Prince Philip, husband of the Queen of England, is dead

Consort of Queen Elizabeth II, Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, who died Friday April 9 at the age of 99, marked his time with a personality for the less complex. Of German origin, but of Orthodox religion, Philip was born Prince of Greece and Denmark on June 10, 1921, on the island of Corfu. He is the fifth child, but the only son, of Prince André of Greece and Princess Alice of Battenberg. Following the exile of his parents, he was tossed from boarding school to boarding school throughout Europe, notably in Saint-Cloud, in France, and in Germany.

Between the ages of 8 and 15, he did not see his mother, who was schizophrenic, and did not receive mail from him either. In 1939, boosted by his uncle, Lord Mountbatten, the Greek aristocrat joined the British Navy as a cadet and took an active part in the Second World War.

On November 20, 1947, the young prince, blond and attractive, married Crown Princess Elizabeth, whom he had met during his studies at the naval college in Darmouth. Great-great-grandson of Queen Victoria, through his daughter Alice who had married a German Grand Duke, he was also one of Elizabeth’s distant cousins. For this marriage of love, he renounces his nationality and his old nobiliary titles, takes the name of Philip Mountbatten and embraces Anglicanism, the state religion.

Throughout his life, despite this conversion, the prince kept certain values ​​inculcated by his orthodox faith, such as a sense of hierarchy, conservatism in matters of mores and ecological concerns. In February 1952, the death premature death of his father-in-law, King George VI, ended his passionate career as a Navy officer.

“This charming and distinguished man was the central element in the democratization of the monarchy against the establishment. His foreign origins undoubtedly explain his open-mindedness. Intelligent, resolute, efficient, he has put a little salt in the life of the queen, a conservative and traditional woman, without ever attempting to overshadow her ”, underlines the royal biographer, Robert Lacey.

Walkabout

After the accession to the throne of Elizabeth in 1952, the husband of the sovereign however struggles to step aside behind his wife, now forced to walk two steps behind her. He doesn’t always manage to hide his frustration when officials at Buckingham Palace, whom he compares to “A bunch of starched shirts”, keep official documents out of reach.

The person concerned breathes a little novelty into the court, then stiff, by sending his children, whose education Elizabeth II entrusted to him, to school instead of entrusting them to tutors. In 1969, he opened the kingship on television, and let it film his daily life in the report “Royal Family”, which was a great success. It was also he who forced the queen, whose shyness is legendary, to practice the walkabout.

Very early on, keen on defending the environment, Philip headed the World Wide Fund, the world fund for the preservation of nature, from 1981 to 1996. It is mainly thanks to the prince that the Loire has remained the last wild river of Europe. He is also responsible for the creation, in 1956, of the Duke of Edinburgh Awards Scheme to help young people in difficulty.

At the same time, this innovator passes for a reactionary good complexion, known for his bad character and his machismo. For his detractors, he is an uncontrollable, narrow-minded man, used to doing things as he pleases. The Duke of Edinburgh cultivates a humor which sometimes slips towards bad taste, even racism: in 1986, during a visit to Beijing, he declares to English students that they would have slanted eyes if they stayed for a long time in China. The Foreign Office had been forced to make up for this blunder with a boring apology.

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Holder of the Duchy of Edinburgh, he had not spared the Scots. To a driving school instructor in Glasgow, this opponent of the tongue-in-cheek language asks how he manages to prevent the locals from drinking whiskey to obtain their driving license.

He was shocked by asserting, a little later, that there were no longer any real poor in Britain. An inveterate patriot, the former lieutenant of the Royal Navy, who had distinguished himself during the conflict in the Pacific, had opposed, in vain, his wife and the government over the granting of the Order of the Garter to Emperor Akihito of Japan.

Muffle and short ideas

In return for using the media for their public relations, the Windsors had to agree to appease an increasingly irreverent curiosity, to the point of becoming hostages of the right to information and the cult of celebrity. Oddly enough, Philip escaped their permanent inquisition. The tabloids have always remained very discreet about the private life of the couple for the sake, no doubt, of protecting the sovereign, head of state, of the Commonwealth, of the Anglican Church and of the armed forces.

When a journalist, in 1996, dared to question him about his alleged extramarital affairs, the Duke replied, unperturbed: “For almost half a century, I couldn’t take a step without having a bodyguard chasing me. How could I have managed to hide a romantic adventure? “

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In 2001, Philip privately claimed that his son Charles would not make a good king. The heir to the throne of England, of course, had moderately appreciated the derogatory remarks of a father whom he considered bossy, cruel and brutal. Hadn’t he sent him to study at his old college, Gordonstoun, a Scottish boarding school with a system more like a prison than a school?

His muffling towards his daughters-in-law, Princess Diana or Sarah, Duchess of York, attests to this lack of consideration. He stuck to the skin of this lover of detective novels and military music a reputation for cultivating mainly short ideas. His peremptory tone on a hoarse bass voice seemed in advance to forbid any contradiction.

But those who knew him well assured that he was seriously mistaken. No one disputed his sense of duty, his dedication to the office and the intelligence of his role. Faced with criticism, Prince Philip also liked to quote Rudyard Kipling, the cantor of the Empire, his favorite author, glorifying those who know “To face the triumph and the disaster and to treat in the same way these two impostors”.

Prince Philip in a few dates

June 10, 1921 Birth on the island of Corfu

1939 Join the British Navy

November 20, 1947 Wife Elizabeth

1952 Accession to the throne of Elizabeth II

2021 Death at Windsor Castle

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