On the 17th of April 2021, a Land Rover painted dark bronze green carried a coffin through Windsor Castle on its open back. The man in the coffin had designed it himself, but he had started work on it in 2003 at the age of 82. By the palace’s account, he chose the color. He shaped the open rear and the rubber stops that would hold his own coffin still.

The world remembered him for his rude remarks. The private record holds stranger things. There was a library of more than 11,000 books by one biographer’s count. There was an easel on the deck of the royal yacht, and there were reports of flying saucers reportedly copied to Buckingham Palace with his approval.

So who was Prince Philip really, and what became of the little boy who, the family story goes, left home in a fruit box? In June 1921, in a summer villa called Mon Repos on the island of Corfu, a fifth child and first son was born. The date was the 10th of June. The house was the summer retreat of the Greek royal family.

The baby was named Philippos, and his title was Prince of Greece and Denmark. He was reportedly born on a table. The accounts disagree about which one. An early biography puts it in the dining room.

Other accounts say the kitchen. Either way, it was a plain start for a prince, and it was the first of many beginnings in his life that took place somewhere that was not quite a home. His father was Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark. His mother was Princess Alice of Battenberg, a woman born deaf who had learned to follow the world by reading lips.

There were already four daughters in the family. Among them, a girl named Cecilia. The new baby was the last child and the only son. The villa itself still stands.

Mon Repos is a museum today. In June 1921, it was simply a summer house on a Greek island, and the newest arrival in it had no idea that he would never really live there. The trouble was the country. The Greek throne was not an old or a settled thing.

In the lifetime of the baby’s father, Greece had sent its kings away twice across Europe. In those same years, crowns were falling one after another. The Romanovs, the Russian imperial family, and relatives of this baby, had been murdered in 1918. A royal birth in 1921 guaranteed nothing at all.

Within a year and a half, the family would learn exactly how little it guaranteed. The baby’s own titles told the story of that world. He was a prince of Greece and a prince of Denmark, and his mother was a Battenberg. He belonged to several royal houses at once, and as it would turn out, to no country in particular.

He was born, in other words, into a whole class of people who were about to lose their place in the world. Kings, grand dukes, and princes across Europe were becoming exiles, pensioners, and house guests of their richer cousins. The baby in the villa on Corfu was not unlucky in some private personal way. He belonged to a caste that history was turning into refugees, and he would be one of them before he was two.

In 1922 came the disaster in Asia Minor, the defeat of the Greek army. Somebody had to answer for it. Prince Andrew was brought before a court martial. He knew what that reckoning had already done to others.

Six of the men tried alongside him were taken out and shot by a firing squad. Andrew was spared. He was banished. The record agrees that British intervention saved him from the firing squad.

In December 1922, a Royal Navy ship, His Majesty’s Ship Calypso, came to Corfu and took the family away. They were royalty. From that day, they were also refugees. This is where the story of the box begins.

Every biographer of the prince repeats it, and none of them can prove it. The baby, about eighteen months old, is said to have been carried aboard the warship in a cot made from a fruit box. Some tellings call it an orange box. It may be exactly true.

It may be a family story that grew a little with every telling. Either way, it became the emblem of the whole life that followed. A prince of two royal houses, the legend says, sailed away from his birthplace in a wooden crate meant for fruit. The family landed in France, and they did not land on their feet.

They settled at Saint-Cloud on the edge of Paris, living on the charity of richer relatives. There was no money to speak of. The children grew up as poor relations in a world of grand ones, surrounded by cousins who still had what this family had lost. It was a strange kind of royalty, all title and no territory.

A family that still used the forms of a court with nothing behind them. The boy would carry that contradiction all his life. A prince by birth who had to earn every real thing he ever had. He went to school in Paris at a school run by Americans.

He was a prince of Greece and Denmark, growing up in France on other people’s money. What he learned there without anybody needing to teach it was a habit that never left him. When the ground moves under you, you get up and you get on without waiting for anyone to explain it. Years later, he would put it in almost exactly those words, and it would become the closest thing he ever gave to an explanation of his own life.

For a few years, that habit was hardly needed. The household was crowded with sisters, and the boy at the bottom of it was the only son. It was not a rich childhood, and it was not a settled one, but for a little while, it was a whole one. That was the thing about the box, if the story is true.

It got him out. It carried him off an island and across a sea to safety, and then it was thrown away, and nobody thought about it again for years. The family was safe now. They had a roof, even if it was borrowed, and they had each other.

Nobody in that house could have guessed what would break next. A throne had gone already, and a fortune and a country. Next, it would be his mother’s mind. Princess Alice had been born deaf, and she had learned to read the lips of people speaking in several languages.

It was a remarkable thing for a girl of her time to master. She had married into a royal house that then lost its kingdom, and now she was the mother of a family with no fixed place in the world. Something in her had changed. By early 1930, her symptoms included a belief that she was the bride of Christ.

Her family did not know what to do. In early February 1930, she was admitted to a sanatorium at Tegel near Berlin. The doctor there was a psychiatrist named Ernst Simmel. He examined her and gave his diagnosis in the language of the day.

He called it schizophrenic paranoia. Then the most famous name in the field was consulted. Sigmund Freud himself gave an opinion on the princess. A modern historian of psychiatry records what Freud recommended.

He advised an exposure of her gonads to X-rays in order to bring on the menopause sooner. A British psychology journal describing the same advice puts it more bluntly. It speaks of x-raying her ovaries. It was medicine as 1930 understood it.

It is hard now to read those clinical words without flinching. A deaf woman who believed she was the bride of Christ was diagnosed by one psychiatrist, and the most famous doctor in Europe advised on what should be done to her body. On the 2nd of May 1930, Alice was moved again. She was taken by force to the Bellevue Sanatorium at Kreuzlingen in Switzerland, run by the psychiatrist Ludwig Binswanger.

She stayed there for about two and a half years. Her son was not quite nine years old when she was taken to Kreuzlingen. A mother who could not hear him and who had learned to understand the world by watching faces was now somewhere he could not see her face at all. What a boy of that age was told nobody now knows.

