Prince Philip: Seven decades a loyal consort

For 70 years Prince Philip has stood two steps behind the monarch and yet at the heart of the world’s most famous family.

Those 70 years have been tumultuous, from Queen Elizabeth ascending the throne as a young woman on the death of her father to a series of family scandals.

Renowned royal family expert and editor-in-chief of Majesty magazine Ingrid Seward has chronicled the events in Prince Philip Revealed.

She first met Philip as a young reporter for Majesty on the late 1970s, she told Kathryn Ryan.

“I was a bit frightened of him really.

‘He picked me out of a crowd of journalists because I had the name Ingrid and because Majesty magazine in those days was published by a company called Hanover, so he thought I was German. But the minute he discovered I wasn’t German he wasn’t at all interested in talking to me.”

While most of the press would follow the Queen on official engagements, one reporter was always assigned to Philip, she says.

“They would always send one journalist to follow Prince Philip and they would call it ‘gaffe alert’”.

Elizabeth first met Philip when she was still a girl, Stewart says.

“Elizabeth was only 13 when they met, she was taken by her parents to Dartmouth [naval college] where he was a cadet and Lord Mountbatten, who was his uncle, engineered it would be the boy to take the two princesses Margaret and Elizabeth around.

“He showed off being 18, and he could see both these little girls were a bit goofy about him, so he jumped over the tennis nets and then he was invited to tea back on the Royal Yacht which was anchored in the river Dart and apparently Elizabeth just sat there gobsmacked by this really handsome young boy.”

Eventually a courtship developed, and Philip proposed to Elizabeth, and asked permission of her father George VI, in 1946

“They were dubious, he’s pretty Germanic, it was only just after the war and all Phillip’s relations were in Germany and his sisters were all married to German aristocrats, and although Philip wasn’t of Germanic blood, he seemed very foreign.”

The marriage has deepened over the years, Stewart says.

“They’ve grown very much, she was so in love with him and I think there is massive affection and respect. He has huge respect for his wife.”

And that respect is reciprocated, she says. It was only in his middle 1990s that Philip stepped back from official duties showing remarkable resilience.

“When Harry and Meghan got married he’d only just previously had a hip operation, only six weeks before, most people wouldn’t have been able to begin to walk at his age after a hip operation, but he walked her down the aisle at St George’s Chapel without a stick, so it’s his immense will power and I think that she loves that.”

Philip has counselled the Queen through a series of family upheavals. The first early in her reign, involving her sister Margaret and her doomed love affair with Captain Peter Townsend.

But the biggest crisis to hit the Royal Family was the unravelling of Prince Charles’ marriage to Diana in the late 1980s.

At first Diana seemed like the perfect match for Charles. She was blue blood, had grown up at Sandringham, knew the Queen’s two youngest children and her father had served as the Queen’s Equerry.

“It all looked very good, but of course what nobody understood was how incredibly young and naïve Diana was and indeed how unstable she was, in a way she was just a little girl.”

As the marriage fell apart Philip urged the Queen to act, she says.

“He was advising Queen to just do something, and the Queen kept saying ‘it’s all going to be alright’ which is probably of course what all of us mothers would say it will be alright I know it will – but it wasn’t.”

Afterwards Philip tried to help Diana, he “wrote copious letters to her,” she says.

“He tried to help her, but she turned against him and decided she didn’t like him at all and when Diana decides that it is just curtains.

“And she ended up absolutely hating him, because she was convinced that he wanted her out of the picture. Quite how she thought he wanted her out of the picture I don’t know.

“She took a dislike to him having been something of a fan of his.”

The pattern was repeated with Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson, she says.

“Oh, Philip had no time for Fergie at all, at the beginning he welcomed her, he liked her, he taught her to carriage drive, he thought she was a lot of fun.”

But as she started to become constant tabloid fodder, Philip turned against her.

“He said about Diana and Fergie, if those girls want out, let them get out, but they cannot be half in and half out, which is exactly what was said about Meghan and Harry.”

She believes the situation with Harry and Meghan leaving the Royal Family to pursue a life outside of the court, and the scandals in which Andrew is embroiled, will have caused much dismay for Phillip and the Queen who have given 70 years of scandal-free service.

“I’m sure like most parents they say to each other, ‘where on earth did we go so wrong?’”

She believes it will be a very different Royal Family once the Queen dies – a more slimmed down monarchy.

“The Royal Family have no power only influence.

“If people are not respecting them they are in trouble and I think the Monarchy, rather sadly for all of us journalists, is going to be scaled back because you cannot have all these younger members of the Royal family running riot.”

Stewart says Prince Charles has already signalled this is his intention, and will, while King, concentrate his efforts on William, Kate and their children.