Prince Philip of Edinburgh dies at 99
Queen Elizabeth II's husband underwent heart surgery last March
The husband of Queen Elizabeth II, Philip of Edinburgh, died this Friday at the age of 99 at Windsor Palace, as announced by the British royal family. "It is with great regret that Her Majesty the Queen announces the death of her beloved husband, Her Royal Highness Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh," Buckingham Palace said in a statement. Felipe de Edimburgo left the hospital on March 16 after being operated on for a pre-existing heart condition. His Royal Highness died peacefully this morning at Windsor Castle. New announcements will be made in due course, ”the note added.
With his lights and his shadows, Philip of Edinburgh was an indissoluble part of almost seven decades of institutional and monarchical stability. Johnson's government and all opposition parties paid tribute to his figure and his life of service to the country. The social distancing measures in force due to the pandemic and the desire expressed in life by Felipe himself will reduce the public dimension of his funeral, which will take place on Saturday the 17th after eight days of national mourning. It will be an intimate ceremony in St George's Chapel at Windsor Castle.
In that castle he had been held, together with Isabel II, since the pandemic began more than a year ago. In mid-February he was admitted to the King Edward VII Hospital in London, due to an infection, and just over two weeks later he was transferred to another health center to undergo a delicate cardiac intervention. On March 16 he was discharged from hospital and returned to Windsor.
None of the attempts to write a biography of Philip of Edinburgh that would unravel his personality succeeded in the endeavor. The husband of Elizabeth II and prince consort of the United Kingdom remained until the last moment as an enigma and a wild card that served supporters and detractors of the monarchy to represent an eternal institution or to deplore the arrogance and arrogance of a caste far from the reality. "Ladies and gentlemen, the person with the most experience in the world in discovering commemorative plaques appears before you," he used to say in his last public acts, before finally retiring from the official scene in 2017. The sense of humor, as caustic as Self-critical, it was one of his few havens.
It is with deep sorrow that Her Majesty The Queen has announced the death of her beloved husband, His Royal Highness The Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh.
— The Royal Family (@RoyalFamily) April 9, 2021
His Royal Highness passed away peacefully this morning at Windsor Castle. pic.twitter.com/XOIDQqlFPn
He collected cartoons of the most famous British cartoonists, like Matt. He had almost 200 original drawings that he distributed throughout the bathrooms of all the palaces and castles of the House of Windsor. It was the way to ensure, in privacy, that the last smile was his. The lieutenant of the Royal Navy searched the sea for his last shelter. Or in the air, where he managed to add 5,986 flight hours in 59 different types of aircraft. His last journey was from Carlisle [North West England] to Islay [Scotland], in August 1997, at the age of 76. Or in the faith that he began as a custom naturally incorporated into his upbringing and social status, and developed in recent years into an introspective endeavor. He helped Robin Woods, dean of Windsor and the queen's domestic chaplain, start St. George's House, a retreat, conference and study center where Anglican priests met to discuss church matters.
Philip of Edinburgh was the stateless aristocrat who renounced his history and his surname to consolidate the House of Windsors. The irreverent and loud-mouthed prince who irritated the British political and media left with his outspokenness. The model of masculine elegance with exquisite fabrics and a classic cut that bears the hallmark of the Savile Row tailor shops in London. Thousand stripes suit in which each line is made up of lowercase "Ps", by Philip, in blue or red. Never white, like the elite English educated at Eton or Oxford. Prince Philip never belonged to that line. And yet he represented the quintessence of a class aware that he once led a great empire.
The Duke of Edinburgh was Elizabeth II's lightning rod, shield, and reverse negative. The anchor of a family and an institution that never harbored the slightest doubt, unlike his children and her grandchildren, that the magic that ensured his stability was built with distance and liturgy.