What the record shows is the length of the silence that followed. From the summer of 1932 until the spring of 1937, according to one account of those years, he did not see his mother, and he did not hear from her. No visits, no letters, no word at all. Count it the way a child would count it.

He was eight when the doctors first took her to Tegel. He was eleven when the last word stopped. Five springs went by without her, from 1932 to 1937, through the years when a boy becomes a young man. Add the two and a half years at Kreuzlingen and the months at Tegel before that, and the mother who had once been the center of his small world was missing for most of his childhood.

By the time she came back into his life, he was nearly sixteen. The household did not survive her going. There was no one left to hold it together, and the family home simply came apart. His father went to the south of France.

One account of Prince Andrew’s later life places him in a small apartment or in hotel rooms or on board a yacht with a companion, the Countess Andrée de La Bigne. A Canadian broadcaster’s history of the family published after the Duke’s death calls her plainly his mistress. Either way, the father had a new life on the Riviera, and there was no place in it for a schoolboy. The schoolboy went to England.

In 1930, the same year his mother was taken, he started at Cheam, an English boarding school for young boys. For most boys at a school like that, the holidays meant going home. For this one, there was no home left to go back to. The house had gone.

The parents had gone. The sisters were growing up and moving on. Long afterward, a television interviewer asked him about that wandering childhood. His answer gave almost nothing away.

“Well, I just lived my life,” he said. “I haven’t been trying to psychoanalyze myself all the time. ” It was a deflection, and a revealing one. He did not deny that the childhood had been hard.

He simply refused to make it the subject. A child who learns that the adults in his life can vanish without warning learns too not to look at it for very long. He published nothing about how he felt about his mother in those years. No diary of his has been published, and his private letters remain almost all unpublished.

What survives instead is the shape of his later life, which tells its own story. He would grow into a man who could not bear to be idle, who could not bear to depend on anyone, and who could not bear to talk about any of it. He would also grow into a man who built things. He would build roles where there were none, rooms laid out to his own plan, machines that did exactly what he wanted them to do.

A boy whose world had been taken apart by doctors, courts, and governments, none of them asking his opinion, would spend his adult life making sure that whatever he could control was made to his own design. As for Alice, her story did not end in that Swiss sanatorium. Years later, she founded a nursing order and wore its gray habit. During the Second World War in occupied Athens, she sheltered a Jewish family.

She was later honored as one of the Righteous Among the Nations, the title given to those who risked their lives to save Jews. In her final years, she lived at Buckingham Palace under her son’s roof, and she died there in 1969. But all that was decades away. In the early 1930s, her son had a mother in an asylum and a father on a yacht.

He still had his four sisters. They were about to leave, too. Within about a year and a half, all four of his sisters were married, and every one of them married a German prince. The weddings came in 1930 and 1931, one after another.

With their mother gone and their father absent, there was little to keep the young women in France. They made their new homes in Germany, and the youngest of the family, a schoolboy in England, found that the last of his household had moved to another country. For a while, Germany became the nearest thing he had to a family. In 1933, he was sent to school there, to Salem.

The school had been founded by an educator named Kurt Hahn, a man with fierce ideas about how to build character in the young. Hahn believed that a boy should be tested by hardship, by service, and by challenge until he found out what he was made of. Hahn was also a German Jew, and Germany in 1933 was no longer safe for him. The Nazis arrested him.

Hahn left for Scotland, and there in the county of Moray he founded his school again. He called it Gordonstoun. The year was 1934. The prince had lasted two terms at Salem.

Now he followed Hahn north. A schoolboy who had already lived in Greece, France, England, and Germany now moved to a fifth country, Scotland, in pursuit of the one adult whose ideas seemed to make sense of his life. Gordonstoun ran on Hahn’s creed, and the creed was Spartan. Cold showers, seamanship, service, challenge.

It was the kind of school that broke some boys and made others. It made this one. For a boy with no house, no parents near him, and no country of his own, a school with clear rules and hard tests was the first fixed structure he had known since Corfu. It also gave him a creed he could carry.

Britain in those years prized a particular kind of manliness, the ideal later called the stiff upper lip. You did not complain. You did not dwell on your feelings. You did the job in front of you and you did it well.

For this boy, it was simply a description of how he had already been living since the age of eight. He was still at Gordonstoun when the next blow fell. It came from the sky, and it came without any warning at all. In November 1937, his sister Cecilia was on a plane bound for London for a family wedding.

With her were her husband, Georg Donatus, their two small sons, Ludwig and Alexander, and her husband’s mother, the Dowager Grand Duchess Eleanor. Cecilia was pregnant. On the 16th of November, near Ostend in Belgium, in thick fog, the plane clipped a factory chimney and came down. Everyone on board was killed.

Among the wreckage, the searchers found the remains of Cecilia’s unborn son. Eleven people died that day. In the space of a moment, a whole branch of the family was gone. There was a sister, a brother-in-law, two little boys, a grandmother, and a son who was never born.

Their brother was a sixteen-year-old schoolboy. He had spent his earliest years in a house full of sisters, and she had been one of them. Now she was gone, and so were the two small nephews he would never see grow up. He went to Darmstadt for the funeral.

His parents were there, too. One account of their marriage records that Andrew and Alice met only once more after their separation, and that it was here at their daughter’s funeral. Whatever passed between them, the family did not mend. It gathered, it grieved, and it scattered again.

What a sixteen-year-old who had just buried his sister needed, the record does not say. The losses did not stop. In 1938, his uncle George, the Marquess of Milford Haven, died of cancer of the bone marrow, by one biographer’s account. Another door in the boy’s small world had closed by the age of seventeen.

Then the count was complete. A country lost at eighteen months. A home dissolved at eight. A mother taken to Tegel and then to Kreuzlingen.

A father gone to the Riviera. Four sisters married into another country. One sister, her husband, two nephews, and her mother-in-law killed in the fog at Ostend. An uncle dead of cancer within the year.

Most people would be lucky to meet that much loss in a lifetime. He had met it before he left school. What does a boy do with that much loss? This one did what Gordonstoun had trained him to do.

