On April 17, 2021, only 30 mourners were allowed inside St. George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle under pandemic restrictions. A widowed queen sat entirely alone. Among the family faces was a 30th name that stood out: Penelope Knatchbull, the daughter of a London butcher who had built a steakhouse fortune.
For 46 years, she had been part of Prince Philip’s life, so close that the royal household had a private nickname for her: “and also. ” The name was shorthand for a fixture, someone so consistently present on guest lists that her absence would have been the thing requiring explanation. Neither born into the family nor married into it, Penny was there because the Queen herself chose her for one of only 30 places at the Duke of Edinburgh’s funeral. No one has ever fully explained why.
The answer, according to royal biographers and those nearest the family, lies in a quieter story of grief, trust, and shared loss. Prince Philip’s early life was defined by displacement. Born in 1921 on the kitchen table of a villa in Corfu, he was carried out of Greece as a baby in a cot made from a wooden fruit box. His mother was placed in a sanatorium when he was nine, his father drifted away, and his sisters married into German noble families.
He grew up moving between relatives and boarding schools, learning early to guard his inner life. That guardedness shaped him. He became a Royal Navy officer who served through the Second World War, then gave up his foreign titles to marry Princess Elizabeth in 1947. His uncle, Lord Louis Mountbatten, had steered him toward the Navy, the British establishment, and the young princess.
Mountbatten was the nearest thing the stateless prince ever had to a father. Penny Eastwood came from the opposite end of English society. Her father, Reginald Eastwood, began work at 15 as a butcher’s apprentice. By the 1960s, he had built a chain of London steakhouses that reportedly turned over 20 million pounds a year and sold some 700,000 steaks annually.
Penny was born into that new money in 1953, schooled in Switzerland, and graduated from the London School of Economics in 1976. She met Prince Philip in the mid-1970s through horses and country pursuits. She was around 21, he was 32 years her senior. They simply liked the same things: horses, the outdoors, and the honest tiredness of a day spent in the open air.
She married into the royal orbit when she wed Norton Knatchbull, Lord Mountbatten’s grandson and Prince Philip’s godson, at Romsey Abbey on October 20, 1979. Prince Charles served as best man. But eight weeks before the wedding, the IRA bombed the family’s boat off the coast of County Sligo, killing Lord Mountbatten, Norton’s 14-year-old brother Nicholas, and two others. The groom’s parents were badly injured.
Penny married into a family in the rawest days of its grief. In 1991, she buried her own five-year-old daughter, Leonora, who died of kidney cancer. Penny insisted the child be buried within the grounds of Broadlands, the family home, so she could always be near her. Royal biographer Ingrid Seward wrote that Philip befriended Penny “when her life began to fall apart” and encouraged her to take up carriage driving.
Carriage driving had become Philip’s obsession after arthritis forced him to give up polo in 1971. He had helped write the modern rules of the sport and competed well into his 80s. He drew Penny into it, giving a shattered young mother a demanding task, early mornings, and a reason to get up. The sport also gave the friendship a public cover that no one could reasonably object to: two enthusiasts at a horse show.
The friendship deepened over three decades. Seward called Penny “the second most important woman” in Philip’s life, a “constant confidant” and “keeper of secrets. ” She offered both the Duke and the Queen an honest view from outside the closed world of the court, because she wanted nothing from them. She danced with Philip in public without apparent concern for what anyone thought.
The couple’s marriage quietly broke down around 2010. Norton reportedly left Broadlands to be with a fashion designer based in the Bahamas and returned in 2014 without any public account of reconciliation. Through the years her marriage came apart, Penny’s constancy at Philip’s side did not waver. The press spent 30 years circling the friendship, hungry for scandal.
A 2015 tabloid headline called her his “flirty admirer. ” But no reporter ever produced a single verified fact of impropriety. The palace’s method was complete silence, denying nothing, confirming nothing, and explaining nothing. Philip himself once pointed out that a man accompanied by police officers wherever he went had no unobserved hours for an affair.
As Philip weakened, the sport was passing to his granddaughter, Lady Louise Windsor, who learned to drive his own fell ponies and carriage. In 2017, at 96, he formally retired from public duties after more than 22,000 solo engagements. In January 2019, he surrendered his driving license after a road collision near Sandringham. Philip died at Windsor Castle on April 9, 2021, at 99, less than two months short of his 100th birthday.
Emergency rules limited his funeral to 30 mourners. The Queen handpicked every name. Almost all were blood or marriage. The 30th was Penny Knatchbull.
Norton was too unwell to attend, so she carried the Mountbatten family’s place, and she came as the friend who had lost her best friend. An unnamed source described her as “heartbroken,” saying simply that she had lost her best friend. She wept in the chapel and said nothing publicly, keeping the same silence she had maintained for 46 years. After Philip’s death, she gave no interviews and wrote no memoir, despite holding one of the most valuable untold stories in the world.
In 2022, a streaming series dramatized the friendship, leaning into ambiguity. But the actor who played Philip pushed back, saying it was “not what people think it is. ”
Penny continued her charitable work, including the children’s cancer foundation that grew out of Leonora’s death. She attended Queen Elizabeth II’s state funeral in September 2022 with her daughter.
The two people who had kept her close for three decades were both gone. In the spring after Philip’s death, Lady Louise Windsor drove his ponies and carriage at the Royal Windsor Horse Show, the very ground where the friendship had lived for years. The reins had passed on. Why was the friendship never explained?
The answer, according to the most careful chroniclers, is that there was nothing to confess and everything to protect. Philip lost a homeland, a mother to an institution, a scattered family, and an uncle to a bomb. Penny lost family to that same bomb, and a daughter to cancer. Grief recognizes grief.
It does not need to explain itself. The 46-year friendship was a private and ordinary human kindness that happened to be conducted on the most public stage on earth. The most important relationships in a life often leave the least behind precisely because they were too real to need recording.
In the end, the friendship survives not in papers or memoirs, but in a single fact: a woman who was neither blood nor married into the House of Windsor was given one of only 30 seats at the funeral, chosen by the widowed Queen herself.