He held the record for longevity as a husband to a British monarch.
Prince Consort of the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth Kingdoms since February 6, 1952, Philippe Mountbatten had married Princess Elizabeth five years before Her Majesty's accession to the throne.
Charismatic, renowned for his deep sense of the general interest, his humor but also for his blunders, Prince Philip was often seen abroad as an embodiment of British culture.
However, its origins were actually very cosmopolitan and largely European, like those of most royal families on the continent.
Philip considered himself primarily Danish, but harbored a certain pride in his Russian, German and Greek origins.
As a descendant of the Romanov family, in 1993 he provided a DNA sample which identified the bodies of Tsar Nicholas II, his wife and his five children buried in an anonymous grave in Siberia.
Enough to sweep away the legend according to which the Grand Duchess Anastasia had escaped from the firing squad during the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917.
A war hero
Philip was born on the Greek island of Corfu on June 10, 1921, from the union of André, Prince of Greece and Denmark, and Princess Alice of Battenberg, granddaughter of Grand Duke Louis IV of Hesse -Darmstadt and great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria.
In 1922, when Philip was only one year old, his family had to leave Greece, his uncle, King Constantine I, being forced into exile after the military disaster of the Greco-Turkish war.
Philip will then follow his education in France and Germany.
“If I couldn't find a word in one language, I tended to say it in another,” he later explained to The Independent about his life in this multilingual family.
When Hitler took power in 1933, Philip was interned in Germany.
The director of his boarding school, a Jew, then fled to the United Kingdom, where he founded a new school in Scotland, Gordonstoun.
The young prince follows him.
On the advice of his uncle, the King of Greece George II, Philip left Gordonstoun in 1939 to join the Royal Navy, when the specter of Nazism threatened Europe.
He fought bravely during the Second World War, mainly in the Mediterranean Sea, where he was distinguished for his role alongside the Greek forces during the Battle of Crete in 1941. But his hour of glory really struck in 1943 when the landing of the Allies in Sicily, a year after obtaining the rank of first lieutenant aboard HMS Wallace.
The Royal Navy was then under fire from an intense bombing campaign led by the Luftwaffe, the German air force, determined to sink this British destroyer.
Philip then hatches a plan: he fires smoke bombs to make the Germans believe that the building has sunk.
Without Philip's intervention, the crew had “very little chance” of surviving, revealed a veteran 60 years later.
During the war, Philip and Princess Elizabeth exchange letters.
Their first meeting dates back to 1939, when King George VI, the future Queen and her sister Margaret visited the Royal Navy College, where Philip was training.
Elizabeth, 13, immediately falls in love with the 18-year-old and decides to marry him.
They were married at Westminster Abbey in London on November 20, 1947, several months after Philip became a British citizen and renounced his titles as Prince of Greece and Denmark.
On the morning of the ceremony, George VI appointed him Duke of Edinburgh.
Philip continued his military career at the head of the frigate HMS Magpie for a year, again in the Mediterranean Sea, where much of the Royal Navy was deployed to curb the expansion of Communism.
His career as a sailor ended in 1951. As the health of George VI began to decline, the duke took on the role of prince consort full time.
The King died on February 6, 1952. Princess Elizabeth ascended to the throne.
Defender of the environment
By the time of his retirement at the age of 96 in August 2017, Philip had participated in more than 22,000 formal public engagements.
He continued to accompany the queen for certain appearances.
The Duke was also at the head of 780 charitable associations or organizations responsible for promoting the preservation of the environment, the learning of science and technology or the practice of sport.
He notably played a fundamental role in the development of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF).
He chaired the British branch of the famous NGO when it was created in 1961, before taking the head at the global level, between 1981 and 1996, putting the pomp and influence of the Crown at the service of the environmental cause.
But Prince Philip's most famous charity operation is the “Duke of Edinburgh's International Prize”.
Created in 1956 in Great Britain and then extended to 144 countries, this prize remains extremely popular today: more than 400,000 young British people are trying their luck this year.
The objective of this program is to develop skills and improve the well-being of young people through sport, involvement in charitable actions or even preparation for expeditions in a natural environment.
"Do you agree to walk by my side?"
The Duke was also famous for his pungent sense of humor, as much as for his many blunders.
After the coronation of his wife, about one of the crown jewels, he said to the queen: “But where did you find this hat?”.
In 1999, he addresses a group of hearing-impaired young people standing right next to a very noisy group of percussionists: “No wonder you are deaf!”.
In 2002, when His Majesty asked a young soldier wounded in the eyes by an Irish nationalist bomb if he could still see, despite everything, he said: “Not a lot, judging by his tie”.
But Philip also showed great sensitivity after the death of Princess Diana in 1997, one of the most difficult moments of the reign of Elizabeth II.
Prince William, then 15 years old, very close to his paternal grandfather, did not wish to walk behind his mother's coffin during the state funeral, preferring the modesty of private mourning.
But the Duke manages to convince him with this sentence: “If you don't do it, you will regret it later.
If I walk with you, will you agree to walk by my side? ”.
A few months later, at a ceremony on the occasion of the royal couple's golden wedding anniversary, the Queen paid tribute to Prince Philip: “He does not gladly accept compliments, but it was just for me my strength and my pillar during all these years ”.
Declaration that she will reiterate in 2012, during his Diamond Jubilee, claiming to have found in him a source of “constant strength”.
In 69 years of reign, and 74 years of marriage, Queen Elizabeth will have known how to incarnate, in so changing times, an unchanged symbol of the British nation.
This reassuring presence, this guarantee of continuity, this unfailing dedication made him, in the eyes of some Britons, the greatest monarch that the United Kingdom has ever known.
The “co-author of this success is the Duke of Edinburgh”, believes his biographer, Gyles Brandeth.
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