HRH Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh: ‘I try to put matters right’
A few hours ago, the prime minister will have received a telephone call from a senior official in the Royal Household, probably the Lord Chamberlain, Earl Peel. That official will have said to him words he will have half-expected to hear for some time: “Forth Bridge is down.”
This afternoon Buckingham Palace announced that Her Majesty The Queen’s husband, the Duke of Edinburgh, had died at the age of 99. Prince Philip had suffered from recent ill-health, including a two-month spell in hospital earlier this year and a “procedure” for a heart condition. He had reached an extraordinary age, only months away from his century, and his long life in the public eye—he began exchanging letters with the young Princess Elizabeth in 1939—means that his legacy will take a long time to digest and even longer to describe.
We must not underestimate the shattering blow this will be for the Queen. She fell in love with the handsome but homeless Danish-Greek prince almost on sight, and they enjoyed nearly 75 years of marriage. That is a length of time few of us can comprehend. He has been the most resolute and irreplaceable support to Her Majesty ever since, and therein lies his greatest act of public service.
At the coronation in 1953, after the bishops had paid homage to the new queen, Philip knelt before his wife, first of all the laity, put his hands between hers, and swore allegiance as her “liege man of life and limb”. That is what he has done ever since. And its value is inestimable. At a banquet to mark their golden wedding anniversary, the Queen told the audience: “He is someone who doesn’t take easily to compliments but he has, quite simply, been my strength and stay all these years, and I, and his whole family, and this and many other countries, owe him a debt greater than he would ever claim, or we shall ever know.”
The notice issued by Buckingham Palace this morning is worth reading carefully. Any language which emerges from the Royal Household is exactingly and minutely calibrated for nuance and interpretation: there is never hyperbole or exaggeration, nor a syllable out of place. Today’s announcement spoke of “deep sorrow” at the death of the Queen’s “beloved” husband. For Her Majesty, the most agile of public tightrope walkers and a woman who has hardly said an unintentional or foolish thing in seven decades, these are profoundly heartfelt and moving sentiments.
Two aspects of the duke’s long public life are worth highlighting at this early stage in the mourning and assessment of his legacy. There are dozens of others, and much ink will rightly be spilled about his achievements and enduring sense of humour.
The first is the creation of the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award. It began in 1956, and was aimed at boys aged 15-18 who did not wish to join a youth movement nor wear a uniform. The award was based on the philosophy of Kurt Hahn, headmaster of Gordonstoun School which the young Philip had attended. Colonel Sir John Hunt, who had led the expedition which had seen Edmund Hillary reach the summit of Mount Everest only three years before, retired from the Army to run the scheme designed as self-improvement and resilience. Girls were admitted in 1958, and the award has been a huge success across the world in helping young people realise their full potential. It operates in 144 countries and over the years eight million boys and girls have participated. That is a formidable legacy for a man who spent his early years as consort restlessly looking for a role.
The second is more general. It is hard to imagine now, so used are we to the image of a stiff and perhaps forbidding old man in military uniform or formal civilian dress, but Prince Philip was an instinctive moderniser within the Royal Family. He was, after all, a brave and quick-thinking naval officer during the Second World War, mentioned in dispatches after the Battle of Cape Matapan in 1941 and one of the youngest first lieutenants—the captain’s invaluable “number one”—in the Royal Navy, aged just 21.
Philip was the first member of the Royal Family to travel in a helicopter, and the first to cross the Antarctic Circle, aboard the royal yacht HMY Britannia in 1956. He was patron of the British Heart Foundation for more than half a century, having particularly supported the charity’s creation of “centres of excellence”. As first UK and then international president of the World Wildlife Foundation, he was passionate about conservation and animal welfare decades before they elbowed their way to the front of the public consciousness.
He was a great organiser, brisk and imaginative if somewhat impatient, which suggests that the notion he could have risen to the very top if he had remained in the navy might not have been mere flattery. Certainly Admiral Sir Terence Lewin, first sea lord 1977 to 1979 and the prince’s near contemporary, said that there would have been so competition if things had turned out differently: Philip, not Lewin, would have headed the Royal Navy.
A connoisseur’s favourite is the documentary Royal Family, a 90-minute feature on the Queen and her immediate kin which was shown on BBC and ITV in the summer of 1969. An early fly-on-the-wall project, it depicted a year in the Queen’s life, with filming beginning at 1968’s Trooping the Colour. On broadcast it was widely regarded as too revealing. The controller of BBC2, one David Attenborough, worried the documentary was “killing the monarchy”, while the deputy editor of the Sunday Telegraph, the eccentric Peregrine Worsthorne, noted wittily that “in the not-so-long run familiarity will breed, if not contempt, familiarity”. The programme was subsequently banned in 1977, though it is now available online.
The Duke of Edinburgh chaired an advisory committee which vetted all the footage for Royal Family. So there is no sense in which this was revelatory, at least in any guerrilla way. This was the image the Royal Family wanted to present, and Philip was the authority for the messaging. Royal Family was as much his creation as that of its director Richard Cawston, and it was the duke’s unsatisfied modernising urges which led him to believe that seeing “the Firm” as (relatively) ordinary people with personalities would be beneficial in the long run. Whether he was right remains for history to judge, but again he was years ahead of the curve, anticipating almost everything from Sylvania Waters to The Only Way Is Essex.
It will take years to agree, if we ever do, on the legacy of the UK’s longest-serving consort. Philip Mountbatten, before that Philip of Greece and Denmark, was a forthright, determined individual with broad interests, big ideas and little patience. His was certainly not the unexamined life which Socrates condemned, though the duke would not have thought of himself as introspective or prone to navel-gazing. For seventy years, he mattered, hugely. Now, at last, he is gone. Lord, latest Thou Thy servant depart in peace, as the Nunc dimittis instructs. It is uncharitable to argue that the Duke of Edinburgh has not earned it.