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The day Elizabeth of York met Philip, her destiny was not to be queen.
She was 7 years old and the maid of honor to her aunt, Princess Marina of Greece and Denmark, who married the Duke of Kent at Westminster Abbey.
Felipe, 12, attended as the bride's first cousin.
When they met again, five years later, in 1939, everything had changed.
Isabel was heir to the throne, as her father assumed as king after her uncle abdicated the crown.
Felipe was an 18-year-old cadet.
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Prince Philip of Greece played cricket in 1939, while studying at Gordonstoun, a boarding school in Scotland.
"How high you can jump!" Elizabeth told her governess, Marion Crawford, in July 1939 when she saw Philip leaping over the tennis nets at the Royal Naval College in Dartmouth.
(Credit: ullstein bild / Getty Images)
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Princess Elizabeth poses with a pony in Windsor Great Park on her 13th birthday, April 21, 1939. (Credit: Central Press / Getty Images)
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The royal family arrived at the Royal Naval College in Dartmouth in 1939. From left to right are Prince Philip, Princess Margaret, Queen Elizabeth, King George VI and Princess Elizabeth.
The latter would be dazzled by the young Marine cadet during this visit.
(Credit: Keystone / Getty Images)
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During the war, Felipe wrote to Isabel and visited her on Christmas 1943. Isabel was 17 years old and a young woman.
He found her very attractive.
At the end of the war, Felipe courted her with serious intentions and took her to concerts and restaurants or had dinner at the nursery with Princess Margaret (Credit: AFP via Getty Images)
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Prince Felipe is portrayed in December 1946, when he was serving as a lieutenant in the Royal Navy.
(Credit: Press Association / AP)
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Princess Elizabeth, now heir to the throne, in her drawing room at Buckingham Palace in July 1946. (Credit: Lisa Sheridan / Studio Lisa / Getty Images)
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Isabel and Felipe walk together.
She had decided on Felipe since she was 13 years old and the war had only intensified the romance.
(Credit: Popperfoto / Getty Images)
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Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip in their role as bridesmaid and escort at Patricia Mountbatten and Lord Brabourne's wedding in 1946. Philip was the bride's cousin.
(Credit: AP)
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Smiling Elizabeth and her fiancé Philip are pictured together at Buckingham Palace in July 1947, after their engagement was announced.
(Credit: Topical Press Agency / Hulton Archive / Getty Images)
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Elizabeth and Philip walk down the aisle at Westminster Abbey on their wedding day, November 20, 1947. Credit: (Bert Hardy / Picture Post / Hulton Archive / Getty Images)
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Wedding portrait of the royal couple.
(Credit: ullstein bild / Getty Images)
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Isabel and Felipe spend their honeymoon in Malta, where he is assigned to the Royal Navy.
(Credit: Hulton Archive / Getty Images)
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A family portrait in 1951, after Isabel and Felipe had Carlos in 1948 and Ana in 1950. (Credit: Keystone-France / Gamma-Keystone / Getty Images)
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Isabel and Felipe visit a national park in Kenya in February 1952. (Credit: AFP / Getty Images)
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At Treetops Game Lodge, Princess Elizabeth learns of her father's death.
(Credit: NCJ Archive / Mirrorpix / Getty Images)
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Elizabeth, now queen, and Philip return to Britain after leaving their Kenyan tour, following news of the death of King George.
(Credit: AP)
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Queen Elizabeth II and Philip greet the audience from the balcony of Buckingham Palace on her coronation day in June 1953. (Credit: Press Association / AP)
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Prince Philip sits next to the queen as she reads a speech to Canadian members of Parliament in 1957. (Credit: Paul Popper / Popperfoto / Getty Images)
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Ana, Carlos, Eduardo and Andrés pose with their parents at Balmoral Castle in Scotland during the royal family's annual summer vacation.
