Prince Philip: The Man Behind the Throne | Royal Family Documentary

Prince Philip: The Man Behind the Throne – In celebration of His Royal Highness Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh: His life, legacy and resounding impact.

Prince Philip: The Man Behind the Throne (2021)
Director: David Blakeman
Stars: Barbara Allred, Dickie Arbiter, Gyles Brandreth
Genre: Documentary
Country: United Kingdom
Language: English
Release Date: October 1, 2021 (TV premiere)
Filming Location: London, England, UK(The Gore)

Synopsis:
The incredible story of Prince Philip’s journey from refugee to war hero to consort of Queen Elizabeth II. A descent of kings, queens, and czars, Philip’s life was shaped by assassination, war and revolution. Battling it out with the British Establishment, he shaped and modernized the British monarchy, preserving and protecting it for generations to come.

Also Known As (AKA):
(original title) Prince Philip: The Man Behind the Throne
United Kingdom Philip: The Man Behind the Throne

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GYLES BRANDRETH: Royalty is that curious phenomenon that mixes fairy tale and reality. It’s Cinderella, but this time, the prince is real. NARRATOR: Philip was the penniless prince who led a remarkable life. HUGO VICKERS: He’s not Greek. The Greek royal family has no Greek blood whatsoever. They were Danish. He was a gorgeous blonde Viking. You can see why a young girl would fall in love with him. But he had to make sacrifices for his place. Lord Mountbatten was one of the conspirators who set Prince Philip up. They changed his name, they changed his religion, they put him into the British Navy and they made him a British citizen. It was made quite clear to him it doesn’t really matter. He just had to turn up. For somebody as active as he, that wasn’t funny. There was a period early on when he thought, "I’m not sure whether I’m cut out for this." And his quest for control brought strain. Yes, Prince Philip can have a bit of a temper. Yes, he can shout at you. DICKIE ARBITER LVO: He likes a good discussion. And if the discussion becomes heated, so much the better. NARRATOR: Philip shaped his life through discipline. He was dynamic. He was intelligent. He was imaginative. He was a man who liked to be moving forward at all points, a man of action. Everything he did was by sheer willpower. He gave up smoking on the morning of his marriage. He had his last cigarette, put it out, and never looked at another one again. And of course, he was charming. He could get away with anything. NARRATOR: But his legacy proved his biggest challenge. He was the man of the house. He was head of the family. What he said goes. INGRID SEWARD: Charles wasn’t the man that he wanted him to be, and that used to really rile him. GYLES BRANDRETH: Prince Philip belonged to the generation where you don’t complain about your childhood, you just get on with life. These are the cards you’ve been dealt with. You play the hand you’ve got. COMMENTATOR: Among the first to declare himself is her own husband, Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh. COMMENTATOR: Rising, he kisses the Queen’s cheek and touches the Queen’s crown in token of his readiness to help her bear its burden. The thing you’ve got to remember about the Duke of Edinburgh is that he was more royal than anybody you’re ever likely to meet. He was more royal than the Queen. Both the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh were great, great grandchildren of Queen Victoria. But the Queen was descended on one side from aristocracy, on the other side from royalty. With the Duke of Edinburgh, on both sides of his family, he was descended from royalty, kings, queens, kaisers, tsars. He was related to them all. HUGO: Princess Alice of Battenberg, Prince Philip’s mother, was born in the presence of her great grandmother, Queen Victoria, at Windsor Castle in 1885. She was the first of the great grandchildren to be born. She descended from Princess Alice of Hesse who had died. So Queen Victoria had rather adopted her mother, Victoria of Battenberg. She was an unusual figure. She was hard of hearing, highly intelligent. Many of Prince Philip’s qualities in terms of his interest in public service, his caring side, the interest in the environment, in spiritual matters, that all came from his mother. Her life was difficult because everything that she had held sacred was overthrown in the First World War. And her two aunts, the Tsarina and the Grand Duchess Ella, were murdered in Russia. She was actually almost completely stone-deaf because her eustachian tubes were blocked, so this was quite isolating. She was a very beautiful and intelligent girl. NARRATOR: Philip’s father had an even more royal birthright. The Greeks basically ran out of royals, and so they imported the Danish royal family, and they basically became the royal family of Greece. Prince Philip was a Prince of Greece, though he had no great fondness for the Greeks, he once told me, because his grandfather was assassinated. The Greek royal family were forever going in and out of exile. One of the Kings of Greece said the prerequisite of being a king of Greece is you have a suitcase permanently packed. Princess Alice married Prince Andrew of Greece and went to live in Greece. She then had four daughters and then, much later, the son, Prince Philip. He was born on the kitchen table in the house called Mon Repos in Corfu. In those days, babies were born at home. I guess the kitchen table is as good as anything. NARRATOR: The new baby was named Philippos Andreou of Schleswig-Holstein- Sonderberg-Glucksburg, Prince of Greece and Denmark. But almost as soon as he was born, things went wrong for the Greek royal family. Prince Andrew of Greece was arrested and put on trial, a show trial, accused of treason and was due possibly to be executed. They only got out by the skin of their teeth, really. They were rescued by the British Royal Navy. They took refuge in a suburb of Paris, where they lived for the next seven years. Prince and Princess Andrew, his parents, didn’t have any money. So they had to rely on the kindness of actually one or two rich aunts like Edwina Mountbatten, wife of Lord Mountbatten, who paid for Prince Philip’s education. The heiress was married to Philip’s high flying and dynastic ambitious uncle. His father floated down to the south of France, where he ended up living with a mistress on a yacht. His mother had a nervous breakdown and ended up in an asylum in Switzerland. And for several years, Prince Philip saw neither of his parents, certainly he didn’t see his mother for two or three years, not a birthday card, not a Christmas card, no communication of any kind. When I asked him about this, he sort of dismissed it. He said that wasn’t, you know, unusual, these things happen. Prince Philip always held his father in very high esteem. And when I wrote a biography of his mother, he bridled at every mention of his father. So what I would say is that he’s managed to convince me that he thinks his father was a good father. But I’m afraid he hasn’t actually convinced me that his father was a good father. And I’m afraid his father was rather a broken man. HUGO: When he was in exile in Paris, he would go down to the Ritz and have a few drinks with friends and tell a few jokes. And that’s sort of how he got through life. Members of the royal family don’t like being in exile, they want to serve their countries. And they feel terribly disappointed if they’re not. At one point in a draft of the book I wrote, Prince Andrew surrendered the role of husband and father, and Prince Philip wrote in the margin, nonsense, I had a holiday of three days with him every summer. It’s not my idea of being a good father. His father had sort of fled the family home, was a dissolute figure who gambled away what family savings there were in the casinos in Monte Carlo, and his mother latterly became a nun and went into holy orders. So it’s a slightly eccentric background. Prince Philip was a dutiful son, despite the fact that during a lot of his life, his mother wasn’t around. And he used to write to her copious letters describing things that he’d been doing. So it was a close relationship. And in her fading years, she went to live at Buckingham Palace. And Earl Mountbatten, Prince Philip’s uncle used to call her Alice at the Palace. Prince Philip said to me once, you know, "My father was away, my mother was ill, I just had to get on with it. NARRATOR: Philip became a refugee at distant relatives’ country estates. Prince Philip had no money at all. The family had lots of rich relations, who had lots of castles and lovely homes, but personally, no money whatsoever, and he even had to put cardboard in the soles of his shoes because there were holes in them. So, I mean, he was really penniless. It didn’t bother him because he was so confident. RICHARD KAY: Philip had been raised by aunts, uncles, cousins, sisters. He’d had to fend for himself, he’d had to sort of stand up for himself, and he’d done a very good job of that. He never really talked about this difficult childhood, but it must have been hugely challenging. The only evidence of it you’ll ever find is in visitors’ books. You go to visitors’ books from the 1930s, different houses that he’s been. I’ve seen it a couple of times. He would be visiting us, and he’d put his name in the name list, signing the address in the visitors’ book, his name, and then on the address column, he’d simply put, no fixed abode. So he must have been aware during his childhood