We received word today that Prince Philip died. And at the ripe age of 99.
While I’m sad that he passed away, and I’m sure his family loved him, I don’t know why this is news.
What did he do, besides being born a prince? I can’t think of anything significant that warrants a world announcement of his death.
He didn’t cure cancer or map the human genome. I researched Prince Philip, and found nothing of note about his life, save being born a prince.
Take a moment and imagine his life; as a prince. How people threw themselves at him.
What things came his way because of his “royalty”?
Philip was born on the Greek island of Corfu on June 10, 1921, to Prince Andrew of Greece and Princess Alice of Battenberg. I bet most people don’t know that the man was Greek.
Philip died with the distinctions of being the longest-serving spouse of a reigning British monarch and oldest ever member of the British royal family.
Yahoo provides a bit more history on Philip and his ultimate union with Elizabeth (his cousin):
His family belonged to the royal Danish House of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glucksburg, which had been installed on the Greek throne at the end of the 19th century. They were exiled from Greece after a revolutionary, anti-monarchy court banished Philip’s father for life. The family fled on a British Royal Navy warship in which the young prince reportedly slept in a crib that had been fashioned from an old orange box.
Philip was later sent to Great Britain, where he attended the Cheam Preparatory and Gordonstoun boarding schools.
The Royal Naval College at Dartmouth, where the prince enrolled at age 17, was the first place he spent significant time with his future wife, a distant cousin who was then 13 years old. (The two had the same great-great-grandparents, Queen Victoria and Prince Albert.) Then-Princess Elizabeth and her family visited the college in 1939 and, shortly after, she and Philip began exchanging letters.
During a visit to Balmoral Castle in Scotland in 1946, they decided to get married. The king agreed to the marriage but asked that they keep the engagement secret until after Elizabeth’s 21st birthday.
Love at first site, I’m sure. Or perhaps, like in many Hollywood movies, a marriage based on treaty and keeping things “royal”.
He lived a truly “privileged” life. That family is the epitome of “privilege”. Based on some archaic notion of royalty.
If we were to do away with something antithetical to human nature, it’s royalty. Why? Because our elitists in America so want what Prince Philip and other so-called royals have. The power to create something from nothing.
The Royal Color Barrier
Look at Meghan Markle, the now non-royal baby-mama of the dude who used to be Prince Harry. Holy Mother of Jackie Robinson, has this chick achieved quite a bit of success in life based on Harry’s non-title. And don’t tell me that Markle was a success before.
She was just a B-list actress for all of a minute by Hollywood standards. Markle was a stone-stepping gold digger who threw herself into the deep end of the royal gene pool. Prince Harry then tossed her a lifeline that turned out to be his royalty.
Still, just the association of “royalty”, the tangential reference to royal, gets the couple millions of dollars. Thus, we can now rescue ethnicity, aka Blackness, from British royal discrimination since Markle muddied the royal genome. In effect, Meghan Markle broke the color barrier for royalty, thus eliminating the institutional racism of British royals, white elitism, and aristocracy.
I’m shocked! No celebration occurred over this. Not even a royal trading card distributed to the masses to signify this “first”.
Back to Philip
The couple married at Westminster Abbey in November 1947. The ceremony was broadcast on the radio to 200 million people.
After his marriage to Elizabeth, Philip resumed his naval career. He had temporarily suspended his career after getting married, in 1949 when he was appointed first lieutenant and second-in-command of a destroyer based in Malta. I’m sure all men who decided to marry at this time were offered this opportunity to “suspend” their careers, then resume. A “matrimony leave” of sorts, right?
Anyway, after a short stint in the Navy, Philip returned to the U.K. in 1951 upon news that the king had grown ill.
“I thought I was going to have a career in the Navy, but it became obvious there was no hope…There was no choice,” Philip later said, according to Vanity Fair. “That’s life. I accepted it. I tried to make the best of it.”
Philip would make the best of becoming a king. Understand…he had no choice!
As time passed, Philip mostly disappeared into the wallpaper, as his defiant wife led the charge. It should be noted that Philip’s children do not carry his family name, but that of their mother. But Philip does have a legacy beyond his children.
Yahoo notes,
In later years, Philip became notorious for his controversial — and often racist — “jokes” to members of the public, like when he told a British student living in China “if you stay here much longer, you will go home with slitty eyes.”
So Philip was a racist by today’s standard. Wait, I stand corrected: a ROYAL racist.
And then there is this final legacy, alluded to in this statement in the article:
The first public acknowledgment of his advancing years came as he was preparing to turn 90, when Buckingham Palace announced that the duke planned to step down as president or patron of more than a dozen organizations ahead of his milestone birthday in 2011.
President or patron of more than a dozen organizations. I’m sure he earned these appointments. At the time of his death, reports are that the Prince is worth about $30 million. A pittance by today’s standard. But that didn’t stop him from living like a KING!
