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Prince Phillip’s death last Friday, at the age of 99, marked the end of an era for Britain’s monarchy; and a nationwide 41 gun salute sounded in tribute on Saturday from the Tower of London, from Edinburg, Cardiff and Belfast, and from Royal Navy warships at sea to signal his demise.

Certainly, for the queen it marks the end of a long marital partnership, a unique union that endured the vicissitudes of life and withstood the exacting test of time: a period of undimmed grief, a time of the deepest sorrow when she finds in the winter of life, she is left bereft of the man she loved and wed in her blossoming spring; and who, throughout the changing hues of the seasons that see the bud, the bloom, the fall turn dust, had remained her anchor, her imposing tower of strength, her rock of Gibraltar in the best of times and the worst of times.

And as the pall thickens and wraps around the castle walls in mournful gloom, the widowed queen, no doubt, dwells on the memories that rise from the newly closed crypt that entombs   the love of her life.

THE CROWN AND THE CONSORT: She was Britain’s yet uncrowned jewel, he was the young handsome homeless Greek

The year is 1939. She is 13 and is with her parents, King George VI and mother Queen Elizabeth and kid sister Margaret. The royal family is visiting the Dartmouth naval college where Phillip, a lad of 18, is studying.  He is an exile from Greece. As the college’s best cadet, he is given the task of escorting the young princesses.

And something else happens to create a lasting impression in Elizabeth’s mind.

Cadets in rowing boats escort the royal yacht, the Victoria and Albert, when it sails from Dartmouth. But Philip continues rowing in its wake long after the others had dropped out, turning round only when ordered to by the increasingly exasperated King, who refers to him as “a bloody fool”.

Meeting him for the first time, she had been reserved, she had been shy but is now smitten by his zest for life and adventure.  Infatuation starts to brew. And when World War II breaks out and Phillip is serving aboard ship, and fighting for king and country, the king’s daughter and he start exchanging letters.

“Philip enjoys driving and does it fast!” she writes in a letter to author Betty Shew that was auctioned off in 2016. “He has his own tiny M.G. which he is very proud of. He has taken me about in it, once up to London, which was great fun.” After the courtship of over a year, the couple eventually marry in 1947 on 24th November, an occasion which, despite the surrounding austerity following a triumphant but devastating war, calls for national celebrations. Elizabeth is only 21. Phillip 26.

As the fire crackles in the Windsor hearth warming her fond reminisces, the queen recalls the countless times she had often wondered on the mysterious part destiny had played in landing this young handsome, homeless Greek on Britain’s shores and eventually leading the exiled prince find home and bed in her royal chambers. What quirk of fate altered the ordained plans of sires and kings to bring this roving refugee, thousand six hundred miles away from home, to her sceptred bedstead to seed the womb of royal kings?

Now the chequered, colorful life of Phillip, the Prince of Greece and Denmark comes vividly to life. He is born on a dining table in a villa on the Greek island of Corfu on 10 June 1921. He is the youngest child and only son of Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark and Princess Alice of Battenberg.

Though he is in line to the succession of the thrones of Greece and Demark, a cruel twist of fate robs him of the chance to be monarch in his own right twice over, when the fierce war raging between Greece and Turkey ends in a disastrous defeat for Greece. His father is court martialled and sent to exile.

Eighteen month old infant Phillip is bundled and asleep in a converted orange crate making do as a makeshift bassinet while the family is forced to take sudden flight across the Adriatic Sea on a British warship to Italy. Andrew is helped by first cousin England’s King George V.

France is the final port of call and eventually the family settles down on the outskirts of Paris.

Philip is sent to a small day school nearby, but in 1930 his world is once again torn apart. His beloved mother, Alice suffers a serious mental breakdown.

In the years immediately after the family’s flight from Greece, her behaviour had grown disturbingly strange. One doctor who saw her, diagnosed her as a paranoid schizophrenic who believed that she was the only woman on Earth, and married to Christ. Gradually Alice’s mother comes to terms with her daughter’s condition and bows to the advice of psychiatrists who decree she should be committed to a mental asylum.

One day, when the children are away from home, Alice is forcibly sedated and bundled into a car and driven off to a clinic near Lake Constance. The day – May 2, 1930 marks the end of Phillip’s family life. But when they return home to find their mother gone, neither he nor his sisters have any inkling it will be the last day they will spend under one roof together as siblings. He is only 8 years old.

Phillip’s father is a changed man, for the worse.  He sees Phillip on and off when he comes home for the school holidays or else Phillip is rather left to the care of his mother’s family in England. Within 18 months of the family break-up, Philip’s sisters are all married to German princelings, so the absence of both parents are far less felt by the sisters than it is to Phillip, the only son in the family not even a teenager yet.

