On a June morning in 1921, on the Greek island of Corfu, a boy was born into one of the grandest and least secure inheritances in Europe. Prince Philip of Greece and Denmark arrived as the only son of Prince Andrew and Princess Alice, a great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria. Through his bloodlines he was cousin to the thrones of Britain, Denmark, Germany, and Russia. Yet the Greek monarchy itself was barely sixty years old, an imported institution propped up by foreign powers, and already stained with the assassination of its founding king.
The fragile security of that world collapsed before the child could walk. Greece had launched a disastrous military campaign into Asia Minor, a dream of a greater Greek empire that ended in total defeat. Hundreds of thousands of refugees fled the burning city of Smyrna. A wounded and humiliated nation went looking for someone to blame, and in the autumn of 1922 a group of army officers seized power, forced the king from the throne, and put the leaders of the defeated campaign on trial.
Six senior men were convicted of high treason and shot against a wall. Philip’s father, a general who had commanded in the lost war and quarreled with his superiors, was arrested, tried, and found guilty. He was saved by a hand reaching in from outside Greece. King George V of Britain, haunted by the murder of his cousin the Tsar of Russia and his family, sent a naval officer to press quietly behind the scenes and ordered a British cruiser, HMS Calypso, into Greek waters.
Andrew’s sentence was changed from death to lifelong banishment. In December 1922, the family was carried out of Greece aboard the British ship. The infant, not yet eighteen months old, had no cot, so one was made for him from a wooden fruit box, an orange crate pressed into service as a royal cradle. He would never live in that country again.
The family settled in a borrowed house at Saint-Cloud on the edge of Paris, lent to them by a wealthy relative, Princess Marie Bonaparte, a trained psychoanalyst and associate of Sigmund Freud. They possessed grand titles and almost no money. There was no estate, no fortune, no reliable income. The security of the Greek royal family had rested entirely on the throne, and the throne was gone.
The household survived on the charity of relatives, largely from his mother’s English side, the Battenberg and Mountbatten family, who paid for the boy’s schooling, clothes, and holidays. The borrowed house could not shelter them from what was happening within the family itself. Through the late 1920s, Princess Alice, who had been born deaf and had taught herself to lip-read in several languages, grew intensely and then overwhelmingly religious, coming to believe she received divine messages. In 1930, when Philip was nine, she was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia.
She was removed by force and committed to a sanatorium in Switzerland. Freud himself was consulted on her case and reportedly suggested that her ovaries be exposed to X-rays to kill off what he called her libido. She remained confined for about two years, then drifted through central Europe, out of contact with her children for years. His father, increasingly absent, drifted to the Riviera and quietly let go of the rest of the family.
In the same two years his mother vanished, all four of his sisters married German princes and moved to Germany. The family dissolved. The sisters married into a Germany on the edge of the Nazi seizure of power. The youngest, Sophie, married Prince Christoph of Hesse, who became an SS officer and ran the Nazi bureau that tapped telephones and intercepted wireless traffic.
Cecilia and her husband, the hereditary Grand Duke of Hesse, would both become members of the Nazi party. In 1937, Cecilia was traveling by air with her husband, his mother, and two of her young sons when their aircraft came down in thick fog near Ostend, killing everyone aboard. She was heavily pregnant. Philip, still a teenager, was among the mourners.
With no home and no family left to take him in, Philip was raised by institutions. He passed through schools in France, England, and then Germany, at a place called Salem, run by an educator named Kurt Hahn. Hahn believed in physical challenge, self-reliance, and service, a philosophy that fit the rootless, independent boy perfectly. But these were the years of the Nazi seizure of power, and Hahn was Jewish.
He was arrested, then driven out of the country. He fled to Scotland and founded a new school, Gordonstoun, and Philip followed him north. The regime that took his sisters in was the same regime that cast his teacher out. In 1938, his uncle George, the Marquess of Milford Haven, who had been a steady guardian through his drifting boyhood, died of cancer.
Into that gap stepped another uncle, Louis Mountbatten, a rising officer in the Royal Navy and a man of immense ambition. Mountbatten made his nephew a personal project. He steered Philip toward the Royal Navy, toward British nationality, and, as many later came to believe, toward a possible marriage to the young Princess Elizabeth, heir to the British throne. Philip entered the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth in 1939 and passed out at the very top of his term, judged the best cadet of his intake.
It was at Dartmouth that year that he first met Princess Elizabeth, then just thirteen years old, and she was much taken with him. When war came, he served in British uniform against a Germany that now held his sisters and the men they had married. He served aboard the warship Valiant in the Mediterranean and took part in the Battle of Cape Matapan in 1941, where his handling of the ship’s searchlights, snapping beams onto enemy vessels out of the black so the British guns could find their targets, helped carry the engagement. He was mentioned in dispatches and awarded a Greek decoration for courage aboard a British ship.
In 1944, his father died alone at Monte Carlo, and father and son never saw one another again. After the war, to marry Princess Elizabeth, Philip had to shed the last outward traces of his birth. In 1947, he became a naturalized British subject, gave up his royal titles of Greece and Denmark, took the plain British surname Mountbatten from his mother’s family, and was received into the Church of England. On 20 November 1947, he married Princess Elizabeth at Westminster Abbey and was created Duke of Edinburgh.
His three surviving sisters were not invited; they were German, married to German princes, and it was thought impossible to seat German royalty at the wedding of the future British queen only two years after the war. Princess Alice, the mother taken from him when he was nine, emerged from her long darkness. She returned to Athens, and during the German occupation, with the Gestapo hunting down the city’s Jews, she took a Jewish widow named Rachel Cohen and her two children into her own home and hid them at genuine risk to her life. She was later honored among the Righteous Among the Nations.
In her final years, she came to live with Philip and Elizabeth inside Buckingham Palace, an old woman in a nun’s gray habit. She died and was buried in Jerusalem. Philip went on to serve at the side of Queen Elizabeth II for more than seventy years, becoming the longest-serving royal consort in British history. He died in April 2021 at the age of ninety-nine.
The villa on Corfu where he was born still stands, now a public museum. The philosophy of Kurt Hahn lives on in the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award, which has carried his code of challenge and service to millions of young people. And the royal house he married into still carries his name in the family style of Mountbatten-Windsor. The boy carried out of his kingdom in a fruit box, a prince of two royal houses with not one roof he could call his own, had lost everything before he was old enough to remember holding it.
Everything inherited proved to be only ever on loan. What he kept was himself, the self-reliance forged in boarding school dormitories, the discipline learned under Hahn on the windswept Scottish coast, the courage shown in the black night of Cape Matapan, and the will to choose a country and a name and a future for himself rather than merely inherit them. The man who looked like the most rooted figure in British public life was in truth the one who had begun with no roots at all.