He went back to school and got on with it. He took on everything the place could offer, and he rose to become guardian, the school’s title for its head boy, the pupil trusted to run its daily life. Kurt Hahn wrote a report on him, and in 1957 an American magazine printed its words for the world to read. “Prince Philip is a born leader,” Hahn wrote, “but he will need the exacting demands of a great service to do justice to himself.

His best is outstanding. His second best is not good enough. ” A later magazine account drawn from papers held at Gordonstoun adds one more line about the boy. At times he was too irritable.

A born leader. Too irritable. In a few short lines a headmaster had described the man the whole world would come to know. The leadership the world would see in uniform and later in hundreds of organizations he would run with ferocious energy.

The irritation it would hear again and again in the things he said out loud in public. Both were already there in a teenage boy at a Scottish school, and both had been sharpened by everything that had been taken from him. The boy who had lost a country, a home, a mother, and a sister had found the one place he trusted, a hard school by a cold sea. And he had been told exactly what he needed next.

He needed a great service. The Royal Navy was waiting for him. In March 1941, off Cape Matapan, a young naval officer was in charge of the searchlights. He was nineteen.

He had entered Dartmouth in 1939 and passed out at the top of his term. Kurt Hahn had said he needed the exacting demands of a great service, and the Royal Navy in wartime was exactly that. At Matapan, he controlled the searchlights, and he was mentioned in dispatches, the formal record of an officer whose conduct in action has been singled out. The war carried him across the world.

In 1945, he was in Tokyo Bay when the Japanese surrender was signed. He was a young officer with a fine record and a future of his own making. Mentioned in dispatches at nineteen, top of his term at Dartmouth, present at the surrender in Tokyo Bay. For the first time in his life, he had a place that he had earned, a profession that did not depend on anybody’s charity, and a ladder he could climb on merit alone.

On the 20th of November 1947, he married the heir to the British throne. He was twenty-six. It was a marriage that would last seventy-three years, until the day he died. It was also the beginning of the end of the one thing he had built for himself.

In those early years of marriage, he also kept a circle of friends of his own in London. Every week on Thursdays, a group of men met for lunch on the second floor of Wheelers at 19 to 21 Old Compton Street in Soho. They called themselves the Thursday Club. According to Larry Adler, it had been started around 1947 by the royal photographer Baron Nahum, with the editors Arthur Christiansen and Frank Owen, the actor James Robertson Justice, and others.

The young husband of the heir was reported to be a member, and so was his private secretary Michael Parker. Other names linked to the club over the years included the actors David Niven and Peter Ustinov. For a young man who had spent his childhood as a guest in other people’s houses, it was a table of his own choosing. Rumors about what went on there were never proven, and Parker dismissed them flatly.

“We enjoyed fun and going around with people who knew what was going on,” he said. “The Thursday Club was a great sounding board, and the idea that it was a drunken orgy was absolute rubbish. ”

Then in February 1952, it all stopped. On the 6th of February, 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. In the same moment, his naval career was over. He was thirty years old.

Everything he had earned on his own merit in the Navy was set aside in a single morning, and nobody asked him whether he minded. What was he supposed to do now? There was no answer because there was no job. A queen’s husband in Britain has no constitutional role at all.

He is not a king. When an interviewer asked him about it many years later, he described the problem with perfect clarity. “There was no precedent,” he said. “If I asked somebody, ‘What do you expect me to do?

’ They all looked blank. ” It is a remarkable admission, and he made it without self-pity. He was simply describing the facts. He had been handed a life with no instructions in a palace full of people who were used to precedent for everything, and on the one question that mattered most to him, they had nothing to offer.

Then came the humiliation. The question arose of what the royal family would be called, and the answer was Windsor. His children would be Windsor, not Mountbatten. To a proud man who had already given up his career, it felt like being erased.

His complaint to friends has been repeated by biographers ever since. “I am the only man in the country not allowed to give his name to his children,” he is reported to have said. “I’m nothing but a bloody amoeba. ” It took until 1960 for that to be softened.

By an order in council, the queen declared that those of her descendants who needed a surname would carry the double name Mountbatten-Windsor. It was a compromise, and it came eight years late. But the young man in Kenya in 1952 had no way of knowing it would ever come at all. So he did what he had done at every turn since Corfu.

He refused to sit still. If there was no job, he would make one. If there was no structure, he would build it. He built it on a scale few people noticed at the time.

In 1956, he founded the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award, a program of challenges for young people, the kind of testing that had once given a homeless schoolboy something to hold on to. In 1961, he became the first president of the World Wildlife Fund in Britain. In 1966, he joined Dean Robin Woods in founding St. George’s House at Windsor, a place for consultation and debate.

Over the years, he would hold more than 780 patronages. He also learned to fly. He gained his wings from the Royal Air Force in May 1953. The Royal Navy gave him its wings in January 1956.

He held a private pilot’s license from 1959, and the Army Air Corps added its wings in 1965. For a man who had been grounded in every other sense, the cockpit was one place where he was still in command. From the outside, it looked like a busy, slightly restless husband finding ways to fill his days. But it was something more particular than that.

A man with no defined job was turning his curiosity loose on whatever caught his interest. And in the early 1950s, one of the things that caught his interest was in the sky. It was there, in those first years of the new reign, that he gave one of his equerries, the officers who attended him in public, a very strange job indeed. From 1952, by one account, copies of RAF reports about flying saucers began arriving at Buckingham Palace.

The account comes from the man who was there to receive them. His name was Peter Horsley, an officer of the Royal Air Force who served as equerry to the Duke of Edinburgh in the early 1950s. The sources disagree slightly about his exact dates, one placing him in the post from 1952 to 1955, another from 1953 to 1956. Either way, he was at the Duke’s side through the first years of the new reign.

And according to his own later testimony given to the researcher David Clarke in the year 2000, he was handed a very unusual assignment. The early 1950s were the years of the flying saucer. The term had taken off after an American named Kenneth Arnold reported a sighting in the United States in 1947. And by the early 1950s, British aircrew were filing reports of their own.

