According to Prince William, his grandfather Prince Philip was "the heart of the family."
And the House of Windsor is indeed down a legendary presence since the patriarch's death in April at the age of 99, his long, historic life the subject of the documentary, Prince Philip: The Royal Family Remembers, which premiered in September in the U.K. and is streaming on Discovery+ starting Dec. 16.
More than a dozen family members, including grandsons William and Prince Harry and granddaughter Princess Beatrice, were interviewed for the film, which seeks to offer rare personal insight into what Queen Elizabeth II's husband of 73 years was really like.
While perceptions of Philip's character are all over the map, the former naval officer who ultimately devoted his life to the service of his queen and a country not originally his own was a beloved force to be reckoned with in his family. Matt Smith, who played the youngest incarnation of Philip on Netflix's The Crown, recalled in 2016 the one word William used to describe his grandfather when the actor chatted with the younger royal at a polo match: "Legend."
And while this documentary obviously can't reveal all (The Crown has us convinced that somewhere in a locked box there's a home movie of Philip sleeping in the buff, shot by his camera-wielding wife when they were newlyweds), it's the most intimate tribute to date to the man who was a fixture of life in the United Kingdom for multiple generations.
But whether you consider yourself a devoted royalist or merely know Philip as the world's "most experienced plaque-unveiler," as he jokingly referred to himself late in life, here are 10 fascinating facts about the queen's late consort:
1. Prince Harry told James Corden that Prince Philip generally ended a Zoom call not with any sort of ceremonious farewell or grandfatherly sentiment, but rather he'd just abruptly close the laptop. Which means the nonagenarian had merely taken his old ways to new technology: Biographer Ingrid Seward shared in her 2020 book Prince Philip Revealed that the first time she was ever introduced to the Duke of Edinburgh in 1984, he asked her if she was German and when she replied that she wasn't, he just turned and walked away. Another time, mistaking her for a tabloid reporter at an event, he briefly glanced at her and again turned on his heel. But, she wrote, when they finally did have a chat days later, he was "charm personified."
A friend of Philip's told the writer, "He is not a gentleman, because he doesn't put people at their ease when he can't be bothered, but he plays by the rules with his wife and family."
Harry says in the 2021 documentary Prince Philip: The Royal Family Remembers, "What you see is what you got with my grandfather. The authenticness of him. He was unapologetically him."
2. According to Seward, when the queen hosted U.S. President Donald Trump for tea in July 2018 at Windsor Castle, Philip—who retired from public life in 2017—was 200 miles away at the christening of his 6-month-old godson Inigo Sebastian Mountbatten Hooper, his first cousin three times removed.
3. In addition to having been a great-great-grandchild of Queen Victoria (as is the queen, making her a third cousin of her late husband), Philip's bloodlines connected him to the royal families of Greece, Germany and Russia. Victoria's great love, Prince Albert, was German-born, and they had nine children, including eldest son Prince Albert Edward (the queen's great-grandfather) and daughter Princess Alice (Philip's great-grandmother). Alice's daughter Princess Alix of Hesse and by Rhine married Nicholas II, the last emperor of Russia and a member of the imperial Romanov family. Alix, who became Tsarina Alexandra and was executed along with her husband and children in Russia in 1918, was Philip's great-aunt.
When remains believed to belong to the late tsarina and three of her children were discovered in Russia in the 1990s, Philip provided a blood sample so his DNA could be used as a familial comparison to help positively identify the bones.
4. When he was a child in the 1930s, Philip didn't see his mother, Princess Alice of Batternberg, for five years while she was spending time in sanatoriums in Germany, Switzerland and Italy with a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia. She didn't attend any of her three daughters' weddings to respective German princes but she was present for her son's 1947 nuptials when he wed the future Queen Elizabeth II. Alice (whose formal married name was Princess Andrew of Greece and Denmark) founded an order of Greek Orthodox nuns in 1949 and spent most of the rest of her life ministering to the downtrodden. Her son and daughter-in-law (whose coronation she did attend in 1953) invited her to spend her final years at Buckingham Palace, and that's where she died in 1969 at the age of 84.