that he had no fixed abode, but he never complained about it. The great stability in his early life was his grandmother, Victoria, Princess Louis of Battenberg, later Marchioness of Milford Haven, and she was the one who bought him his school clothes ’cause his father didn’t really bother with him and his mother wasn’t there. NARRATOR: Education provided a structure to the young prince’s life. Originally, Prince Philip was at school in Germany in Baden, where one of his sisters was living, and they had this brilliant headmaster, Kurt Hahn, who very quickly saw what was happening in Germany and the rise of Nazidom. And so he moved his whole enterprise to Scotland, to Gordonstoun and set up the school there. NARRATOR: Gordonstoun is a remote Scottish boarding school with a curriculum focused on fitness, initiative, and self-discipline. He responded very well to that sort of outward bound way of life, which was sort of making people into good, responsible citizens and pushing them. He was always sort of to the fore at his schools. He’s so successful at sports, you see, which is terribly important for British school boys. Gordonstoun is by no means the right school for everybody, and it certainly wasn’t the right school for his son, the Prince of Wales, but it was very much the right school for Prince Philip. And he did very well there. NARRATOR: While Philip had found a home of sorts… COMMENTATOR: The infant daughter of the Duke and Duchess of York was christened Elizabeth Alexandra Mary and affectionately welcomed as the Empire’s Baby. NARRATOR: After her uncle, King Edward the Eighth, abdicated for love, the Empire’s Baby was now destined to be Queen. GYLES: The Queen had an idyllic British childhood. Completely perfect. A loving parents who were a loving couple, and adoring father, adoring grandparents, a close family unit, just her and her sister, Princess Margaret Rose, two young girls being brought up in London. Country pursuits for them. Just a perfect small, close family surrounded by love. Her life was always set out. The inevitability of her one day becoming Queen was there for her. She just followed the path. NARRATOR: From a young age, Elizabeth would often accompany her parents on royal tours and visits. COMMENTATOR: Dartmouth, where the king studied as a cadet before the war to the Royal Naval College, here it is now in 1939, accompanied by the Queen and Princesses. NARRATOR: Philip was now 18 and had graduated from Gordonstoun. Despite a desire to fly with the RAF, his uncle, Louis Mountbatten, had steered him towards the Navy. The influence of Lord Mountbatten is rather interesting. Having studied a lot of the papers, I think I’m confident to say to you that Lord Mountbatten took no interest in him whatsoever until he saw the possibility that he might marry Princess Elizabeth. Mountbatten arranges that his cadet’s nephew join the royal party at Dartmouth. Prince Philip was charged with looking after the princesses while the King did his duty, and it was love at first sight. She was about 13. There he was. I have to say, showing off a bit, and looking very handsome. NARRATOR: Newsreel shows Philip in uniform, standing a couple of steps behind the royal family. It’s the first time he and Elizabeth were filmed together. Prince Philip was funny, witty, very handsome, and quite full of himself. And he was a very engaging young man, very charming and very kind, actually. You can see why a young girl would fall in love with him. He was a gorgeous blonde Viking. When they left later in the day, Philip urgently rowed his boat across after the royal barge, waving goodbye to them. I mean, that was presumptuous, at the very least. NARRATOR: The young pair struck up a written correspondence. You wouldn’t have thought they were well suited because Princess Elizabeth had such a sheltered upbringing, and Prince Philip had this much more sort of a bohemian upbringing. NARRATOR: The royal establishment had their doubts about Philip’s suitability. They weren’t anti-Philip, they were anti the fact that he wasn’t part of the British establishment. He might have royal blood, but he hadn’t got a bean and he had a difficult family background. And I think that that King George and Queen Elizabeth felt that she was too young to make up her mind, and perhaps they would have preferred a sort of rich English or Scottish aristo than a penniless prince. Prince Philip put his foot in it straightaway when he arrived up at Balmoral to meet Princess Elizabeth’s parents, King George VI and Queen Elizabeth. And he walked into the room and actually did a curtsey ’cause he was wearing a kilt and he thought that would endear him to his future parents in law. But in fact, they didn’t think it was at all funny. SARAH BRADFORD: The courtiers were not friendly. They thought that he was ignorant. They thought he wasn’t properly educated, i.e., he hadn’t been to Eton, which is, you know, the thing for the courtiers. He told me when he went to stay at Windsor Castle, there was a flunky taking him to his room and showing him the way, and he said rather impatiently to this flunky, "I do know the way, you know, my mother was born here." They thought he was a bit of a rough diamond, basically. And of course, he was a foreigner. His sisters were very Germanic. They’d all married Germans, two of whom were Nazis. So it was difficult. And the Queen Mother apparently always called him the Hun. When he came into the room, she’d say, "Here comes the Hun," which I don’t think he particularly liked. His sister, Sophie, the one who became Princess George of Hanover, her first husband, Prince Christopher of Hesse, died in 1943, and he had been a member of the party and they all became disillusioned by this later. But I mean, there’s no question about it, they were because a lot of princes in Germany were taken in by Hitler. Cecile was living in Darmstadt and married to the Grand Duke, who had literally just inherited the title. And they were coming over to England for the wedding of his brother to Margaret Geddes. And unfortunately, the plane hit a chimney in the fog at Ostend, and everybody on board was killed. So Prince Philip was called into his father’s study. And I remember when I first started working with people in his office, they said, one thing you should know about him is this awful thing happened that he desperately minded about his sister and even more so because she was pregnant at the time. And I mean, the little baby was actually born in the trauma of the accident. And so he then travelled out with his father to Darmstadt, to the funeral, and, you know, there were just rows of coffins. There’s no question about it that there was a lot of Nazi influence in Darmstadt, but you obviously can’t put that at Prince Philip’s door at all. I mean, he was there because he was attending his sister’s funeral. But he will have seen that and he’d have been very well aware of it. But it was very difficult for him and, of course, when he was marrying the Queen. So some of the stuffier courtiers were very much taking the idea that, you know, I mean, he was basically German. Having German connections was about to get extremely undesirable. Now we are at war, and we are going to make war until the other side have had enough of it. Philip was a very good sailor. We saw him in naval service from 1939. He served in both the European theatres and the Far Eastern theatres of war. NARRATOR: Serving on board HMS Valiant in the Mediterranean, Philip made his mark during a night-time attack on three Italian cruisers. He fixed a searchlight on the bridge of an enemy ship and held it steady until the battle was won. It was Britain’s greatest victory over the Italians at sea. He served with great distinction. He was in Mediterranean home waters, he served Cape Matapan, was mentioned in despatches and he also served in the Far East. So when people kept talking about VE Day, that meant nothing to him because he still had to go on serving till the whole thing was over. And the war in the Far East was also over, which was a little bit later. While Elizabeth waited patiently for her pen-pal prince, Philip received a mention in despatches and the Greek War Cross. Prince Philip had a heroic war. He was a young man. And I think he enjoyed the war. He certainly did his stuff during the war. Officers who knew him at the time, but men who served under him, they really liked him. They reckoned he was a good leader and a good bloke. So he had a distinguished naval career, and he expected that to continue. NARRATOR: Philip’s heroic actions had not gone unnoticed back home. COMMENTATOR: Neither her parents nor the girl herself desired that she should live a sheltered life. She was rapidly approaching womanhood. Her rare self-reliance was evident in her bearing. PHIL DAMPIER: During the war, Princess Elizabeth had had a picture of him on her mantlepiece, and her nanny actually said to Princess Elizabeth, "You shouldn’t really have that there, otherwise will people start talking." So Elizabeth went away and came back with another photo of Prince Philip with a beard, and said, I don’t think anyone’s going to recognise that. NARRATOR: Victory brought a chance for the now 20-year-old Elizabeth to reconnect with Philip. After years spent housing his nephew, Lord Mountbatten accelerated his plan for the now anglicised war hero. His uncle became extremely interested and set Prince Philip up. They changed his name from Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg- Glucksburg into Mountbatten. They changed his religion from