Prince Philip of Britain dies at age 99

LONDON — Prince Philip, the Greece-born royal who because the husband of Queen Elizabeth II was the longest-serving consort to a British sovereign, died Friday. He was 99.

“His Royal Highness handed away peacefully this morning at Windsor Citadel,” the royal household introduced. “Additional bulletins shall be made sooner or later. The Royal Household be part of with folks around the globe in mourning his loss.”   

The Duke of Edinburgh’s dying got here 12 days earlier than Queen Elizabeth’s 95th birthday on April 21. Underneath a long-standing plan generally known as “Operation Forth Bridge,” his dying ushers in a interval of nationwide mourning.

 Philip, whom the queen known as “my power and keep,” was hospitalized in February after “feeling unwell,” and was handled for an an infection and a preexisting coronary heart situation, Buckingham Palace stated. He was launched a month later after present process a coronary heart process.

Philip, who popularized the sobriquet “The Agency” for Windsor household enterprise, ended his official duties within the fall of 2017. Months earlier, in June, he was hospitalized for an an infection and missed the Queen’s Speech opening the newly elected Parliament that month.

Two days after lacking Easter 2018 companies at St. George’s Chapel, he was admitted to King Edward VII Hospital for beforehand scheduled hip substitute surgical procedure, the palace stated. That 10-day hospitalization got here weeks earlier than the start of Prince William and Kate’s third little one, Prince Louis Arthur, and the wedding of Prince Harry to Meghan Markle on Might 19, 2018, at St. George’s.

In January 2019, Philip was unhurt after he was concerned in a collision whereas driving a Land Rover — at age 97 — close to the queen’s Sandringham property. The car overturned, in line with witnesses, and two ladies had been handled for accidents. Weeks later, he determined to show in his driver’s license.

Throughout the coronavirus pandemic, Philip and Elizabeth had been staying at Windsor Citadel, west of London.

The Duke of Edinburgh supported his spouse all through an unprecedented time of social, financial, technological, political change and household crises.

Fourteen prime ministers held workplace whereas Philip was British consort — companion to the sovereign — from Winston Churchill in 1952 by incumbent Boris Johnson.

Each the duke and the queen, the world’s longest-reigning monarch, witnessed the transformation of a once-global British Empire right into a Commonwealth of 52 impartial member states, a free affiliation headed by the queen.

Philip’s public statements had been few and much between lately and, even rarer had been his direct dealings with the media. Beforehand, the duke was famend for talking his thoughts at public engagements, many occasions with cringe-worthy remarks that bent the bounds of humor.

Throughout the 1981 recession, for instance, he stated: “Everyone was saying we should have extra leisure. Now they’re complaining they’re unemployed.”

“Aren’t most of you descended from pirates?” Philip requested a rich resident of the Cayman Islands in 1994.

“You are too fats to be an astronaut,” he instructed a 13-year-old boy in 2001.

When assembly in 2012 with a mayor who used a mobility scooter, Philip requested him: “Have you ever run over anyone?”

Philip was born June 10, 1921, on the Greek island of Corfu because the youngest little one and solely son of Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark and Princess Alice of Battenberg. Andrew, whose father, King George I of Greece, was assassinated in 1913, was a commander within the Greek military in the course of the 1919-1922 warfare with Turkey. With Greece’s defeat, Andrew and the household had been exiled in 1922, settling in France.

Philip’s maternal grandfather, Prince Louis of Battenberg, renounced his German titles, adopted the surname Mountbatten, an Anglicized model of the German Battenberg, and have become a British citizen.

At age 7 in 1928, Philip was despatched to high school in England. He lived together with his maternal grandmother, Victoria Mountbatten, and his uncle George Mountbatten.

Philip’s 4 sisters married German aristocrats, and three of them — Sophie, Cecilie and Margarita — joined the Nazi occasion. To make sure, one in every of his brothers-in-law was amongst these implicated within the 1944 plot to kill Adolf Hitler.

In an interview with historian Jonathan Petropoulos printed in his 2006 e-book “Royals and the Reich,” Philip pressured that he was by no means “acutely aware of anyone within the household truly expressing anti-Semitic views,” however he acknowledged there have been “inhibitions concerning the Jews” and “jealousy of their success.”

As a teen, Philip joined the Royal Navy and went on to serve in World Battle II, together with taking part within the battles of Cape Matapan and Crete and the invasion of Sicily. He was in Tokyo Bay for the Japanese give up on Sept. 2, 1945, and would later obtain the Greek Battle Cross of Valor for his companies within the Navy.

In 1947, the 26-year-old Philip married his third cousin, Princess Elizabeth, 21, and in doing so, renounced his Greek title to grow to be a naturalized British topic. He was later made Duke of Edinburgh by Elizabeth’s father, King George VI.

The royal matrimony at the moment was not with out controversy since Philip was not a local son. The Queen Mom reportedly referred to him as “the Hun.” Nonetheless, the couple married in Westminster Abbey and acquired greater than 2,500 marriage ceremony presents from around the globe. One 12 months later, son and inheritor to the throne Charles was born, adopted by Anne, Andrew and Edward.

