For Britain’s Queen Elizabeth, ‘the only man I could ever love’

Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, husband of Queen Elizabeth II, father of Prince Charles and patriarch of a turbulent royal household that he sought to make sure wouldn’t be Britain’s final, died on Friday at Windsor Castle in England. He was 99.
His loss of life was introduced by Buckingham Palace, which stated he handed away peacefully.
Philip had been hospitalised a number of occasions in recent times for numerous illnesses, most just lately in February, the palace stated. The queen and Prince Philip acquired their first doses of the coronavirus vaccine in January.
He died simply as Buckingham Palace was once more in turmoil, this time over Oprah Winfrey’s explosive televised interview with Philip’s grandson Prince Harry and Harry’s biracial spouse, Meghan, on March 7, when the couple, in self-imposed exile in California, lodged accusations of racism and cruelty towards members of the royal household.
As “the first gentleman in the land”, Philip tried to shepherd into the twentieth century a monarchy encrusted with the trimmings of the nineteenth. But as pageantry was upstaged by scandal, as regal weddings had been adopted by sensational divorces, his mission, as he noticed it, modified. Now it was to assist protect the crown itself.
And but preservation — of Britain, of the throne, of centuries of custom — had all the time been the mission. When this tall, good-looking prince married the younger crown princess, Elizabeth, (he at 26, she at 21) on November 20, 1947, a battered Britain was nonetheless recovering from World War II, the solar had all however set on its empire, and the abdication of Edward VIII over his love for Wallis Simpson, a divorced American, was nonetheless reverberating a decade later.
Philip occupied a peculiar place on the world stage because the husband of a queen whose powers had been largely ceremonial. He was basically a second-fiddle figurehead, accompanying her on royal visits and typically standing in for her.
And but he embraced his royal position as a job to be performed. “We have got to make this monarchy thing work,” he was reported to have stated.
He saved at it till May 2017, when, at age 95, he introduced his retirement from public life; his closing solo look got here three months later.
Philip’s public picture usually got here wearing full navy regalia, an emblem of his high-ranking titles within the armed forces and a reminder of each his fight expertise in World War II and his martial lineage: He was a nephew of the conflict chief Lord Mountbatten.
Many noticed Philip as a principally distant if sometimes loose-lipped personage in public, given to riling constituents with off-the-cuff remarks that had been known as oblivious, insensitive or worse. To a Black British politician he was quoted as saying, “And what exotic part of the world do you come from?”
As the years glided by, phrase seeped out that Philip, in non-public, may very well be irascible and demanding, chilly and domineering — and that as mother and father, he and an emotionally reserved queen introduced little heat into the family.
Even extra, as many Britons got here to see the royal household as more and more dysfunctional, they discovered Philip to be a not-insignificant actor in a state of affairs that had many questioning the very factor that he and Elizabeth had been elevated to make sure: the monarchy’s stability.
Though the glory he knew was largely of the mirrored form, Philip nonetheless loved the privileges and prerogatives of the British crown, residing in luxurious, crusing yachts, enjoying polo and piloting planes. And he used his station to advertise the frequent good, lending his identify and time to causes like constructing enjoying fields for British youths and preserving endangered wildlife.
Another was instituting efficiencies at Buckingham Palace, initially purchased by his and Elizabeth’s ancestor George III. Philip had intercoms put in, for instance, to obviate the necessity for messengers.
At residence he confirmed — by palace requirements, at any fee — a typical contact. When the phone rang, he answered it himself, setting a royal precedent. He even introduced to the queen in the future that he had purchased her a washer. He reportedly blended his personal drinks, opened doorways for himself and carried his personal suitcase, telling the footmen: “I have arms. I’m not bloody helpless.”
He despatched his kids to high school as a substitute of getting them tutored at residence, as had been the royal customized. He arrange a kitchen within the household suite, the place he fried eggs for breakfast whereas the queen brewed tea — an try, it was stated, to supply their kids with some semblance of a standard home life.
Philip appreciated to drive quick, usually relegating his chauffeur to the again seat. Once, when the queen was his passenger, a minor accident led to main headlines. He finally surrendered his driver’s licence in 2019 at age 97, after his Land Rover had collided with one other car, injuring its two occupants, and overturned close to the royal household’s Sandringham property in Norfolk.
