No wonder he was cranky.
Spare a little sympathy for Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, famous for his irascibility and bizarre, occasionally offensive remarks in public. "If you stay here too long you will become slitty eyed," he was once heard to remark to a British student in China.
PHOTOS: Prince Philip: A royal life
Yikes. But as Philip Eade's new biography details, the little Greek princeling had a calamitous early life, filled with drama and multiple tragedies. He lost his home, his name and identity, his family and many of his close relatives by the time he was a teenager. Then his wife became Queen Elizabeth II in 1953 and he lost his job in the British navy, consigned from that point to play a supporting role, fathering her heirs, staying out of politics, organizing her palaces, and always walking a few paces behind her for the rest of his life.
This he has done, quite splendidly, but Eade shows what a frustrating struggle it has been for a smart, robust, take-charge alpha male to tamp down his natural instincts and personality. Philip has a temper, can't bear fools and says so. He's as likely to scoff at clucking about the terrible things that happened to his family.
'You are where you are in life so get on with it' is his philosophy," Eade quotes an old friend saying of him. "He never let misfortune cloud his life."
But what a lot of misfortune. It goes some way in explaining why Philip sometimes seemed wrong for the part of royal consort. Much of this is not news to Brits; Philip, who just turned 90, has been married to their queen for 64 years, making him the oldest and longest-serving consort of a British sovereign in history. But this is the first Philip biography to focus on his first 32 years, before his wife was crowned.
Americans, however, may be confused by the maddening entanglements of Philip's extended European family and his ethnic and royal connections. Eade does an admirable job explaining all this.
Philip, though born (in 1921 on Corfu) a prince of the now-exiled Greek royal family, is not Greek; he was mostly Danish (the Greeks recruited his grandfather, a Danish prince, to be their king in the 19th century), with German and English thrown in. Like his wife, he is a great-great-grandchild of Queen Victoria. He speaks no Greek, and though he was said to look "like a Greek god" when he was young, because he was so tall, blond and good-looking, in fact, he looked Danish. When he married Elizabeth in 1947, he renounced his Greek citizenship and Greek church and became British, Anglican and a royal duke.
When Philip was a baby, the Greeks got fed up with his family and ran them out of Greece. Subsequently, his mother, Alice, had a nervous breakdown and ended up in an asylum for years. His father drifted away to a mistress in Monaco, where he drank and gambled his way to an early death. His four older sisters married Germans, some who later became Nazis (which was awkward even though Philip fought on the Allied side in WWII). One sister and her entire family later died in a horrific plane crash.
Shuttled around to various relatives and boarding schools in Germany and Britain, Philip grew into a tough young man mostly raised by his English royal relations and marinated in the British navy. He adopted the name of his maternal uncle, the endlessly ambitious Lord Louis Mountbatten (the original German name, Battenberg, was changed during WWI), who helped him get cozy with his distant cousins, the British royal family. Princess Elizabeth, five years his junior, met him when she was 13 and promptly fell in love. He did not but he came round.
Now, four children, eight grandchildren, two great-grandchildren and thousands of public appearances later, Philip is as familiar a presence as the queen herself. If he is occasionally viewed with exasperation, he is also increasingly seen as crucial to her success. "He helped to make her what she's become," Eade quotes a diplomat saying. "We are extremely fortunate that he married her."
When the queen goes, the British no doubt will grieve deeply. This book suggests that when Philip goes, they may find themselves just as mournful.
