Philip Mountbatten

1921 – 2021 · Generation XXXVII · Duke of Edinburgh

Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, was the husband of Elizabeth II and the longest-serving royal consort in British history. He was born Prince Philip of Greece and Denmark on 10 June 1921 at Mon Repos, a villa on Corfu, reportedly on the dining-room table. He was the fifth child and only son of Prince Andrew of Greece and Princess Alice of Battenberg. Through his father he was a great-grandson of Christian IX of Denmark, and through his mother a great-great-grandson of Queen Victoria, as his future wife also was.

His childhood was unsettled from the start. After the Greek king was forced to abdicate in 1922, Prince Andrew was court-martialled and banished, and a British warship, HMS Calypso, carried the family away from Corfu with the eighteen-month-old Philip in a cot made from an orange box. They settled near Paris, in Saint-Cloud. By the early 1930s the household had broken up. His four sisters married German princes, his mother was diagnosed with schizophrenia and placed in an asylum, and his father moved to Monte Carlo. Philip was sent to Cheam School in England in 1928, then briefly to Salem in southern Germany, and finally to Gordonstoun, the Scottish school founded by Kurt Hahn after he fled the Nazis. In 1937 his sister Cecilie was killed with her husband and two sons in an air crash at Ostend.

In 1939 he entered the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth, where he finished as the best cadet of his course. It was there, that July, that he was asked to look after the thirteen-year-old Princess Elizabeth and her sister during a royal visit, and the two began to write to each other. He served in the Royal Navy throughout the Second World War. In the battleship HMS Valiant he controlled the searchlights at the Battle of Cape Matapan in March 1941 and was mentioned in dispatches. In October 1942, aged 21, he became first lieutenant of the destroyer HMS Wallace, one of the youngest in the navy to hold that post. During the invasion of Sicily he devised a raft of smoke floats that drew off German night bombers and let the ship slip away. He ended the war in HMS Whelp with the British Pacific Fleet and was in Tokyo Bay when Japan surrendered on 2 September 1945.

Before his engagement to Elizabeth was announced in July 1947 he gave up his Greek and Danish titles, became a naturalised British subject and took the surname Mountbatten from his mother’s family. George VI created him Duke of Edinburgh, Earl of Merioneth and Baron Greenwich on the morning of the wedding, which took place in Westminster Abbey on 20 November 1947. Charles was born in 1948 and Anne in 1950, followed by Andrew in 1960 and Edward in 1964. Philip went back to sea, served in Malta and in 1950 was given his own command, HMS Magpie, but the king’s failing health ended his active career in July 1951. In February 1952 the couple were in Kenya at the start of a Commonwealth tour when George VI died, and it was Philip who told his wife at Sagana Lodge that she was queen.

A consort has no constitutional role, and he had to shape the job himself. He chaired the Coronation Commission before the ceremony of 1953, and he complained in private when it was decided that the royal house would keep the name Windsor rather than take his. In 1957 the Queen made him a prince of the United Kingdom. He accompanied her on her overseas tours and carried out 22,219 engagements of his own. With Kurt Hahn he founded the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award in 1956, a programme of challenges for young people that spread to more than ninety countries. He was the first president of the World Wildlife Fund in Britain from 1961 to 1982 and its international president from 1981 to 1996. He qualified as a pilot, gave up polo in 1971 for competitive carriage driving and, as president of the International Equestrian Federation from 1964 to 1986, oversaw the writing of the sport’s international rules. His bluntness was famous, and some of his offhand remarks on foreign visits were heavily criticised.

He was patron, president or member of some 800 organisations (published counts range from more than 780 to 814) and retired from public duties in 2017 at the age of 96. He died at Windsor Castle on 9 April 2021, two months before his hundredth birthday. His funeral was held in St George’s Chapel on 17 April. After the Queen’s death in September 2022 the two were laid to rest together in the King George VI Memorial Chapel at Windsor.

Place in the family

Philip Mountbatten was a great-great-grandson of Queen Victoria.
The archive records 27 of his descendants, across 3 generations.

Images

Philip at about one year old at Mon Repos, Corfu, July 1922 (Unknown photographer (Topical Press Agency), public domain)
As a naval officer with the Pacific Fleet, visiting Melbourne on 29 August 1945 (Associated Press, public domain)
Driving a four-in-hand at the world championships at Het Loo in the Netherlands, August 1982 (Hans van Dijk / Anefo, CC BY-SA 3.0)

Line of descent: Christian IX of Denmark → George I of Greece → Andrew of Greece and Denmark → Philip Mountbatten.

Parents

Andrew of Greece and Denmark (1882 – 1944)
Alice of Battenberg (1885 – 1969)

Partners

Married Queen Elizabeth II (1926 – 2022) in 1947 — 4 children together

Children

King Charles III (1948 – )
Anne, Princess Royal (1950 – )
Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor (1960 – )
Prince Edward, Duke of Edinburgh (1964 – )

Life

1921 — Born
1947 — Married Elizabeth II
2021 — Died

Sources

Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh · Wikipedia
The Duke of Edinburgh: Early life and education · The Royal Family (royal.uk)
50 facts about The Duke of Edinburgh · The Royal Family (royal.uk)
Obituary: HRH The Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh · BBC News