A Royal Constant Philip's Defining Role

How His Modernising Legacy Will Continue

- Kate Russell

When Prince Philip entered the world, on the dining table of a villa in Corfu, Greece, a man was expected to have a stiff upper lip and children were seen and not heard.

As he marks his 98th birthday on June 10, it’s clear to see all that has changed – and so has Philip, redefining regal masculinity in his role as confidant and support not only to his beloved wife, the Queen (93), but also to three further generations of royal men.

It hasn’t been easy for the man Prince William describes as “a legend”. With an absentee father, Prince Andrew of Denmark and Greece, and a mother, Princess Alice of Battenburg, who was sectioned in a mental hospital when he was just nine, Philip had no template for a loving family.

“The family broke up,” he remembers. “My mother was ill, my sisters were married, my father was in the south of France. I just had to get on with it. You do. One does.” An old friend and his former private secretary, Michael Parker, sighed as he once explained, “When he needed a father, there just wasn’t anybody there.”

As a result, Philip privately admits, “I have had to create myself and make it up as I go along – but then, don’t we all?”

This is as far as he will go to explain the shifting nature of his relationships with his children − Prince Charles (70), Princess Anne (68), Prince Andrew (59) and Prince Edward (55) − grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

At first, he was a distant parent. Famously, when he and the Queen returned from almost six months on tour, he didn’t embrace Charles (or a very small Anne). Instead, he shook their hands. Charles’ biographer Sally Bedell-Smith notes wryly, “In the manner of the upper class, neither of them were physically demonstrative.”