The Duchess of Cambridge could do worse than look to the Queen's long-suffering consort to learn how to play the support role
There is something primitive yet metaphysical about the moment a royal heir is minted. The Duchess of Cambridge, due to give birth in the next couple of weeks, will not suffer the indignities of, say, Mary of Modena in 1688, forced to give birth in front of an audience of 200 and still accused of a bit of business with bedpan and changeling. Indeed, there will be barriers to ensure that photographers do not so much as capture a grimace upon hospital arrival. Still, not only a nation, but a world will be watching, a private moment that is intrinsically public.
It will bring the focus on Kate the Commoner's new role into still more acute relief. How will she shape up as a parent and monarch-maker? How will it change her as a prospective princess? Who not merely is she, but whom does she intend to be? A woman forever on the make? "A jointed doll on which certain rags are hung … her only point and purpose being to give birth"? – the latter quotation from Hilary Mantel's not unsympathetic article for the London Review of Books in February.
There is one very obvious potential role model, and it is emphatically not that of her histrionic late mother-in-law – rather the Windsors' stalwart, long-serving and self-effacing patriarch. Attention has naturally fallen on the Queen during these last two plushly ceremonial years. The spotlight, as ever, has been less on the increasingly gaunt figure metaphorically at her side, but typically the regulation one step behind.
Prince Philip, recently turned 92, is currently convalescing after a hospital stay. In his capacity as the backbone of the House of Windsor, the Duke may yet outlast us all. However, as South Africa is being forced to consider a post-Mandela nation, so our thoughts are turning to the contribution made by the Queen's long-suffering consort – and it is an extremely different reaction to the one that many might have predicted in the 1970s and 80s.
The stereotype that grew up around this athletic young parvenu was a lusty one; albeit this was a parvenu who – like the cousin he was to marry – was great-great-grandoffspring of Queen Victoria. Philip of Greece may formally have issued from the Danish-German House of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg, but we knew him in his Spitting Image and Private Eye incarnations as Phil the Greek and/or Keith.
And what fun it all was with his dodgy Nazi relatives, "slitty-eyed" racism, shooting tigers while saving pandas and conspiracy theories about his offing the Princess of Wales. Believe the hype and he was a cross between a mafioso overlord and "HRH Victor Meldrew" (the epithet is David Starkey's).
The picture today is fundamentally altered. And, if one is not at the zenith of adulation of the Pacific islanders who believe the Prince to be the penis-gourd-sporting Melanesian Messiah, then, at the very least, the example of Britain's longest-serving monarchal consort is deserving of our – and, more specifically, the Duchess of Cambridge's – interest.
The Queen's husband grew up in relative normality for a royal. Much has been made of Diana, Princess of Wales's disruptive upbringing. Not only was her father-in-law's similarly a broken home, he had no home from the age of one, when he was bundled into an orange box in Corfu and set sail into a quarter-century of statelessness.
This was no starvation-type deprivation (although into adulthood friends remarked upon his frequent need of a good meal), but it was impoverished enough to mean saving for a raincoat and having school fees paid by a gambling uncle. Later, he found himself at Windsor Castle for Christmas 1943 because he had "nowhere particular to go". Such straits were, of course, by no means unusual during these years. Still, they meant the Queen's partner had an affinity with her subjects that the ducal stuffed-shirt favoured by her courtiers might not have enjoyed.
Like Diana, Prince Philip has tended to be self-deprecating on the subject of his education ("I am one of those ignorant bastards who never went to a university"). Nevertheless, again, unusually "normally" for a royal, he attended school, even if it was the notoriously spartan Gordonstoun. The army gave him a home and a wage – an unroyal accoutrement that was very much needed.
And then came the fairytale transformation. Like Kate, the 26-year-old Philip was accused of being an upstart, with Louis Mountbatten as his Carole Middleton. His lieutenant's £11 a week was supplemented with a home in the form of Clarence House, the weekend retreat of Sunninghill Park, £10,000 a year, and a chunk of Welsh gold from which to sculpt a wedding ring.
The Prince has often been criticised for his stiff upper lip, not least in contrast with Diana's tremulously pouting one. He is blamed for Prince Charles's perceived weaknesses (sensitivity, reticence, tree-hugging), which many now consider strengths. In this, Prince Philip has been no different to many of his generation. Moreover, he has been prepared to take on "feminised" aspects of what is – for all his evident testosterone – ultimately a wifely role.
A hands-on father, he taught his children to swim, sail, ride and paint, and introduced them to the painful realisation that "they're not anonymous". He styled himself as an adviser, rather than a tyrant, and was happy to take on such wifely activities as interior design and coronation planning. He has watched his figure as scrupulously, if not as neurotically, as Diana. Why, he even appears as beset by cystitis as so many of his sisters.
Without any constitutional basis, the role he has fashioned has been his own creation. He may have read up on his great great-grandfather early in his wife's reign, but Prince Albert was a (hotly resented) co-ruler, Philip's own role fundamentally passive. And so he replicated Albert's less controversial interests: rectitude, the management of royal finances, science and technology, with a hunter's respect for ecology – and the infinite charities and biscuit factories of which today's royal living is made.
Had something happened to his spouse, Prince Philip would have served as Regent until his son came of age. He is the Commonwealth realms' longest-serving consort, the oldest-ever spouse of a reigning British monarch, and the oldest-ever male member of the British royal family.
As a youth he was described as "undefeatable", and so he has proved. Service is an unfashionable concept, but service he has given, at the sacrifice of his personal freedoms and ambitions. From the giving up of smoking on the eve of his wedding, via the renunciation of his nominal religion and dropping of his name, to the abandonment of his career, Philip has proved himself the consummate royal wife.
Tirelessly active while constitutionally passive, engaged, protective, strategically reactive, (largely) uncomplaining, he has achieved the one thing that, in the end, royals are there for – leaving the monarchy on a surer footing than he found it.
Prince Philip's death – whenever it comes – will leave a void in which there will only be questions. Would the Queen continue to rule without him? Will his son succeed to her role? Still, as the Duchess of Cambridge builds castles in the air ahead of the next generation of Windsor heirs, she could do a lot worse than set her sights on emulating this most macho female role model.
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