Early in 1981, the Duke of Edinburgh wrote to his eldest son about a nineteen-year-old girl the newspapers would not leave alone. Propose to her or release her, he advised, and decide soon. The son read an order. By one account, he carried that letter in his breast pocket for years and took it out for friends.

Look what they did to me, he would say. I was forced into it. He was thirty-two, a former naval commander, the heir to the throne. His father’s biographer called the letter fair and sensible.

So what had the father done across a lifetime that made his son hear sensible advice as a command? The answer begins in the father’s own boyhood. Prince Philip of Greece and Denmark was born on the 10th of June 1921 on a dining room table in a house on the island of Corfu. Before he was two, his family was carried into exile.

His father settled in Monte Carlo with a mistress. His mother was diagnosed with schizophrenia and placed in a sanatorium in Switzerland. His four older sisters married German princes within eighteen months. The boy was sent away to schools.

He was eight when his mother was committed, and by one account he had no contact with her at all for nearly five years in the mid-1930s. He arrived at Gordonstoun in 1934 as its tenth pupil, and the school rescued him. Founded by Kurt Hahn, a German Jew who had fled the Nazis, it ran on cold showers, sea rescue, and the belief that there is more in a boy than he knows. Philip captained cricket and hockey, finished as head boy, and passed out of Dartmouth as the best cadet of his course.

By 1947, at twenty-six, he had married the heir to the throne. His own summary of those years was famously flat. The family broke up, he said. My mother was ill.

My sisters were married. My father was in the south of France. I just had to get on with it. One does.

His son was a different kind of child. Charles, Prince of Wales, was heir to the throne from the age of three, and biographers described a father determined to toughen up a sensitive boy. Philip gave him a cricket bat on his first birthday and had a repeated mantra: I want Charles to be a man’s man. In 1961 a choice was made against the boy’s grandmother.

The Queen Mother urged Eton, arguing that it was ideal for one of his character and temperament, that it was so important to grow up with people he would be with later in life, and that in Scotland he might feel terribly cut off and lonely, as if at school abroad. The Queen sided with her husband, and Philip was quoted as telling friends, It’ll make a man of him. On the 1st of May 1962, a thirteen-year-old boy was flown north to Scotland, with his father at the controls, and driven the last half mile to Gordonstoun. What came home in the boy’s letters was misery.

I hate coming back here, he wrote in his third term. I hardly get any sleep because I snore and I get hit on the head the whole time. It’s absolute hell. Later: It’s such a hole, this place.

The father who received the letters did not bring the boy back. There is one scene from those years the son never forgot. In November 1965 he played Macbeth in the school play, and his parents were in the audience. All he could hear from the stage, he remembered, was my father going ha ha ha.

Afterward, his father’s verdict was, It sounds like the Goons. Yet a little over a year later, a magazine reported that the boy hero-worshipped his father and had taken up polo to win his approval. Years later, Philip tried to explain the distance between them in a single sentence: He’s a romantic and I’m a pragmatist. That means we do see things differently.

And because I don’t see things as a romantic would, I’m unfeeling. A romantic needs to be told what you think of him. A pragmatist assumes you can work it out. The boy left Gordonstoun in 1967 as its guardian, exactly as his father had been.

The career that followed had already been drawn in his father’s wake. In 1969 he was invested as Prince of Wales at Caernarfon Castle, and in 1970 he came down from Cambridge as the first heir to the throne to take a degree. The plan that carried the day at a palace conference belonged not to Philip but to his uncle, Lord Louis Mountbatten: Trinity College, Dartmouth, then the Royal Navy and a command of his own. It was the father’s life laid out for the son to walk.

And the father’s life at sea had been a hard act to follow. Philip had been mentioned in dispatches at nineteen at the Battle of Cape Matapan and was credited by a shipmate with saving lives off Sicily in 1943. The son’s apprenticeship was dutiful and competent but plainly different. In February 1976 he took command of a minehunter, the Bronington, and left the service that December as a commander, his severance said to have founded the charity that became the Prince’s Trust.

When Charles passed out of Dartmouth in 1971, the only member of his family to attend, according to one account, was Mountbatten. His father, whose college it had been, was not reported there. Letters were how the two men usually spoke. The father wrote; the son read.

And what the son read was not always what the father meant. A naval officer’s note is brisk. It gives the facts, makes a recommendation, and expects it to be carried out. A young man who has spent years hoping for praise reads the same note looking for warmth and finds a set of orders.

