In 1947, shortly after his daughter Elizabeth’s marriage to Filippo Mountbatten, a distant relative of the Windsors but of an unknown Greek branch of the crown, the then King of England George VI he takes his very fresh son-in-law on a hunting trip: «You know why I mentioned you Duke of Edinburgh? To follow Her ”she tells him and the She stood for the future sovereign. “You are your job.” True or not, the joke that appears in the first episode of the TV series “The Crown», A cult show all over the world revered by fans as a biography of the most reliable British crown in history itself, contains the essence of the life of Prince Philip, who died on April 9, 2021. An entire existence, more than 70 years, spent alongside the longest-lived sovereign in the history of England, a true servant of the Crown. Serial gaffeur, best remembered for his intemperance and jokes not suited to the ceremonial, Philip leaves a great mark on the history of the monarchy, which began in 1066 with the Norman king William the Conqueror, much more than the folklore that the headlines of the tabloids have reserved for him over time. Staying second is much more difficult than being first.
Calendar arabeschi
Destiny always loves to mock the affairs of men. The disappearance of Philip of Edinburgh falls about ten days after the Queen’s birthday, who on April 21, the same day as Rome’s birth, will turn 95, but it will be a very sad anniversary. In reality Elizabeth never celebrates, because she has an official celebration in June (Trooping the Colour) which falls in June. And precisely in June, Filippo was born who would have turned 100, a milestone that he will not celebrate.
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Although the Scottish title of Duke of Edinburgh and a certain rudeness of character, shared with the highlanders, Philip had Mediterranean blood. He was born in Corfu on June 10, 1921: his mother Alice of Battemberg, was a princess in exile in Greece where she founded an order of nuns, but the family boasted a distant lineage from Queen Victoria, great-great-grandmother of Elizabeth herself. Orphaned as a child, Filippo grew up in boarding schools around Europe: the trauma and the severe education he received have marked him. On the one hand, there was formed his ethic of duty, which he then applied to the role of Eternal Second, the constant shadow of the sovereign. On the other hand, the total lack of empathy (which then also spilled over into the famous out-of-place comments) made him a bad father, especially towards Prince Charles, whose sensitive soul unnerved his father who saw him as weak and inept. .
A champion of Politically Uncorrect
In his very long and extraordinary life, Filippo has collected dozens of gaffes, meticulously preserved by newspapers and by those who did not spare him criticism. He continually forced the Queen to shut him up: “Shut Up” is perhaps the phrase he addressed most often in public ceremonies. “You are a woman, aren’t you?” he asked an African girl during an official visit; he admonished English students not to stay too long in China otherwise “they would have almond eyes”; he asked the aborigines of Australia if they still used arrows. Phrases that today would scandalize the champions of Politically Correct, the army of social media moralists. Behind the gaffes there was a desecrating intent, and therefore with a strong revolutionary charge, a protest against that world of court ceremonials, so falsely hypocritical. A world that Philip obviously benefited from at the highest levels, but which he hated deep down. In the era of do-gooders, of the flag of discrimination waved inappropriately, even by his daughter-in-law in the TV lounges, Filippo was a white fly, a sort of ancien regime dinosaur: had he made them in the “puritans” of the 2000s, those sentences would have earned accusations of sexism and racism. But it was simply ironic and healthy cynicism, a salacious realism that the Crown will miss.
Longevity record
Nobody knows if the father of the future Queen Elizabeth, the stammering King who inspired an Oscar-winning film, really uttered that sentence about the role of Philip, but even if it wasn’t true, it is entirely probable: it contains in a few effective jokes. the entire life of the Prince Consort of the Queen of England. Total self-denial to the cause of the Crown, even if studded with numerous marital escapades, a constant and tireless public commitment alongside the most beloved, long-lived and powerful sovereign the British crown has ever known: if the 69 years of reign crown Elizabeth as the first in the history of the monarchy up to (having also beaten Queen Victoria), Philip also had his own record: he is the consort who lived the longest alongside the monarch. 74 years old, 17 more than Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, the wife of the King George III, the mad ruler made famous by a famous 90s movie.