Now in London, he lives with his mother’s mother at Kensington Place before moving in with his mother’s elder brother George who, for the next 8 years, acts as his guardian at school functions. From 1932 to early 1937, he neither sees his mother not does he hear from her even though she had recovered from her mental breakdown and would soon become a nun on the island of Tinos.

Years later, it didn’t come easy for him to understand this period of his life. With his nature reluctant to overstate the effect of these traumatic growing up years, all he could say to a biographer was: ’I had to get on with it.  You do. One does.’’

Prince Phillip was a man of no regrets, who lived life to the brim and drank its nectar to the dregs. He called a spade a spade and cared not a tuppence if anyone got offended by it, which may explain away many of his social gaffes before world leaders.

Seventy three years after stealing Elizabeth’s heart, he stayed the marital course to the end, and had, till death made him depart, cherished the heart he thieved.

Though he had no regrets during his life, one he may have harboured shortly after his death at 99, may have been kicking the bucket two months before reaching 100 and missing by a beat or two, the privilege of receiving the traditional congratulatory letter, with selfie portrait and all, the Queen sends to all her subjects who become centenarians.

Nein Fuhrer! This guy wants a blooming HitlerMEIN HEAVEANS! To what new hell’s depths can Lanka further descend? If the present economic, political, social chaos was not enough to damn Lanka to kingdom come, then to make the tragedy complete, a SLPP State Minister chose this week to concur with what he thought were the wishes of the voters that President Gotabaya Rajapaksa become a Hitler incarnate. STATE MINISTER DILUM AMUNUGAMA: “Who wants Gota to be a Hitler’’ In an amazing exhibition of his fascist belief that only an iron fist and a studded jackboot can prevent Sri Lanka’s slippery slide into anarchy, State Minister Dilum Amunugama revealed his gross ignorance of the manifest lessons of history when he called upon the duly elected President to swerve from the democratic course and apply the Hitler solution to halt the country’s worsening crisis. Speaking from his hometown Kandy, former Foreign Minister Sarath Amunugama’s nephew, Dilum opened his exhaust and spelt out his recipe for total disaster thus: ‘’If the people are blaming the government for its lack of progress, they do because the people voted President Rajapaksa into power expecting him to play the part of a dictator and get things done. Even the Maha Sangha expressed the same sentiments. They said it does not matter even if he becomes a Hitler. But today they are blaming him for not becoming a Hitler. This is the root cause for him to be blamed. Even I believe that. ‘ ‘’The 6.9 million who voted for him believe he should be a Hitler. He is being blamed for not doing that. I don’t think the President wants to be a Hitler at once. But if he is pushed to become a Hitler due to the actions of various groups, he will turn into a Hitler and then no one will blame him. Everything will be fine.’ The State Minister’s flight of fascist fancy was immediately cut down by Ven. Muruttettuwe Ananda Thera, the custodian of the Mahinda Rajapaksa temple. The venerable monk said: ‘’We don’t think President Gotabaya will become a Hitler on any grounds. Truth be spoken, the Rajapaksas are a group of leaders who worked against Hitlers. We don’t know whether the minister made such comments to get credits from anyone or to destroy the country. We do not know that and we condemn such statements. This is a land the Buddha has visited thrice and our Dhamma is based on kindness. No one can boast or claim that 6.9 million votes were received because of him. Only Mahinda Rajapaksa can make that claim. The addition has only been 500,000 votes but now that vote base is gone. After the leadership of Mahinda Rajapaksa we have no idea as to who we should stand with. ‘’ But let’s hear from a man whose immediate forefathers would have experienced first-hand the full brunt of Nazi horror. The German Ambassador to Lanka, Holger Seubert tweeted on Tuesday: ‘’I am hearing claims that say “being Hitler” could be beneficial to Sri Lanka today. Let me remind those voices that Adolf Hitler was responsible for human suffering and despair beyond imagination, with millions having been massacred. Definitely, he can never be a role model of any politician!” The State Minister of Vehicle Regulation, Bus Transport Services and Train Compartments and Motor Car Industry, Dilum Amunugama should stay put in his compartment belted, regulating bus timetables and conducting vehicle emissions, instead of driving headlong into the buffets, flying the Nazi Swastika and hailing the most hated man in history since World War II, as the ideal role model President Rajapaksa should aspire to be and, to paraphrase the words of Milton in his Paradise Lost, ‘sole reigning to hold the tyranny of Lanka.’