Prince Philip’s official biographer
The art of retiring gracefully
More than 65 years since his wife became Queen, Prince Philip is now comfortably the longestserving royal consort in British history, surpassing by eight years the record previously held by George III’s Queen Charlotte, who was consort from 1761 until her death in 1818. In the process, he has carried out more than 22,000 solo engagements – he recently hazarded a guess that he is the world’s most experienced plaque-unveiler – and outlasted 12 prime ministers and 12 US presidents.
A month short of his 96th birthday, he still follows dutifully a pace or two behind his wife while on royal walkabouts, helping to break the conversational ice and emitting the occasional mischievous aside. He has every right to remark, as he did in 2011 when he turned 90, “I reckon I’ve done my bit”.
An overtly masculine, forthright and restless character, the Duke of Edinburgh was not obviously cut out to play second fiddle, yet ever since the Queen’s accession to the throne in 1952 he has been required to address his wife as ‘‘Ma’am” in public and bow whenever she enters a room.
Unlike Prince Albert, Queen Victoria’s consort and “uncrowned king”, Prince Philip is barred from taking any part in constitutional affairs or expressing any political opinions – although he has never been afraid to speak his mind and, in private, the Queen has doubtless relied on his advice and encouragement throughout her reign. Rarely one to guard his tongue, he has become famous for his occasional diplomatic faux pas, as well as for sharp remarks to reporters and photographers and volcanic explosions with his staff.
Frustration with his restrictive role (he was previously a first-rate naval officer, destined, many thought, for the highest rank in the Royal Navy) may partly explain the odd loss of temper. But more telling clues to his complex nature are to be found in his turbulent childhood. His father was almost executed during a military coup in Greece, his favourite sister was killed in a plane crash and, when he was eight years old, his mother was incarcerated in a German psychiatric clinic for five years, leaving him to be brought up by his Mountbatten uncles in England.
“He never had the love,” remarked one friend years later about the prince’s childhood. “There was no one really close – that day-to-day parental contact that you need to smooth off the rough edges. That’s where the rudeness comes from – not enough slap-down when it mattered.”
Prince Philip has always been at pains to play down the effects of all this. “I just had to get on with it. You do. One does.” Yet it meant that as an adolescent he would never have a room of his own, and when an interviewer asked him later in life what language he had spoken at home as a child, he retorted sharply: “What do you mean, at home?” When signing visitors’ books, he wrote in the address column: “Of no fixed abode.”
On the outbreak of war in 1939, the 18-year-old vagabond prince decided against returning to neutral Greece, as his mother wished him to do, and instead committed himself to finishing his naval training at Dartmouth and fighting on the Allied side, even though all four of his sisters were living in Germany. Mentioned in dispatches in 1941 for directing searchlights during the battle of Cape Matapan, which effectively scuttled Italian naval operations in the Mediterranean, he went on to become one of the Navy’s youngest and most highly regarded first lieutenants and by the end of the war it was widely predicted that he would eventually follow in the footsteps of his grandfather, Prince Louis of Battenberg, and become First Sea Lord.
But the illness of George VI put paid to that idea, and in 1951, four years into his marriage to Princess Elizabeth, Prince Philip realised that he could no longer pursue an active naval career at the same time as supporting his wife in carrying out her increasingly demanding duties as heiress to the throne.
Having just turned 30, he left the Navy on “indefinite leave”, never to return. It was just about the only regret he has been prepared to admit to in later life. “It was not my ambition to be president of the Mint Advisory Committee,” he told one interviewer years afterwards. “I didn’t want to be president of the World Wildlife Fund. I was asked to do it. I’d much rather have stayed in the Navy, frankly.”
Yet, as recognised last week, his contribution to the 785 organisations with which he has been associated over the years has been immense. Not least the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award scheme, which has so far spread to 144 countries and boosted the selfesteem of some eight million young people who have taken part in it.
Of course the trajectory of Prince Philip’s life changed forever the moment the King died at Sandringham, while his daughter and Philip were in Kenya at the start of an intended tour of the Commonwealth. They would have been expecting to have at least 20 years of relatively carefree married life before she became Queen, but barely five years after their marriage, at the age of just 31, was far too soon for such a vigorous and headstrong young man to abandon his beloved career and slip happily into his new role of walking a yard behind his wife at public functions. Prince Philip’s low spirits during the first few months of his wife’s reign seemed to echo Prince Albert’s despairing entry in his diary soon after marrying Queen Victoria: “Oh, the future!”
While the Queen now had a
Not obviously cut out to play second fiddle, he proved the Queen’s ‘strength and stay’
definite position in the country, Prince Philip was continually warned by crusty courtiers against straying into affairs that were not his concern. Deciding that one thing he could do would be to act as his wife’s “eyes and ears”, he began taking advantage of his greater freedom to get around the country, visiting factories and coal mines, broadening the Queen’s experience by proxy and keeping her informed about the state of public opinion. But even these forays ran the risk of causing offence, as when he visited the House of Commons to listen to a debate – something a royal consort had not done since 1846 –
and was later quietly ticked off for having been seen to express his own opinions about what he heard in defiance of his constitutional position.
Far more upsetting was the dispute over the Royal family name, a row that erupted when, two days after the King’s death, Prince Philip’s uncle Louis Mountbatten held a dinner party at Broadlands and triumphantly toasted the fact that the House of Mountbatten now reigned. Word of this reached Queen Mary, who spent a sleepless night before summoning the prime minister’s secretary, Jock Colville.
The upshot was that Prince Philip – who in fact favoured the name Edinburgh, rather than Mountbatten – was firmly told that the House of Windsor had been founded by George V in perpetuity and his marriage did nothing to change that. “I am the only man in the country not allowed to give his name to his children,” responded the Prince. “I’m nothing but a bloody amoeba.”
Yet he has rarely complained about his lot during six and a half decades as consort, and although he has now decided to retire, his wit evidently remains as quick as ever. When the mathematician Sir Michael Atiyah told him how sorry he was to hear he was standing down, the Prince shot straight back in characteristic fashion: “Well, I can’t stand up much longer!”
In the last year alone, he has carried out 219 official engagements and it should come as no surprise that a man of 95 has resolved to take things a little easier from now on.
He is said to have reached his decision over the past few months and told the Queen about it over the Easter weekend at Windsor Castle, where he now intends to spend more of his time, indulging various interests such as painting and carriage driving. In private, though, I have no doubt that he will continue to serve as the Queen’s “strength and stay”, as she describes him, the essential support on which her singularly successful reign has for so long depended.