The Widow of Windsor
Fakir Syed Aijazuddin
In addition to the twenty-five or so regnal titles affixed already to the name of Queen Elizabeth II, another doleful one can now be attached:
The Widow of Windsor. This was last applied to Queen Victoria (the Queen’s great–great-grandmother), after the death of her husband Prince Albert in December 1861.
Like Prince Philip, Albert too had passed away at Windsor Castle. Unlike Philip, though, Albert as husband of a Queen regnant sought the title of Prince Consort. Prince Albert (a German princeling) desired a degree of equivalence with his younger wife. In Prince Philip’s case, though, he had married Elizabeth before she became Queen and, at her coronation in 1953, he took an oath to be her ‘liegeman of life and limb’. That oath went beyond alliteration. As her companion, Philip saw ‘his job first, second, and last was never to let her down.’