Prince Philip, Husband of Queen Elizabeth II, Is Dead at 99 - The Duke of Edinburgh, who married the future queen in 1947, brought the monarchy ...

Prince Philip, Husband of Queen
Elizabeth II, Is Dead at 99
The Duke of Edinburgh, who married the future queen in 1947, brought the
monarchy into the 20th century, but his occasional tactless comments hurt his
image.

Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, husband of Queen Elizabeth II, father of
Prince Charles, and patriarch of a turbulent royal family that he sought to ensure
would not be Britain’s last, died on Friday at Windsor Castle in England. He was

99.

His death was announced by Buckingham Palace, which said he passed away
peacefully.

Philip had been hospitalized several times in recent years for various ailments,
most recently in February, the palace said.

        Go here for updates and reaction to Prince Philip’s death.

He died just as Buckingham Palace was again in turmoil, this time over Oprah
Winfrey’s explosive televised interview last month with Philip’s grandson Prince
Harry and Harry’s wife, Meghan. The couple, in self-imposed exile in California,
lodged accusations of racism and cruelty against members of the royal family.

As “the first gentleman in the land,” Philip tried to shepherd into the 20th century
a monarchy encrusted with the trappings of the 19th. But as pageantry was
upstaged by scandal, as regal weddings were followed by sensational divorces, his
mission, as he saw it, changed. Now it was to help preserve the crown itself.

And yet preservation — of Britain, of the throne, of centuries of tradition — had
always been the mission. When this tall, handsome prince married the young
crown princess, Elizabeth, on Nov. 20, 1947 — he at 26, she at 21 — a battered
Britain was still recovering from World War II, the sun had all but set on its
empire, and the abdication of Edward VIII over his love for Wallis Simpson, a
divorced American, was still reverberating a decade later.

The wedding held out the promise that the monarchy, like the nation, would
survive, and it offered that reassurance in almost fairy-tale fashion, complete with
magnificent horse-drawn coaches resplendent in gold and a throng of adoring
subjects lining the route between Buckingham Palace and Westminster Abbey.

More, it was a heartfelt match. Elizabeth told her father, King George VI, that
Philip was the only man she could ever love.

Philip occupied a peculiar place on the world stage as the husband of a queen
whose powers were largely ceremonial. He was essentially a second-fiddle
figurehead, accompanying her on royal visits and sometimes standing in for her.

Prince Philip at a banquet at a Tokyo hotel held by the Japanese Equestrian
Federation in 1986.Credit…Tsugufumi Matsumoto/Associated Press

And yet he embraced his royal role as a job to be done. “We have got to make this
monarchy thing work,” he was reported to have said.

He kept at it until May 2017, when, at age 95, he announced his retirement from
public life; his final solo appearance came three months later.

But he did not entirely fade from public view. He surfaced in May 2018, when he
joined the sun-splashed pomp of the wedding of Harry and Meghan, waving to
crowds lining the streets from the back seat of a limousine, the queen beside him,
and striding up the steps of St. George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle in a crisp
morning suit.

By then he had re-emerged as a kind of pop-culture figure, introduced to a whole
new generation through the hit Netflix series “The Crown,” a costume drama that
has traced the events of postwar Britain through the prism of his buffeted royal
marriage. (Matt Smith played the prince as a young man, and Tobias Menzies in
middle age.)

Public and Private Faces
Philip’s public image often came dressed in full military regalia, an emblem of his
high-ranking titles in the armed forces and a reminder of both his combat
experience in World War II and his martial lineage: He was a nephew of the war
leader Lord Mountbatten.

Many saw Philip as a mostly remote if occasionally loose-lipped personage in
public, given to riling constituents with off-the-cuff remarks that were called
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 went by, word seeped out that Philip, in private, could be irascible
and demanding, cold and domineering — and that as parents, he and an
emotionally reserved queen brought little warmth into the household.

Even more, as many Britons came to see the royal family as increasingly
dysfunctional, they found Philip to be a not-insignificant actor in a state of affairs
that had many questioning the very thing that he and Elizabeth had been elevated
to ensure: the monarchy’s stability.

Philip had apparently not expected the type of public scrutiny that came with the
times, when the washing of dirty linen, even the queen’s, had become a staple of
the tabloid press, which he grew to despise.

No headlines were more boisterous than those during the tumultuous marriage
and divorce of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer. But Philip himself felt the
spotlight’s unwelcome glare when the royal family was castigated for a seemingly
grudging response to Britain’s outpouring of grief over Diana’s death in a car
crash in Paris in 1997.

The royal family in 1969. From left, Prince Edward, Prince Philip, Queen
Elizabeth, Princess Anne, Prince Charles and Prince Andrew.Credit…Associated
Press

Painful, too, for Philip was the revelation that Prince Charles, his oldest son, had
let it be known that as a child he had been deeply wounded by a father who
belittled him time and again, often in front of friends and family.

