When Buckingham Palace announced that Prince Philip would be stepping down from public life, I found myself surprised at my own piqued interested into the life and times of the royal family.
Here was a man – a 95-year-old man – retiring from a job he had held for more years than many live. In my short existence, Prince Philip and Queen Elizabeth have always been well established in both age and tenure, the faces of the British Royal family for a long while before I found myself wandering into this world.
Which makes it all the more interesting to consider the lives of the royal couple far beyond the confines of, well, royalty. Before we came to know them in the boundaries of money, polish and power, who were the royal couple? What were their hobbies? Their fears? Their loves? What did they do, before public life swallowed much of their time and energy?
And above all else, how did the two come to be?
For those who didn’t watch The Crown on Netflix, the courtship of the Duke of Edinburgh and Queen Elizabeth II wasn’t a short one.
In fact, the couple first met at a wedding in 1934 when the then Princess was just eight years old and Philip – who was her distant third cousin born into the Greek and Danish royal families – was about 14 years old.
A 1957 cover story in TIME says that five years later, in 1939, when Prince Philip was reportedly asked to escort Elizabeth and her sister Margaret during a tour of Dartmouth, the future Queen was “besotted” with him and the two began exchange letters. Queen Elizabeth was just 13 at the time.
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Royal matchmakign was a major major buiness, let;s remember.
I understand that Lord Mountbatten helped arranged the meeting between Philip and Elizabeth in 1939, looking for a royal match for the young, displaced Philip to secure the name and fortunes of the Mountbatten family.
Lord Mountbatten’s advice was to him, and also to Charles later: that a young man should ‘sow his wild oats and have as many affairs as he can’ but choose a young, inexperienced bride.
And so they both did. I believe Philip would have been encouraged to make a connection with and woo the eligible heir to the throne Elizabeth (encouraging her crush) from an early age. I imagine that there were other irons in the fire too.
It is a lovely story but they also had concerns about the fact that he was (and has been) a known womaniser.