When fate demolishes privilege and greatness with a slap, some figures defend with greater tenacity and conviction their intended place in the world. Philip of Greece and Denmark was born on the island of Corfu, in the family palace of Mon Repos, on June 10, 1921. Nephew of King Constantine I of Greece, forced to abdicate after the defeats inflicted by the Turkish army of Kemal Ataturk . Son of Prince Andrew, brother of the King, and Princess Alice of Battenberg. His father dragged the whole family into exile to escape the firing squad. And up to the age of nine, together with his four sisters, he spent time between Paris and London, under the auspices of his aunt, Maria Bonaparte, princess of Greece and Denmark, who lent them their residence in Saint-Cloud, 10 kilometers from the center of the French capital. Napoleon's great-granddaughter was a writer and had an overwhelming enthusiasm for psychoanalysis. It was her friendship with Sigmund Freud, probably, that caused the Austrian neurologist to treat Princess Alice for her disorders, when she began to assure that she had sexual relations with Jesus Christ and with the Buddha himself. Her brutal treatment to alleviate her supposed schizophrenia was to subject her to electroshocks that caused her early menopause. She was 45 years old.
The adults took the boy Felipe on a country excursion when four men in white forcibly dragged Alicia out of the home and put her to sleep with a powerful sedative disguised in an orange. She woke up hundreds of kilometers away, in the Bellevue sanatorium in Kreuzlingen (Switzerland). Alienated from his mother and father, who abandoned his descendants to the charity of relatives and sought refuge in Monte Carlo until the end of his days, his most faithful friends say that the Duke of Edinburgh then began to forge a breastplate of the that never came off. He “he built a trench around it and filled it with submachine guns. No one could cross that line unless he had his complete trust, ”explained Michael Mann, the dean of Windsor who replaced Robin Woods and had a similar friendship with the prince.
He stumbled through various educational institutions. First the Cheam School boarding school, in England; a year in the elitist Schule Schloss Salem, in Germany, when the totalitarian and racist ideology of Adolf Hitler began to permeate that country. His four sisters married German princes, at least two of them with Nazi whims. Philip followed the Jewish educator Kurt Hahn in his flight to Scotland, where he founded the College of Gordonstoun. It is the same Hahn who also set up the Atlantic College of Wales, where Princess Eleanor of Spain will soon begin her two years of international baccalaureate. And it was there, with medium academic grades, but excellence in sports practice and possibilities of beginning to demonstrate a sense of leadership, that she decided that England, not Greece, was her homeland.
A homeland and the navy
Applied for, and granted, nationality, she enlisted in the Royal Navy. She used to say to the revered British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli that "everyone likes flattery, but when it comes to royalty, she has to supply herself by shoveling." This explains why the legend has elevated Philip of Edinburgh to the category of hero when he remembers his intervention in the Second World War. It does him much more justice to remember the events as they were, because he shows that his participation in the conflict was not a walk and he knew how to diligently fulfill his obligations. On the night of March 28, 1941, aboard the battleship HMS Valiant, his skill in handling searchlights contributed to the Italian Navy suffering considerable casualties at Cape Ténaro (the British prefer to call it Cape Matapán), south of the Peloponnesus. The greatest defeat at sea for the Italians, the most glorious hour of the officer Philip of Greece.
Key factor in his life was the influence of his uncle, Louis Dickie Mountbatten, Lord Mountbatten, brother of his mother, Alicia. The last viceroy of India and the courtier who had, or claimed to have, the most influence in British politics (including a shady plan to bring down the Labor government of Harold Wilson with a coup) until the IRA ended his life, a aboard a fishing boat off the coast of Ireland in 1979. It was their decision to have the Battenbergs acquire a more English pedigree with a new surname, Mountbatten, which removed a counterproductive Germanic resonance at the time. And hers was also the idea of appointing the young 18-year-old cadet Felipe of Greece as a companion to the princesses Elizabeth and Margaret, during the visit of the royal yacht Victoria & Albert to the Dartsmouth Naval Academy. "There appeared a blond boy, like a Viking, with an angular face and piercing blue eyes," Marion Crawford, the Scottish ruler of the two princesses, later described that encounter. The future Elizabeth II was then 13 years old.
