Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh

• 1. Introduction

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  Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, was born on a dining room table. The date was the 10th of June 1921, and the place was Mon Repos, a villa on the Greek island of Corfu. Before he turned two, he was carried out of Greece in a fruit box. He belonged to the royal families of both Greece and Denmark, yet he grew up with no settled home and little contact with his mother.

  In April 2021, two months short of his 100th birthday, he died at Windsor Castle. By then he had been consort to Queen Elizabeth II for longer than any royal consort in British history. Over the years he delivered 5,493 speeches.

  How does a refugee child end up at the side of a monarch for nearly seven decades? What did he build while walking a pace behind his wife? And why is a man with so many speeches to his name remembered just as often for his blunt remarks?

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• 2. Exile and Schooling

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  Philip was the fifth child and only son of Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark and Princess Alice of Battenberg. His four older sisters were Margarita, Theodora, Cecilie and Sophie. Through his father, a son of King George I of Greece, he stood in line to both the Greek and Danish thrones from birth. His godparents included his uncle Lord Louis Mountbatten and the municipality of Corfu, represented by its mayor, Alexandros Kokotos.

  In September 1922, King Constantine I, Philip's uncle, was forced to abdicate after Greece suffered heavy losses in the Greco-Turkish War. Constantine had led the expeditionary force and took the blame. The new military government arrested Philip's father, who had commanded an army division. General Georgios Hatzianestis and five senior politicians were tried and executed in the Trial of the Six. Andrew's own life was believed to be in danger, and Alice was placed under surveillance. In December a revolutionary court banished Andrew from Greece for life, and a British naval vessel evacuated the family.

  The exiles settled in Saint-Cloud, a Paris suburb, in a house lent by Philip's wealthy aunt, Princess George of Greece and Denmark. At The Elms, an American school run by Donald MacJannet, the boy was described as a "know it all smarty person, but always remarkably polite". In 1930 he was sent to Britain. He lived with his maternal grandmother at Kensington Palace and with his uncle George Mountbatten, 2nd Marquess of Milford Haven, at Lynden Manor in Bray, Berkshire. He then enrolled at Cheam School.

  The household he had left behind came apart over the next three years. His four sisters married German princes and moved to Germany. His mother was diagnosed with schizophrenia and placed in an asylum. His father settled in Monte Carlo.

  In 1933 Philip went to Schule Schloss Salem in Germany, partly because it saved on school fees. The family of his brother-in-law Berthold, Margrave of Baden, owned the school. Its Jewish founder, Kurt Hahn, fled Nazi persecution and established Gordonstoun School in Scotland. After two terms at Salem, Philip transferred there.

  In 1937 Philip, then 16, attended a funeral in Darmstadt. His sister Cecilie, her husband Georg Donatus, Hereditary Grand Duke of Hesse, their two sons and Georg Donatus's mother had died in an air crash at Ostend. Cecilie and Georg Donatus were members of the Nazi Party. The following year Philip's uncle and guardian, Lord Milford Haven, died of bone marrow cancer. Lord Louis took over parental responsibility for the rest of Philip's youth.

  Philip never learned Greek, because he had left as an infant. In 1992 he said he "could understand a certain amount". He considered himself Danish and spoke mostly English. His mother's story had a late echo. In October 1994 he became the first member of the British royal family to visit Israel. He travelled to Jerusalem for a ceremony at Yad Vashem honouring Alice, who had been recognised as one of the Righteous Among the Nations for sheltering members of a Jewish family during the Nazi occupation of Greece.

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• 3. War at Sea

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  In September 1939 King George II of Greece, Philip's first cousin, asked him to return to Britain and resume his Royal Navy training. Philip had spent a month in Athens that summer with his mother, after a term as a cadet at the Royal Naval College, Dartmouth. He graduated from Dartmouth the next year as the best cadet in his course.

  The war divided his family. Two of his brothers-in-law, Prince Christoph of Hesse and Berthold, Margrave of Baden, fought on the German side while Philip served the British. He became a midshipman in January 1940. He spent four months on a battleship protecting convoys of the Australian Expeditionary Force in the Indian Ocean. After Italy invaded Greece in October 1940, he was moved to a battleship in the Mediterranean Fleet.

  On the 1st of February 1941 he was commissioned a sub-lieutenant. He had earned the top grade in four of the five sections of the qualifying examination. He took part in the Battle of Crete. At the Battle of Cape Matapan he controlled his battleship's searchlights, and he was mentioned in dispatches. He was also awarded the Greek War Cross.