A 1994 biography, “The Prince of Wales,” by Jonathan Dimbleby with the
cooperation of Prince Charles, noted that while Philip indulged “the often brash
and obstreperous behavior” of his daughter, Princess Anne, he was openly
contemptuous of his son, whom he thought of as “a bit of a wimp.”

Charles, for his part, “was cowed by his father,” who he believed had forced him
into a “terrible mismatch” with Diana, Mr. Dimbleby wrote.

Though the glory he knew was largely of the reflected kind, Philip nevertheless
enjoyed the privileges and prerogatives of the British crown, living in luxury,
sailing yachts, playing polo, and piloting planes. And he used his station to
promote the common good, lending his name and time to causes like building
playing fields for British youths and protecting endangered wildlife.

Prince Philip, an avid sportsman, at a bicycle polo game at Windsor in
1967.Credit…United Press International

Another was instituting efficiencies at Buckingham Palace, originally bought by
his and Elizabeth’s ancestor George III. Philip had intercoms installed, for
example, to obviate the need for messengers.

At home he showed — by palace standards, at any rate — a common touch. When
the telephone rang, he answered it himself, setting a royal precedent. He even
announced to the queen one day that he had bought her a washing machine. He
reportedly mixed his own drinks, opened doors for himself, and carried his own
suitcase, telling the footmen: “I have arms. I’m not bloody helpless.”

He sent his children to school instead of having them tutored at home, as had
been the royal custom. He set up a kitchen in the family suite, where he fried
eggs for breakfast while the queen brewed tea — an attempt, it was said, to
provide their children with some semblance of a normal domestic life.

Prince Philip carried British passport No. 1 (the queen did not require one) and

fulfilled as many as 300 engagements a year, including greeting President Barack
Obama and his wife, Michelle Obama, at Buckingham Palace in April 2009
and again in May 2011. (He was not in attendance when the queen met with
President Donald J. Trump in December 2019 in London.) And he was front and
center at royal events, like the marriage of Prince William and Kate Middleton in
April 2011, watched around the world, and Elizabeth’s visit to the Irish Republic,
the first by a British monarch, the next month.

Philip was the first member of the royal family to go to the Soviet Union,
representing the queen on a trip with the British equestrian team in 1973.

To escape the court life, Philip liked to drive fast, often relegating his chauffeur to
the back seat. Once, when the queen was his passenger, a minor accident led to
major headlines. He ultimately surrendered his driver’s license in 2019 at age 97,
after his Land Rover collided with another vehicle, injuring its two occupants, and
overturned near the royal family’s Sandringham estate in Norfolk.

He liked to pilot his own planes and once had a near miss with a passenger jet. He
enjoyed sailing, but was said to have so little patience with horse racing that he
had his top hat fitted with a radio so that he could listen to cricket matches when
he escorted the queen to her favorite spectator sport.

Prince Philip in a training plane at White Waltham Airfield in England in 1953. He

liked to pilot his own planes.Credit…Associated Press

When he first came to public attention, his every colorful remark was noted.
When a man introduced his wife as the Ph.D. in the family, saying, “She’s much
more important than I am,” Philip replied, “We have the same problem in our
family.”

Deep Roots in Royalty
Philip was born on the Greek island of Corfu on June 10, 1921, the fifth child and
only son of Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark, who was the brother of King
Constantine of Greece. His mother was the former Princess Alice, the oldest
daughter of the former Prince Louis of Battenberg, the first Marquess of Milford
Haven, who changed the family name to Mountbatten during World War I.

Philip’s family was not Greek but rather descended from a royal Danish house
that the European powers had put on the throne of Greece in the 19th century.
Philip, who never learned the Greek language, was sixth in line to the Greek
throne.

Through his mother, Philip was a great-great-grandson of Queen Victoria, just as
Elizabeth is Victoria’s great-great-granddaughter. Both were great-great-great-
great-grandchildren of George III, who presided over Britain’s loss of the
American colonies.

Philip in Greek dress on his ninth birthday. His family was descended from a royal
Danish house that the European powers had put on the throne of
Greece. Credit…The New York Times

A year after Philip was born, the army of King Constantine was overwhelmed by
the Turks in Asia Minor, now part of Turkey. Prince Andrew, Philip’s father, who
had commanded an army corps in the routed Greek forces, was banished by a
revolutionary Greek junta.

In “Prince Philip: The Turbulent Early Life of the Man Who Married Queen
Elizabeth II” (2011), the British writer Philip Eade reported that as an infant
Philip was smuggled out of Greece in a fruit crate as his father, eluding execution,
found refuge for his family in Paris, where they lived in straitened circumstances.

