There must have been intense frustration at the limitations of his role, but he was a rock for his hardworking wife
It is not disparaging of Prince Philip, who has died aged 99, to say he was always a walk-on part in the pantomime of monarchy. It was a part in which he was a star. Plucked from the ranks of lesser European royalty as the “suitable” husband for a queen, he was perfectly cast. Nephew of the king of Greece, safely naval and effortlessly gracious, he took to his assigned role as if to the manner born. He served in the war, but when his wife became queen in 1952, he gave up a naval career. While known as the Queen’s consort, he did not hold the title Prince Consort, one confined to Victoria’s Albert.
The monarchy in the 1950s faced not a crisis but questions inevitable for so archaic an institution in a state recently traumatised by war and transformed by a socialist parliament. A minor strain of republicanism ran through the House of Commons. Postwar meant modernity as well as austerity. The monarchy was still bruised by the forced abdication of the Queen’s uncle, Edward VIII, albeit soothed by the exemplary wartime conduct of her father, George VI. All the same, the monarchy could do without a shock.
