THE GREATEST love story

INSIDE THE UNBREAKABLE BOND BETWEEN PRINCE PHILIP AND HER MAJESTY

- Sara Tapia

With more than seven decades of their lives entwined in both love and duty, Prince Philip and Queen Elizabeth shared a romance that endured the test of time. Meeting for the first time at the ages of 13 and 8 respectively, the pair have spent almost an entire lifetime together and have been a pillar of strength for each other in good times and bad. “I think he is her rock, really, and she is his,” Princess Eugenie, 31, has said of her grandparents. “Together, they’re invincible.”

A ROMANCE SPARKED

Although their paths had crossed twice in the past, Philip and Elizabeth were properly introduced when he escorted the then-princess and her sister Margaret around Britannia Royal Naval College in Dartmouth in 1939. The meeting was entirely by fate, as the soldiers who had been enlisted to show the two princesses around the grounds had been struck down by illness – leaving Philip with the task. Elizabeth’s childhood governess, Marion “Crawfie” Crawford, later said the then13-year-old Elizabeth was immediately smitten by Philip’s “Viking” blond hair and blue-eyed good looks.

The pair started a back and forth of “cousinly correspondence” before Philip started to fall just as hard. And by Christmas 1943, which Philip spent with the royals at Windsor Castle, Elizabeth had already told Crawford the then-22-year-old naval officer was The One.