For the Air Force, in the years of the Cold War, an unidentified return on a radar screen was not a joke. Someone had to find out. For the men who flew the aircraft, these were serious reports filed by trained aircrew in the official way about things they had seen with their own eyes and could not name. What nobody outside a very small circle knew was that the palace was taking an interest, too.

According to Horsley, with the Duke’s approval, the RAF’s Fighter Command began sending copies of its aircrew reports of flying saucers to Buckingham Palace. The reports of strange objects in British skies were being copied to the home of the new queen and her husband, himself a pilot. Horsley was allowed to go further on conditions he later remembered precisely. In his words, “The prince agreed that I could investigate the more credible reports, provided I kept it all in perspective, and did not involve his office in any kind of publicity or sponsorship.

” It was a very characteristic arrangement. Be curious, be serious, and keep it quiet. So Horsley began to interview witnesses, and some of them, astonishingly, he interviewed at the palace itself. One was James Howard, a captain with the British airline BOAC, who in June 1954 had reported a strange sighting over the North Atlantic.

Another was a schoolboy, Stephen Darbyshire, who in February 1954 had taken photographs of what he said was a flying saucer at Coniston. Horsley’s reason for bringing them to Buckingham Palace was simple. He wanted to put them on the spot. A person who would happily tell a tall tale in a pub might think twice about telling it in a royal palace.

Picture the schoolboy from Coniston, photographs in hand, being shown into the home of the queen to explain to an Air Force officer exactly what he had photographed. There was a memo, too. In 1954, Horsley wrote a confidential report to the Duke about a sighting by an RAF pilot named James Salandin. The memo is pictured in Clarke’s account, a paper from an equerry to a prince about an object seen in British skies by an RAF pilot.

The Duke was not alone in his family in this interest. According to the editor of the magazine Flying Saucer Review, a man named Gordon Creighton, copies had been sent to Buckingham Palace ever since the magazine began in 1955. Both the Duke and his uncle, Lord Mountbatten, were said to be subscribers. The biographer Philip Eade also describes the Duke as a longtime reader of the magazine.

Mountbatten had his own brush with the subject. In February 1955, he took down an account of a strange craft seen over his estate at Broadlands. Set the dates side by side, and the picture is remarkable. Fighter Command reports from 1952.

The Duke’s own RAF wings in 1953. The schoolboy’s photographs at Coniston in February 1954. The airline captain’s sighting in June 1954. The Salandin memo that same year.

The first issue of Flying Saucer Review in 1955, and a copy for the palace from the start. For three or four years at the beginning of his wife’s reign, the most powerless man at court was quietly backing an inquiry into the skies run by his own equerry. What did he actually believe? Horsley tried to answer that years later.

“Prince Philip was open to the immense possibilities of new technology leading to space exploration,” he said, “while at the same time not discounting that other older civilizations in the universe might already have done so. ” It is a careful sentence. It describes a man who looked at the sky the way a pilot does, wanting the evidence before the verdict. The Duke had grown up in a world where great certainties had fallen apart.

Thrones that had stood for generations had gone in a season. A mother had been diagnosed by psychiatrists with Freud himself consulted. A sister had been killed by fog and a factory chimney. A boy who had lived through all that had little reason to trust anybody who told him that a question was settled.

If pilots who flew for a living said they had seen something they could not explain, he wanted to hear them out. It also describes a temperament. This was the same man who would later say he had never been noticeably reticent about subjects he knew nothing about. He did not mind being thought odd.

He had spent his whole childhood being the odd one out, the boy with no country and no home, and he had long since stopped caring whether other people approved of his interests. The public knew nothing about any of it. There were no announcements, no statements, no photographs of the Duke studying flying saucer reports at his desk. Horsley had promised there would be no publicity, and for decades there was none.

The story came out only much later in Horsley’s own memoir and in the work of researchers who went looking for it. For a man the press would soon call impatient, it was a strikingly patient interest kept up over years with no audience and no reward. Nobody was going to praise him for it. Most people, had they known, would have laughed.

He kept at it anyway because he wanted to know. Curiosity for him did not need permission, and it certainly did not need applause. And by Horsley’s own telling, the strangest part of it was still to come. In his memoir, published more than forty years after the event, Peter Horsley told the story of a visit to a flat in West London.

The book was called Sounds from Another Room, and it appeared in the late 1990s. The sources disagree about whether it was published in 1997 or 1998. In it, Horsley described the strangest encounter of his career. It is his story and only his, told by a senior officer of the Royal Air Force who had nothing obvious to gain from being laughed at.

He waited until the events were more than forty years old before he set it down in print. And even then, he made no great claims for it. He simply told what he said had happened. It belongs firmly to the realm of legend rather than history.

But it is the story he chose to tell. And the biographer Philip Eade puts it this way: “Prince Philip’s equerry,” Eade writes, “once went off at the prince’s bidding to meet an extraterrestrial humanoid at a house in Ealing. ” Horsley’s own account places the meeting in a flat in West London. The man he met there was called Mr.

Janus. What struck Horsley most, he later wrote, was the man’s extraordinary ability to read my thoughts. And Mr. Janus, by Horsley’s account, had something to say about the Duke.

“Prince Philip is a man of great vision,” he told Horsley, “which will prove of great importance in future galactic harmony. ” Horsley went back to the address sometime later. By his account, there was no sign of life in it. Speaking to a newspaper in 1997, Horsley summed up the whole episode in two sentences.

“We talked for hours about traveling in space and time,” he said. “I never saw him again. ”

It is easy to smile at the tale, and many people have: a royal equerry sitting for hours with a man who claimed to read his mind and who spoke of galactic harmony. For anyone trying to understand the Duke, the point of the story is simply that the prince had sent his man to find out whatever Mr.

Janus really was. He did not dismiss the question before he had heard the answer. Whatever happened in that flat, if anything happened at all, it would be a mistake to think he would believe anything he was told. A few years later, a very different kind of invitation arrived, and his response was swift.

