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Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh died aged 99

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Age took away Queen Elizabeth’s husband, who died at nearly 100 at Windsor Castle, where his mother Alice of Battenberg was born and where he joined his wife in this new Covid annus horribilis. Philip will be remembered by many only for his jokes and gaffes, rather than for the great man he was. Without him Elizabeth would not have supported the weight of the crown so long and so well: Philip was her rock, as she herself had defined him. He was the only person who could treat her like a human, sending her to hell when she deserved it and advising her when she needed it. Philip told Elizabeth that no one, if he could, would have chosen a life like theirs, massacred by daily public commitments. In November 2017 they had celebrated 70 years of marriage: years with ups and downs, as for all couples, but essentially happy. The Queen knew that behind her, a few steps away, was someone she could always count on.

Farewell to Prince Philip, the jokes and the gaffes that have distinguished him

Son of Prince Andrew of Greece and Alice of Battenberg, Philip was born on the kitchen table of the villa of Mon Repos on the island of Corfu on June 10, 1921. But he had very little Greek. English blood mixed with Russian, Prussian and Danish blood flowed in his veins due to the complex dynastic crossings of the time. Philip stayed in Greece for only 18 months, until a coup d’état and the abdication of his uncle, King Constantine I, forced his family to flee so quickly on December 3, 1922 that to carry the prince was used. a box of fruit. They went to Paris, housed in the outbuilding without heating of a relative.

We are used to thinking that the life of princes is always enviable, but nobody would have wanted Philip’s childhood. Her mother went crazy after a few weeks and was admitted to a psychiatric institution. His father went to Monte Carlo to squander the last of his money. The sisters moved to Germany, and three out of four married Nazi officers. He was tossed from family to family until he arrived in England as the guest of his maternal grandfather, whose family had anglicized the “too German” surname Battenberg into Mountbatten. He was penniless, without a title and without hope.

When Prince Philip crashed behind the wheel of his Land Rover

The career in the Royal Navy always works wonders for the destitute and decayed nobles and the greatest miracle the British Navy did with him. On the day King George VI went to visit Dartmouth Naval College with his wife Elizabeth and daughters Elizabeth and Margaret, Philip was chosen to escort and entertain the princesses. Elizabeth was 13, he was 18. She fell in love with him immediately and forever. They began to write and continued when Filippo left for the war, to fight with the Mediterranean fleet at the head of Matapan, where he helped sink the Italian ships. Elizabeth was proud to write letters to her man in the war, as did other girls. They married on November 20, 1947, and in London still devastated by bombs, the ceremony appeared to everyone as a sign of hope: life was starting again. A few days earlier, George VI and Winston Churchill had wanted to speak with Philip, to make sure he was aware of what he was about to do. He would give up his titles, the Orthodox religion and even his surname: his children would be called Windsor. And he also had to stop driving that reckless way. Elizabeth also asked him something, not to smoke anymore.

Throughout their lives, the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh have never kissed or touched in public, to safeguard the dignity of their role. After the wedding, Philip declared that his life from that moment had only one purpose: never to disappoint his wife. The gratitude he has always felt for her did not allow for yielding, and so it was. The rumors about his alleged adventures, relaunched by the TV series The Crown, are not very credible. At court it was said that when it came to women, Filippo loved to look at the windows, but he never bought. He was not a good father and relations with Prince Charles were very bad: he considered him weak and fragile. Instead, he preferred his daughter Anna, the real tomboy of the Royal Family.

The last public engagement for Prince Philip

Filippo had an irascible temperament, which he vented without paraphrasing against the newspapers. The things he read were so different from what actually happened in his family that an insurmountable gap was immediately dug between him and the press. “You have the mosquitoes, we have the reporters,” he once said to the leader of a Caribbean country. And the mosquitoes of Fleet Street have never forgiven him, helping to create the false image of a useless and indolent prince consort, prone to public gaffes, in perennial quarrel with his wife and children.

Nothing more wrong. Over the years Filippo has done everything that was expected of him in his difficult role, always three steps behind the Queen. He was also a good painter, a champion of sailing, polo and horse-drawn carriage races, his passion. He flew 59 different types of aircraft and flew across the Pacific. He was the oldest member of the British royal family in history, but he renewed the institution most of all.

In May 2017, at the age of 96, he announced his retirement from public life: he could no longer stand up, and he did not like having become, as he said at his last ceremony, “the most expert license plate finder commemorative of the world “. In January 2019, the car accident and his decision to return his driver’s license, which deprived him of the only joy he had left: to be alone for a while driving around the royal estates. Filippo wanted to live for a long time, to respect the commitment to never disappoint the Queen. He had retired to a small cottage in Sandringham, where his wife would visit him when she could, then the decision to move with her to Windsor. Elizabeth no longer has her rock, and without the man who helped her to become a great ruler, the weight of the years and the crown will now be even more onerous.

When Prince Philip took it out on a photographer insulting him

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