Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, was carried aboard a British warship in December 1922 as an 18-month-old infant, laid inside an old orange crate because his family had nothing else to carry him in. The Greek monarchy had fallen, and his father, Prince Andrew, had been sentenced to death by a revolutionary court before being rescued by British intervention. The boy who would one day stand beside the British throne for over 70 years was born on June 10, 1921, on a dining table in a villa on the Greek island of Corfu. Though his family held royal titles across several European thrones, they had almost no money, and the grandeur of his bloodline stood in stark contrast to the precarious reality of their lives.
His mother, Princess Alice of Battenberg, was a great-great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria and had been born deaf. In 1930, she suffered a breakdown and was forcibly committed to a sanatorium in Switzerland, where doctors diagnosed her with paranoid schizophrenia. The family even consulted Sigmund Freud, who reportedly attributed her condition to sexual frustration and recommended exposing her ovaries to radiation. Philip was nine years old when his mother was taken away.
From 1932 to 1937, he had no contact with her at all. His father drifted to the French Riviera, where he lived with a companion and died in a Monte Carlo hotel in 1944, leaving his son a few clothes, a signet ring, and a debt of £17,500. His four older sisters all married German princes within eight months between 1930 and 1931. Two of their husbands joined the Nazi Party, and one, Prince Christoph of Hesse, became an SS officer who ran a secret intelligence bureau for the regime.
The sisters were later excluded from Philip’s royal wedding because of their German connections. At age 12, Philip was sent to a school in Germany run by Kurt Hahn, a Jewish educator and outspoken opponent of Hitler. After Hahn was arrested and forced to flee the country, Philip followed him to Scotland, becoming one of the first pupils at the new Gordonstoun school. It was there that a headmaster’s report identified the traits that would define the man: a born leader who needed the exacting demands of a great service, whose best was outstanding but whose second best was not good enough.
In 1939, Philip entered the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth, graduating as the best cadet of his intake. That summer, he was assigned to entertain the young Princess Elizabeth, then 13, who was transfixed by him. They began a correspondence that lasted through the war. During World War II, Philip served with distinction in the Mediterranean.
At the Battle of Cape Matapan in March 1941, he controlled the searchlights that illuminated enemy cruisers for the fleet’s guns, and he was mentioned in dispatches for his actions. In 1943, aboard the destroyer HMS Wallace, he saved his ship by launching a decoy raft of smoke floats that drew a German bomber away while the vessel escaped. Philip married Princess Elizabeth at Westminster Abbey on November 20, 1947. To do so, he renounced his Greek and Danish titles, became a British subject, and adopted the surname Mountbatten.
His three surviving sisters were not invited, excluded as single category deemed too politically awkward for the postwar royal wedding. The king’s death in February 1952 ended Philip’s naval career at age 30, when Elizabeth became queen. He later fought an eight-year battle over whether his children could carry his name, reportedly complaining bitterly that he was “nothing but a bloody amoeba,” the only man in the country not allowed to give his name to his own children. A compromise was reached in 1960 just before the birth of Prince Andrew, creating the surname Mountbatten-Windsor.
Denied a career at sea, Philip threw himself into public service. In 1956, he co-founded the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award with Kurt Hahn, a program that grew into one of the most far-reaching youth initiatives in the world. He reorganized the royal estates, took up carriage driving in his 50s after polo became impossible, and helped codify the sport’s rules, competing into his 70s. Those close to him described a man who was seldom truly calm, who could shift from easy charm to sudden coldness without warning.
One biographer recorded that Queen Elizabeth once refused to come out of her cabin on the royal yacht until her husband was in a better temper. Yet their marriage lasted 73 years, the longest of any sovereign in British history. Princess Alice returned to live with her son in her final years, installed in rooms at Buckingham Palace. She had spent the war sheltering a Jewish family from the Gestapo in occupied Athens, and Israel later honored her as Righteous Among the Nations.
She died at the palace in December 1969, owning almost nothing, having given her possessions away to the poor. Philip carried out public duties into his mid-90s, finally stepping back from public life in the summer of 2017. He died at Windsor Castle on April 9, 2021, at age 99, two months short of his 100th birthday. Because of pandemic restrictions, his funeral was limited to 30 mourners, and the image of the queen seated alone in the chapel became fixed in the national memory.
Asked how he had borne the weight of his life, Philip gave the same answer he had given since childhood: he simply had to get on with it. For over 70 years, standing a step behind the crown, that is exactly what he did.