Philip’s father was said to have been an Anglophile. The boy’s first language was
English, taught to him by a British nanny. He grew to 6 feet 1 inch, his blue eyes
and blond hair reflecting his Nordic ancestry.

When his parents separated, Philip was sent to live with his mother’s mother, the
Dowager Marchioness of Milford Haven, a granddaughter of Queen Victoria. He
spent four years at the Cheam School in England, an institution bent on
toughening privileged children, and then went to Gordonstoun School in Scotland,
which was even more austere, promoting a regimen of hard work, cold showers,
and hard beds. In five years, he said, no one from his family came to visit him.

Even so, Philip sent Charles to both schools, to have him follow in his footsteps.

At Gordonstoun, Philip developed a love of the sea, learning seamanship and
boatbuilding as a volunteer coast guardsman at the school. He seemed destined
to follow his Mountbatten uncles into the British Navy.

While he was at Gordonstoun, in 1937, he learned that his pregnant sister Cecilie
had died in a plane crash along with her two children and her husband, a German
aristocrat and prominent Nazi Party member. Philip, at 16, traveled to Germany
for the funeral and was photographed having to march alongside men in Nazi
uniforms with whom he would soon be at war. (Three of his four older sisters had
married into the German aristocracy, and another of their husbands became an
SS officer. His surviving sisters were later not invited to his wedding to
Elizabeth.)

Philip in 1963 at the tiller of Coweslip, his Flying Fifteen class sailboat, with Uffa
Fox, a friend and the originator of the design, on the Isle of
Wight.Credit…Associated Press

Philip entered the Britannia Royal Naval College at Dartmouth in 1939 and was
honored as the best all-around cadet of his term. The next year, with Britain at
war, the 19-year-old Philip went to sea as a sublieutenant aboard the battleship
Ramillies in the Mediterranean fleet. He was later transferred to the Valiant,
another battleship.

On March 28, 1941, the British fleet caught an Italian squadron off Cape Matapan
in Greece and, with the Royal Air Force’s help, sank three cruisers and two
destroyers. Philip participated in the clash, operating a searchlight. “Thanks to
his alertness and appreciation of the situation,” his captain wrote, “we were able
to sink two eight-inch-gun Italian cruisers.”

Philip was promoted to lieutenant in June 1942 and took part in the Allied
landings in Sicily in July 1943 before sailing for the Pacific campaign. There he
served as aide-de-camp to his uncle Louis, Lord Mountbatten, who was then the
supreme allied commander in Southeast Asia; Philip was on the United States
battleship Missouri on Sept. 2, 1945, when the Japanese formally surrendered.

(Lord Mountbatten was killed in a bombing by the Irish Republican Army in
1979.)

Where or when Philip first met Princess Elizabeth remains unclear, but it seems
certain that he was invited to dine on the royal yacht when Elizabeth was 13 or
14, and that he was also invited to stay at Windsor Castle around that time while
on leave from the Navy. There were reports that he had visited the royal family at
Balmoral, its country estate in Scotland, and that by the time the weekend was
over, Elizabeth had made up her mind, telling her father that this dashing young
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 patient, and wrote to his own mother, Queen Mary.

Princess Elizabeth and Philip in Quebec in 1951. The next year, they were in
Kenya when they learned that her father, George VI, had died. Her coronation
followed.Credit…Fox Photos, via Getty Image

“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 humor” and, “thinks about things in the right way.”

Elizabeth was said to have written to Philip three times a week while she toured
South Africa. By the time she returned to England, Prince Philip of Greece and
Denmark had renounced his foreign titles and become Lt. Philip Mountbatten, a
British subject. The gesture pleased his future father-in-law. The engagement was
announced on July 10, 1947.

Articles about the coming marriage pushed reports of food and coal shortages off
the front pages. Sales assistants sent ration coupons to the princess (even the
royal family was living within limits) so she could have new dresses. The House of
Commons approved 100 extra clothing coupons for her. On the eve of the
wedding, in 1947, Lieutenant Mountbatten was made the Duke of Edinburgh, Earl
of Merioneth, and Baron of Greenwich, and given the title His Royal Highness.

The ‘First Gentleman’
A year later, on Nov. 14, 1948, Elizabeth gave birth to the couple’s first child,
Charles Philip Arthur George, at Buckingham Palace. Charles was followed by
Princess Anne, in 1950; Prince Andrew, in 1960, after Elizabeth had become
queen; and Prince Edward, in 1964. In addition to the queen and his four
children, Prince Philip is survived by eight grandchildren and 10 great-
grandchildren.