In public, the son defended every choice the father made for him, calling Gordonstoun a place that developed his willpower and self-control. In private, the letters home had told another story. Where the father teased, the great-uncle wrote long letters. Mountbatten and Charles called each other honorary grandfather and honorary grandson, and Broadlands became the young prince’s retreat, where he could meet women beyond the prying eyes of the British press.

In a letter of 1974, the old man advised him to sew his wild oats and have as many affairs as he could before settling down, but for a wife to choose a suitable, attractive, and sweet-charactered girl before she met anyone else she might fall for. The father corrected; the great-uncle counselled. Philip regarded the relationship as somewhat self-indulgent on both their parts, and he felt much the same about the Queen Mother’s emotional hold over the young man. Then on the 27th of August 1979, a bomb planted by the Irish Republican Army killed Mountbatten at Mullaghmore in Ireland, along with his grandson Nicholas, a fifteen-year-old boat boy, and an elderly woman.

Life will never be the same now that he has gone, Charles wrote in his diary, and I fear it will take me a very long time to forgive those people. He had lost the one older man in his life who spoke to him in the language he needed. Within eighteen months, the father picked up his pen. The newspapers had found Lady Diana Spencer, and they would not let her go.

She was nineteen and the press was hounding her; the prince had not proposed. Mountbatten’s advice from seven years earlier and the pressure of the living father were for once pointing the same way. Philip worried that Diana’s reputation was being compromised by her visits to Balmoral. The letter itself has never been published, but biographers agree on its substance: Diana’s reputation was on the line, and Charles should either propose to her or release her, and in either event should make a decision shortly.

It is the kind of letter a sensible father might write to any son keeping a young woman waiting. That is how Philip’s defenders read it. His biographer called it very reasonable, fair, sensible. The son read it with other eyes.

Biographers wrote that he chose to interpret the letter as coercive and accusatory, that he received it as an ultimatum. By one account he kept the letter, carried it in his breast pocket, and over the years would take it out and show it to friends, saying, Look what they did to me. I was forced into it. Pamela Hicks, Mountbatten’s daughter, found the letter measured and sensitive.

The trouble, she said, lay with the reader. He wasn’t in love. He wasn’t ready. He saw it as a ghastly threat.

Psychologically, he assumed his father bullied him, so he read it as a bullying letter. Charles proposed at Windsor Castle on the 3rd of February 1981. The engagement was announced on the 24th. In the television interview that day, asked, And in love?

Diana said, Of course. Her fiancé added the line that would follow him for the rest of his life: Whatever in love means. They married at St. Paul’s Cathedral on the 29th of July 1981 and began their honeymoon at Broadlands, in the house of the great-uncle who had advised him to choose a sweet-charactered girl and who had been dead for nearly two years.

The marriage the letter had hastened did not last. In the summer of 1992, with the marriage in pieces, Philip began writing to his daughter-in-law. The letters are some of the most remarkable documents he ever wrote. There were ten in the set, written over four months: six handwritten by Diana, four typed carbon copies of Philip’s replies.

In one he wrote, I can only repeat what I have said before. If invited, I will always do my utmost to help you and Charles to the best of my ability, but I am quite ready to concede that I have no talent as a marriage counselor. Diana wrote back to Dearest P, thanking him for his great understanding and tact. Other lines printed later are harder on the son.

We do not approve of either of you having lovers, one ran, and Charles was silly to risk everything with Camilla for a man in his position. The father who could not find warm words for his son found them on paper for his son’s wife, and in the same correspondence, by these accounts, he called his son silly. The marriage could not be saved. On the 9th of December 1992, the separation was announced in the House of Commons.

The son answered in his father’s own form: a long letter written at a distance and read by the whole country. On the 29th of June 1994, about thirteen million people watched the Prince of Wales answer a question about his marriage on television. Asked whether he had been faithful, he replied, Yes, until it became irretrievably broken down, us both having tried. Then came a biography of 620 pages, written with access to the prince’s journals and letters.

It was devastating about the father. The Duke, it said, had often seemed intent not merely on correcting the prince but even mocking him, that the small boy was frequently brought to tears by the banter to which he was subjected, and that the father’s behavior was inexplicably harsh. Unnamed friends described it as very bullying. The mother did not escape: the Queen was described as detached, having failed to intervene by protective word or gesture.

In Britain, the Daily Mirror called the book a crowning act of treachery. Asked about it that October, Philip gave his answer. I’ve never discussed private matters, he said, and I don’t think the Queen has. There is one sentence from that moment that says a great deal.

If I wasn’t occupying the position I do, he said, I would feel very free to discuss this. He stopped. I’m just here. That’s all there is to it.