In 1959, Desmond Leslie wrote to invite the Duke to meet George Adamski, one of the so-called contactees, people who claimed to have met visitors from other worlds. The Duke’s reply, according to Horsley, was written on the letter in four words: “Not on your Nelly. ” To General Browning, he added a more measured verdict. “He may not be a crank,” the Duke said, “but he’s a bit too fanciful for me.

” Horsley thought Leslie was probably sincere, but gullible. “Prince Philip so far has been the most interested,” Adamski claimed in May 1959. The record suggests the interest was real, but the welcome was not. The Duke would read the reports.

He would hear the witnesses. He would look at the evidence. He would not sit down with a man who said he had met visitors from space. His uncle drifted away from the subject.

Mountbatten, by the biographer’s account, gradually lost interest after 1962 when Solly Zuckerman dismissed the whole business. The nephew did not lose interest. He kept reading. He also kept corresponding.

He exchanged letters with Timothy Good, a writer on unidentified flying objects. And in one of them, by Eade’s account, he wrote that there are many reasons to believe that extraterrestrials exist because there is so much evidence from reliable witnesses. That letter has not been published in full, and the quotation comes to us at second hand through the biographer. It should be read with that caution.

But if it is accurate, it is a striking thing for the husband of the queen to have put on paper. The books kept coming, too. When someone sent him a copy of Haunted Skies, an encyclopedia of British sightings, his office wrote back to say that the Duke would add this copy to his collection and that it would make a most welcome addition to his library. In the summer of 2020, when he was ninety-nine years old and less than a year from his death, he was sent a book about the Rendlesham Forest incident.

His secretary replied that it would be read with close interest. Ninety-nine years old and still reading about lights in the sky. The boy who had been carried off Corfu had grown into a man who never stopped asking what was up there. And yet almost nothing of this reached the public.

When David Clarke wrote to the Duke’s private secretary in 2017 asking about Horsley’s papers, which Horsley had said were kept in the royal archives, the answer was polite and final. Extensive searches, the office replied, had not yielded any papers that would help. If the files ever existed, they have never been found. What remains is a memo published by a researcher, the recollections of one equerry, a magazine subscription, a few polite letters from the Duke’s office, and the word of a biographer.

It is enough to show the interest. It is not enough to show what he truly concluded. And perhaps he preferred it that way. So the Duke’s flying saucers stayed private.

The world never knew that the man it laughed at for his gaffes was in his spare hours quietly reading about the possibility of other civilizations among the stars. That book about Rendlesham went into a library at Buckingham Palace that by one count held more than 11,000 volumes, and the rest of that library was just as surprising. To the public, the Duke of Edinburgh was a man of action. He was the naval officer, the polo player, the brisk figure walking two paces behind the queen and saying the wrong thing to strangers.

Nobody imagined him curled up with a book, but the private man was a reader, and the people who studied his life were struck by it. The biographer Sally Bedell Smith set out what the shelves contained. The Buckingham Palace Library, she wrote, contained more than 11,000 books. Predictably, there were over a thousand volumes on wildlife and conservation and some six hundred on equestrian pursuits.

But there were also more than two hundred books of poetry, and perhaps most surprisingly, nearly a thousand books on art. Ingrid Seward put the number higher still, at 13,000, almost all of them non-fiction. A magazine profile published just after his death gave the same figure and added a specialist collection of some 2,000 books on wildlife. The accounts differ on the totals.

They agree on the man. Seward said that he loved biography more than anything and that he liked poetry, things like Tennyson. There is something telling in that taste. This was the man who told an interviewer that he had never tried to psychoanalyze himself.

He would not sit and examine his own life, but he would read by the hundred the lives of other people set down by somebody else at a safe distance. And he would read poetry, the most private and emotional kind of writing there is, in a library where nobody was watching. Picture the shelves. More than 11,000 volumes by the lowest count, 13,000 by the highest, a thousand on wildlife, or 2,000 by another reckoning, six hundred on horses, more than two hundred of poetry, nearly a thousand on art.

Somewhere among them, the encyclopedia of British sightings that his office had promised would be a most welcome addition. And on another shelf, the fourteen books he wrote himself. It is a library that does not fit the caricature at all. The man who seemed to the newspapers to have no inner life had built himself a room full of other people’s inner lives, of poems and biographies and paintings collected over decades.

And he did not only look at pictures. He made them. According to one newspaper, the Duke took up painting in oils in the 1950s under the influence of the painter Edward Seago. In 1956 and 1957, Seago sailed with the Duke aboard the royal yacht Britannia on the long voyage to the Antarctic.

On that voyage, by one newspaper account, the two men painted each other as they worked at their easels. Years later, the two pictures were hung side by side. Philip’s portrait of Seago at his easel on Britannia and Seago’s portrait of Philip painting were shown together in an exhibition called Portrait of the Artist at the Queen’s Gallery in 2016. The friendship lasted for twenty-one years.

Seago came to stay at Sandringham each January and July, two visits a year, regular as the seasons. And according to the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge, the Duke himself, a keen artist, often watched Seago painting and sketching. What did his own pictures look like? Sir Hugh Casson gave an answer that sounds like a description of the man himself.

“Totally direct,” Casson said. “No hanging about, strong colors, vigorous brush strokes. ” The man painted the way he spoke. Some of the pictures were tender.

One shows his wife at the breakfast table. Even its date is uncertain. One account gives 1957 and another 1965. Robert Lacey called it a tender portrayal, impressionistic in style.

It is a picture of a queen that only her husband could have painted, because only her husband ever saw her like that. The cameras caught him walking two paces behind her at ceremonies without number. The painting shows what they never caught. It shows a husband at the breakfast table looking at his wife and wanting to keep the moment.

Others were of the places where the family went to escape. Two oils of a cottage at Balmoral, the estate in Scotland, were reported to hang in the Queen’s private rooms at Sandringham. Hugo Vickers saw the painting as a release. “Prince Philip uses painting a bit like Churchill did,” he said, “to relax.

He was modest about it and private. ” The portrait painter Jonathan Yeo once asked the Duke whether he painted. The answer came back with something close to pleasure. “Oh yes,” the Duke said.

