Making of a modern monarchy

The reformed Royal family sailed unscathed through the mid-century crises of the abdication, the Depression and the Second World War

PRINCE PHILIP, FAMOUSLY, WAS BORN on a kitchen table in Corfu in 1921. The birth-pangs of the house of Windsor only four years previously were scarcely less dramatic. And both events were a product of the pan-European crisis of monarchy triggered by the Russian Revolution. This toppled the four great Continental empires of Germany, Austria-Hungary, Ottoman Turkey and Russia itself and left many of the lesser kingdoms — like that of Greece to which Philip was in the line of succession — hanging by a thread.

But not Britain. Partly it was due to the good luck of being a victor in the First World War rather than one of the vanquished. But it was also a product of the good management