Prince Philip, duke of Edinburgh, earl of Merioneth and Baron Greenwich, was born June 10, 1921, in Greece and died April 9, 2021, in England. He was the husband of Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom.
Philip’s father was Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark, a younger son of King George I of Hellenes . His mother was Princess Alice (1885–1969), who was the eldest daughter of Louis Alexander Mountbatten, 1st marquess of Milford Haven, and Princess Victoria of Hesse and the Rhine, granddaughter of Queen Victoria.
Philip was educated at Gordonstoun School, in Scotland, and at the Royal Naval College in England. From January 1940 to the end of World War II, he served with the Royal Navy in combat in the Mediterranean and the Pacific.
In 1947, Philip became a British subject, renouncing his right to the Greek and Danish thrones. When he married his distant cousin Princess Elizabeth 1947. On the eve of his wedding, he was designated a royal highness and a Knight of the Garter, Baron Greenwich, earl of Merioneth, and duke of Edinburgh.
The couple had four children: Charles Philip Arthur George, was born in 1948. Anne Elizabeth Alice Louise (born 1950), Andrew Albert Christian Edward (born 1960), and Edward Anthony Richard Louis (born 1964).
Philip continued on active service with the Royal Navy, until Elizabeth became queen in 1952, from which time he shared her official and public life. He attended an average of 350 official engagements a year on behalf of the royal household. In 1957 she gave him the dignity of prince of the United Kingdom, and in 1960 his surname was legally combined with the name of her family—as Mountbatten-Windsor. His right-wing views occasionally embarrassed a monarchy trying to put aside its traditional upper-class image.
Philip engaged in a variety of philanthropic endeavours. He served as president of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) from 1981 to 1996, and his International Award program allowed more than six million young adults to engage in community service, leadership development, and physical fitness activities. In 2011, to mark his 90th birthday, Elizabeth conferred on him the title and office of lord high admiral, the titular head of the Royal Navy. In May 2017 it was announced that Philip—who was one of the busiest royals, with more than 22,000 solo appearances over the years—would stop carrying out public engagements in August. His last solo event took place on August 2, 2017.
Prince Philip did not have the title of king because of British royal tradition whereby a man marrying into the royal family does not assume the male version of the title held by his wife. He became duke of Edinburgh prior to his marriage to Elizabeth in 1947, and she designated him a prince in 1957.
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