He appreciated to pilot his personal planes and as soon as had a close to miss with a passenger jet. He loved crusing, however was stated to have so little endurance with horse racing that he had his high hat fitted with a radio in order that he might take heed to cricket matches when he escorted the queen to her favourite spectator sport.
When he first got here to public consideration, his each colourful comment was famous. When a person launched his spouse because the PhD within the household, saying, “She’s much more important than I am,” Philip replied, “We have the same problem in our family.”
Philip was born on the Greek island of Corfu on June 10, 1921, the fifth baby and solely son of Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark, who was the brother of King Constantine of Greece. His mom was the previous Princess Alice, the oldest daughter of the previous Prince Louis of Battenberg, the primary Marquess of Milford Haven, who modified the household identify to Mountbatten throughout World War I.
Philip’s household was not Greek however fairly descended from a royal Danish home that the European powers had placed on the throne of Greece on the finish of the nineteenth century. Philip, who by no means discovered the Greek language, was sixth in line to the Greek throne.
Through his mom, Philip was a great-great-grandson of Queen Victoria, simply as Elizabeth is Victoria’s great-great-granddaughter. Both had been great-great-great-grandchildren of George III, who presided over Britain’s lack of the American colonies.
Where or when Philip first met Princess Elizabeth stays unclear, but it surely appears sure that he was invited to dine on the royal yacht when Elizabeth was 13 or 14, and that he was additionally invited to remain at Windsor Castle round that point whereas on depart from the Navy. There had been experiences that he had visited the royal household at Balmoral, its nation property in Scotland, and that by the point the weekend was over, Elizabeth had made up her thoughts, telling her father that this dashing younger naval officer was “the only man I could ever love”.
George VI had doubts. He took her to South Africa on a royal tour, cautioned her to be affected person and wrote to his personal mom, Queen Mary.
“We both think that she is too young for that now, as she has never met any young men of her own age,” George wrote. But he added: “I like Philip. He is intelligent, has a good sense of humour” and “thinks about things in the right way”.
Elizabeth was stated to have written to Philip thrice every week whereas she toured South Africa. By the time she returned to England, Prince Philip of Greece and Denmark had renounced his international titles and turn into Lt Philip Mountbatten, a British topic. The gesture happy his future father-in-law. The engagement was introduced on July 10, 1947.
On November 14, 1948, Elizabeth gave delivery to the couple’s first baby, Charles Philip Arthur George, at Buckingham Palace. Charles was adopted by Princess Anne, in 1950; Prince Andrew, in 1960, after Elizabeth had turn into queen; and Prince Edward, in 1964. In addition to the queen and his 4 kids, he’s survived by eight grandchildren and eight great-grandchildren.
There had been rumours of hassle in Philip’s marriage with the queen, experiences of raised voices within the palace corridors. But the marital difficulties of their kids overshadowed any discord between the mother and father. Princess Anne was divorced from her first husband, Mark Phillips, in 1992, and Prince Andrew’s divorce in 1996 from Sarah Ferguson, the Duchess of York, who was often called Fergie, supplied a subject day for the tabloids.
But these divorces paled beside the travails of Charles and Diana. And Philip, a vigilant guardian of royal propriety was not a silent bystander within the melodrama. Philip registered his disapproval of Diana by snubbing her on the Royal Ascot horse race. And after Diana, at 36, was killed in 1997, Philip got here in for his share of criticism when the royal household remained out of view at Balmoral, seemingly out of contact with the general public’s grief, an angle portrayed as cussed and chilly within the 2006 movie The Queen.
Over the years, Philip turned a nationwide gadfly and occasional supply of embarrassment. In 1961 he criticised British trade as a bastion for “the smug and the stick-in-the-mud,” calling failures in manufacturing and commerce “a national defeat.” He was stated to write down his personal speeches, and his behavior of claiming what he thought made him good copy.
In 1995 he requested a Scottish driving teacher, “How do you keep the natives off the booze long enough to pass the test?” On a go to to Australia in 2002, he requested an aboriginal chief, “Do you still throw spears at each other?” And talking about smoke alarms in 1998 to a lady who had misplaced two sons in a hearth, he stated: “They’re a damn nuisance. I’ve got one in my bathroom, and every time I run my bath, the steam sets it off.”
THE NEW YORK TIMES