Greek Orthodox into the Church of England, and they made him a British citizen. SARAH: Lord Mountbatten certainly promoted the marriage as far as he could do. He became much closer to Philip than he had been. COMMENTATOR: A delightful royal occasion was the wedding of Lord Mountbatten’s daughter, Patricia, whose bridal attendants included both the princesses. At the church door, Prince Philip of Greece, now Lieutenant Mountbatten lends a hand with the coats. Philip was essentially a part German princeling and there was resentment and unhappiness about that in the country. And clearly it affected the royal family too, and they were worried about a union. They’d had to shore up their own… the monarchy here, their own throne, only a generation or so earlier, because of the overthrow of the Tsar in Russia, and they didn’t want anti-German feeling to erupt again because of Elizabeth’s choice of husband. Lord Mountbatten saw the danger of Lord Euston, later the Duke of Grafton, who was a Grenadier Guard, and he was a great friend of the Queen’s. It’s always said that Lord Mountbatten got him a double promotion and sent out to be ADC to Lord Wavell in India, which very conveniently got him out of the way. They loaded the gun for him and they left him to pull the trigger. They couldn’t force him to do it. NARRATOR: The king initially refused to allow the couple to get married. However, the steely princess threatened abdication if she didn’t get her prince. A number of women that swooned over him ’cause he was a good looking young man and he was a dashing naval officer. RICHARD: There was some unease certainly among higher members of the family, but they did manage to overcome it, I have to say, because Philip was a very charming man, capable and was quite clearly devoted to Elizabeth, which I think meant everything to King George. They were a very, very strong family unit, and it meant the break up of that. And the king absolutely adored his daughters. And, you know, he was probably quite happy with the arrangement as it was. A lot of families, I think, are concerned when a daughter suddenly marries perhaps the first man that she’s ever fallen in love with. So in order to see whether it was going to work or not, the king was happy to take them all off to South Africa and make them delay and wait a bit. But after that, he realised that it was going to go ahead, and it did. NARRATOR: After waiting a year, the public announcement of the engagement went ahead. I am so happy that my future husband is by my side. The general public were thrilled. It was the austere war years. London was a filthy, dirty grey bombed out city. And suddenly, this golden looking couple are going to get married, so everyone could relate to the joy of their romance. HUGO: The Queen Mother had very much hoped that the Queen would marry a Grenadier Guard. There’d been lots of them around at Windsor Castle during the war. And she said, "Won’t the Grenadiers be cross?" And actually, they were so cross that they wouldn’t have Prince Philip as Colonel of the Regiment in 1952, which was not very nice of them. He gave up smoking on the morning… on the morning of his marriage. I think he had his last cigarette, put it out, and never looked at another one again. That is typical of Prince Philip. Everything he does is by sheer willpower. And actually just having a cigarette and saying, "Right, that’s it, I’m never smoking again." HUGO: The wedding, it was a moment of great colour. I mean, it was still a service dress uniform occasion, so it was no sort of red tunics or anything like that. And, you know, rationing was still on and it was not so easy. But nevertheless, it did give everybody great hope for the future. None of his three surviving sisters were invited to the wedding, which they minded about bitterly. But luckily, by the time of the coronation in 1953, they were all determined to be there and they jolly well were there. SARAH: Gandhi sent a tray cloth that he had specially made for her. And Queen Mary, the Queen’s grandmother, completely misread it and thought it was his loincloth, and said, "Disgusting thing." NARRATOR: Philip and Elizabeth took up the new titles, the Duke and Duchess of Edinburgh. SARAH: If you look at the pictures of the pair of them on honeymoon at Broadlands Lord Mountbatten’s house, they’re looking extremely fondly at each other. And at that time, Prince Philip was writing, you know, quite dashing things about her, say, and she’s lovely all over. NARRATOR: Clarence House in London became the royal residence. Marriage did give Prince Philip great stability, despite his denials and saying he was fine. It gave him… it gave him a home for a start. It gave him a home. It gave him somewhere he could be around his friends. NARRATOR: Despite the difficulties, Philip grew into his new role. In between a whirlwind of naval duties, diplomatic efforts and charitable engagements, the couple had two children, Charles in 1948 and Anne in 1950. He had to curb a lot of the things that he was thinking or what he would like to do until such time as the Queen came to the throne, he was able to do very much more after that. During the early years of their marriage, Prince Philip was in the Navy. So he wasn’t exactly a house husband, but he took charge of the children. And obviously, they had nannies, but the Queen was busy with affairs of state. She was 26 years old. She had two young children. And Prince Philip made the decisions as far as the children were concerned. It was very much like an old-fashioned marriage where the man is deferred to, because that’s how the Queen was brought up. And so obviously that’s the way she’s going to be. SARAH: He really liked the idea of bringing up the children. Throwing Prince Charles into the swimming pool at Buckingham Palace. They had this wonderfully happy time, which… where Prince Philip was quite often in Malta. The Navy was in full swing there. And the Grand Harbour had wonderful ships in it, and there were polo matches and dances at the Phoenicia Hotel. The Queen has always said Malta was the only place other than England that she could call home. She could drive around in her little car, she could go shopping, she could go to the cinema, she could go and watch Prince Philip playing polo. It was a place where they were very relaxed and where they could really be as normal a young family as possible. NARRATOR: But the simple life didn’t last. Whilst Philip and Elizabeth were on a tour of Kenya, the king died suddenly. NEWSREADER: From Sandringham, the Queen Mother spoke to her daughter on the telephone. Here lay the body of the beloved king, whom death with cruel suddenness has taken from our midst. The high and mighty Princess Elizabeth Alexandra Mary is now by the death of our late sovereign of happy memory become Queen Elizabeth the Second by the grace of God, Queen of This Realm. NARRATOR: Elizabeth was now Queen. According to his equerry, Michael Parker, who happened to be on the trip to Kenya with them at the time, it was complete shock. He went white and he just put a newspaper over his face and just tried to absorb the enormity of it all because neither he or the Princess thought that her father was gonna die. They’d expected another ten years of freedom of married life before the Princess had to take up the reins of the monarchy. So it was a huge shock, their happy existence was over. He generally thought that they would carry on as man and wife, naval officer and wife until about 1960. That turned out to be a vast overestimate. And of course, life changed considerably. After that, he had to give up his career. That was a major setback for him. And he had to adjust to this new untested role as a sovereign’s partner, companion to the Queen. It was all very unfamiliar territory to him. NARRATOR: As the Queen’s consort, Philip was granted ceremonial titles. That is probably one of the biggest blows in his life that he had to face because he hated getting any appointments which he hadn’t earned. You couldn’t give him anything, any honour unless you could prove that he’d earned it. So to suddenly find himself made an Admiral of the Fleet, a Field Marshal and Marshal of the Royal Air Force, he hated all that, and you can understand why. His uncle Lord Mountbatten rose to be head of the Navy. His grandfather had risen to be head of the Navy, and everybody said Prince Philip could have done it on his own merits and he would have been. It’s unquestionable that to be the consort to the Queen of England is a pretty important role. So you’re not leaving the naval career for nothing. NARRATOR: Once Queen, Elizabeth’s workload intensified. The Queen didn’t discuss affairs of state with Prince Philip because constitutionally she’s not allowed to. She is sovereign by an Act of Parliament and through succession and government papers go to her. While he was the Prince of the United Kingdom, he was not entitled to look at any state documents. GYLES: I said to the Duke of Edinburgh, did you know what to do? He said, "No. I have no idea." I said, "Were there people telling you what to do?" He said, no. There were people telling me what not to do. For the Queen, when she became queen, there was a role set out. It was clear what she was going to do because there is a role for the Queen, and she stepped into it naturally and easily. But he was then left on the sidelines and it was challenging for him because the Queen then had as her advisors, a Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, who was an old man by then and who had literally sat