  In October 1942, aged 21, Philip became first lieutenant of HMS Wallace. He was one of the youngest men in the Royal Navy to hold that post. During the invasion of Sicily in July 1943, he served as second-in-command. German aircraft attacked the ship at night and were expected to return to finish it off. Philip devised a plan to launch a raft carrying smoke floats as a decoy. The bombers went after it, and Wallace slipped away unnoticed.

  By 1944 he had moved to a new destroyer in the 27th Destroyer Flotilla of the British Pacific Fleet. He was present in Tokyo Bay when the Japanese Instrument of Surrender was signed. In January 1946 he returned to the United Kingdom aboard Whelp. He was then posted as an instructor at the Petty Officers' School in Corsham, Wiltshire.

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• 4. Courtship and Wedding

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  Philip and Elizabeth first met in 1934, at the wedding of Elizabeth's uncle Prince George, Duke of Kent, to Philip's first cousin Princess Marina of Greece and Denmark. The meeting that mattered came in 1939, when King George VI and Queen Elizabeth toured Dartmouth. The Queen and Lord Louis Mountbatten asked Philip to escort the royal couple's daughters, 13-year-old Princess Elizabeth and 9-year-old Princess Margaret. Through Queen Victoria, the girls were Philip's third cousins. Elizabeth fell in love with him, and the two began exchanging letters.

  In the summer of 1946 Philip asked George VI for his daughter's hand. The King agreed but insisted that any formal engagement wait until Elizabeth's 21st birthday the following April. By March 1947 Philip had taken the surname Mountbatten from his mother's family and had stopped using his Greek and Danish royal titles on becoming a naturalised British subject. The name was itself a recent invention. His maternal grandfather had anglicised the family name Battenberg to Mountbatten during the First World War, amid anti-German feeling. The engagement was announced to the public on the 9th of July 1947.

  Not everyone approved. Philip had no financial standing, was foreign-born, and had sisters married to German noblemen with Nazi links. Marion Crawford wrote that some of the King's advisers "did not think him good enough for her" and called him "a prince without a home or kingdom". Later biographies reported that Elizabeth's mother initially had reservations and teased him as "the Hun". In later life she told the biographer Tim Heald that Philip was "an English gentleman".

  Religion posed a smaller puzzle. Philip had been baptised in the Greek Orthodox Church but seemed always to regard himself as an Anglican. In October 1947 Geoffrey Fisher, the archbishop of Canterbury, received him into the Church of England to regularise his position.

  Titles then arrived in a rush. On the 19th of November 1947, the day before the wedding, George VI gave Philip the style of Royal Highness and appointed him to the Order of the Garter. For barely a day he therefore bore the unusual style Lieutenant His Royal Highness Sir Philip Mountbatten. On the morning of the wedding, the 20th of November 1947, he was created Duke of Edinburgh, Earl of Merioneth and Baron Greenwich. Worried about her father's poor health, Elizabeth had insisted that Philip give up smoking. He did so on their wedding day.

  The ceremony at Westminster Abbey was broadcast by BBC radio to 200 million people around the world. In post-war Britain, none of Philip's German relations could be invited, including his three surviving sisters. The couple took up residence at Clarence House. Their son Charles was born in November 1948 and their daughter Anne in August 1950.

  On the 21st of July 1948, Philip was introduced to the House of Lords, immediately before his uncle Louis, who had just been created Earl Mountbatten of Burma. No record shows that Philip ever spoke there.

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• 5. Duty, Press and Family

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  Philip broke the news to Elizabeth at Sagana Lodge in Kenya on the 6th of February 1952. Her father, George VI, had died, and she was now queen. The couple had set out on a Commonwealth tour only at the end of January, and the royal party returned to the United Kingdom immediately. Philip's naval career, which had taken him to Malta in 1949, had effectively ended in July 1951. He was promoted to commander on the 30th of June 1952.

  In December 1952 Philip was initiated into Freemasonry at Navy Lodge No 2612. He was honouring a commitment made to George VI, who expected the royal patronage of Freemasonry to continue. After the initiation, Philip took no further part. In 1967 Elizabeth's cousin Prince Edward, Duke of Kent, became Grand Master, the role Philip might otherwise have held.

  A quarrel over a surname followed. Lord Mountbatten wanted the royal house renamed Mountbatten, while Philip suggested Edinburgh, after his dukedom. Elizabeth's grandmother, Queen Mary, heard of this and told Winston Churchill. Churchill advised Elizabeth to proclaim that the house would remain Windsor. Philip complained in private: "I am nothing but a bloody amoeba. I am the only man in the country not allowed to give his name to his own children."

