09/04/2021: on the royal gates of Buckingham Palace is posted the announcement of the death of HRH Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, better known as the husband of Queen Elizabeth II.
Philip was born into the Greek and Danish royal families and embodied the character of the 20th century “one-piece man”. The newscasts and the main articles of these hours depicted him as the “great shadow” of Queen Elizabeth, highlighting his life of pleasures and scandals and the luxury in which he had been able to live his long life.
EVENTS OF HIS LIFE
Philip went through the most dramatic and perhaps the biggest events of the bloody ‘900. He was exiled from his own country, Greece, only 18 months after his birth and he was forced to spend the early years of his life moving from one country to another trying to fix the puzzle of a disintegrated family after his father had been condemned to death. The mental health of his mother, at the same time, deteriorated (Dymond, s.d.). Despite what the newscasts of the recent hours seem to let us believe, he has not always had a life of luxury and happiness: he grew up with the emptiness of a “ghost” family experiencing the trauma of being a member of a royal family one day and an exiled child looking for help and wandering from one country to another the day after with no one to count on but himself.
HIS IMPORTANT CONTRIBUTION TO THE HISTORY OF THE UNITED KINGDOM
He was not just a Prince and perhaps he never took advantage of his position. He was, in a word, “INSPIRATION”. He founded his own life on the great values of the 20th century man enrolled in the navy and strong of his strict education received at Gordonstoun, a private school on the north coast of Scotland, where Philip learned to be an independent and strong man, despite everything he went through as a child. At the same time and almost paradoxically, he was a far-sighted man and, most of all, a far-sighted Prince who was able to bring the contemporary technological and scientific modernization of the century in the gates of Buckingham Palace, making the English royal family more and more in step with the current times. He was a shadow of Lilibet, as he liked to call his wife, but he was that shadow without which the English royal family would never have had any light anymore. “Prince Philip saw world wars and economic crises come and go. The radio gave way to the television, and the television to the internet. And through it all, he helped provide steady leadership and guiding wisdom” (Obama, s.d.): these are the words with which former US President Obama expressed his condolences to Queen Elisabeth II, depicting him as a monument of the 20th century, a man who lived in one of the most cruel centuries in the history of the humankind and who survived it.
QUEEN ELIZABETH’S PERCEPTION OF HER HUSBAND
“He is someone who doesn’t take easily to compliments but he has, quite simply, been my strength and stay all these years, and I, and his whole family, and this and many other countries, owe him a debt greater than he would ever claim, or we shall ever know.” With these words Queen Elizabeth spoke of her husband in a public speech on the occasion of their 50th anniversary in 1997. He was more than what we believe: he was a fundamental part of the royal family, the reason of its modernity, openness and longevity and all English people “owe him a debt”.
Comments