Image: AP Photo
Princes are thin on the ground these days. While there are still a few royals reigning across Europe, the world of interrelated international royalty that evoked a glittering combination of Grimm’s fairy tales and Ruritania is long dead everywhere except Netflix Christmas movies. But there’s one person left who’s a living connection to the milieu of European monarchy: Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, who will turn 100 years old in June and is currently in the hospital. Buckingham Palace informed media that after a two-week stay at London’s King Edward VII Hospital, he’s been moved to Bartholomew’s Hospital for further treatment of a stubborn infection and a “preexisting heart condition,” but that it’s responding to treatment and he “remains comfortable.”
Philip was a prince without a home or much to his name when he met the 13-year-old Princess Elizabeth; despite her own sprawling family tree, she grew up embedded in the world of the British aristocracy. Philip was related to half of Europe and bounced around their homes after his family was forced out of Greece by political turmoil. Hot-tempered, prone to saying appalling things, poorly suited to the role of second fiddle, he has spent his life simultaneously supporting his wife and angrily bumping up against the confines of his position. In a sense, he’s the last prince charming, literally a dashing European royal in a glittering uniform—and the realities of his life are an excellent testament to the complexities of what that role actually entails, as well as the limits of the “Prince Charming” fantasy itself.
He is among the last living links to the tightly interconnected world of European monarchy as it once existed. He was born Prince Philipos of Greece and Denmark of the House of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg, in 1921, at a summer palace on Corfu. The dynastic name is cobbled together from several places along the Danish/German border, a hotly contested piece of real estate with a duke who parlayed his way onto the throne of Denmark in the 19th century. His mother, Alice of Battenberg, was a great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria, born in Windsor Castle. In his sepia-toned baby photos, he could easily be mistaken for a stray Romanov in the last days before the revolution and, in fact, his great aunt was Alix of Hesse, later known as the ill-fated Empress Alexandra of Russia, who met her end in a Siberian basement just three years before Philip was born. (Related to the Romanovs on both sides of the family, he was one of three people whose DNA was used to identify their bodies.)
Philip’s uncle was Constantine I, King of Greece. Philip was a prince of both Greece and Denmark because the monarchy of Greece was a tenuous and relatively recent invention, with an imported royal family. In the 1820s, Russia, Britain, and France backed a Greek bid for independence from centuries-long Ottoman control of the peninsula—the conflict that Delacroix painted and where Lord Byron died—and then, for their efforts, took it upon themselves to install a king. They first offered the crown to Leopold, the youngest son of the Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld, one of the many small German kingdoms that still existed as independent entities. (Otto von Bismark dubbed it the “stud farm of Europe”—an unimportant but convenient place for sourcing a sufficiently titled husband.)
Leopold turned it down, eventually accepting the crown of the newly independent Belgium instead, and so they turned to Otto, the younger son of King Ludwig I of Bavaria (another independent German-speaking territory). Otto was booted in 1862; after more rooting around the various courts of Europe, they finally found someone to take the crown: Prince Wilhelm of Denmark, who in 1863 became George I of Greece. He was eventually assassinated. The cycle of collapse and restoration continued off and on until the 1970s—frequently to the point of farce and confusion—but Philip and his family exited the picture in 1922.
Philip’s father, Prince Andrew, was a younger brother of Greek king Constantine I and—in the frequent manner of younger royal sons—had a high rank in the Greek military; during a military coup, he was accused of treason for his part as a commander in the disastrous Greco-Turkish War. He was convicted and it took the intervention of George V to save him. The family were evacuated from Greece on a British battleship, Philip famously transported in a crib made from an orange crate. They settled in Paris, living off wealthy relatives, until the family unit essentially dissolved in 1930, when his four older sisters married German aristocrats in rapid succession—three of them to men who would eventually become Nazis—and his parents’ marriage dissolved. His mother suffered a breakdown, spent years at a sanatorium, and when she recovered returned to Greece, took vows as a nun. She spent the war years sheltering Jews, for which she is honored at Yad Vashem. His father, on the other hand, chose the stereotypically aristocratic route and decamped to Monte Carlo where he set up house with his mistress. Ten-year-old Philip, now a poor relation, was bounced around Europe, spending much of his time at boarding schools; asked by an interviewer in the early 1990s what language he spoke at home, he retorted: “What do you mean, ‘at home’?”
Ultimately, he landed in school in the United Kingdom, at Gordonstoun. That put him firmly in the orbit of his Battenberg relations, now the Mountbattens, having anglicized their name during World War I alongside their relatives, the now-Windsors, to avoid anti-German sentiment. Philip still had family on the continent—there are pictures from his sister’s funeral in which he is surrounded by high-ranking Nazis—but he entered Britain’s Royal Navy and ultimately served in World War II. And his uncle Louis Mountbatten had very big, iconically British aspirations for him. Mountbatten, who was a high-ranking naval officer in World War II and as well as the Viceroy of India who oversaw the disastrous Partition, was equally ambitious in his dealings with his royal relations, the Windsors, and he thought that his nephew Philip was a perfect match for the young princess who would eventually become queen.
The love story goes that Elizabeth fell permanently in love with Philip at 13 years old, on a visit to the Royal Navy College, where he was a dashing 18-year-old cadet, and that was that. But the real-world details were, as always, much more complicated. Many of the sticklers at the Palace opposed the relationship. He was an outsider with “a distinctly Continental flavor,” as biographer Sally Bedell Smith puts it. He wasn’t deferential, he hadn’t gone to Eton—horror of horrors—and he was a foreigner, with all that German family. Not to mention that he had no money, no home, and nothing, really, beyond a roguish smile, a near-worthless title, and the fact that he looked very good in a naval uniform. The Queen Mother, in particular, was none too sure about Philip, even as Mountbatten constantly pressed his case.
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