“I did used to, and I’m glad you asked me because I’ve actually taken it up again recently. ” Yeo later judged the pictures to be the work of a good amateur painter. The Royal Collection has shown his work in public more than once. An exhibition to celebrate his ninetieth birthday was held in 2011.

After his death, a display called Prince Philip: A Celebration opened at Windsor Castle. And among the objects on show was one of his own paintings of Windsor Castle. So here was a second private life hidden in plain sight. The man who was said to be blunt, impatient, and allergic to anything delicate spent decades in front of an easel, painting his wife at breakfast and a cottage at Balmoral, and kept a library in which nearly a thousand books were about art.

None of it was a secret exactly. Nobody had ever thought to ask. What linked the books and the paintings and the flying saucers was the same restless mind. It looked at the world and wanted to understand how it was made.

And the same eye that framed a painting looked at every room and every machine around him and saw how it could be made better. In 1956, he had his study at Buckingham Palace redesigned with a television, a tape deck, and curtains that opened by themselves. The designer was Hugh Casson, the same man who would later describe his paintings. According to the Royal Collection, the new study was fitted with a modern television set, a tape deck, a turntable and radio, and automated curtains.

In a palace of old rooms and old habits, the queen’s husband had installed automated curtains. It was a small thing. It said a great deal about a man who liked every room he worked in to answer to his hand and who saw no reason why a palace should be any different. He had a hand in bigger designs, too.

The royal yacht Britannia had its interiors designed with his help. The official royal record says it plainly: the Duke helped to design the interior of the yacht. On the ship where he painted Seago and Seago painted him, the rooms themselves bore his mark. That yacht carried him to the Antarctic with Seago.

It gave him the seabirds he photographed for his own book. It was the one royal home that belonged to the sea, the element that had carried him off Corfu as a baby and given him his career as a young man. And the rooms in which he sat on those long voyages were rooms he had helped to plan. In 1992, fire tore through Windsor Castle.

In the rebuilding that followed, the Duke chaired the committee that oversaw the restoration. When a new window was made for the private chapel, he did not leave the design to others. The Royal Collection still holds his own sketch outline showing his ideas for the window. The glass was made by the artist Joseph Nuttgens and installed in 1997.

The window began as the Duke’s own sketch. He designed for his wife as well. Among the objects shown after his death were pieces of jewelry he had designed for the queen, reportedly as anniversary gifts. A man who was supposed to be gruff and unsentimental had sat down and drawn jewels for the woman he married.

They were married for seventy-three years. Anniversaries came and went by the dozen, and on some of them, by this account, the gift was a piece he had designed himself. It was the same instinct that drew the chapel window and the barbecue trailer, turned toward the one person who had given him the fixed point that his childhood never had. And then there was the barbecue.

At Balmoral, the family’s estate in Scotland, there were barbecues, and the Duke did not simply light a fire. He had a trailer built to carry everything a barbecue might need. His daughter, Princess Anne, described it after his death with evident affection. “The trailer was designed specifically for that role,” she said.

“It was actually made by the engineer at Sandringham, but it was designed entirely for that purpose. And everything had a place. ” The writer Robert Hardman called it a towable barbecue-cum-picnic contraption, and it was also something more. It was a portrait of the man in a single object.

Nothing was left to chance, and nothing depended on anybody else remembering where things went. Go back for a moment to the boy in the fruit box. He left Corfu with nothing that was his own. He grew up in borrowed houses among other people’s furniture, with his family scattered across three countries.

He was sent from school to school, and for most of his childhood there was no home of his own to arrange at all. The man he became could not stop arranging. The study with its automated curtains, the yacht’s interiors, the chapel window, the jewels for his wife, the barbecue trailer. He was making again and again the ordered world that had been taken from him.

None of this was done for show, and little of it was public. The designs were for use and for him. They were the work of a man who found his peace in making things fit and who did not much care whether anybody noticed. He was not without a sense of humor about any of it.

By one account, he collected cartoons, including cartoons of the royal family, hung them on the walls of the royal homes, and became patron of the Cartoon Museum. A man who could hang jokes about himself on his own walls was not a man without perspective. It was a fitting hobby for a man so often caricatured. The cartoonists gave the public its picture of him and his family, and he hung cartoons on his own walls.

It was his way, perhaps, of keeping the joke where he could see it, and of showing that he knew exactly what people said. He also wrote. By the count Buckingham Palace gave in 2017, he was the author of fourteen books. One of them, Birds from Britannia, published in 1962, was a book of photographs of seabirds taken from the yacht.

Another, Thirty Years On and Off the Box Seat, was about the sport he took up in middle age. Even the seabird book carried his particular stamp. Most royal travelers bring home souvenirs. He brought home a book of the seabirds seen from the yacht.

Some accounts give a higher count of books. All of them agree that he was far busier with pen and camera than his public image ever suggested. Taken together, the list is long and peculiar. A study with automatic curtains, the rooms of a royal yacht, a stained glass window, jewelry for a queen, a barbecue trailer, a wall of cartoons, fourteen books.

None of it was his job. All of it was his choice, and every piece of it was shaped in some way by his own hand. But the trailer was a hobby, the window was a commission, the study was a room. At the age of fifty, the Duke took up something far more demanding than any of them.

A dangerous competitive sport that asked for nerve and precision at once. In 1971, at fifty, he gave up polo, reportedly because of an injured wrist, and climbed up onto the box seat of a carriage. Competitive carriage driving was a dangerous sport, a test of nerve and of precision in equal measure, and that made it the perfect sport for the Duke. He came to it with more authority than any other beginner could have had.

From 1964 to 1986, he was president of the FEI, and under his presidency, international rules were created for carriage driving. The rules of the game were drawn up on his watch. He held that presidency for twenty-two years, from his early forties into his middle sixties. Then he played it.

One account says he began competing in 1973, and the sources do not quite agree on when the hobby became a competition. What they agree on is the result. At the World Driving Championship of 1980, he won team gold. In 1978, 1982, and 1984, he won bronze.

