In 2003, at the age of eighty-two, Prince Philip began work on a Land Rover that he intended to serve as his hearse. He chose the dark bronze green paint, a color used on many military vehicles. He designed the open rear and the rubber stops that would hold his own coffin steady. He kept refining it for sixteen years, making his final adjustments in 2019.
When he died on April 9, 2021, at Windsor Castle, two months short of his hundredth birthday, the vehicle was ready. On April 17, his coffin was carried through the castle on its open back, exactly as he had planned. It was a fitting end for a man whose life had been shaped by the loss of nearly everything he had been born into. He was born on June 10, 1921, in a summer villa called Mon Repos on the Greek island of Corfu, the fifth child and first son of Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark and Princess Alice of Battenberg.
Alice was deaf and had learned to read lips in several languages. The newborn was named Philippos, a prince of Greece and Denmark by blood, and a Battenberg through his mother—a child of several royal houses and, as it would turn out, of none in particular. His birth came at a moment when such titles guaranteed nothing. Across Europe, royal families were losing their thrones and their lives; the Russian imperial family, his relatives, had been murdered in 1918.
Within a year and a half, the Greek royal family collapsed. After the Greek army’s defeat in Asia Minor in 1922, Prince Andrew was brought before a court-martial. Six of his fellow defendants were shot by firing squad. British intervention saved Andrew, but he was banished.
In December 1922, the Royal Navy ship HMS Calypso came to Corfu and took the family away. According to a story every biographer repeats but none can prove, the eighteen-month-old prince was carried aboard in a cot made from an orange box. Whether or not the tale is literally true, it became the emblem of his life: a prince of two royal houses sailing into exile in a wooden crate. The family settled at Saint-Cloud on the edge of Paris, living on the charity of richer relatives.
They were royalty in name only, all title and no territory. The boy grew up as a poor relation in a world of grand ones, surrounded by cousins who still had what his family had lost. He learned a habit that never left him: when the ground moves beneath you, you get up and get on with it. The next thing to break was his mother.
By early 1930, Alice was showing signs of severe mental illness, including a belief that she was the bride of Christ. In February of that year, she was admitted to a sanatorium near Berlin. A psychiatrist diagnosed her with schizophrenic paranoia, and Sigmund Freud was consulted. Freud’s advice, recorded by a modern historian of psychiatry, was to expose her ovaries to X-rays in order to hasten the menopause.
In May 1930, she was forcibly moved to another sanatorium in Switzerland, where she stayed for about two and a half years. Her son was eight years old. From the summer of 1932 until the spring of 1937, according to one account, he neither saw nor heard from her—no visits, no letters, no word at all, through the years when a boy becomes a young man. The family home did not survive her going.
His father moved to the south of France, where he took up a new life with a woman described by at least one family history as his mistress. There was no place in it for a schoolboy. The boy was sent to England. In 1930, the same year his mother was taken away, he started at Cheam, an English boarding school.
With his mother institutionalized, his father absent, and his four sisters marrying German princes one after another in 1930 and 1931, there was no home left to return to for the holidays. In 1933, he was sent to a school in Germany founded by the educator Kurt Hahn, who believed that a boy should be tested by hardship and challenge. Hahn was German Jewish, and by 1934 the Nazis had arrested him. He fled to Scotland and founded a new school, Gordonstoun, and the prince followed him there.
It was the first fixed structure he had known since Corfu. Hahn’s creed was Spartan: cold showers, service, challenge. It made this boy. The next blow came from the sky.
In November 1937, his sister Cecilia was on a plane bound for London with her husband and their two small sons when the aircraft struck a factory chimney in thick fog near Ostend, Belgium. Everyone on board was killed, including Cecilia, who was pregnant; eleven people died in all. The sixteen-year-old went to Darmstadt for the funeral. His parents were there, too, their first meeting since their separation.
The family gathered, grieved, and scattered again. In 1938, his uncle George, Marquess of Milford Haven, died of cancer. By the time he left school, the boy had lost a country, a home, a mother, a father, four sisters to another country, and one sister and her children to a flying accident. What saved him was what Hahn had built.
