WhatsApp
HIS HUGE, red hands were what you noticed first. On his wrist the plain watch with its brown leather strap, and the copper bracelet he wore to ease the rheumatism that so plagued his later years. Moulded by his genes and by life, those hands, big as lion-paws, in turn moulded those around him: his wife, their children, her subjects.
Had Philip been the soft-skinned English aristocrat that the king and queen would have preferred for their elder daughter, Elizabeth, it would have been different. But he was an outsider. By the time he married his second cousin once removed, at the age of 26, he had lost virtually all his early roots. His father was dead; his mother, having suffered a mental breakdown, had withdrawn into a religious order. She wore a grey habit to the end of her life. Three of his four sisters married Nazis; none was welcome at the royal wedding in Westminster Abbey just after the end of the war.