A love ETERNAL

MARRIED FOR 73 YEARS, PHILIP WAS ELIZABETH'S GREATEST SUPPORT

As distant third cousins – Queen Victoria and Prince Albert were their great-great-grandparents – Elizabeth and Philip first crossed paths as children at a family wedding in 1934. Then on July 22, 1939, 13-year-old Elizabeth visited the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth, where the 18-year-old Philip was a cadet in training. “She never looked at anyone else,” said her cousin Margaret Rhodes. The two struck up regular correspondence with each other, which was the foundation of their love story.

“To have been spared in the war and seen victory, to have been given the chance to rest and to readjust myself, to have fallen in love completely and unreservedly, makes all one’s personal and even the world’s troubles seem small and petty,” the late Duke of Edinburgh wrote to the Queen in 1946.

TIMELESS LOVE