What set him apart was that he redesigned the equipment as well as driving it. According to one specialist account of his career, he invented what became known as the bendy pole, a cantilevered pole suspended by a pin which made it easier for a team to take tight turns. By that account, it is still used today. He developed flush hubs and steel wheels to replace wooden ones.

He brought quick-release shackles for the traces across from the world of sailing, the world he had known since Gordonstoun and the Navy. The seamanship that a hard Scottish school had taught him as a boy found its way half a century later onto the harness of a team of competition horses. He built a marathon carriage from scratch. By that account, he wrote three books about the sport.

The engineer and the sportsman were the same man. He could not use a piece of equipment without wanting to improve it, and he could not improve it without wanting to test it himself at speed on a hillside in the rain. There was another reason the sport suited him, and he never needed to say it aloud. A team of horses does not care who you are.

It does not care whether you are a prince or a stable lad, whether you have a country or a constitutional role. It responds only to skill, to nerve, and to patience. For a man whose public life was a long series of ceremonies in which he had no real power, the box seat was a place where everything depended on him, and on him alone. He went on doing it long after most men would have stopped.

A sport that punishes slow reactions and tired arms kept him at its center well into his seventies. By one account, he retired from competition in 2003 in his early eighties. That same year, as it happened, he began work on another vehicle, one that he would spend the rest of his life perfecting. Retirement from competition was not retirement from the box seat.

In 2004, he published a book about his decades of driving, Thirty Years On and Off the Box Seat. And in it he wrote one of the most candid passages he ever put into print. “I am getting old,” he wrote. “My reactions are getting slower and my memory is unreliable, but I have not lost the sheer pleasure of driving a team.

” He went on driving. In 2018, at the age of ninety-seven, he was photographed at Windsor, still driving, a man in his late nineties handling a team as if it were the most natural thing in the world. He had also spent much of his life in the air. Here, too, the numbers tell the story.

The official royal record lists his wings from the Royal Air Force in 1953, from the Royal Navy in 1956, a private pilot’s license in 1959, and wings from the Army Air Corps in 1965. In all, it records 5,986 hours at the controls across fifty-nine different types of aircraft. Another page of the same record says more than sixty. His last flight as a pilot was on the 11th of August 1997, from Carlisle to the Scottish island of Islay.

He was seventy-six years old. Forty-four years separated his first set of wings from his last landing. And in all that time, the pilot’s habit of mind never left him. Check the instruments.

Trust the evidence. Stay calm when the ground is coming up fast. The pilot who had once received the Air Force’s reports of strange objects in the sky had by then been flying for more than four decades himself. He knew the sky as few people in public life ever did.

Perhaps that is why he took the pilots seriously when they said they had seen something up there that they could not explain. He had spent enough hours aloft to know that the sky does not always behave the way the textbooks say it should. Nearly 6,000 hours in the air. Thirty years and more on the box seat.

Rules for a sport drawn up on his watch. A carriage pole said to be still in use. A gold medal in his late fifties. Still driving at ninety-seven.

These are the achievements of a man who needed more than anything to be doing something difficult well and with his own hands. He was technical, exacting, and impatient with anything done badly. That exactness had another side. The directness that made him a fine driver and a clever engineer was the same directness that came out of his mouth in public in front of the cameras.

And it was that, far more than the paintings or the carriages or the flying saucers, that the world would remember. In 1960, speaking to dentists, he used a word for his own worst habit. The occasion was a speech to the General Dental Council, and the word, as an American magazine reported it that year, was dontopedology. “Dontopedology,” he told the dentists, “is the science of opening your mouth and putting your foot in it.

A science which I have practiced for a good many years. ” The joke was on himself, and it was a good one. It was also, in its way, a warning. The next year, speaking to a gathering of industrialists, he went further.

“I have never been noticeably reticent,” he said, “about talking on subjects about which I know nothing. ” It was the same man who had received flying saucer reports at the palace and filled a library with books on art. He did not mind being out of his depth. He did not mind saying so, and he did not, it turned out, mind saying almost anything at all.

Over the decades that followed, the remarks piled up, and the newspapers collected them like specimens. They were told and retold so often that they became for millions of people the whole of what they knew about him. Some were merely rude. Some were funny.

Many were far worse than that, and those who heard them did not laugh. In 1969, he met the singer Tom Jones and asked him, “What do you gargle with, Pebbles? ” In 1984 in Kenya, a woman handed him a small gift, and he asked her, “You are a woman, aren’t you? ” In October 1986 in China, he met a group of British students in the city of Xi’an.

What he said to them became the remark that followed him longest. The wording is reported in several versions. In one, he told them, “If you stay here much longer, you’ll all be slitty-eyed. ” In another, carried by the Guardian, he said that by the time they went home, they would have slitty eyes.

By one biographer’s account, he later insisted that the word he had used was slit-eyed. According to the BBC, he thought he had been making a private remark. It did not stay private. It went round the world.

In 1992 in Australia, he was invited to stroke a koala. “Oh no,” he said. “I might catch some ghastly disease. ” In 1995 in Oban in Scotland, he met a driving instructor.

“How do you keep the natives off the booze long enough to get them through the test? ” he asked. Other reports give the last words as “passed the test. ” In 1998, he met a British student who had trekked in Papua New Guinea.

“You managed not to get eaten, then. ” In August 1999 at a factory in Scotland, he looked at a fuse box and said that it looked as if it had been put in by an Indian. One account records his attempt to take it back. “I meant to say cowboys,” he is said to have explained.

“I just got my cowboys and Indians mixed up. ” In the same year, he met John Taylor, later Lord Taylor of Warwick, and asked him, “And what exotic part of the world do you come from? ” Taylor’s answer, by one account, was Birmingham. In March 2002 at Cairns in Australia, he met an indigenous businessman and asked him, “Do you still throw spears at each other?

” The man was reported to be more surprised than offended. That same year in Stornoway, he told a policewoman in body armor that she looked like a suicide bomber. Set out like that in a row, they make painful reading, and they should. Each one was reported at the time, and each one was repeated for years afterward in newspaper lists until the lists themselves became part of his public identity.

