Philip had a traumatic childhood. The family had no money, his parents’s marriage was falling apart, and his four sisters were all much older, and were soon all married to German aristocrats (the second youngest would soon die in an aeroplane crash, along with her husband and children). He got through it by making a joke of everything, and by being practical.
This is where, I think, his “Legend!!!” status came from; in the 1990s there was a great divergence in how we dealt with mental anguish. We were now supposed to open up and show our feelings, even if we didn’t want to. Nothing better illustrated this great emotional divide than the tragic death of Prince Philip’s daughter-in-law Diana, after which the Queen and Duke’s emotional restraint felt dangerously out-of-touch; the tabloids demanded they cry publicly, to join the wailing crowds outside.
Yet many of us felt that this was not emotional liberation but emotional tyranny; some people get through hardship and trauma by a very public display of emotion; others do it by focussing on the practical. It doesn’t mean they’re not hurting, necessarily. From an early age, Prince Philip endured his fair share of grief — he just got through it by making plans and doing something useful.
The future Greatest Living Englishman had first attended school in England when he was seven, but two years later his mother, who went deaf and suffered from schizophrenia, was sectioned. His father had gone off to the south of France to live with his mistress in true aristo-bounder style.
And so, through a connection via one of his sister’s husbands, the poor, lonely boy was sent off to a new school — in Nazi Germany. Which was as fun as can be imagined.
Schloss Salem had been co-founded by stern educator called Kurt Hahn, a tough, discipline-obsessed conservative nationalist who saw civilisation in inexorable decline. But by this stage Hahn, who was Jewish, had fled to Britain, and Philip did not spend long at the school either, where pressure from the authorities was already making things difficult for the teachers. He laughed at the Nazis at first, because their salute was the same gesture the boys at his previous school had to make when they wanted to go to the toilet, but within a year he was back in England, a refugee once again.
Here he attended Hahn’s new school, Gordonstoun, which the strict disciplinarian had set up in the Scottish Highlands. Inspired by Ancient Sparta, the boys had to run around barefoot and endure cold showers, even in winter, the whole aim of which was to drive away the inevitable civilisational decay Hahn saw all around him. To 21st century ears it sounds like hell on earth, yet Philip enjoyed it, illustrating just what a totally alien world he came from.
But what really set his world apart from ours is the idea of duty. Philip was a talented naval officer, and fought with great courage at the battle of Cape Matapan in 1941 when British and Australian forces had decisively beaten the Italians. He ended the war one of the Navy’s youngest first lieutenants. Some say he could have risen to the top; but he had fallen in love with Princess Elizabeth in the meantime, and the rest is history – and TV.
Towards the end of his time on earth Philip came to have that rare, cursed honour of having his life dramatised in his own lifetime. The Crown covered the great social change of the period, but also reflected it. The modern monarchy had been established by George V, who with his radio broadcasts kept the House of Windsor on the throne by making them celebrities. Yet it relied on a culture of gentleman’s agreements and shame among editors and journalists.
By the 1970s that was collapsing, and the sense of restraint Philip had grown up with had disappeared. In season one of The Crown, Philip’s sister-in-law cannot marry for love because divorce was impermissible in the Church of England and their feelings did not come before ancient, sacred rules. By the end of season four almost all of the royal marriages have collapsed.
Indeed, the House of Windsor seemed stuck with the worst of both worlds, with an old-fashioned lack of emotional development and empathy, and a modern lack of duty.
Yet of all the institutions that have lost the faith of the public in this period — the Church, Parliament, the media, the police — the Crown itself has done better than most at surviving, curiously well-adapted to a period of moral change, even moral anarchy. The House of Hanover/Windsor, since their arrival in this country in 1714, have been noted above all for their ability to adapt. And just as they survived the Victorian age by transforming themselves into the bourgeoise, domestic ideal, so they have survived the new Elizabethan era, even if it is ending on another downward note with the estrangement of his grandson Prince Harry.
There was once a time when the Royal’s German blood was a punchline for comedians. Now it is the royals who are deeply British while the country itself is cosmopolitan and globalised. The census results next year will show a society that has seen greater demographic change than the preceding four or five thousand years combined, the second Elizabethan age being characterised more than anything by a transformational movement of people. Prince Philip, the Greek-born, Danish-German wanderer who came to become the Greatest Living Englishman, perhaps epitomised that era better than anyone else.
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