her on his knee in the 1920s when she was a baby girl and her father’s private secretary. So these two old men, as it were, and she was only 26, came to dominate the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh was left out. The Queen is actually a fundamentally shy woman, and having Philip at her side helped enormously. Can you imagine if you’ve got any degree of shyness walking into a room where all eyes are on you, hundreds of people all waiting to see what you’re going to say, what you’re wearing, what you’re gonna do? NARRATOR: The coronation of the new Queen brought an early chance for Philip to show his worth. COMMENTATOR: St. James’s Palace was the meeting place of the newly appointed Coronation Commission presided over by the Duke of Edinburgh. NARRATOR: Planning the event was Philip’s first task as royal consort. It went without a hitch. At the coronation Prince Philip’s humour sort of stood out right from the start, and just after the Queen had been crowned, he had to kneel at her feet and swear his allegiance to her. And a few seconds later, he said to her, "Where did you get that hat?" And I think that’s the first example of how he relaxed the Queen using jokes. He was the perfect foil for her because he would make her giggle at quite serious moments. COMMENTATOR: The royal family assembled together on the palace balcony to receive the acclamation of their subjects on Coronation Day. NARRATOR: But outside the marriage, Philip was frustrated by attempts by the British establishment to rein in his influence. When the Queen came to the throne, Winston Churchill insisted as Prime Minister that Prince Philip couldn’t have his name Mountbatten to name his children. NARRATOR: Philip’s uncle, Lord Mountbatten, had overstepped the mark. So Lord Mountbatten boasted at dinner, well, the House of Mountbatten now reigns in this land and he wasn’t entirely wrong. What actually happened was that Prince Ernst of Hanover, who was at dinner with Lord Mountbatten, went to see Queen Mary, and said, you know, this is what Mountbatten is saying. And she summoned Churchill, and said, this must not be. And Churchill was a very powerful figure. And to some extent, I think he rather bullied the Queen into it being still called the House of Windsor. And there were very many good reasons for doing that. The House of Windsor is a very, very good name for the Royal House. Everybody knows Windsor Castle, loves it, it was a very clever thing. That, of course, is also a made-up name that was made up in 1917. But it is said, I think, Prince Philip was genuinely annoyed because most men give their name to their family. NARRATOR: Mountbatten’s boasting had sealed the fate of the dynasty. Philip was furious and their relationship would never fully recover. He actually complained, I’m nothing but a bloody amoeba. He’s the only man in Christendom, he complained, whose own children didn’t take his name. He was unhappy about that, but it was also the restrictions on what he could and couldn’t do. He couldn’t speak so frankly, as he had done before. The old school courtiers at Buckingham Palace were very unfriendly to him. They didn’t like him. They thought he would be a philanderer. They didn’t appreciate his views and his ideas of modernisation. He was a bright, sharp, opinionated young man. He didn’t like the set up at Buckingham Palace. He found it stuffy. He found this habit of servants wearing wig is ridiculous. So he clearly wanted to be more than just your breath of fresh air. He was gonna make big changes if he was gonna stick around. But there was a period early on when he thought, "I’m not sure whether I’m cut out for this." NARRATOR: A world tour provided Philip with an escape from the restrictions of royal life. Prince Philip went off to Melbourne to open the Olympics in Australia. And then he took the opportunity to hijack, if you like, the Royal Yacht Britannia and sailed off for another three months with his friends. Prince Philip was away for almost six months with his equerry, Michael Parker. They went off on a sort of world tour on Britannia. And of course it started gossip and people were imagining that he must be having wild affairs all over the world. Speculation was rife in papers, particularly abroad, that the marriage was in dire trouble. DAVID SAUNDERS: Prince Philip was an alpha male, very much so. I would describe him as a great man’s man because he can mix with the men and be a man’s man. But he was a ladies’ man as well. He could have women smiling and turning to jelly. Prince Philip has been accused time and time again, and go back to French newspapers in the 1950s, of him having a wandering eye and perhaps even a wandering hand. In the early ’60s, it emerged that Prince Philip had been going to Thursday Club, which was a club in London with some very racy characters going to it. There are all sorts of rumours that he’d met various women there. There was a lot of rubbish talked about the orgies of the Thursday Club, which I think were just sort of drunken boys evenings, really. Stories have been written about a whole legion of women whom Philip has allegedly been involved with. He certainly had an eye for pretty women, and he liked, you know, the company of pretty women. There were quite a lot of rumours. And the trouble is that how can you tell whether an affair is a physical affair or just a friendship and an attraction. And that’s the problem. Well, Prince Philip had a way of dealing with accusations of past affairs. He said if I… you know, how could I do this if I always had a detective with me, if I was always surrounded by people. At the end of the day, there’s never been any firm evidence that he had affairs. Now, Prince Philip was one of those people that window shop, but he didn’t buy. COMMENTATOR: On a faraway island in mid-Pacific, an escort, indeed a serenade by ladies of the island and his Royal Highness borne aloft on a Pacific Island Throne. NARRATOR: Midway through the Britannia tour, crisis hits when Philip’s equerry, Captain Michael Parker is sued for divorce. His wife alleges adultery. The rumours built up, particularly overseas, not for the first time in the last 100 years. It was the press in America that started the rumour as much as they did about King Edward the VIII’s affair with Wallis Simpson, they all emerged in America. And it was the American press which ran story after story suggesting that Philip was getting up to no good while he was out of the country. Such were the rumours, and so concerned were Buckingham Palace and indeed the Queen that she authorised the palace to issue the one and only statement about the state of her marriage to Prince Philip, basically saying, all is well. But significantly, she flew out to Portugal to meet him ahead of his return to the UK. And I think that was a significant concession, if you like, to all these rumours and to show that all was well in the marriage. The Queen, assuming that he have grown a beard while he was away, actually turned up with a false beard on to try and greet him. In fact, he’d shaved it off by the time he got there. So, the joke fell a bit flat. But by then, they seem to have reconciled their differences. And then only four years later, Prince Andrew was born and then Prince Edward. So that’s why Prince Andrew became known as the love child because it kind of indicated that the marriage was back on track in 1960. NARRATOR: The experience did not endear the press to Philip. Prince Philip did not like the media and really didn’t want to engage in any kind of conversation with them. So the way we always see him is, as you know, of sort of rather grumpy personality. I got on extremely well with the press, I normally do, I think, but there are certain things occasionally which they do, which perhaps I don’t like so much. He walked away as soon as somebody asks a silly question. I mean, a reporter said, "How was your flight, sir?" And he said, "Have you ever been on an airplane?" The reporter said, "Yes," "It was just like that." Or "How are you feeling today, sir?" the Reporter said. "Well, do I look sick?" NARRATOR: Philip threw himself into charitable work, using his influence to further causes which he felt passionate about. Prince Philip said he didn’t resent the loss of his career, but he knew he had to find something else to do. And because he’s not the sort of man that could sit for five minutes doing nothing. What he used to do was to work out when he was required and the Queen did need him there for a lot of things in the course of the year. When he wasn’t required, he plough his own furrow. COMMENTATOR: Prince Philip’s recent tour of America helped to collect $1 million for children’s charity. Prince Philip was a man who lived very much in the present. If you’d had his particular childhood, you don’t spend a lot of time looking back. And he was a man who liked to be moving forward at all points and, you know, a man of action. And there was always a new issue and a new problem, new things to be solved. Shortly after the war, the National Playing Fields Association was set up because local authorities wanted to build on bomb sites and wanted to build on green belt ’cause there was a desperate shortage of housing because they’d been flattened during the sort of ’39-’45 war. And Prince Philip put his foot down with Kurt Hahn, who established Gordonstoun, and said, "No, children must have space to run around, must have space to breathe." And that’s why we have so many open spaces and parks and greenbelt throughout the United Kingdom." And it’s