The longtime consort to Queen Elizabeth II lived a life of privilege and luxury, but
he also had a life beset with struggles, sadness, heartbreak, and trauma. He died on April 9,
2021, at home in Windsor Castle. Here are the tragic details of Prince Philip.
In 1947, and at the age of 26, Prince Philip married into the royal family of the United
Kingdom. In adherence to old-school traditions amongst the powerful ruling families of Europe,
no commoner could marry the future queen of the British realm, and Philip was of suitable
lineage and noble birth. Born in 1921, Philip hailed from the royal families of both Greece
and Denmark, his birth taking place on the Greek island of Corfu. But in September 1922,
scarcely a year after he'd celebrated his first birthday, Philip and his family had
to leave Greece, and urgently.
After a major military defeat, Philip's uncle, King Constantine of Greece, abdicated the
throne. Philip's father, Prince Andrew, who served in Greece's military under Constantine
was accused of treason, and was banished from Greece. The family fled to France via a British
naval ship, where baby Philip was reportedly safely smuggled in a fruit crate, according
to The Independent.
While his family found physical safety and refuge outside of its Greek homeland, the
late Prince Philip's childhood was fraught with separation, disaster, sadness, and instability.
While in exile in France, Philip's mother, Princess Alice of Battenberg, experienced
a deep spiritual shift, converting to the Greek Orthodox faith and becoming an extremely
religious person. By 1930, according to CNN, her family equated her spiritual fervor to
a mental illness, possibly schizophrenia, and forced her into a sanatorium in Switzerland
where she was personally cared for by the famed Sigmund Freud. According to The Psychologist,
Freud diagnosed Alice's religious mindset as a symptom of "sexual frustration," and
he kept her institutionalized for over two years, despite her insistence that she was
not, in fact, insane.
Around the same time that his wife was sent away, Philip's father, Prince Andrew, took
the opportunity to abscond with a lover to the South of France. He essentially abandoned
his son, and various relatives around Europe took in Philip over the years, seeing to his
health and education, primarily at boarding schools, per Philip Eade's book, Young Prince
Philip: His Turbulent Early Life. As an example of Philip's own awareness of his turbulent
family life, Eade noted how when an interviewer asked an adult Philip what language he spoke
at home growing up, he responded,
"What do you mean, 'at home'?"
Along with his parents, a then-infant Prince Philip fled Greece with his four older sisters,
Margarita, Theodora, Sophie, and Cecilie. The latter was much older than Philip, and
in 1931, when he was 10 years old, she married Georg Donatus, a German grand duke. In November
1937, Cecilie boarded a plane to travel to the London wedding of her husband's brother.
Conditions became dangerous along the way. The pilot decided to make an emergency landing
in Belgium, and after thick fog made a stop in Brussels impossible, he aimed to touch
down at an airport near Ostend instead. The fog was so dense that the pilot didn't see
the chimney of a factory, and it clipped a wing. The plane quickly caught fire and then
crashed. All 11 people onboard died during the disaster, including Cecile, her husband,
and two of their three children.
Europe isn't all that big of a place, and the royal families that ruled it for centuries
are intricately and inexorably intertwined. This means that World War II pitted relatives
against one another, some on the side of the Allies and some affiliated with Nazi Germany.
As an active member of the British Royal Navy and future consort to the Queen of England,
Prince Phillip was a member of the Allies. However, three of his sisters explicitly sided
with the Nazis.
According to The Independent, there are photos of Philip marching with Nazi officers in Germany
in 1937 — at the funeral procession following the death of his sister, Cecilie and her husband,
Georg Donatus. The German aristocrat and his wife had joined up with the increasingly powerful
and openly anti-Semitic Nazi Party earlier that year.
Princess Sophie was also a Nazi, at least through marriage. She married Prince Christoph
von Hessen, who rose through party ranks to the position of Ministry of Air Forces under
Hitler. Another of Philip's sisters, Margarita, married Gottfried, the Prince of Hohenlohe-Langenburg
and a German army commander.
Philip Mountbatten married the future Queen Elizabeth II in 1947. At the time, she was
still Princess Elizabeth, but next in the line of succession, upon the death of her
father. Her coronation came relatively quickly, when her father, King George VI, died in 1952.
