Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh and husband of Queen Elizabeth II, has died at the age of 99.
Buckingham Palace announced on Friday that the duke, who married the then 21-year-old Princess Elizabeth in 1947, “passed away peacefully this morning at Windsor Castle”.
The duke was discharged from hospital last month after being admitted for an infection in February. Buckingham Palace said he also underwent a “successful procedure for a pre-existing condition”.
A critical figure in the shaping of Britain’s royal family over more than seven decades, he engaged in public duties for nearly 70 years until retiring from public life in August 2017, local news outlets say.
The death is expected to mark the start of eight days of official mourning for the duke, who was born in June 1921 in Corfu. His father was a prince of both the Greek and Danish royal families, while his mother belonged to the royal family of Hesse, in Germany.
The duke will lie in state at St James’s Palace before being buried in the royal vault at Windsor Castle.
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Prince Philip was carried out of Greece in a fruit box on a Royal Navy vessel as a baby amid growing hostility to the royal family following the Greco-Turkish war.
Having a multitude of family ties to the UK, the Duke first settled in the country as a pupil at Gordonstoun School, in the Scottish Highlands. He went there after Kurt Hahn, who had run the prince’s previous school in Germany, fled the threat of growing persecution from the Nazi regime.
He first met Princess Elizabeth — then 13 — when he showed her and Princess Margaret, her sister, around Dartmouth Naval College, where he was studying, in 1939 and the pair started corresponding. They married in November 1947. It was the duke who in February 1952 informed his wife, during a visit to Kenya, that her father had died and she was now queen.
He will be remembered for his work in establishing, in 1956, the Duke of Edinburgh’s award scheme to encourage young people to become involved in their communities and outdoor activity. He also served with distinction in the Royal Navy during the Second World War and was a keen amateur pilot.
However, he was also well known for his tendency to make tactless remarks, most famously his comment in 1986 to a group of British students studying in China that if they stayed any longer, they would go “slit-eyed”.
In 1996, he caused controversy by saying it was “a little unreasonable” for the then-government to ban private ownership of handguns after the Dunblane massacre of 16 schoolchildren and their teacher. He argued that the step was no more logical than if a government had decided to ban cricket bats after they were used as a weapon.
Nevertheless, the duke’s key role has been to support his wife through a reign longer than that of any other UK monarch, often through times of turbulence for both the Royal Family as an institution and for the country as a whole.
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