London – Prince Philip, husband of Queen Elizabeth II of Great Britain, has died, the royal family announced on Friday. He was 99 years old.
“His Royal Highness died peacefully this morning at Windsor Castle,” the family said in a statement.
He had been hospitalized in February and was operated on for heart disease. He and the queen were married for over 73 years.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson said Philip “earned the affection of generations here in Britain, across the Commonwealth and around the world.”
“As the expert carriage driver he was, he helped lead the royal family and the monarchy so that it remains an indisputably vital institution for the balance and happiness of our national life.”
His role in life was to walk one step behind the queen, but even there, Prince Philip was able to find out his own reputation and role in history.
“Essentially, the queen has always worn the crown,” said Giles Brandreth, who ran one of Philip’s charities for years, while “Prince Philip was always allowed to wear pants. That’s how it worked.”
Philip was born into the Greek royal family in 1921, but was educated and made a naval career in Britain.
And luckily or, many think, for the royal design, he was chosen to escort the young Princess Elizabeth on a tour. The cousin and close friend of the queen until her death in 2016, Margaret Rhodes, well remembered the impression Philip had at that first meeting.
In an interview with CBS News, Rhodes once said that Philip had the immediate advantage of looking good when he met the young princess, describing him as a “completely handsome Viking god.”
They were married at Westminster Abbey in 1947 in a televised ceremony that carried millions of viewers around the world. It was the beginning of a lasting and successful royal marriage. He and the queen have four children, eight grandchildren and nine great-grandchildren.
After Isabel became queen in 1953, Philip gave support and, from time to time, controversy. Some thought it was a source of political inaccuracy prone to blunders.
He once asked the Aborigines of Australia if spears were still being thrown. Closer to home, he once asked Scottish driving instructors how they kept students “out of the sauce” long enough to pass the test.
“He just said what he felt,” Brandreth told CBS News. “It was a lot of fun. Prince Philip was the man who said that if you ever see a man opening the car door to his wife, be it a new car or a new woman. He was a shrewd observer of people.” .
In 1997, with Britain in mourning after the death of Princess Diana, he intervened to turn off a moment of crisis at his funeral. It was Philip who convinced the young princes William and Harry to walk behind his mother’s coffin when they did not want to. “I’ll walk with you,” he said.
Philip remained healthy and active until old age, but suffered several setbacks in recent years. In 2011 he was treated for a blocked coronary artery and then spent several nights in hospital in December 2019. A month later he was forced to stop driving at the age of 97 after hitting a car with his Land Rover near the Royal Sandringham family estate.
Philip retired from official royal functions in 2017 and public appearances became rare. He passed the recent coronavirus blockade at Windsor Castle with the Queen.
The real ones rarely spring up and we don’t know what Philip thought about the intense brilliant tribute the queen paid him on his golden wedding anniversary, but some of his words could be his epitaph:
“It has simply been my strength and my permanence all these years,” the monarch said. “I and his whole family, and this and many other countries have a bigger debt to him than he would ever claim, or we will never know.”