  A partial fix came in February 1960. An Order in Council declared Mountbatten-Windsor the surname of the couple's male-line descendants who were not styled Royal Highness or titled prince or princess. It arrived only 11 days before Prince Andrew was born. The constitutional expert Edward Iwi had argued that without a change the child would be born with "the Badge of Bastardy". Harold Macmillan had tried to refute him over three months of correspondence. Prince Edward was born in March 1964.

  Six months after her accession, Elizabeth announced that Philip would have "place, pre-eminence and precedence" next to her on all occasions, unless an Act of Parliament said otherwise. She also made sure he would serve as regent for Charles if she died unexpectedly, and Parliament passed a bill to that effect in 1953. At her Diamond Jubilee in 2012 she called him her "constant strength and guide".

  As chairman of the Coronation Commission, Philip became the first member of the royal family to fly in a helicopter, visiting the troops who would take part in the ceremony. At the service he was not crowned. Instead he knelt before Elizabeth, her hands enclosing his, and swore to be her "liege man of life and limb". For six months spanning 1953 and 1954 they toured the Commonwealth, while the children stayed in Britain.

  In the early 1950s the press accused Philip of hostility to Princess Margaret's wish to marry the divorced Peter Townsend. His reply was short: "I haven't done anything." A different storm broke in 1956, when Philip left on a world voyage aboard a newly commissioned ship. Elizabeth and the children stayed home. On the way he opened the Summer Olympics in Melbourne and became the first royal to cross the Antarctic Circle.

  On the return leg, his private secretary Mike Parker was sued for divorce by his wife. The press still treated divorce as a scandal, and Parker resigned. He later said that "the Queen was wonderful throughout". She made him a Commander of the Royal Victorian Order as a public show of support. Newspapers then claimed the royal couple were drifting apart. This enraged Philip, and Elizabeth issued a strongly worded denial. On the 22nd of February 1957 she granted him the style and title of a Prince of the United Kingdom.

  One scheme of 1965 never left the drawing board. After Ian Smith declared Southern Rhodesia's illegal Unilateral Declaration of Independence, the diplomat Michael Palliser suggested a bold move. Elizabeth could appoint Philip governor-general and send him with a detachment of Coldstream Guards to dismiss Smith. Palliser and the minister George Thomson dropped the idea. It would draw the royal family into politics, and Philip's safety would be at risk.

  At the start of 1981 Philip wrote to Charles, urging him to decide whether to propose to Lady Diana Spencer or end the courtship. Charles felt pressured and proposed in February. They married five months later. By 1992 the marriage had broken down. Philip and Elizabeth hosted a meeting to reconcile the couple, without success. Philip wrote to Diana, expressing disappointment at the affairs of both and asking her to see the situation from each side. She found the letters difficult but appreciated his good intent. Charles and Diana separated in 1992 and divorced in 1996.

  On the 31st of August 1997 Diana was killed in a car crash in Paris. Philip was on holiday at Balmoral with the extended family. That morning he and Elizabeth took William and Harry to church. For five days they kept the boys at Balmoral, away from the press, and the seclusion caused public dismay. Before the funeral procession, William and Harry hesitated over whether to walk behind their mother's coffin. Philip told William: "If you don't walk, I think you'll regret it later. If I walk, will you walk with me?" He walked through London behind the gun carriage with William, Harry, Charles and Earl Spencer.

  Mohamed Al-Fayed, whose son Dodi Fayed also died in the crash, later claimed that Philip had ordered Diana's death. The inquest concluded in 2008 that there was no evidence of a conspiracy.

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• 6. Causes and Patronages

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  Philip's first solo engagement as Duke of Edinburgh came in March 1948. He presented prizes at the boxing finals of the London Federation of Boys' Clubs at the Royal Albert Hall. Over the following decades he served as patron, president or member of more than 780 organisations. Many focused on the environment, industry, sport and education.

  His most lasting creation was a youth programme. In 1956 Philip and Kurt Hahn, the Gordonstoun founder who had fled Nazi Germany, launched The Duke of Edinburgh's Award. They wanted to give young people "a sense of responsibility to themselves and their communities". Philip chaired the international programme, which was open to people aged 14-24. That same year he also established the Commonwealth Study Conferences.

  Sport filled many of his titles. He was president of the National Playing Fields Association for 64 years, from 1947 until his grandson Prince William took over in 2013. He was president of The Football Association from 1955 to 1957 and of BAFTA from 1959 to 1965. His two terms as president of the Marylebone Cricket Club began in 1949 and 1974. He was also the first patron of Lord's Taverners, a youth cricket and disability sports charity, and he organised fundraising events for it.