largely down to him. And, you know, people don’t know about it. It had been the first national charity that he became involved in when he became engaged to Princess Elizabeth back in 1947. And what surprised me when I turned up at the office, it was to find, A, he was the President and he was there, and B, he found somebody very committed to the task in hand and extremely hands on. He was interested in psychology. He read a lot of Carl Jung, the Swiss analytical psychologist. Jung thought that the happy people in this life are outward looking, not interested in themselves, interested in other people and the world around them, science, nature, art, the world beyond themselves. Philip had real reservations about people who spent time brooding about themselves, thinking about themselves, hugging themselves, being kind to themselves. He didn’t have much chock with any of that. PHIL DAMPIER: He had a great deal of interest in physical fitness for young people. He once said that he was worried that kids in future would only have to bother about lifting a knife and a fork. And this was decades before we started to get worried about obesity. The Duke of Edinburgh’s Award scheme has touched the lives of millions of people. It teaches leadership and then they have the ability to earn various certificates. Once you get a gold standard, you’ve really got somewhere. He was the first royal person to talk about overpopulation. He talked about conservation. He knew that certain species, you know, were going to die out unless they were preserved. RICHARD GRIFFIN: Prince Philip was President of the World Wide Fund for Nature for many, many years. He could go to any country in the world and get access to the head of states. The work he did with conservation over the years was amazing. He also alleviated the burden of the Queen from running the royal estates. He did all that for her because he realised that was somewhere where he could help her a lot. He was very much to the fore when it came to managing the estates of Sandringham and Balmoral. He was also a deputy ranger at Windsor Castle. So he got a tremendous input for sustainability within the homes. He had to, for himself, find his own role and that he did through all the different projects in which he got hands on involvement. And then the other 830 and more organisations in which he was involved. COMMENTATOR: The evening raised 10,000 pounds for the Duke’s Award scheme. So a good time was had by all. He made a real difference to people’s lives. As he said to me once, "The fundraising never stops." NARRATOR: When the endless cycle of royal and charitable duties got too much, Philip retreated to the family’s country estates. Working for anyone that’s powerful, rich, famous, which of course the royal family are all of the above, they have two lives. There’s their work, and there’s their pleasure. And I was very, very fortunate because I was part of His Royal Highness’ pleasure. I started off at the bottom of the ladder and worked my way up to the private coachman to His Royal Highness The Duke of Edinburgh. Prince Philip would come from Buckingham Palace, which was the office to Windsor Castle, have a wonderful weekend driving the horses. The horses didn’t care who he was. They would sometimes act good and sometimes not act good. But for him, it was a spiritual release. He enjoyed the fact that just because he told the horses to do something, they didn’t always do it. I think it was his therapy personally. NARRATOR: But Philip wasn’t satisfied with a gentle trot. Three, two, one, go. NARRATOR: He helped to develop competitive carriage driving into a fast-paced international sport. It was quite surreal, actually, that her husband, Her Majesty the Queen’s husband, was driving a carriage that him and I had designed and built to a sport that he’d invented with horses she’d bred. And I think that’s pretty unique. We went to several European, World and National Championships. He was an international competitor. On his own merit, he won two bronze and a gold medal as part of the British Team driving, so he was an excellent horseman. To do anything with horses, you have to be a great communicator. Competitions we’d go to, they’d always be a drinks party or a cocktail party, and to see him working his way around the room was – I would love to have 10% of that. But of course, when you’re in the heat of competition, sometimes Prince Philip was guilty of talking like a sailor to his horses sometimes when we were going through the obstacles, if they didn’t go exactly where he wanted them to go. NARRATOR: But Philip was never far from his main role as husband to the Queen. By 1977, Elizabeth had been on the throne for 25 years and was in the limelight wherever she went. Nobody can be normal with the Queen. There is an invisible moat around the Queen. The Queen’s own children bow or curtsey to her when they meet her for the first time in the day. NARRATOR: The renown reflected onto Philip. The first time I met the Duke of Edinburgh, I was slightly nervous. You know, worried about saying or doing something wrong. But he was an absolute gentleman. He made me feel very much at home, very comfortable. The Duke was the only person on the planet that would treat the Queen as a human being simply because he was her partner, her soul mate, her best friend. Prince Philip wore the trousers behind the scenes. There was an example of that when he was driving with his uncle, Lord Mountbatten, in the back of the car. They were driving across the royal estate and the queen started complaining that Prince Philip was driving far too fast. And he said, if you make another complaint about my driving, I’ll chuck you out. And she just went quiet. And when they stopped, Lord Mountbatten said to the Queen, why do you let him talk to you like that? She said, "Well, because he would have thrown me out." I once went with the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh to the Royal Variety Show. And she disappeared into the middle of the crowd to be introduced to various people. And I stood at the edge of the gathering with Prince Philip. And he was observing the scene. And suddenly I realised that he’d caught her eye and across the crowded room, I watched them look at each other, and she smiled and he raised his glass to her. I thought, "Yes, of course, there is something special between these two people." It isn’t obvious, but it’s there. NARRATOR: Philip played up to his role as a representative of Her Majesty. He enjoyed looking the part. He always dressed immaculately. He was conscious of what he was wearing. Whenever we turned up for an event, he would always be wearing the correct tie. He always had a handkerchief in his pocket at exactly the angle, the same line that his father used to have. He comes from that era when men did dress very smartly. You would never see him out and about with a shirt and a tie and a jacket. They were around in the days of, let’s say, the old Hollywood. Even though they were never classed celebrities, you would see them at these different events, white tie, black tie, long suit, he always looked immaculate. NARRATOR: So impactful was Philip’s style that to some, he attained a spiritual status. There’s an island in the deepest part of the Pacific Ocean, where locals worship Prince Philip as a deity, as a god. It’s the one place on Earth where he is senior, if you like, to his wife because everywhere else she is the sovereign. She is the Queen, he’s the man two steps – two paces behind or so. And here he is the godlike figure who they worship. GYLES: They venerate him as a god. What was interesting when I raised this with him, he said, "I don’t want to talk about that." And I said, "Why not?" He said, "Because, you know, you would just want to make fun of these people. You want to make – it’s a funny story for you. A picture of these native people with a picture of me in their boat as though it’s – can’t we respect people’s traditions, whatever they may be?" Indeed, they even very kindly sent him a penis gourd at one point and got a letter back when the Palace was asked whether Prince Philip was going to wear this, the answer came back from the courtier, we are reluctant to commit His Royal Highness. When you meet royalty, it’s always difficult. Somebody once said, when royalty leaves the room, it’s rather like getting a seed out of your tooth. You know, it’s a relief because it’s quite awkward. The Duke of Edinburgh was aware of that, and whenever he went down a line meeting people, he went out of his way to try to make it at least one of them laugh, and he usually succeeded. You’re going to watch the world’s leading plaque unveiler at work. – great fun with the Queen and Prince Philip. And I always used to try and take a day where I just follow Prince Philip around. It was very, very funny to see him at close range and how he interacted with people. A classic example was when they went to the National Cyber Centre. This centre was basically monitoring any possible nuclear attacks or spy networks. And he said to one of the chaps sitting in their computer, "Do you speak Russian or Chinese?" And the bloke said, "No." He said, "Well, let’s hope they don’t attack when you’re in charge." He was in Ghana and said, "How many MPs have you got in your parliament?" And the chap said, "About 200." And he said, "That’s about right." He said, "We’ve got 650 in our parliament, and most of them are absolutely bloody useless." 