Many of these remarks were about race. They were said to real people at real public events by the husband of the head of state. After his death, the Guardian and CNN both published long reckonings with this side of his record, and their verdict was the same. This side of the man complicated the obituaries.

That is the honest word for it. What did he think of it himself? He rarely said, and when he did, he gave very little ground. In 1990, speaking at the National Press Club in Washington, he offered a mild defense.

“I’m not always as tactless as people make out,” he said. In 2011, when the broadcaster Fiona Bruce challenged him on China in a BBC interview, he was unrepentant. “It has no effect in China if that’s what you’re worried about,” he said. Pressed on whether he thought he had been a success in his role, he brushed the question away.

“I couldn’t care less,” he said. “Who cares what I think about it? I mean, it’s ridiculous. ”

Any explanation has to start with the same facts that run through everything else in this story, and it excuses nothing.

Remember the school report. A born leader, Hahn had written, and at times too irritable. Remember the answer to the question about his childhood. “I haven’t been trying to psychoanalyze myself all the time.

” This was a man who had been trained by loss and then by a hard school never to look inward and never to soften what he said. He did not filter. He did not reflect. He did not stop to imagine how a sentence would land on the person standing in front of him.

The same directness built the carriage pole and the barbecue trailer. It sent his equerry to interview pilots at the palace and painted his wife at breakfast. Turned outward in public on strangers, it produced the remarks. They came from the same unguarded mind, and that is precisely why they could not be explained away by him or by anyone else.

The public never saw the library, the easel, or the flying saucer reports. It saw the man at the walkabout saying the thing that nobody else would say and then moving on down the line. For more than sixty years, that was who he was in the eyes of the world. And in May 2017, as he prepared to stop, he made one last remark that people would remember.

On the 4th of May 2017, a mathematician told the Duke that he was sorry to hear he was standing down. The mathematician was Sir Michael Atiyah. The Duke’s reply was immediate. “Well,” he said, “I can’t stand up much longer.

” He was ninety-five years old. Since his wife’s reign began, he had carried out tens of thousands of public engagements. The figures the palace gave that May were staggering. By then, 5,493 speeches, 637 solo visits overseas.

On the 2nd of August 2017, at the age of ninety-six, he carried out his final engagement, the Captain General’s parade at Buckingham Palace, and the total of solo engagements since 1952 stood at 22,219. Twenty-two thousand times, he had turned up, shaken hands, asked questions, said something memorable, and moved on. And then he went home. He went on with his private life.

He kept driving. He kept reading, including that book about Rendlesham Forest sent in the summer of 2020. And he kept working on the vehicle he had begun in 2003, the year he gave up competition. It was a Land Rover Defender built at the Solihull factory in 2003.

He was eighty-two when the project began. Over the years that followed, he shaped it to his own design. He had the color changed from belize green to dark bronze green, a color used for many military Land Rovers. He designed the open back.

He designed the stops gripped with rubber that would hold it still. The finished vehicle had a black grill and no number plates. He made his final adjustments in 2019, by the palace’s account given to the press after his death. He had worked on it for sixteen years.

Another report put it at eighteen. He was planning his own funeral, and he was 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. He had been married to the Queen for seventy-three years. The funeral was held on the 17th of April in St George’s Chapel at Windsor. The rules of the pandemic limited the mourners to thirty.

The Queen sat alone. His carriage and his ponies, it was reported, had a part to play in the day, and his coffin was carried through the castle on the dark bronze green Land Rover he had designed. Boris Johnson reflected on the vehicle after it had been described to the public. He spoke of its unique and idiosyncratic silhouette, and of a man who was, above all, practical.

It was a fair description of the Land Rover. It was a fair description of the Duke. What he left behind is scattered like his childhood. The villa where he was born on Corfu is a museum.

The Duke of Edinburgh’s Award still runs. St George’s House still holds its debates at Windsor. The window he sketched still lets the light into the private chapel. His paintings are reported to hang in the royal homes.

His fourteen books sit on library shelves. And on competition carriages, the bendy pole he is credited with inventing is, by one account, still in use. None of these things is a monument in stone. Every one of them is something he made or helped to make with his own hands and his own plans.

And so the story of the box came full circle. A baby, the family legend says, was carried off Corfu in a crate made for fruit, a box he had not chosen, on a ship he did not ask for. His mother, whom he had not seen for five long years as a boy, had ended her days under his roof at Buckingham Palace. His wife had been beside him for seventy-three years.

Something of the scattered family of his childhood had in the end been gathered in. Ninety-eight years after Corfu, the same man was carried through Windsor in a box of a very different kind, on a vehicle whose every detail he had chosen himself. He had lost his country before he was two. He had lost his mother to doctors before he was nine.

He had lost his home, his father, and his sisters to other lives in other countries. He had lost a sister and her children to fog and a factory chimney. He had lost his career to his wife’s crown and his name to her family. Each time he had been carried somewhere by forces he could not control.

So he built. He built a role where there was none. He built rooms where everything had a place, a window for a chapel, a carriage pole said to be still in use, an award for other young people searching for something to hold on to. He filled a library with other people’s lives.

He let his equerry bring witnesses to the palace to describe what they had seen in the sky. And at the very end, he built the vehicle that would carry him to his grave, so that his last journey at least would go exactly as he intended. Was he strange by the measure of his public image? Without question.

A royal consort who read flying saucer reports, painted in oils beside a famous painter, invented a carriage pole, and designed his own hearse does not fit anybody’s picture of a prince. But the strangeness was never random. It was the habit of a boy who had learned very early that nobody else was going to build the structure for him. What the world called eccentric was the shape of a childhood he never talked about.

The remarks remain, and they should. Many of them hurt people, and no explanation undoes that. But they were the same unguarded mind seen from the outside. The man who could not stop himself saying what he thought was the man who could not stop himself rebuilding the world around him piece by piece to his own design.

Late in his life, a biographer recorded the closest thing he ever gave to an explanation. He spoke of his childhood with a kind of flat acceptance. “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. ”

On a spring day in 2021, a Land Rover painted dark bronze green carried his coffin through Windsor Castle, built exactly to his design.

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