Philip’s naval profession, which had seen the newly married couple stationed in Malta for a brief interval, subsequently ended when George VI died Feb. 6, 1952, and Princess Elizabeth grew to become queen.

The duke assumed his new position as consort, accompanying Her Majesty around the globe on home journeys, state visits and Commonwealth excursions.

Elizabeth was formally topped queen in 1953 within the first reside tv coronation to be broadcast globally. Shortly thereafter, Philip and Elizabeth embarked upon a seven-month worldwide tour, visiting 13 nations and logging over 40,000 miles.

Alongside his royal commitments, the duke grew to become a certified pilot and recurrently performed polo till his 50th birthday. Philip achieved many flying {qualifications} that might see him obtain his Royal Air Pressure wings in 1953, helicopter wings two years later and personal pilot’s license in 1959.

In an official capability, Philip traveled to greater than 140 nations.

“The beauty of my father is that no person’s ever forgotten assembly him, so that they’ve all obtained their tales,” Prince Edward, the Earl of Wessex, stated throughout an engagement at Windsor Citadel in Might 2017.

“Wherever he is been, wherever on the earth — folks keep in mind him. You may’t actually get a greater accolade than that,” he added.

Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip’s reign additionally needed to endure occasions of crises, together with the British monarch being shot at with blanks in 1981. Two years earlier, the queen’s artwork advisor, Anthony Blunt, was revealed to be a Communist spy, and Philip’s uncle, Louis “Dickie” Lord Mountbatten, was killed by an Irish Republican Military bomb.

In 1992, the marriages of three of their youngsters collapsed. Andrew and Anne divorced from their spouses and Charles and Diana started a separation that led to divorce 4 years later. Additionally in 1992, hearth gutted Windsor Citadel, one of many couple’s official residences. The queen described this 12-month interval as an “annus horribilis.”

Throughout Charles and Diana’s troubles, Philip reportedly recommended the couple to reconcile, however to no avail. A 12 months after the 1996 divorce, Diana and her boyfriend Dodi Fayed had been killed in a Paris automobile crash as photographers had been chasing their limousine. Earlier than the funeral, Philip efficiently inspired his 15-year-old grandson, William, to stroll behind Diana’s casket. Sixty years earlier, the then-16-year-old Philip marched behind the casket of his sister Cecilie after she was killed in a airplane crash.

“For those who do not stroll, I believe you may remorse it later,” Philip instructed William, in line with British media accounts. “If I stroll, will you stroll with me?”

Fayed’s father claimed that Philip had ordered the couple executed, however in 2008, a London coroner rejected Mohamed al Fayed’s conspiracy allegations, ruling there was no such proof. The jury ultimately determined that the crash resulted from grossly negligent driving by the couple’s chauffeur and the pursuit of their limousine by paparazzi.

Within the a long time following his marriage to the queen, the Duke of Edinburgh had taken up greater than 22,000 solo engagements, 637 abroad visits, delivered an estimated 5,493 speeches and labored as a patron to virtually 800 organizations, in line with the royal web site.

One in every of his most profitable associations has arguably been the creation of the Duke of Edinburgh Award, a youth self-improvement program that has been operating for 65 years.

In Might 2017, the palace introduced that the then-95-year-old prince would completely discontinue his royal duties as of the autumn. Philip and his spouse had regularly handed on a few of their respective workload lately. Their son and inheritor, Prince Charles, in addition to grandsons, Princes William and Harry and different members of the family assumed extra collective accountability till Andrew was successfully stripped of his royal duties in 2019 due to his affiliation with the late intercourse offender Jeffrey Epstein and Harry stepped again as a senior royal in 2020.

The queen stated in tribute to her husband on their golden marriage ceremony anniversary on Nov. 20, 1997, “Fairly merely, (he has) been my power and keep all these years, and I and his complete household, on this and plenty of different nations, owe him a debt better than he would ever declare or we will ever know.”

The couple celebrated their 70th marriage ceremony anniversary in November 2017. Throughout their personal celebration at Windsor Citadel, Elizabeth offered him with the Grand Cross of the Royal Victorian Order for “companies to the sovereign.”

Survivors embody his spouse, Queen Elizabeth II, and their youngsters: Charles, Prince of Wales; Anne, Princess Royal; Prince Andrew, Duke of York; and Prince Edward, Earl of Wessex. The queen and Philip additionally had eight grandchildren and 10 great-grandchildren, together with Augustus Philip Hawke Brooksbank, who was born Feb. 9, 2021, to Princess Eugenie and her husband, Jack Brooksbank, and is is called partly to honor the Duke of Edinburgh.

Philip had insisted that he didn’t need the “fuss” of a state funeral at Westminster Corridor, in line with The Instances of London. As an alternative, his physique is predicted to lie in St. James’s Palace, the place Prince Diana’s physique lay earlier than her funeral.

— CNBC’s Marty Steinberg relies in New Jersey.