1963 at the Kenyan Independence ceremony, and he was out there, a lot of countries were handed over obviously from the British Empire. And as midnight struck and the band struck up and the union jet came down and the Kenyan flag was about to be raised, he turned to Jomo Kenyatta, the Kenyan leader, and said, "Are you sure you want to go through with this?" NARRATOR: But the jokes didn’t always land. He occasionally got into trouble because he wasn’t particularly politically correct. He just spoke as he found, he was easy with people. He tried to keep the conversation going. So he makes the odd remark. And occasionally they would go adrift. He once said to me that it always made his heart sink if he saw he was going on a foreign trip and he saw the British press were going to be there ’cause he knew they’d spend the four days of the trip just waiting for him to make a gaffe, and that would become the story. What I liked about him was that when he’d done that, one of these so-called gaffes, he never ever apologised for it. If you saw him the next day, he would just carry on as if nothing had happened. If we’re having a conversation and somebody pokes one of these at you with a tape recorder behind or one of those long listening devices and they can overhear a conversation 20 yards away, you get a bit anxious. He argued that we in the media have got this all wrong, that all he is doing is breaking the ice. He always wanted to get a rise out of people and he’d like to make them laugh. Sometimes it could be offensive. You had to know his ways. I remember thinking, whatever he says, he doesn’t really mean it. He’s just sort of – it’s just his manner. The great thing about the Duke of Edinburgh, there isn’t really any kind of myths or anything, that people say to me, is this true or is that true" because what you see is what you get. That is the reality with him. Well… I’m delighted he took it down. I hope he did it. He was probably the last man who’d get away with politically incorrect jokes. I think a lot of people admired that. What’s interesting about the Duke of Edinburgh is that he wasn’t particularly concerned as to whether the public liked him or not. He came from an era where he fought in the war and he saw some horrors there. He thought that most people in the modern era are a little bit too sensitive and, therefore, you know, they’re a little bit too sensitive to criticism. And he certainly wasn’t that. He’d take onboard any criticism and just brush it off, and he accepted that that was part of the job. When he went to Canada many years ago, he actually said openly, "If you want us, we’re here, we’ll do our bit. But if you don’t want us, just let us know, we’ll go away again." He said people seem to think the monarchy is there for itself. The monarchy is not there for itself. It’s there for the people. And if the people want change, then they can have change, they can vote for it because that’s what democracy is all about. Perhaps it was a little bit unfair to concentrate sometimes on his witty one-liners and not the immense contribution that he actually made to public life. NARRATOR: The global attention necessitated a level of protection. Prince Philip tolerated police officers, and he liked his freedom. And obviously he never had protection until he got married to the Queen, then he had to put up with it. NARRATOR: Like it or not, security was important. In 1979, Lord Mountbatten, now Prince Charles’s mentor, was killed by an IRA bomb. When we were at Sandringham and Balmoral, if he wanted some free time, we would step away. And at the end of the day, if Prince Philip’s gonna get in his car and drive off with the protection officer, there’s not a lot you can do about it. Prince Philip was really not that security minded. He was a strong, healthy, vigorous man. You’ve got something interesting to talk about like carriage driving. I always used to say, "Well, can I come with you? ‘Cause I’m interested in carriage driving. I’m not coming with you as the bodyguard." And he sort of allowed him to go that way. Equally, there were other times when I could go and say, "Sir, you really need a policeman with you today." NARRATOR: Philip was often required to adapt to security concerns. Most weekends when we were driving, he would say to me, "We have a guest this weekend." One day, he said to me, "We’re taking Mrs. Reagan on the carriage." NARRATOR: President Ronald Reagan and the First Lady, Nancy Reagan were in the UK for a state visit. But security was tight. Prince Philip came out for a drive. He said, "Bloody woman." I said, "What’s happening, sir?" He said, "Oh, we’ve got to have secret service men riding on the carriage." Security men had a suit that was two sizes too small and no neck, just a head put on top of his shoulders. We get on the carriage and we drive up. The Queen and the President was riding two horses from Canada. We finished up at this area. You drive between these plastic cones that are about six inches wider than the carriage. And of course, we’re driving by them. And she said, "Oh, what are these?" "Oh, I’ll show you," he said. So we then start, trot on, and we started trotting around these cones. And I looked up and there’s the Queen and the President. And I’m thinking all this security and we’re going to kill the President’s wife driving through the cones. Constitutionally, of course, Prince Philip did not have an official role of any kind, but it’s entirely up to the Queen, how much she consulted him about whatever. On private family matters, of course, she deferred to him as any wife would of that generation. Philip was the head of the family. That was Philip’s role. And the Queen pretty much made that clear from when they started having children that Philip’s role would be inviolate. NARRATOR: As eldest child, Charles would one day be king. Prince Philip was very close to his daughter, Princess Anne and Prince Edward. He was never particularly close to Prince Charles. Charles wasn’t the man that he wanted him to be, and that used to really rile him. I once asked the Duke of Edinburgh about his relationship with Prince Charles, and I said, "To me, sir, you both seem so similar. I mean, you walk the same way, you talk the same way, you share interests in all sorts of things that are similar. You know, young people, nature, the environment." Then he stopped me, he said, "No, no, no." He said, "Yeah, we are very similar. Of course, we’re very similar. But there is a fundamental difference. And the difference is this, that Charles is a romantic and I’m a pragmatist." And Prince Philip was a real pragmatist. He liked to solve things. He liked to get things done. He was a doer, he was practical, he was – he wasn’t a romantic. They’re not at all the same sort of person. And I think that Prince Philip perhaps expected too much of Prince Charles. Whenever Prince Charles came up with a new scheme, be it some sort of green initiative or some sort of idea to do with architecture or farming, his father would always question him on it. And he would always try and put him on the spot and get an answer out of him as to why he was doing this. And maybe sometimes he agreed with him, but he would never sort of let him know that he agreed straight away. He was always… You know, he always tended to sort of make people explain things to make sure that they knew why they were doing it. DICKIE ARBITER: There was a time when the media was full of Prince of Wales and his relationship with his parents, and he didn’t get on with his parents. It’s like any other family. There are times you get on with your family and there are times you don’t get on with your family. But this is a high profile family. So they can’t sneeze without it being reported as having flu. They can’t cough without it being reported as having bronchitis. So, every everything they do, every move they make is under the microscope, and every move they make is reported on. Prince Charles went through a period of being a bit sorry for himself. He co-operated with a biography in which he talked, about as a small child, feeling lonely in his perambulator. And I think Prince Philip would have found that sort of thing disappointing to read about. And it wouldn’t have made much sense to him either, because he belonged to the generation where you don’t complain about your childhood. You just get on with life. These are the cards you’ve been dealt with, you play the hand you’ve got. NARRATOR: Philip watched as Charles’s relationships dominated the media. The arrival of Diana Spencer brought more attention. RICARD: In the beginning, I think Philip possibly had the easiest relationship with her. Philip had been an outsider. Diana was a bit of an outsider herself. She married into the royal family. He married into the royal family. She was an outsider as far as the royal family was concerned. She wasn’t an outsider as far as grand English life was concerned because she was the daughter of an earl. In some ways, Prince Philip was to blame for the marriage of Charles and Diana because he did put pressure on Prince Charles to marry her. And clearly, she wasn’t the right – she wasn’t the right wife to Charles and he told him to stop, stop dithering and make your mind up. I’m sure at the time, he was probably joking, but he even said, "If it doesn’t work out, you can go back to Camilla." NARRATOR: With Charles and Diana married, and before long, parents to another future king, William, the royal family’s prospects seemed assured. Even the Queen and Philip’s second son, Andrew, had settled down. Andrew was hard work, the Queen’s favourite, but in many ways, a spoiled child and a successful serviceman. He