He rose to become guardian, the school’s title for its head boy. Hahn’s report on him was later printed in an American magazine: a born leader, but at times too irritable, who would need the exacting demands of a great service to do justice to himself. He said of the boy that his best was outstanding but his second best was not good enough. The Royal Navy was waiting.
He entered Dartmouth in 1939 and passed out at the top of his term. In March 1941, off Cape Matapan, he was in charge of the searchlights and was mentioned in dispatches. The war carried him across the world, and in 1945 he was in Tokyo Bay when the Japanese surrendered. For the first time in his life, he had a place he had earned entirely on merit.
On November 20, 1947, he married the heir to the British throne. The marriage would last seventy-three years. It was also the end of the career he had built. When the King died in February 1952 and his wife became queen, his naval career ended the same morning.
He was thirty years old, and no one asked whether he minded. A queen’s husband has no constitutional role and no precedent to follow. When an interviewer later asked what he was expected to do, he recalled that he asked the question himself and everyone simply looked blank. He refused to sit still.
If there was no job, he would make one. He founded the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award in 1956, a program of challenges for young people. He became the first president of the World Wildlife Fund in Britain in 1961. Over the years, he would hold more than 780 patronages.
He also learned to fly, gaining wings from the Royal Air Force in 1953, the Royal Navy in 1956, and the Army Air Corps in 1965. In all, he logged nearly six thousand hours across some sixty types of aircraft. In the early 1950s, one of his interests was in the sky. According to the later testimony of Peter Horsley, his equerry, with the Duke’s approval, RAF Fighter Command began sending copies of its air crew reports about unidentified flying objects to Buckingham Palace.
Horsley was allowed to investigate the more credible reports, provided it all stayed quiet and involved no publicity. He interviewed witnesses, some of them at the palace itself, and wrote a confidential memo to the Duke about a sighting by an RAF pilot. The Duke and his uncle Lord Mountbatten were reportedly subscribers to the Flying Saucer Review. The Duke’s reply to an invitation to meet the self-styled contactee George Adamski was swift, four words: not on your nelly, though he continued to read the subject for the rest of his life.
His office accepted a book about the Rendlesham Forest incident in the summer of 2020, when he was ninety-nine, assuring the sender it would be read with close interest. There was a great deal the public never saw. His library at Buckingham Palace held more than eleven thousand books by one biographer’s count, including nearly a thousand on art, more than two hundred of poetry, and over a thousand on wildlife. He wrote fourteen books himself and took up painting in oils in the 1950s under the influence of the painter Edward Seago, who sailed with him on the royal yacht Britannia.
After his death, an exhibition showed his portrait of Seago hanging beside Seago’s portrait of him. He designed jewelry for his wife, sketched the outline for a stained-glass window at Windsor after the 1992 fire, helped design the interiors of the royal yacht, and had a trailer built at Balmoral for the family’s barbecues, with a place for everything. In 1971, at fifty, he took up competitive carriage driving. He helped draw up the international rules as president of the sport’s governing body, redesigned the equipment, invented what became known as the bendy pole, and won a team gold medal at the 1980 world championship.
He was still driving at ninety-seven. The same directness that built his machines came out of his mouth in public, and it was that, far more than the paintings or the carriages, that the world remembered. In 1960 he joked to dentists that he practiced the science of opening his mouth and putting his foot in it. The next year he told industrialists that he had never been noticeably reticent about talking on subjects about which he knew nothing.
Over the decades, the remarks grew worse. In China in 1986 he told British students that if they stayed much longer they would all be slitty-eyed. He asked an indigenous Australian businessman if his people still threw spears at each other, and told a policewoman in body armor that she looked like a suicide bomber. These remarks hurt real people, and no explanation undoes that.
They came from the same unguarded mind that built the carriage pole and painted his wife at breakfast. The public saw the remarks; it never saw the library or the easel. After his retirement from public life in August 2017, having carried out 22,219 solo engagements since 1952, he kept driving, kept reading, and kept working on the Land Rover. On April 17, 2021, it carried his coffin through Windsor Castle to St.
George’s Chapel, where the Queen sat alone among just thirty mourners, the pandemic’s limit. The boy who had left Corfu in a fruit box had made sure that this time, he would leave in a box of his own design.