A royal tribute to longevity and love at first sight

National Post, 16 April 2021

Married 73 years, Queen Elizabeth called Prince Philip her 'strength and stay.'

It was more than 80 years ago that a teenage Princess Elizabeth, future Queen of Canada, first laid eyes on a Greek royal who had ended up at the British naval college.

Prince Philip Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glucksburg was by that time stateless and had been trimmed down to just cadet Philip Mountbatten. He captured her heart then and there. Love at first sight — at least for the future sovereign — would last down the years, sustaining her until she buries her consort on Saturday just four days short of her 95th birthday and a few months short of his 100th.

Her Majesty has preferred to grieve in a discreet manner. She has her faith, her family close by and is comforted by the countless simple, decent people who pray for the repose of the soul of the late Duke of Edinburgh.

But there is a demand for statements, and so the courtiers artfully posted a few lines from her 1997 speech on the occasion of their golden wedding jubilee. She called Prince Philip her “strength and stay” and that was it.

That speech repays a careful reading; it is one of the more important of Elizabeth’s reign. Though it was delivered on the occasion of an already long marriage, it is not about marriage, save for the final paragraph about Philip. It’s about longevity.

The Queen makes a nod toward the march of time — the Beatles and mobile phones make the list — and notes that Tony Blair, then the incumbent prime minister and her 10th, was born in the year that she was crowned.

Having established that relevant datum, Her Majesty then dwells at some length on how democratically-elected politicians and hereditary monarchs both must listen to the people they lead. It was less than three months after Diana, Princess of Wales, and Dodi Fayed had died in the Paris traffic tunnel. Blair, elected prime minister just four months before that, had badgered the Queen to grieve in a more fashionably ostentatious manner. The Queen and the Duke gave in, but by their golden jubilee in November 1997, she was beginning to come round to her original instincts. Later, everyone else would, as recorded cinematically in the 2006 film The Queen.

Thus the Queen noted her (officially, at least) gratitude for the advice of her prime ministers, delivered “without fear or favour.” But sovereigns, too, must sense what their subjects are saying.

“For us, a Royal Family, however, the message is often harder to read, obscured as it can be by deference, rhetoric or the conflicting currents of public opinion,” Elizabeth said. “But read it we must. I have done my best, with Prince Philip’s constant love and help, to interpret it correctly through the years of our marriage and of my reign as your Queen.”

“But read it we must.”

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