  Conservation brought both honour and criticism. Philip helped found the World Wildlife Fund in 1961. He was its UK president until 1982, international president from 1981 and president emeritus from 1996. In 1963 he helped found the Australian Conservation Foundation, and he was president of the Zoological Society of London for two decades. Critics pointed to his support for fox hunting, the shooting of game birds, and the killing of a tiger in India in 1961.

  In 1965, at the suggestion of Harold Wilson, Philip chaired a scheme to recognise industrial innovation. It later became The Queen's Awards for Enterprise. That year he also became president of the Council of Engineering Institutions. He helped create the Fellowship of Engineering, later the Royal Academy of Engineering, and he became its senior fellow. He commissioned the Prince Philip Designers Prize and the Prince Philip Medal for exceptional designers and engineers. In 1970 he helped found The Maritime Trust, which restores and preserves historic British ships.

  He served as chancellor of four universities: Cambridge, Edinburgh, Salford and Wales. After his father-in-law's death in 1952 he also became Ranger of Windsor Great Park, overseeing its protection and maintenance. In 2017 the British Heart Foundation thanked him for 55 years as its patron. It said he had "supported the creation of nine BHF-funded centres of excellence".

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• 7. Passions and Plain Speaking

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  Philip played polo until 1971, when he turned to carriage driving. He helped expand the sport, and its early rule book was drafted under his supervision. In 1980 he became world champion in four-in-hand driving with the British national team. He was also a keen yachtsman, and in 1949 he struck up a friendship at Cowes with the boat designer Uffa Fox.

  His first flying lesson took place in 1952. He received Royal Air Force wings in 1953, helicopter wings with the Royal Navy in 1956 and a private pilot's licence in 1959. In 1959 he flew solo in a Druine Turbulent, making him the only member of the royal family to have flown a single-seat aircraft. By his 70th birthday he had logged 5,150 pilot hours. He retired in August 1997 after 44 years, with 5,986 hours in 59 different aircraft.

  A British Pathe newsreel found in April 2014 showed his two-month flying tour of South America in 1962. His co-pilot was Captain Peter Middleton, grandfather of Philip's granddaughter-in-law Catherine.

  Philip also painted in oils and collected art, including contemporary cartoons that hang in Buckingham Palace, Windsor Castle, Sandringham House and Balmoral Castle. The architect Hugh Casson described his own paintings as "exactly what you'd expect... totally direct, no hanging about. Strong colours, vigorous brushstrokes." He was a patron of The Cartoon Museum and of the Royal Society of Arts from 1952 until 2011.

  In 1960 Philip attended the National Eisteddfod of Wales in a long green robe. The Archdruid of Wales, Edgar Phillips, initiated him as an Honorary Ovate with the bardic name Philip Meirionnydd, reflecting his title of Earl of Merioneth. In 1961 he became the first royal interviewed on television, answering Richard Dimbleby's questions on Panorama about Commonwealth Technical Training Week. In Canada in 1969 he spoke about republicanism: "It is a complete misconception to imagine that the monarchy exists in the interests of the monarch. It doesn't. It exists in the interests of the people."

  A White House butler recalled that during a visit in 1976, Philip chatted with him and a fellow butler and poured them drinks. Philip was known for plain speaking, and his jokes divided listeners into those who laughed and those who winced. In a 1960 address to the General Dental Council he coined a word for his blunders: "Dontopedalogy is the science of opening your mouth and putting your foot in it, a science which I have practised for a good many years." Later he suggested his comments had fed the perception that he was "a cantankerous old sod". In 2011 the historian David Starkey called him a kind of "HRH Victor Meldrew".

  During a state visit to China in 1986, Philip made a private joke to British students at Xi'an's Northwest University about their eyes changing if they stayed too long. The British press reported it as racial intolerance. Chinese authorities were reportedly unconcerned, and an official explained that Chinese students in the UK were often told in jest not to stay away too long, lest they go "round-eyed". The remark did not harm Sino-British relations, but it shaped his reputation.

  In May 1999 British newspapers accused him of insulting deaf children at a pop concert in Wales. Philip wrote: "The story is largely invention." He pointed out that his mother had been seriously deaf and that he had long been patron of the Royal National Institute for the Deaf.

  Other jokes were harder to defend. Meeting Stephen Menary, an army cadet blinded by a Real IRA bomb, Philip quipped about the tie Menary was wearing when Elizabeth asked how much sight he retained. Menary later said: "I think he just tries to put people at ease by trying to make a joke. I certainly didn't take any offence."

