In April 2021, a coffin made its final journey through the gates of Windsor Castle on the back of a dark bronze green Land Rover. The vehicle had been designed by the man inside it, a project he had begun in 2003 at the age of eighty-two. He had chosen the color. He had shaped the open rear and fitted the rubber stops that would hold his own coffin steady.

It was the last act of a life that had been, from its very beginning, a study in building order out of chaos. The boy who would one day design his own hearse was born on the 10th of June 1921, in a summer villa on the Greek island of Corfu. He was the fifth child and first son of Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark and Princess Alice of Battenberg, a woman born deaf who had taught herself to read lips in several languages. Named Philippos, he held the titles of Prince of Greece and Denmark, a belonging that was already an illusion.

The Greek throne was unstable, and across Europe, royal houses were falling. Within a year and a half, his family would learn how little a title guaranteed. In 1922, following the Greek army’s defeat in Asia Minor, Prince Andrew was brought before a court-martial. Six men tried alongside him were executed by firing squad.

Andrew was spared, banished, and in December 1922, a Royal Navy ship took the family away from Corfu. The prince was eighteen months old. According to a family legend no biographer has ever proven, he was carried aboard the warship in a cot made from a fruit box. Whether true or not, the image became the emblem of his life: a prince of two royal houses sailing away from his birthplace in a crate meant for fruit.

The family settled in Paris as poor relations, living on the charity of richer cousins. There was no money and no home of their own. The boy was sent to school, first in Paris, then to a boarding school in England. In 1930, when he was eight, his mother’s mind began to fail.

She developed a belief that she was the bride of Christ. She was admitted to a sanatorium near Berlin, where a psychiatrist diagnosed schizophrenic paranoia. Sigmund Freud himself was consulted, and his recommendation, recorded by a historian of psychiatry, was to expose her ovaries to X-rays in order to hasten menopause. Alice was later forcibly moved to a sanatorium in Switzerland, where she stayed for about two and a half years.

From the summer of 1932 until the spring of 1937, her son did not see her or hear from her at all. No visits. No letters. The household did not survive her departure.

Prince Andrew went to the south of France and began a new life with a companion. The four sisters married German princes in rapid succession and moved to Germany. The young prince, still at school in England, found himself completely alone. In 1933, he was sent to a school in Germany founded by the educator Kurt Hahn, who believed character was built through hardship, service, and challenge.

Hahn was a German Jew, and after the Nazis arrested him, he fled to Scotland, where he founded a new school, Gordonstoun. The prince followed him. A boy who had already lived in Greece, France, England, and Germany now moved to a fifth country, Scotland. The Spartan creed of cold showers and difficult tests gave him the first fixed structure he had known since Corfu.

He was still at Gordonstoun when the next blow fell. In November 1937, his sister Cecilia was on a plane bound for London with her husband, their two small sons, and her husband’s mother. The plane clipped a factory chimney near Ostend in thick fog and crashed. Everyone on board was killed, including Cecilia’s unborn son.

The sixteen-year-old prince went to Darmstadt for the funeral. His parents were there, too; it was reportedly the only time they met again after their separation. The family gathered, grieved, and scattered. Within a year, an uncle died of cancer.

The losses were complete: a country lost at eighteen months, a home dissolved at eight, a mother taken away, a father gone, four sisters married into another country, and one sister and her children killed in a moment. The boy did what Gordonstoun had trained him to do. He went back to school and got on with it. He rose to become guardian, the school’s title for its head boy.

Kurt Hahn wrote a report on him: “Prince Philip is a born leader, but he will need the exacting demands of a great service to do justice to himself. ” The report also noted that he was, at times, too irritable. The leadership and the irritation were both already there in a teenage boy. The great service was the Royal Navy, and it was waiting for him.

He entered Dartmouth and passed out at the top of his term. In March 1941, off Cape Matapan, he was in charge of the searchlights and was mentioned in dispatches. The war carried him across the world, and in 1945 he was in Tokyo Bay when the Japanese surrender was signed. For the first time, he had a place he had earned on his own merit.

On the 20th of November 1947, he married the heir to the British throne. He was twenty-six. The marriage would last seventy-three years. It was also the end of his naval career.

In February 1952, the king died. The young couple were in Kenya, and it fell to the husband to break the news to his wife. She was now the queen, and he was now without a job. A queen’s husband has no constitutional role.