(Credit: Lichfield / Getty Images)
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Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip during their 1977 visit to New Zealand (Credit: Serge Lemoine / Getty Images)
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Queen Elizabeth II has lunch with Prince Philip and their children, Princess Anne and Prince Charles at Windsor Castle in Berkshire, circa 1969. A camera (left) is positioned to record the BBC documentary Royal Family 'by Richard Cawston.
The production followed the royal family for a year and aired on June 21, 1969. (Credit: Hulton Archive / Getty Images)
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The Queen and Philip fly back from Yorkshire.
This photo was taken during the filming of the documentary.
(Credit: Bettmann Archive / Getty Images)
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Prince Philip walks behind the coffin of Diana, Princess of Wales, alongside Prince William, Earl Spencer, Prince Harry and Prince Charles, in September 1997. (Credit: Anwar Hussein / WireImage / Getty Images
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The Queen and Prince Philip observe some of the many tributes to Diana left by the public.
(Credit: Pool / AP)
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Queen Elizabeth, accompanied by Prince Philip, delivers a speech in both houses of Parliament to commemorate her 60 years on the British throne, in March 2012. (Credit: Kirsty Wigglesworth / Pool / AP)
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Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, hold hands as they attend the state inauguration of Parliament on December 3, 2008 in London, England.
(Credit: Anwar Hussein Collection / Pool / WireImage / Getty Images)
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The Queen and Prince Philip walk back to Buckingham together after hosting a party in June 2011. (Credit: Matt Dunham / WPA Pool / Getty Images)
Editor's Note:
Kate Melby is a UK broadcaster and columnist on culture and politics, and a theater critic for The Guardian newspaper.
He is also completing a doctorate in Renaissance literature.
The opinions expressed in this comment are yours.
See more opinions.
(CNN) -
In 2016, Queen Elizabeth II turned 90 years old.
Devout subjects gathered outside Buckingham Palace to cheer her on.
One told a newspaper that they had come to celebrate "the mother of the nation."
Most British queens have been imagined at some point as national mothers.
The nine children of Queen Victoria were fundamental to her image as the head of an exemplary family.
The tomb of the first Queen Elizabeth, recorded in Westminster Abbey in 1606, describes her as "Mother of her country, protector of religion and all liberal sciences", despite the fact that, as is known, she had no children. own.
The death of Prince Philip, Queen Elizabeth's consort, the complement to this mother, is for many of us here in Britain like a death in the family.
The British newspaper I announced the news this morning as the death of "the nation's paterfamilies."
If you are in America (or anywhere in the world) and you read this, it probably sounds absurd.
Normal Britons will never have the wealth of this family, its tax advantages, its soft political and social influence.
Why do we buy into this medieval rhetoric about being family?
Why do we care?
Have we not outgrown Tudor ideas of holy royalty?
Part of the answer has to do with familiarity.
Prince Philip, often known by his title of Duke of Edinburgh, was the husband of the reigning monarch for almost 70 years;
He is the father, grandfather, and great-grandfather of the next three heirs to the throne.
Only those of his own generation can remember a time when he was not part of the public landscape.
Like the death of Pope John Paul II in 2005 or Elizabeth Taylor in 2011, the death of the queen's consort is one of those great events that disrupts our sense of the continuity of the world.
The world is dark, unstable, and rapidly changing: the loss of the Duke of Edinburgh will feel to many Britons like the end of an old order.
However, there is more here than the mere death of a long-lived celebrity.
In Britain, we have a tendency to project our private family dynamics onto the royal family.
Like our own family, they are born into a relationship with us, unless, like Felipe, they marry young and stay for decades.
We admire the photos of royal children being led by the hand to their first day of school;
we watch their weddings and cry at their funerals.
As our families adjust to an evolving world, so do they, but in public.
It is the price paid for the royal family's greatest trick: appearing normal.
Something normal.
Children born into the royal family are public property from birth.
(When Prince Harry recently complained to Oprah Winfrey that he was "born for office," he was referring more specifically to life as the target of violence, but the constant threat is a direct result of this lifelong scrutiny.)
This is a tangibly different kind of fame from the American politician entering public life as an adult, or even the child movie star.All British children born the same year as a royal baby will celebrate milestones. of his life compared to a little prince or princess.
