Prince Philip was no stranger to tragedy. As a prince of Greece and Denmark, a military
coup in 1922 forced his family to flee to Italy when he was just a baby. In the following
years, his mother was institutionalized for a mental breakdown, later diagnosed as schizophrenia,
and his father abandoned the family to live with his mistress. But even those challenging
times could not prepare young Philip for the ultimate tragedy yet to come.
His sister, Princess Cecilie, was the third of Prince Philip's siblings, born in 1911
on the Greek royal family's estate in Tatoi, Greece. She married Georg Donatus, Hereditary
Grand Duke of Hesse in 1931, and they had three children. They both joined the Nazi
Party in May 1937.
As depicted on Netflix's The Crown, the princess was eight months pregnant with her fourth
child when she, her husband, his mother, their nanny, and two of their three children boarded
a plane in Darmstadt, Germany, on November 16, 1937, bound for London to attend the wedding
of Georg's brother, Prince Ludwig, to Margaret Campbell-Geddes.
Sadly, the family never arrived. Unexpectedly, the pilot attempted to make an unplanned landing
in Brussels, but it was covered in dense fog. When he instead tried to land at the similarly
foggy Ostend airport, he crashed into a factory chimney that had been obscured by poor visibility.
The plane broke apart and caught on fire when it hit the ground. There were no survivors.
Princess Cecilie was only 26 years old at the time of her death.
In the wreckage of the plane they found the body of a newborn baby. Belgian investigators
believed that Princess Cecilie gave birth to the baby during the flight, leading to
speculation that the pilot was attempting to make an emergency landing after the Princess
went into labor unexpectedly.
Due to the tragedy, the large wedding plans for November 20th were scrapped and the next
day Prince Ludwig and Margaret were married in a private ceremony. The couple then collected
the bodies of the princess and her family in Belgium and returned to Darmstadt. Prince
Philip, along with the rest of his family, attended the funeral.
Most royal watchers are familiar with the "stiff upper lip" mentality of British aristocracy,
particularly in the case of Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip. Though the queen was born
into her life of propriety and duty to the crown above all else, Philip was nevertheless
nearly as composed as Her Royal Highness. Though often given to a degree of social frankness
that sometimes proved embarrassing to the crown, the public rarely knew how Prince Philip
felt about anything. This is likely somewhat intentional (he is a royal, after all) but
might also be attributed to those early tragedies he suffered.
Though only a toddler when his family was forced to flee Greece, Philip must have grown
up hearing the stories behind the tragedy and likely learned early on the value of staying
under the radar. Given how frequently he was shuttled off to various countries and schools,
he'd have had no choice but to adapt, even given life-altering tragedies like the death
of Cecilie. As Vogue magazine notes, one especially heart-rending summation of his childhood misfortunes
that Philip once gave his biographer was,
"I just had to get on with it. You do. One does."
As Prince Harry recently explained to James Corden, he's more comfortable with The Crown's
approach to royal life than that of the notoriously vicious British tabloids.
"They don't pretend to be news. It's fictional, but it's loosely based on the truth."
Princess Cecilie's death is a perfect example of the way the show manipulates the story
and elides some of the real-life details in favor of more dramatic storylines. While the
show got many key features of Cecilie's story right (including her pregnancy, in-flight
birth, and death in the plane crash), it strayed from the truth when it came to Philip's role
in his sister's death.
In this case, he actually had no role, contrary to the event's depiction on The Crown. On
the Netflix series, Philip's decision to not visit Cecilie meant that she boarded the flight
that led to her death. In reality, a royal biographer is quoted in Vogue as reiterating
that Cecilie was always going to attend the wedding, and that Prince Philip had nothing
to do with the accident at all.
In the end, even circumstances as tragic as Cecilie's death and Philip's lonesome childhood
still receive a bit of Hollywood embellishment. Still, as Philip might say, you just have
to get on with it, as one does.
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