When an interviewer asked him about it years later, he described the problem plainly. “There was no precedent,” he said. “If I asked somebody, ‘What do you expect me to do? ’ They all looked blank.

”

Then came the humiliation of the family name. His children would be Windsor, not Mountbatten. He was reported to have said, “I am the only man in the country not allowed to give his name to his children. I’m nothing but a bloody amoeba.

” It took until 1960 for an order in council to allow the double name Mountbatten-Windsor. So he did what he had done since Corfu. He refused to sit still. If there was no job, he would make one.

In 1956, he founded the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award. In 1961, he became the first president of the World Wildlife Fund in Britain. He learned to fly, gaining wings from the Royal Air Force, the Royal Navy, and the Army Air Corps, accumulating nearly 6,000 hours in the air across dozens of aircraft types. He also pursued a strange private interest.

From 1952, according to his equerry, an RAF officer named Peter Horsley, copies of RAF reports about flying saucers began arriving at Buckingham Palace with the Duke’s approval. Horsley interviewed credible witnesses, some of them at the palace itself, including an airline captain who had reported a sighting over the North Atlantic and a schoolboy who had photographed what he said was a flying saucer. The Duke later declined an invitation to meet a man who claimed to have met visitors from other worlds, writing on the letter, “Not on your Nelly. ” But he kept reading.

In his final years, his office wrote back to confirm that he would read with close interest a book about a famous incident in Rendlesham Forest. He was ninety-nine years old and still asking what was up there. His library at Buckingham Palace held, by one biographer’s count, more than 11,000 books: volumes on wildlife, horses, poetry, and nearly a thousand on art. He painted in oils under the influence of the painter Edward Seago, who sailed with him aboard the royal yacht Britannia on a voyage to the Antarctic.

The two men painted each other at their easels, and the paintings were later hung side by side in an exhibition. One of his own pictures showed the queen at her breakfast table, a tender portrayal that only a husband could have painted. He could not leave a room alone. He had his study redesigned with automated curtains.

He helped design the interiors of Britannia. After fire tore through Windsor Castle in 1992, he chaired the restoration committee and sketched the design for a new chapel window. He designed jewelry for his wife as anniversary gifts. At Balmoral, he had a trailer built to carry everything a barbecue might need, designed entirely for that purpose.

“Everything had a place,” his daughter said. At the age of fifty, he took up competitive carriage driving, a dangerous sport requiring nerve and precision. He came to it with authority, having served as president of the international equestrian federation from 1964 to 1986, during which time the rules of the sport were created. He went on to win team gold at the World Driving Championship in 1980 and bronze in 1978, 1982, and 1984.

He invented what became known as the bendy pole, a device still in use today. He continued driving until his late nineties, photographed at Windsor at the age of ninety-seven. The directness that made him a fine driver and a clever engineer was the same directness that came out of his mouth in public. The remarks piled up over the decades.

In China in 1986, he told British students that if they stayed much longer they would all be “slitty-eyed. ” In 1995 in Scotland, he asked a driving instructor, “How do you keep the natives off the booze long enough to get them through the test? ” In 2002, he told a policewoman in body armor that she looked like a suicide bomber. Many of these remarks were about race and were said to real people at real public events.

They followed him to the end of his life and complicated every obituary. When challenged, he gave very little ground. “I couldn’t care less,” he said. “Who cares what I think about it?

”

In May 2017, he prepared to step down from public duties. His final solo engagement was on the 2nd of August 2017, bringing the total since 1952 to 22,219. He was ninety-six. He went home and kept driving, kept reading, and kept working on the vehicle he had begun in 2003.

He was planning his own funeral, doing it the way he did everything else: practically, precisely, with his own hands on the design, and with no fuss made about it at all. On the 9th of April 2021, he died at Windsor Castle. He was ninety-nine years old, two months short of his hundredth birthday. The funeral was held on the 17th of April in St George’s Chapel.

The pandemic limited the mourners to thirty. The queen sat alone. His coffin was carried through the castle on the dark bronze green Land Rover he had designed. Late in his life, he had given the closest thing he ever offered to an explanation of his own childhood.

“It’s simply what happened,” he said. “The family broke up. My mother was ill. My sisters were married.

My father was in the south of France. I just had to get on with it. You do. One does.

”

The boy who had left Corfu in a fruit box had made certain that this time, he would leave in a box of his own.