Prince Philip 1921 – 2021
It wouldn’t be a stretch to call the Duke of Edinburgh a proto-feminist. Despite being the embodiment of that Kipling-esque idyll, a man’s man, he married a woman to whom he would always be subordinate in the eyes of the world. Yet he could never be said to live in her shadow. It’s possible no man was better suited to be a queen’s consort than Philip Mountbatten.
By nature and nurture, he was proud, resilient and resourceful. There was the downside of his brusqueness with staff, and he could be unbending with his family. But his rigidity and rather tart sense of humour seem to have been the self-protective result of a tough start in life.
Born a prince, he did not exactly live the dream. He barely knew his parents, and practically every one of the few adults in his life who nurtured him either abandoned him or died.
His unusual and rather Spartan upbringing might have been tailor-made to equip a man for the peculiarly sequestered life he was to lead as an adult. As biographer Philip Eade put it, by the time he met
