On November 20, 1997, the night of her 50th wedding anniversary, Queen Elizabeth made a speech in front of Tony Blair and dozens of distinguished guests at London’s Banqueting House. It was relatively short and succinct, as her speeches usually are. And much of it was quite, well, run-of-the-mill: She thanked the prime minister for hosting that evening’s festivities and acknowledged the country as a whole for supporting the couple during her reign. But, at the end of her speech, she spoke of her husband, Prince Philip, with profound and uncharacteristic emotion: “He is someone who doesn’t take easily to compliments, but he has, quite simply, been my strength and stay all these years,” she said. “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.” Twenty-four years later, the royal family announced that Prince Philip had passed away peacefully at the age of 99 on the morning of April 9 at Windsor Castle. On September 8, 2022, Queen Elizabeth followed.
Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip’s relationship was one of love, respect, and long-lasting admiration. They first met at Britannia Royal Naval College in 1939, where an 18-year-old cadet Philip was introduced to a 13-year-old Princess Elizabeth of England while she was touring the grounds. From then, it’s said, the young royal never thought of anybody else. The two began to exchange letters throughout the war years. Upon his return from the Pacific theater in 1946, his relationship with Queen Elizabeth blossomed. It’s presumed that he proposed that June, on the grounds of Balmoral. “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,” he wrote in a letter dated from that year.
Despite his stately title, there was originally some resistance to the marriage from the crown. Many thought Philip to be too brusque, too unpolished, too German, too Greek, too…un-English to marry then Princess Elizabeth. But Elizabeth was insistent. A formal announcement was made in July 1947, bearing Philip’s new Anglicized last name: Mountbatten. Months later, he renounced his right to the Greek and Danish thrones.
