life. He had much in common with his predecessor as royal consort, Prince Albert – another foreigner with a rather un-english interest in
He wrote three books which address his spiritual and philosophical views
ideas and a keenness for reform – and one wonders how different the UK might be today if Philip had had a comparable level of power and influence.
But being a 20th-century royal, he could only lobby, rather than guide policy – and so, like any old commoner, he had to learn how to argue a case cogently and eloquently.
Perhaps, as his rather knockabout public persona fades from view, Prince Philip the writer and thinker will come to be more widely appreciated. One hopes that some of his books might even be republished.
In the meantime, we might remember him by reading a contribution he made to a book of prayers in 1998. It distils in a few words much of what he thought about the triangular relationship between man, God and the natural world – a little glimpse into what was whirring away in the private mind of this most public of figures:
“Oh Lord, the creator of the universe and author of the laws of nature, inspire in us thy servants the will to ensure the survival of all the species of animals and plants which you have given to share this planet with us. Help us to understand that we have a responsibility for them and that ‘having dominion’ does not mean that you have given us the right to exploit the living world without thought for the consequences. Through him who taught us that Solomon could not compare with the beauty of the flowers of the field.”