The father thought it bloody stupid of his son to air his grievances, and it made him bloody angry. In private he said, by his biographer’s account, I tried to be a good father. We did our best. The divorce was final on the 28th of August 1996, and by one account a letter from the father followed, strongly urging his son, for the good of the monarchy, to give up Camilla Parker Bowles.

The son refused. For once, the son simply said no. He had gone to Gordonstoun. He had gone to sea.

He had proposed when the letter came. Now in his late forties, he kept the woman he wanted. The father was not alone in his view, but the son set the letter aside, as the father had once set aside the letters home from Gordonstoun. In the late summer of 1997, Diana was dead, and on the 6th of September her funeral was held in London.

The question was whether her sons should walk behind the coffin. Philip at first was against it. Then he spoke to his grandson. I’ll walk if you walk, he told William.

And so the old man walked with his son, with Diana’s brother, and with the two boys behind the same coffin. Two months later, at their golden wedding, Philip made a speech, and in it he said something warm about his children in public. I am naturally somewhat biased, he said, but I think our children have done rather well under very difficult and demanding circumstances, and I hope we can be forgiven for feeling proud of them. In May of 2001, a few weeks before Philip turned eighty, the Daily Telegraph printed what his friends said he really thought of his son.

The father, they said, regarded his son as precious, extravagant, and lacking in the dedication and discipline he will need if he is to make a good king. One aide said that Prince Charles was quite frightened of his father, who dominates the family by being bullying and loud, and that Charles dealt with it by disengaging. Another account quoted a royal aide saying Charles had never overcome his father’s hectoring manner. The palace issued a denial.

The Duke said no such thing, a spokeswoman said. These are remarks made by a reporter and have been wrongly attributed to the Duke. They certainly did not reflect the Duke’s view of the Prince of Wales. But the denial did not say the friends had not talked.

Richard Kay wrote that Philip’s decision to permit some of the closest figures of his inner circle to ventilate his firmly held views about his son had reopened the family rift. Then the father did something the record shows him doing almost nowhere else. According to one account, he wrote to his son and then telephoned him to apologize. The son left open whether his father had said the things at all.

He accepted only that if they had been said, they were said by people who did not have genuine access to Philip, and that the remarks were intended to provoke trouble. The apology mended the moment and left the substance untouched. Alongside the cheap shots, something was changing. On the 9th of April 2005, Charles married Camilla in a civil ceremony.

His parents did not attend, but that afternoon they came to the service of prayer and dedication at St. George’s Chapel. At the reception, the Queen spoke of the couple in the language of the racecourse. They have overcome Becher’s Brook and the Chair, she said.

I’m very proud and wish them well. And then my son is home and dry with the woman he loves. A biography of Philip records that the father could rarely resist firing cheap shots at his son’s expense, that he did it all the time, and that it became a habit. Once, unwrapping a pair of driving gloves, he held up one in lilac and joked, I think we’ll give these to the Prince of Wales.

But on the 4th of June 2012, a concert for the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee was held outside Buckingham Palace. Philip was in hospital and could not be there. The Prince of Wales took the stage and spoke of his father. The only sad thing is my father couldn’t be here, he said.

But if we shout loud enough, he might just hear us. The crowd began to chant his name. Philip. Philip.

Philip. On that night, the son praised the father in public, and the father, by his biographer’s account, was deeply touched. The relationship, the biographer wrote, did finally change for the better. On the 2nd of August 2017, a ninety-six-year-old man stood at Buckingham Palace with the Royal Marines and carried out the last public engagement of his working life.

He had carried out 22,219 solo engagements since 1952, sixty-five years at his wife’s side as consort. In February 2021, the father was admitted to hospital, and his son went to see him, staying for about half an hour. The last conversation between them was by telephone the day before the Duke died, and it was about the plans for his hundredth birthday. The father was very deaf by then, so the son had to shout.

We’re talking about your birthday, he called down the line, and whether there’s going to be a reception. The answer came back in the voice of the old naval officer, dry to the last. Well, I’ve got to be alive for it, haven’t I? The son called it a happy memory.

The father died at Windsor Castle on the morning of the 9th of April 2021. He was ninety-nine. It was the sixteenth wedding anniversary of the son and Camilla. Behind the coffin at St.

George’s Chapel, at the head of the walking family, came his eldest son. In a film for the BBC that autumn, the son remembered the father he had loved, a man who adored barbecuing, who was marvelous at arranging silly games, and who had to fall back on himself. After seventy years, the son had found the key to the father. The father had spent a lifetime writing what he could not say, and the son had spent a lifetime reading orders in it.

Whether he still keeps that letter from 1981, the one he carried for years in his breast pocket, no one has ever said.