Time.news – His Royal Highness Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, Earl of Merioneth, Baron Greenwich, Royal Knight of the Most Noble Order of the Garter would have turned 100 on 10 June. The prince, the only one able to stand up to Queen Elizabeth II, but also his faithful ally, died in Windsor Castle, three weeks after being hospitalized for 28 days in hospital for problems related to an infection and a heart disease.
The prince had been for months, during the pandemic, at Windsor Castle, together with his wife who lived with him over 70 years of marriage. “It was my strength and my stability“, the queen said of him on the threshold of fifty years of marriage. Indeed, theirs was a marriage of steel, which has overcome political and family crises, scandals and bitter mourning.
It was November 20, 1947 when in Westminster, in front of two thousand guests (including six sovereigns and seven queens), Elizabeth and Philip of Mountbatten said yes. The first few years of marriage were far from royal duties, with the birth of the first two children and Buckingham Palace protocol seeming far away.
But at the age of twenty-five, Elizabeth became the forty-second British sovereign from the time of William the Conqueror, the following year she was crowned worldwide and he, in 1953, became the prince consort. Philip struggled to adapt but then he always remained next to the queen, giving her strength and inspiration.
With 74 years of marriage (68 of which alongside a queen) he was the longest-lived prince consort in British history (Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, wife of King George III, reached 62 years and 71 days of marriage). And he was also one of the busiest: he attended 300 events a year before retiring to ‘private life’ in 2017, at the age of 96.
In public Filippo knew walk one step back to the queen, in private she recognized him the spaces that a devoted wife ensures. And theirs was a union of steel.
Born on 10 June 1921 in the Greek and Danish royal families, he was the only son of Prince Andrew of Greece and of the Danish Princess Alice of Battenberg, great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria: unico son after four sisters, he was just one year old when he arrived in France on a British ship after his uncle, King Constantine I of Greece, was forced to abdicate: the legend tells that he was transported in an improvised cradle, a fruit box. Apart from his legend, it was not a happy childhood.
“My mother was sick, my sisters were married and my father had left us to go to the south of France. And it’s the synthesis of a turbulent and lonely childhood, with a shattered family, the need to rely only on his strength and an unorthodox upbringing that explains many of his future behaviors.
With his father, Prince Andrew of Greece, who lived with a mistress between the south of France and Monte Carlo and his mother, Princess Alice of Battenberg, hospitalized in a German psychiatric facility after a nervous breakdown, Philip and his four sisters – Margarita, Theodora, Cecilia and Sophie – were left to fend for themselves as World War II loomed on the horizon.
Within three years, the prince’s sisters married as many German nobles with close ties to the Nazi party. Meanwhile, Princess Alice, Philip’s mother, was diagnosed with schizophrenia.
But it was not over because fate had yet to rage against him: Cecile – the sister who is said to be his favorite, pregnant in the eighth month – and her husband, Grand Duke Georg Donato, were killed in a plane crash along with their two young children and the baby, which she probably gave birth in mid-air, when their plane crashed into a factory in Ostend in Belgium. At the funeral in Darmstadt, Germany, Philip of Greece and Denmark, who was just 16, he was photographed next to the Nazi hierarchs who saluted Heil Hitler.
The love with Elizabeth was not initially seen well at Court: he was a Greek prince in exile, with a reputation as a playboy and a pro-Nazi family: King George VI did not consider him the right person for his daughter. But Elizabeth held out and Philip renounced his past: he abandoned the Greek title, his Orthodox faith to embrace the Anglican one and was a naturalized British citizen.
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Royal Family: Queen Elizabeth, Prince Philip and two children
Once married, Filippo was always able to stay by his wife’s side, while insisting on affirming some personal ambitions: for example, that the tradition be changed whereby his children, Anna and Carlo, had only their mother’s surname, Windsor, and not that of the father; and with the birth of Andrea, after the battle was won, the family’s surname was Mountbatten-Windsor.
In his 65 years of ‘service’, in public appearances and under strict protocol, the prince has been an inexhaustible mine of witty jokes but also of sensational slips. Outspoken, far too unconventional, the queen’s consort never held back and always said what he thought to anyone.
Even Malala must have smiled one day at an unorthodox joke: the young Pakistani woman, Nobel Peace Prize winner, who miraculously escaped a Taliban attack for her commitment to women’s education, said impassively: “Children in the United Kingdom they go to school only because their parents don’t want them at home, in the way. “
Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip
Impertinent therefore despite the lineage. And who knows, even the queen was not irritated that time she said, with a reflection on marriage and courtesy: “When a man opens the door to his wife … it’s either a new car or a new wife”. Dedicated fellow traveler (despite rumors of betrayal), Philip offered himself as mediator at the time of the crisis between Prince Charles and Lady Diana, set out to remove Sarah Ferguson, the wife of Prince Andrew, when his betrayals became public and he was often the shadow man of the Crown.
His grandson, Prince Harry, paid homage to his son, Archie, who has no noble titles, gave his grandfather’s surname. The son of the Dukes of Sussex is called Archie Mountbatten-Windsor. Filippo, however, now elderly and tried, was unable to bring back the most serious crisis that is now through Buckingham Palace: the farewell of the Sussex, the once beloved dukes but now also much talked about.
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