made a great career in the Navy. And then Fergie came into his life, and they were thrilled. I mean, they were delighted. NARRATOR: Sarah Ferguson had aristocratic ancestry and a promising career in PR. Philip approved. He had initially taken to her greatly. I mean he thought she was marvellous. I mean, like the Queen, they were astonished that anyone wanted to take Prince Andrew off their hands. NARRATOR: But Andrew and Sarah’s relationship soon ran into trouble and became front page news when she was photographed sunbathing topless while having her toes sucked by her financial adviser. When the toe sucking fiasco erupted in that summer of ’92, Philip was utterly furious. I mean, he thought that she had brought great shame on the royal family. And he let his feelings be known quite obviously. It wasn’t just the toe sucking, I mean, it was the whole collapse of the marriage, her inappropriate gestures she did, her largesse. She spent lots of money. She was always seemed to be buying things, traveling first class, doing un-royal things in a slightly undignified way. He really didn’t want anything more to do with her, and if she walked into a room, he would walk out. And it got to the extent where Fergie would only be welcome in royal homes when Prince Philip was away or not present. And their relationship never really recovered. NARRATOR: Andrew wasn’t the only son with a troubled relationship. Charles and Diana were struggling to reconcile a life of royal duties with a 12-year age difference. Prince Philip and Princess Diana got on really well actually. He had a great deal of sympathy, and I think that he disapproved of how Charles behaved to Diana. And he’d write nice letters to her, describing himself as Pa and the queen as Ma and supporting her. There was a lot of stuff about how royal duty interferes so much in a royal marriage, quite unlike any other marriage. And he was trying to be sympathetic and helpful. The marriage of the heir to the throne was important. It was important to the country, to the monarchy, and to the Commonwealth that he felt he should get involved if he could. I’ve read the letters that he wrote to the Princess of Wales and I’ve read her replies. And they are very good letters on both sides. They are very moving, particularly since we know what eventually happened. But he was really trying to engage with her and to find points of contact. And saying things like, you know, you both like the opera. Why don’t you try and go to the opera together a bit more? That sort of thing. All sorts of things like that. I said to her – at the time, I said, well, these are very helpful letters. They’re supportive letters. And she acknowledged that they were, but she said that the time she received them, she found it hard to accept that they were being offered on that basis. INGRID SEWARD: He gradually became more and more annoyed with her. He said to her, Diana, you must remember it’s not all about you. You’re part of us, and it’s about us as a whole. At the end, Diana said, "I hate Prince Philip, I hate him." So she took really against him. NARRATOR: Philip was not often in a position where he didn’t get his own way. Diana told me that he shouted at his staff and she told me that she told William and Harry never ever speak to people that work for you like that. But I think Prince Philip had a very loyal band of old retainers. If he tore a strip off somebody in his office, he’d go in later in the day and say, "Could you just look through these papers for me?" And you’d realise that, "Okay, you are on track again." If I made a mistake or what he thought was a mistake, I could say to him, "Well, hang on a minute, so we did that ’cause of A, B, C." And sometimes he’d accept it. But other times he would say, "Well, you could have done that better." And you say, "Yeah, fair comment." But you could argue the point. Did he like a good argument? No, he likes a good discussion. And if the discussion became heated, so much, the better. I wouldn’t go as far to say argument, and it becomes a shouting match. It’s a good… a good discussion, a good debate. NARRATOR: Despite Philip’s debating skills and with all the pressure, Diana declared war. Prince Philip kept saying to the Queen, Lilibet, you have to do something about Diana. This is when they were at the height of the war of the Wales’, and the Queen kept thinking if she didn’t do anything, it would go away. And Prince Philip kept saying, "You’ve got to do something." So he was chiding her. When the Queen is dealing with political situations and things, she will take advice and act on it. And so there are two different people. One is what should the Queen do as opposed to what would the person inside the Queen like to do? He did write a letter suggesting that they could lead separate lives and carry on with their duties. But unfortunately, that wasn’t the view taken by the couple. Princess Anne was the first of the royal children to battle it out through the divorce courts, with her tank driving husband, captain Mark Phillips. Divorce is a matter of great sadness. And for the for the royal family to have three marriages go wrong, it must have been profoundly shocking and deeply disturbing for them. I think Prince Philip’s viewpoint would be if they can’t make it work, it’s better that they are out of it rather than their destructive publicity affecting the monarchy. NARRATOR: But nothing could prepare the palace for what was to follow. Diana’s death put the royal family under intense focus. There was a lot of criticism levelled at the Queen and Prince Philip for not coming back to London. And unfortunately, again, it was media instigated, you go and ask the question, "Do you think the Queen and Prince Philip should be in London?" And the answer, "Yeah, of course they should." If you put the question, "The Queen and Prince Philip are up at Balmoral supporting their grandchildren, William aged 15, Harry aged 12. Do you think they’re doing the right thing for them?" And the answer would be yes. So it depends how you put it. It was a very, very difficult period and it was only really because the Queen and Prince Philip supporting had dug in and just kept their heads down and carried on that they were able to survive. And I think if it hadn’t been for their characters, that the monarchy could have been finished. NARRATOR: Just a few months after Diana’s death, Philip and Elizabeth celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary. I think that the main lesson that we’ve learned is that tolerance is the one essential ingredient of any happy marriage. And you can take it from me that the Queen has the quality of tolerance and abundance. NARRATOR: After half a century as the Duke of Edinburgh, Philip had developed many hobbies for the Queen to tolerate. There were so many things, science, technology, all those things, he was interested in, industry. I mean, you know, it’s endless. The arts as well, pictures, he had a huge collection of pictures he was buying. He was an extremely knowledgeable ornithologist. Prince Philip has written over a dozen books. He’s written about conservation. He’s written about science. He’s written about carriage driving and managing estates. He was fascinated by comparative religion, and he had friends who were Buddhists, who were Muslims, who were Jewish people. He went to the Vatican for a private audience with Pope John Paul II. But he wouldn’t want to talk about that in public. That wasn’t his style. He did studied religion very deeply. He’s got a collection of about 600 books on religion. GYLES: In fact, he published three books about faith and the environment. Nobody reads them. They are too complicated for people. He was a voracious reader, which Sophie of Wessex, Prince Edward’s wife, told me not too long ago that he was constantly reading and even well into his 90s. He also used to take the UFO monthly magazine. Yes, he did. NARRATOR: Philip didn’t limit his interests to academia. GYLES: He kept himself very fit indeed. Exercises, stretching exercises, he went swimming. He did his own version of the Atkins diet, you know? He didn’t eat too much, not too many carbohydrates. He was good on that sort of thing. Moderation in all things. He didn’t drink very much. But he could mix a mean gin and tonic. You know, he drank a little bit of beer. He was very self-disciplined, actually. When he was a young man, he would run around the garden at Windlesham Manor wearing sweats and a lot of jerseys, you know, which is what people do now. And then it used to make the Queen laugh. She says, "Why are you doing this ridiculous running in all those clothes?" He said, "Because I want to sweat it off." Flying was one of the great passions of his life. He went on flying from being a young man in his 20s through to being in his 60s went on flying. He flew as much in his lifetime as somebody in the RAF would have done. I felt that if I knew how to fly, I might begin to understand some of the demands on and some of the difficulties of pilots whether service or airline. The Queen’s Flights upgraded from turboprop to a jet aircraft. So he said to me, "Oh, I can’t drive too much over the next couple of weeks. I want to upgrade my licence." This is the Queen’s husband. He’s learned to fly a jet. So he had to take a helicopter from the East Terrace of Windsor Castle, fly to Brize Norton, jump in a jet fly that, fly a helicopter back. After about the third day, I said, "How do you do this, sir? I mean, I know driving four horses isn’t simple, but here you are driving four horses, then