On November 20, 1947, the heir to the throne married Philip of Greece in Windsor Cathedral. King George VI demanded that his eldest daughter reach 21 years before the marriage. The day before the wedding, he granted her impending son-in-law the title of his royal highness. On the very morning of the ceremony, he made him Duke of Edinburgh, Earl of Merioneth, and Baron of Greenwich. It would take ten years for his wife, the already queen, to elevate him to the rank of prince. "Phil the Greek", as the British tabloid press called him for many years, had to endure the sambenito of upstart in court circles of the more ancestral European monarchy, although in 1992 he had no objection to that a blood sample be taken to identify the remains of members of the Romanovs, the Russian imperial family, murdered in Yekaterinburg in July 1918.
Father of four children, Carlos, Ana, Andrés and Eduardo, he could not give any of them his surname, because the resistance of the then Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, made the Windsor brand prevail unalterable. It was Felipe who announced to his wife the death of George VI, during a visit to Kenya. "For the first time in history, a young woman climbed as a princess to a tree, and after a shocking experience, she already descended as queen of that same tree the next day." It was February 6, 1952, and since then the prince consort has participated in more than 22,000 official acts, made 637 official visits abroad - alone, or accompanying the queen - and gave almost 5,500 official speeches.
Telephone and heating
He was the first member of the royal family to give a television interview. To the BBC, of course. He tried how he could give an air of modernity to an institution that was forcibly stagnant. Thanks to him, the inhabitants of Buckingham Palace were able to communicate by internal telephone line instead of sending messages through the palace staff. Thanks to him, the heating reached that huge building. Felipe is credited with the unfortunate idea of allowing the cameras to shoot a documentary with the day-to-day life of the royal family, which contributed to erode that "mission to move and preserve the reverence of the people" with which Walter Bagehot, the author of The English Constitution defined the role of the monarchy.
It was his own character, not very accommodating to sentimental attitudes and bland when he felt like it, that ended up fostering the legend of an excessively authoritarian and influential shadow over his first-born, Prince Charles of England. The legend - the only way to tell the insides of the British royal family - assures that it was his own efforts that accelerated Carlos' marriage to Diana Spencer. And on his shoulders rests the acrimony that Buckingham had with Lady Di in his later years. To the point that the Egyptian millionaire Mohamed Al Fayed was delirious to accuse the prince of having ordered the murder of the "princess of the people" and her son, Dodi, that fateful night in 1997 in Paris.
The letters exchanged between father-in-law and daughter-in-law, known ten years later, show Felipe desperate to rescue a marriage that was already sinking hopelessly. “How much I want to do everything I can to help you and Carlos, within my capabilities. But I'm afraid I have no talent as a marriage counselor. " "I disagree. His last letter shows great tact and understanding, ”Diana replied. That understanding did not last until the end, when the respective television interviews of Carlos and his wife aired an adultery that, for Prince Felipe, hopelessly demolished four decades of popular respect earned by the queen and her husband.
Theology buff
Since he presided over a military parade at Buckingham Palace on August 2, 2017 and thus put an end to his public agenda, Philip of Edinburgh has been secluded at Sandringham Palace. Surrounded by his books - theology and poetry, most of them - he gladly gave his children and grandchildren a role that he never enjoyed. His relations with the press, except for those occasions when he was able to promote his passion for nature conservationism, were stormy for decades. "I have come to the conclusion that I have done something well when I am not in the media, because I know that any appearance of mine is going to receive criticism," he reflected with resignation at 85 years old. Last April, he interrupted his voluntary retirement to thank the health personnel who were fighting on the front line against the pandemic, "and all those key workers so that the infrastructure of our lives continues."
Philip of Edinburgh devoted most of his, from the misunderstood role of consort, to maintaining the ethereal infrastructure of the monarchy. "He is not one of those who accepts compliments easily, but he has simply been my strength and my support throughout all these years," said Elizabeth II of her husband when they celebrated their golden wedding anniversary on November 20, 1997. Philip of Edinburgh continued to be so almost a quarter of a century later.