"The family broke up," Philip said of that early time. "My mother was ill, my sisters were married and my father was in the south of France. I just had to get on with it. You do. One does."
5. Then-Princess Elizabeth was famously 13 when she first became smitten with 18-year-old cadet Philip during a 1939 visit with her sister and father to Royal Naval College, Dartmouth. But the meant-to-be couple first met when she was 8 and he was 13 at the 1934 wedding of his cousin Princess Marina and her cousin Prince George, who became the Duke and Duchess of Kent. The future queen and Duke of Edinburgh danced together for the first time in 1943, at an intimate party at Marina and George's Coppins estate, in Buckinghamshire.
6. When Philip's father, Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark, died suddenly of a heart attack in December 1944 at the age of 62 while living in Monte Carlo, there was no inheritance for his heirs. Stationed in the Pacific on the HMS Whelp, Philip was unable to attend the funeral. When the war was over (he witnessed the signing of Japan's agreement to surrender on Sept. 2, 1945), Philip went to Monte Carlo to collect some of his dad's possessions, such as his gold signet ring and an ivory-handled shaving brush, from Andrew's mistress, and Andrew was ultimately interred in Greece in 1946.
7. Though there's no doubt that Elizabeth and Philip were a love match, his beloved uncle Dickie Mountbatten (born Prince Louis of Battenberg) really wanted a member of their family to marry a British royal. It was through Dickie's string-pulling that Philip, who was born in Greece and not yet a British citizen at the onset of World War II, was able to continue his career progression in the Royal Navy as fighting began. (However, one of Dickie's main objectives—to have the British royal family become House of Mountbatten—never came to pass. Queen Elizabeth II's grandmother Queen Mary told Winston Churchill that her late husband King George V had intended for them to be the House of Windsor forever after—and the prime minister relayed as much to the new young queen in 1952.)
8. Making £11 a week (which in the 1940s was actually the equivalent of more than $500 today, though not exactly Crown money) on his naval salary, Philip entered his marriage with a few suitcases and the clothes on his back. But his mother provided a most smashing gift for him to offer his bride: A diamond and aquamarine tiara that had been a gift from Alice's late aunt Tsarina Alexandra and Tsar Nicholas II. Diamonds from the tiara were used to make the engagement ring Philip designed with jeweler Philip Antrobus and a diamond bracelet.
9. A heavy smoker like so many military men in wartime, Philip quit cold turkey before his wedding and supposedly never took another puff. He did continue to enjoy a pint of lager with supper, his tastes running to hearty traditional fare like bangers and mash.
He was also into gadgets, designing a hidden cabinet for his bedroom that could be opened with a button and making sure his staff was equipped with the most modern household items, including an electric pants press. In charge of the improvements while Clarence House was being renovated for the newlyweds, Philip also had a cinema installed in the basement of the sprawling manse and kept a mini-fridge in his study so he didn't have to bother a servant whenever he wanted a cold beverage. He made sure there was a radio in every bedroom and, per John Gibson's From Belfast's Sandy Row to Buckingham Palace, a "sleek, white, very futuristic television set" that was a wedding gift from the Mountbattens was set up in the servants' sitting room.
10. From the beginning of their marriage, starting with their first years at Clarence House before she became queen, Elizabeth and Philip had adjoining bedrooms, which was pretty common for fancy people of that era. But they used that shared door on the regular, Philip's valet James MacDonald later revealing that one morning he went into the Duke of Edinburgh's room and his wife was in his bed. She was wearing a silk nightgown and Philip didn't appear to be wearing anything. "He did not go in for pajamas," wrote biographer Philip Eade in Prince Philip: The Turbulent Early Life of the Man Who Married Queen Elizabeth II. On a trip to visit friends in Cornwall, the aide who went with him realized there weren't any pajamas in Philip's suitcase. And when his host Fred Browning offered to loan him a pair, he replied, "Never wear the things."
So The Crown had it right.
Prince Philip: The Royal Family Remembers is streaming on Discovery+