flying a helicopter, which is not that I know anything about flying a helicopter, but it’s not like flying a plane, and flying a plane is nothing like, how do you – how do you get it all in your brain?" He said, "Funnily enough, it’s all very similar. You’re at the mercy of the elements and you can’t control the wind, you can’t control updrafts, you can’t control downdrafts. You have to kind of go with the flow." And of course, if I was to describe him in one word, he kind of goes with the flow as long as it’s in his direction. Prince Philip would fly the airplane, and when it got to its cruising height, he would come back and sit with us and do his paperwork, but of course he would leave his captain and co-pilot on the flight deck. I remember once we were doing a trip and the World Wide Fund for Nature lady with us didn’t realise they’ve got pilots at the front, and she spent the entire flight watching the altimeter in the cabin worried that Prince Philip wasn’t going back on the flight deck. We let it get down to about 1,000 feet when she was really panicking before we went back and took over the controls. NARRATOR: As he grew older, Philip had to abandon many of his more adventurous hobbies. But he remained at the Queen’s side. The real role that the Queen and Prince Philip had was as conciliators. They were always trying to move things forward and make things better for the rest of us. You could go back to things like German state visits and Japanese state visits, but obviously the one that would be most easily remembered today would be the Ireland visit. NARRATOR: Irish Republican terrorists were to blame for the death of Philip’s uncle, Lord Mountbatten. HUGO: Prince Philip would have had a very personal reason for not wishing to engage with the Irish. But he said once that people should consider, you know, it’s very easy for them to stir up hatred and things with their enemies. But if you’d make friends with them, you very often get a much better result. NATO is a defensive and a co-operative alliance and never intended in any way to initiate or to support aggression of any kind. On two public occasions, both times, I think, celebrating wedding anniversaries, the Queen has spoken very deeply and movingly of how much she depends on Philip. You know, "my strength and stay" is her commonest phrase she uses. And I think that summed him up. I mean, he’s been there for her. He’s always been there for her. And it’s hard to imagine that she could have functioned as Queen in the way she has without Prince Philip. NARRATOR: Philip was still carrying out royal duties well into his 90s. He joked once that he and the Queen had to live to a hundred to keep Charles off the throne because they were worried that he did have some ideas that were a bit off the wall and also that he could tend to be a bit mercurial and he might not have been as strong a character as they were. But in later life, he had a much better relationship with Prince Charles, and he was very pleased to see how Prince William turned out the fact that he married well to Kate. And I think they think that however long Charles is on the throne, the long-term future of the monarchy is in safe hands. DICKIE: His grandchildren adored him and they admired him. And if they’ve got a problem, if they need to talk something through, it’s easy to go and talk to granddad. He’s been around a long time. He’s been through the mill so he could advise them. They adored him, and they have huge respect for what he’s done. NARRATOR: He was also extremely good to various descendants of his sisters. He educated quietly and privately without people knowing it, quite a number of their children and grandchildren. And I remember his private secretary, Sir Brian McGrath had to deal with odd people, descendants of some of these, great nephews of Prince Philip, who wound up in trouble in India and would sort of say, I’m a great nephew of the Duke of Edinburgh. So the call would go through to Buckingham Palace and Sir Brian would have to sort it out. One or two caused quite a lot of trouble. Near the very, very end of Prince Philip’s life because he had lived to face such a very great age, the Queen decided that he should be allowed to retire and that he shouldn’t have to follow her around on all their sort of engagements that they used to do jointly. And in the last years, there were times when he was just sort of following along and he’d make the odd remark here and there. He wanted to get away from that whole royal round, the constant comings and goings of palace life. NARRATOR: Prince Philip’s final royal duty came 65 years after his naval career came to an abrupt end. Since 1952, he had carried out over 22,000 public engagements. He sort of really was able to then drift off and do whatever he liked. He moved to Sandringham. He was living not in the great big house, but at Wood Farm, which is a fairly modest farmhouse on the royal estate. It’s a property that perhaps belongs to the Queen. And the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh do very much treat it as one of the private homes, and it’s got a lovely… it’s got a lovely feel about it. It’s very cosy. He was much happier sitting with a few staff to look after him, a footman, cook, not many people, a companion or two came to stay. He spent his days pottering around the garden, painting, reading, catching up with correspondence. A long time ago when Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, turned 100, I said to Prince Philip, what, would you like to be 100? He said, "Oh, God, I can’t imagine anything worse." He was then, I suppose, in his late 70s, He said, "Bits are falling off already. He said, "Oh, God no, I can’t imagine anything worse." I certainly don’t want to live to be 100." NARRATOR: Just two months before his 100th birthday, Philip died of old age at Windsor Castle with the Queen at his bedside. I particularly wanted to say that my father, I suppose the last 70 years, has given the most remarkable, devoted service. And as you can imagine, my family and I miss my father enormously. – MAN: Fire! – MAN 2: Fire! NARRATOR: At the funeral, his coffin was carried by a custom Land Rover designed for the purpose by Philip himself. Due to the ongoing COVID pandemic, the Queen had to sit alone. I think the public will look to the Queen and see how it’s affecting her because basically since the age of 13, she’s been in love with this man. And I think people will worry how she’s going to deal with the grief of his passing. RICHARD: I think she’s gonna find it enormously difficult. In recent years, she’s lost her mother and her sister, and the third member of the trinity was Prince Philip. I mean, these were the three most important people in the Queen’s life. The Duke of Edinburgh told me that, I said to him, you know, "What would you like your epitaph to be?" Well, he said, "I don’t know. I did my best to keep the show on the road while I was here." In fact, if we regard the long reign of Elizabeth the Second as a success, the joint author of that success is the Duke of Edinburgh. He had supported her for all those years and understood how to support her and loved her. This is a man who came from a world in which it was taken for granted that men were the leaders, there had been very few female heads of state outside of the British Isles. He will be remembered for his courageous approach to life and his consistency and his support of the Queen and his total support of Britain. When you spend 27 years working with somebody, yes, I miss him, I’ve got so much respect for him. If you just look back at some of the speeches and lectures he was giving in the 1960s and the ’70s, they seem incredibly prescient. I’ve seen some of his archives, for various reasons, for various projects, and they’re extraordinary. He was way ahead of his time and most of the things he talked about, Prince Charles then followed up and now Prince William. NARRATOR: From his start as a penniless Prince to war hero, consort, and family man, Philip shaped his own legacy. He was very much the power behind the throne and much underrated while he was alive. And it’s gonna be very, very difficult for the younger royals to actually replace that. But it’s incredible to think that Prince George, if he lives to a similar age, will be the first monarch of the 22nd century. So if that lasts into the 22nd century, I think they’ll feel it’s job done. We have a monarchy that thrives on longevity, thrives on continuity and stability, where all around us, presidents and prime ministers are here today gone tomorrow. Our monarchy is not elected out of office. Our monarchy is there by succession. Politicians come and go, our monarchy continues. It’s 1,000 years of history. It’s the golden thread of our island story, and it’s about kings and queens, princes and princesses and their flesh and blood, real people too. They are human beings like us. The Queen and Prince Philip are husband and wife. And they also are the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh. Throughout her reign, he’s walking one step behind her, giving her total support. So he managed to support the Queen and do his own thing, be a dad, grandad, husband, friend, what a remarkable legacy. This Commonwealth came into existence because people made sacrifices and offered their service to it. Now it has been handed to us. And if we don’t make sacrifices for it, we shall have nothing to hand on to those who come after us. And the world will have lost something of much greater value than just a grand conception.