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• 8. Last Years and Legacy

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  On the 2nd of August 2017, Philip met Royal Marines at his final solo public engagement, aged 96. It capped 22,219 solo engagements since 1952. Prime minister Theresa May thanked him for "a remarkable lifetime of service". On the 20th of November 2017 he and Elizabeth marked their 70th wedding anniversary, making her the first British monarch to celebrate a platinum anniversary.

  His long life set records, though he took little pleasure in the prospect. In April 2009 he overtook Queen Charlotte as the longest-serving British royal consort. In February 2013 he became the oldest-ever male British royal. In a 2000 interview, aged 79, he said he could not "imagine anything worse" than reaching 100 and remarked that "bits of me are falling off already".

  His health had been giving warnings. In 2008 he walked unaided into King Edward VII's Hospital with a chest infection and left three days later. When the Evening Standard reported that he had prostate cancer, Buckingham Palace denied it and the paper retracted. In a June 2011 interview marking his 90th birthday, Philip said he would slow down, having "done his bit". Elizabeth appointed him Lord High Admiral. In December 2011 he suffered chest pains at Sandringham House and underwent successful coronary angioplasty and stenting at Papworth Hospital. A bladder infection took him to hospital during his wife's diamond jubilee celebrations in June 2012. In June 2013 he spent 11 days in the London Clinic after an exploratory abdominal operation.

  In April 2018 he had a planned hip replacement. A month later he walked with Elizabeth unaided at the wedding of his grandson Harry and Meghan Markle. Then, in January 2019, he was involved in a car collision as he drove onto a main road near the Sandringham Estate. He was uninjured, but the driver and a passenger in the other car were taken to hospital. He apologised and, three weeks later, voluntarily surrendered his driving licence. The Crown Prosecution Service decided that prosecuting him would not be in the public interest.

  In July 2020 he stepped down as Colonel-in-Chief of The Rifles, a post held since 2007. His daughter-in-law Camilla succeeded him. In January 2021 he and Elizabeth were vaccinated against COVID-19 at Windsor Castle. February 2021 brought another hospital stay. In March he was moved by ambulance to St Bartholomew's Hospital, where he underwent a successful procedure for a heart condition. He returned to Windsor Castle a week after his discharge.

  Philip died of "old age" on the morning of the 9th of April 2021, at Windsor Castle, aged 99. According to the biographer Hugo Vickers, he had been suffering from inoperable pancreatic cancer since 2013. His daughter-in-law Sophie, Countess of Wessex, said his death was "so gentle. It was just like somebody took him by the hand and off he went." Elizabeth was reported to have said, through her son Andrew, that his death had "left a huge void in her life".

  His death set Operation Forth Bridge in motion, the plan for announcing it and organising his funeral. COVID-19 regulations limited mourners to 30, and the usual public ceremonial could not take place. It was later reported that Elizabeth had rejected a government offer to relax the rules. The funeral took place on the 17th of April 2021 at St George's Chapel, Windsor Castle. Philip was temporarily interred in the Royal Vault, alongside 25 other coffins including that of George III.

  His will is sealed for at least 90 years under a High Court ruling intended to protect the Sovereign's "dignity and standing". The order followed a private hearing in July 2021. When The Guardian challenged the closed hearing, the Court of Appeal dismissed its arguments in July 2022. A service of thanksgiving at Westminster Abbey took place on the 29th of March 2022. Elizabeth died on the 8th of September 2022, and on the evening of the 19th of September, after her state funeral, the couple were interred together in the King George VI Memorial Chapel at St George's.

  To mark the centenary of his birth, the Royal Collection Trust staged Prince Philip: A Celebration at Windsor Castle and the Palace of Holyroodhouse. It showed around 150 personal items, including his wedding menu, his midshipman's logbook from 1940 to 1941 and the robes he wore at the 1953 coronation. The Royal Horticultural Society bred a deep pink rose called The Duke of Edinburgh Rose. When it was given to Elizabeth, she remarked, "It looks lovely." A specimen was planted in the East Terrace Garden at Windsor Castle, a garden Philip helped design. In September 2021 the Royal National Lifeboat Institution named a new Shannon-class lifeboat Duke of Edinburgh. The same month BBC One broadcast Prince Philip: The Royal Family Remembers.

  His ancestry had one more role to play. In 1993 scientists confirmed the identity of the remains of several Romanov family members, murdered in 1918, by comparing mitochondrial DNA with living relatives in the female line. Philip was among those relatives, because he descended from Princess Alice of Hesse through a purely female line, as did Empress Alexandra and her children.

  Far from London, on the island of Tanna in Vanuatu, the inhabitants of several villages worship Philip as a god-like spiritual figure. They keep portraits of him and hold feasts on his birthday.

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