Ascending to the role of Queen's consort, Philip's life changed dramatically; most notably,
he was required to give up his position in the British Royal Navy.
According to Bryan Kozlowski's Long Live the Queen!, his new, largely ceremonial, and ambiguous
role of royal husband left him bored and despondent, and he once compared his state to that of,
quote, "a bloody amoeba." While his wife struggled with the loss of her father and the duties
of becoming the ruler of the British Empire at the relatively young age of 27, Prince
Philip took to moping about Buckingham Palace, prone to fits of anger and sadness. His lack
of mental wellbeing affected his physical health, too. Within a year of Queen Elizabeth
II's crowning, Prince Philip developed a case of stress-related jaundice. It took three
weeks of bed rest in a darkened room for him to fully recover.
As Prince Philip had a relationship with his father that, at times, was characterized by
difficulty and distance, his connection to his oldest son, Prince Charles, was also strained,
tough, and complicated. According to the Daily Mail, Philip was a decidedly hands-off father.
He wasn't privy to the boy's birth, and he was around to celebrate, quote, "just two
of [Charles'] first eight birthdays."
Philip preferred to be overseas, living the British Royal Navy life and being gone from
home and family for long stretches of time. He wasn't an outwardly affectionate father,
but when he did spend time with his son, it was to train him in manly pursuits. Philip
reportedly taught Charles to swim by tossing him into the Buckingham Palace pool. Philip
also insisted that Charles attend Gordonstoun, the same boarding school where he'd studied.
According to Vanity Fair, Charles hated the strict and tough school, comparing his time
there to a "prison sentence."
Father and son were apparently very different, and that led to a consistent disconnect, which
Philip apparently acknowledged in 2004 when he said,
"Charles is a romantic — and I am a pragmatist. That means we do see things differently. And
because I don't see things as a romantic would, I am unfeeling."
As he approached his nineties, Prince Philip's health began to deteriorate. From the 2000s
to the 2020s, the royal consort has been frequently hospitalized with serious medical issues.
In April 2008, he was admitted to King Edward VII's Hospital in London to treat a chest
infection. He recovered quickly, but later that year, the rumors and reports that the
then-86-year-old Philip had been diagnosed with prostate cancer were so strong that Buckingham
Palace issued a rare statement denying it. A few months later, in January 2009, Philip
suffered a back injury that was severe enough that it caused him to miss several official
engagements.
On Dec. 23, 2011, while celebrating Christmas at the royal family's Sandringham estate,
Philip experienced "chest pains," and he was airlifted to a Cambridgeshire hospital, where
doctors performed an angioplasty and installed a stent to treat a problematically blocked
coronary. He spent Christmas and Boxing Day in a hospital bed, recovering. Just a couple
of months after that, in early 2012, Philip again missed celebrations, this time his wife's
Diamond Jubilee, commemorating the 60th anniversary of her taking the throne. The cause: a bladder
infection, for which he'd be hospitalized for a second time later that year. Another
infection sent Philip back to King Edward VII's Hospital for five days in June 2017.
Later that summer, the 96-year-old Philip officially retired from royal duties.
Even after he retired to relieve himself of his duties as a member of the royal family,
Prince Philip continued to suffer from various health and medical problems. After his notable
absence at a 2018 Easter religious service and other Windsor Castle events, Buckingham
Palace revealed that Philip had been convalescing in King Edward VII's Hospital for 10 days
following a hip replacement surgery. And then in December 2019, the 98-year-old Philip spent
four days at King Edward VII's Hospital to treat what the Independent called a "pre-existing
condition" following a fall and a respiratory illness.
In February 2021 Philip returned to that same London medical center, because of what Buckingham
Palace called a "precautionary measure," later confirmed to be an infection. Two weeks after
his admission, he was transferred via ambulance to a different hospital for additional treatment
of the infection as well as a pre-existing heart issue.
"It is with great sorrow that her majesty the queen announces the death of her beloved
husband his royal highness the prince of phillip, the duke of Edinburgh."
On April 9, 2021, the royal family announced the death of Prince Philip, reporting that
he, quote, "passed away peacefully this morning at Windsor Castle." The announcement added,
"The Royal Family join with people around the world in mourning his loss."