Even the rest of us broadly identify with the generation of the royal family to which we are closest.
Our lives run parallel to his.
The way we identify with royalty may seem trivial.
When she was young, Queen Elizabeth pinned her hair in her familiar headpiece of loose curls, a style that has hardly changed over the decades.
My own grandmother, a year apart, copied that hairstyle, as do thousands of women across the country.
When I look at Queen Elizabeth, I see my late grandmother staring back at me.
I suspect that I am not alone.
My grandmother's sister, on the other hand, reminded me of Queen Elizabeth's sister, Princess Margaret: they were both glamorous party girls born into a world that expected nothing more than decorous flirtations with men;
both were left unattached when the glamor ran out.
They were women of their time.
Some parallels seem more tangible.
Prince William was born a few years before me.
In the year he married Kate Middleton, my lifelong college boyfriend and I were planning our wedding;
now they argue in public engagements about the same early parenting experiences that mark the lives of nearly all of my friends in their thirties.
We all saw their wedding;
now many of us feel involved in the lives of their children.
We saw them fall in love at university, we cried over their breakup, we were happy about their reunion… why shouldn't we consider their children as our own?
Prince Philip knew how to handle this public scrutiny with pragmatism, despite his visible frustration and some mistakes along the way.
He always made it clear that he understood that there was a price to pay for privilege.
In many cases, he seemed to be the best of the knowers.
But in the royal house, "Phil the Greek," like many other in-laws to royalty, started out as an outsider.
He was the son of a deposed royal family: nephew of the Greek King Constantine I, removed from power for the second time by a military junta in 1922, and not of a ruling royal house.
On Friday morning I heard a BBC report describing that he lacked an institutional education, that he had not gone to Eton or served in an Army Guard regiment.
Instead, he had confined himself to going to Gordonstoun, a "minor" private boarding school, and serving in the Royal Navy, a socially inferior branch of the military.
This is what Sigmund Freud would have called the "narcissism of small differences": the strict vigilance of the closest social markers.
Britain is built on it.
For most of my generation, Prince Philip has always been the old guard, reminding us of everyone's grumpy grandfather.
But as Netflix's "The Crown" recently reminded viewers, upon Felipe's arrival in the royal family, he was seen as a modernizer, introducing television cameras and softening protocol.
Young Isabel was determined to marry him.
His parents and counselors were concerned that this energetic and ambitious young man would quickly tire of being the companion of a female head of household, and they were not entirely wrong.
In this, and in many other things, he was typical of a certain elite male generation.
He personified the glamorous masculinity of the young generation of World War II;
Like many veterans, he struggled to adjust to his own irrelevance in the anticlimax of Britain's postwar gray years.
But he found new energy as part of a generation of civic entrepreneurs, spearheading redevelopment programs and founding the Duke of Edinburgh's Prize, which fostered community service and self-reliance among young people.
He was another royal role model that a generation of men could relate to, good and bad.
Even the marriage of Prince Philip seemed to represent the moral example of a certain aristocratic generation.
His union with Queen Elizabeth was a lifelong devotion.
Recently, "The Crown" caused controversy by dramatizing rumors that Felipe had sought the company of other women, something that he always denied.
But whatever the truth, in many ways it was irrelevant to their mutual commitment.
The two embodied a generation and a set of customs.
Felipe and Isabel made things work and spent 73 years together;
three of her four baby boomers suffered painful divorces.
This is the British family in microcosm.
Prince Philip was the patriarch of this family, our family.
Even in death, he shared a trauma with the rest of the nation.
Isolated first in Windsor Castle and later in hospital, COVID quarantines prevented him from spending his final months surrounded by his extended family.
Maybe that's why the obituaries in Britain will be generous to him.
(The BBC broadcasts were inundated this morning with euphemistic references to his usual "gaffes" - or what the rest of us call expressions of racism).
He endured with the nation.
It was imperfect, but it was family.
Prince Philip Queen Elizabeth II