Table of contents for PEOPLE Prince Philip in PEOPLE Prince Philip

THE DAY HIS WIFE was formally crowned Queen of the United Kingdom, the Duke of Edinburgh also took a vow inside Westminster Abbey: He promised to be her “liege man of life and limb.” That is precisely how Prince Philip, 99, who died at Windsor Castle on the morning of April 9, spent his life. This only son of Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark and Princess Alice of Battenberg served his adopted country first as a naval officer and then as the “strength and stay” of Queen Elizabeth II, to whom he was married for more than 70 years. “I can think of very few couples as united,” Lady Pamela Hicks, a bridesmaid at their 1947 wedding, told People in 2016. Flinty and frank, he was also known for occasional…

BY 1943 PHILIP, A FIRST LIEUTENANT, was second in command on HMS Wallace and distinguished himself by helping to save the ship from a German bomber. When the Christmas holidays came, having “nowhere particular to go,” as he later said, Philip accepted an invitation to spend them at Windsor Castle. Elizabeth, by then 17, confided to her governess that he was “the one,” and the King’s private secretary observed that the couple “frisked and capered away til near 1 a.m.” Philip sent a thank-you note to the Queen, saying he hoped she wouldn’t think it presumptuous if he added Windsor to his favorite places. The romance between the princess and the Royal Navy man remained a secret outside the palace. Elizabeth’s father, King George, wrote to his mother that Philip…

ONE MUST SYMPATHISE NOT only with the grieving daughter but with the young woman who has to put her youth aside,” The New York Times wrote of the new Queen. “She picks up a burden whose weight will be hard to bear.” Arriving in London from Kenya, Elizabeth, dressed in black, her eyes reddened, descended the aircraft steps alone. Philip followed a few paces behind. “When the late King died,” he explained to one biographer, “everything changed.” Back home at Clarence House, Elizabeth’s 84-year-old grandmother would pay a visit, curtsying to her granddaughter, her new Queen. As a swirl of ceremony enveloped his wife into a world he could not constitutionally enter, Philip was left on the outside. His role was naturally destined to be a supporting one now that…

A SMALL FIGURE stood in the courtyard of Windsor Castle the afternoon of Nov. 20, 1992, watching a painful scene as hundreds of firefighters rushed to battle flames engulfing her childhood home. “It was the most shaken I ever saw her,” an adviser recalls of the Queen. Elizabeth called her husband, in Argentina at the time, and the couple spoke at length about the tragedy on what should have been a day of celebration—their 45th wedding anniversary. Then she phoned her mother and wept. In a year plagued by royal scandal and the breakdown of the marriages of three of the couple’s four children, the blaze was “a cruel metaphor,” Time magazine wrote. Four days later the Queen stood before a room gathered to honor her 40 years on the…

THIS,” SAID A FAMILY FRIEND, introducing the tow-headed 4-year-old at his side to a stranger, “is Prince Philip. His grandfather is a king of Greece.” Indignant, the little boy shot back, “No! I’m Philip—just Philip, that’s all!” Prince Philippos of the royal house of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg was born June 10, 1921, in Corfu, Greece. He didn’t have a drop of Hellenic blood—his paternal grandfather, King George I, was a Danish prince who had been installed on the Greek throne at age 17 and had eight children, including Philip’s father, Prince Andrew, a general in the Greek army. Philip’s mother, Princess Alice of Battenberg, was born in Windsor Castle, a great-granddaughter of Britain’s Queen Victoria. (Yes, that made Philip a distant cousin of his wife; see family tree, page 36.) Alice’s father,…

NOT YET RECOVERED FROM World War II, England in 1947 was a country in need of joy and beauty. On the gray morning of Nov. 20, the Windsors delivered. “This wedding, on a dark day of a troubled, distracted and most uncertain time, carried over six continents and seven seas a brightness so simple it was hard to understand,” Time wrote of the union of Princess Elizabeth, 21, and the newly titled Duke of Edinburgh, 26, whom one of the bridesmaids dubbed “God’s gift to girls.” To be sure, concessions were made in the name of austerity—the prime minister refused to declare a national holiday and insisted on keeping the wedding route to the minimum 1½ miles—but for the estimated half million who lined the London streets, many singing popular…

ALTHOUGH THE NEW Queen and Philip would sometimes leave young Charles and Anne for months while on tour, when the whole family was home, the couple “did their level best to give their children a normal family life,” Elizabeth’s private secretary Martin Charteris recalled. Between 5 and 6.30 p.m. the sound of children playing was “heard all over the house,” and Elizabeth would read to one and Philip to the other before bedtime. “The ability to play outdoors and entertain yourself was endless,” Princess Anne recalled in a 2016 documentary, Elizabeth at 90. “And a lot of it was done together.” But they were, of course, not a normal family. With royal duties commanding most of her attention, the Queen left domestic decisions up to her husband. “Elizabeth wore the…

THEY ARE THE most lovely couple,” Prince William said of his grandparents in 2016, five years after his own wedding to Kate Middleton. “I have regularly asked them both how on earth they’ve managed it. I hope Catherine and I have the same sort of future ahead of us, where we can be as happily married as they are after 68 years.” By their 70th year as husband and wife, Elizabeth and Philip had the longest royal marriage known to history, never wavering in their commitment to each other or to duty. “My ambition,” Philip wrote in 1947 in a letter to his new mother-in-law while on his honeymoon, “is to weld the two of us into a new combined existence that will not only be able to withstand the…

TEN-YEAR-OLD PRINCESS Elizabeth was at home when she heard the cheers from the London streets below: Her uncle King Edward VIII had just given up the crown to be with “the woman I love,” and a crowd was hailing the new King—her father. Rushing upstairs, she told her younger sister the news. “Does that mean that you will have to be the next Queen?” asked Margaret. “Yes, someday,” Elizabeth replied. “Poor you,” concluded her sister, according to biographer Sally Bedell Smith in Elizabeth the Queen. The future Queen, however, accepted her fate in silence. At age 2, Elizabeth Alexandra Mary already had, in the words of Winston Churchill, “an air of authority and reflectiveness astonishing in an infant.” Yet until her father’s brother relinquished the throne, she grew up unburdened…

PENNING LETTERS BY THE FIRE ON their honeymoon in Scotland, the young marrieds couldn’t contain their happiness. “Cherish Lilibet? I wonder if that word is enough to express what is in me,” Philip wrote to his new mother-in-law. “Philip,” Elizabeth wrote to her, “is an angel…. Having him around all the time is just perfect.” Upon returning to London, however, all was not perfection. “Philip is terribly independent, and I quite understand the poor darling wanting to start off properly without everything being done for us,” Elizabeth had written to her mother, adding that her new husband needed to feel he’s the “boss in his own home.” But that wasn’t easy since the couple didn’t have a proper home of their own. Awaiting renovations on Clarence House, they moved into…

WHEN PRINCE Charles emerged on the balcony of Buckingham Palace on July 29, 1981, and kissed his new bride, the country was euphoric. The union had ended more than a decade of press speculation over who would wed the next King of England. (“The Prince and the Proper Girl: Who and Where Is She?” a People headline wondered back in 1974 when Charles was pushing 26.) But for Charles’s parents the marriage was cause for a different sort of joy, one tinged with relief. By then Elizabeth and Philip were already grandparents twice over to Princess Anne’s young children Zara and Peter with her husband, equestrian Captain Mark Phillips. But what of their firstborn and heir? When Charles chose Lady Diana Spencer, just 19, a daughter of the Queen’s former…