After his marriage, Prince Philip took command of the frigate Magpie in Malta.
But King George VI had lung cancer, and when his condition worsened, it was
announced that Philip would take no more naval appointments. In 1952, the
young couple had reached Kenya, their first stop on a commonwealth tour, when
word arrived on Feb. 6 that the king was dead.

It fell to Philip to break the news to his wife.

Philip presided over the Coronation Commission, and in 1952 the new queen
ordained that he should be “first gentleman in the land,” giving him “a place of
pre-eminence and precedence next to Her Majesty.” Without this distinction,
Prince Charles, who was named Duke of Cornwall and later Prince of Wales — the
title traditionally given to the heir to the throne — would have ranked above his
father.

Queen Elizabeth II’s coronation on June 2, 1953. One of her first acts was to give
Philip “a place of pre-eminence and precedence next to Her Majesty.”
Credit…Associated Press

Philip was appointed to the highest ranks in the armed services: admiral of the
fleet, field marshal, and marshal of the Royal Air Force. He held the posts without
pay.

Four years later, in 1956, Philip, then 35, took a four-month, 36,000-mile sea tour.
Ostensibly he was on his way to Melbourne, Australia, for the opening of the
Olympic Games, but the trip followed reports of his carousing with friends at
bachelor parties in London.

On his return, the queen gave Philip the title Prince of the United Kingdom. By
royal warrant, Elizabeth brought her husband’s name into the royal line, ordering
that their children, except for Prince Charles, be known as Mountbatten-Windsor.

There were rumors of trouble in the marriage, reports of raised voices in the
palace corridors. But the marital difficulties of their children overshadowed any
discord between the parents. 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 known as Fergie, provided a field day for
the tabloids.

But those divorces paled beside the travails of Charles and Diana. And Philip, a
vigilant guardian of royal propriety (he once complained that Henry VIII, whom
he called a “wonderful military strategist,” was remembered solely for his six
wives), was not a silent bystander in the melodrama. According to Andrew
Morton, in his book “Diana: Her True Story,” written with Diana’s cooperation,
Charles told her that his father “had agreed that if, after five years, his marriage
was not working, he could go back to his bachelor habits.”

From left, Prince Charles, Prince Harry, Earl Spencer, Prince William and Prince
Philip stood as the coffin bearing the body of Princess Diana was taken into
Westminster Abbey in London on Sept. 7, 1997.Credit…Pool photo by John Gaps
III

Once their differences had become public, however, Philip registered his
disapproval of Diana by snubbing her at the Royal Ascot horse race. And after

Diana, at 36, was killed in 1997, Philip came in for his share of criticism when the
royal family remained out of view at Balmoral, seemingly out of touch with the
public’s grief, an attitude portrayed as stubborn and cold in the 2006 film “The
Queen,” in which James Cromwell played Philip to Helen Mirren’s Elizabeth.

Over the years, Philip became a national gadfly and occasional source of
embarrassment. In 1961 he criticized British industry as a bastion for “the smug
and the stick-in-the-mud,” calling failures in manufacturing and commerce “a
national defeat.” He was said to write his own speeches, and his habit of saying
what he thought made him good copy.

In 1995 he asked a Scottish driving instructor, “How do you keep the natives off
the booze long enough to pass the test?” On a visit to Australia in 2002, he asked
an aboriginal leader, “Do you still throw spears at each other?” And speaking
about smoke alarms in 1998 to a woman who had lost two sons in a fire, he said:
“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 comments invited scorn. “I know all about freedom of speech,” he told some
students, “because I get kicked in the teeth often enough for saying things.”

Philip was a sportsman. He was captain and mainstay of the Windsor Park polo
team. When he turned 50, troubled by arthritis and liver problems, he curtailed
his playing and turned to carriage racing. He also started painting.

In an interview on BBC Radio in 1965, Philip recognized that he was missing out
on things like “just being able to walk into a cinema or go out to a nightclub or go
to a pub.” But he quickly acknowledged the bright side.

“I’ve got a lot of advantages which compensate for it,” he said.

Prince Philip inspecting Canadian troops in 2013 in Toronto.Credit…Chris
So/Toronto Star, via Getty Images

Correction: April 9, 2021
An earlier version of this obituary misstated when the Danish house from which
Philip’s family was descended was put on the Greek throne. It was in the middle
of the 19th century, not the end.

Correction: April 9, 2021
An earlier version of this obituary misstated the number of great-grandchildren
who survive Philip. There are 10, not eight. The earlier version also misstated
Philip’s relation to King George III. He was George’s great-great-great-great-
grandson, not his great-great-great-grandson.

A version of this article appears in print on April 10, 2021, Section A, Page 1 of
the New York edition with the headline: Prince Philip, Husband of Queen
Elizabeth II, Dies at 99. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/09/obituaries/prince-philip-dead.html

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