Prince Philip: Consort to the Queen, companion of the nation
Golden Jubilee visit to Suffolk 09/10/03 (PA Images)
The Duke is dead. Long live all the things that he stood for: old-fashioned virtues such as courage and courtesy, along with an appetite for adventure that he successfully encouraged through his reward scheme. His deep love of the natural world, too, will have an abiding legacy in a country that he leaves incomparably better informed about the environment than he found it.
Nowhere else in the world was there anyone of his age and calibre still serving in public life — except, of course, for his beloved wife herself. And Elizabeth II could not have become one of the greatest of our Queens without this heroic husband at her side. For more than seventy years, Prince Philip has been not only the Queen’s Consort, but the nation’s companion, too. We shall miss his reassuring presence at countless public events, his mischievous sense of humour and his inexhaustible energy.
His place in our hearts was assured, but the position of a Prince Consort is never easy and not always comfortable. Nor was Philip’s role one that he found ready-made: he had to remake it for himself, reconciling his constantly evolving position in national life with what the establishment, the press and the public expected of him.
His was a long life, just shy of a century, lived under relentless scrutiny and frequent criticism, much of it unfair. He was fortunate to have lived long enough to see the customs and values he inherited transformed beyond recognition, yet also to be judged by the exacting standards of much younger generations than his own. The vicissitudes of the Royal Family were often laid at his door and he was blamed not only for his notorious (but actually quite rare) gaffes but also for sins of omission as a father. Yet the Duke never complained; indeed, he would have seen any concession to self-pity as an unforgivable dereliction of duty.
It was right that the Prime Minister mentioned Prince Philip’s wartime career, which was remarkable. He served as a sub-lieutenant on the battleship HMS Valiant at the Battle of Cape Matapan in 1941, in which he distinguished himself and was mentioned in dispatches. This was one of the Royal Navy’s greatest victories in World War Two: together with her sister ships Warspite and Ramillies, Valiant destroyed two Italian heavy cruisers in less than five minutes, to be followed by a third, along with two destroyers; the battleship Vittorio Veneto, though damaged, escaped. Two years later, during the invasion of Sicily, Philip (by now First Lieutenant) saved his ship, the destroyer HMS Wallace, from a night bombing raid by launching a raft, using smoke floats as a decoy. After serving in the Pacific War on another destroyer, HMS Whelp, he was present in Tokyo Bay when the Japanese Foreign Minister surrendered on board the USS Missouri. The Duke lived to be one of the last British servicemen not only to have seen action in the Second World War, but to have witnessed its end.
Now we too bear witness to a life well lived, in the service of his family and his country. His old-fashioned qualities may be rarer now than they once were, but we shall miss them all the more. The Duke of Edinburgh was of a generation that took nothing for granted, but by the end of his life he was so much part of our mental furniture that his absence will feel quite disorienting. For the Queen, he was quite simply her rock. For the country, he was a symbol of all that once made us proud to be British. Prince Philip did his best to pass on his values and his virtues to succeeding generations, including his own family. If ever we wonder what the Monarchy is all about, we should spare a thought for this extraordinary man, married to an even more extraordinary woman. Their greatest achievement is to have rendered the institution to which they have given a lifetime’s service more indispensable than it has ever been. The Duke is dead. God save the Queen!
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