A 99-year-old prince outwitted his nurses on his final night — shuffled down the corridor, poured himself a cold beer, and drank it alone in the dark… But the Queen’s reaction the next morning was not what anyone expected.
On the last night of his life, Prince Philip did what he had always done — exactly as he pleased.
The nurses had been attentive all evening, the kind of quiet, watchful care that settles over a sickroom when everyone knows, but no one says, that the end is near. Philip was 99. He had been back at Windsor Castle for 24 days, having returned from hospital in mid-March. He never left again. But within the castle’s ancient walls, he had remained, in his own way, alive — up and about, occasionally answering the telephone himself, which startled at least one lady-in-waiting who had expected a member of staff.
That night, he waited. He had always been a patient hunter, a carriage-driver who understood that timing was everything. When the corridor fell quiet and the soft shuffle of nurses’ shoes faded, he reached for his Zimmer frame, rose from his chair, and set off.
He shuffled along the corridor of Windsor Castle — a place he had called home for most of his adult life, though he had never quite belonged to it the way the Queen had. His mother, Princess Alice, had been born within these very walls. He had once told a courtier who patronisingly suggested he might come to like Windsor: “Thank you very much. My mother was born there.”
He found the Oak Room. He found a beer. He poured it himself and sat down to drink it in the quiet of a castle that had stood for a thousand years, in a room that had witnessed the comings and goings of kings and queens, conquerors and councils. He was alone, and it is not difficult to imagine that he preferred it that way.
Nobody knows exactly how long he sat there. Nobody disturbed him. Perhaps, in the half-lit stillness of that ancient room, something passed through his mind — the span of it, nearly a century’s worth, beginning in the chaos of a Greek coup d’état, his infant self smuggled out of Corfu in a crate adapted from an orange box. The years at Gordonstoun, the naval career he loved and was forced to abandon when his wife became Queen. The 22,219 public engagements, the decades of handshaking and speech-making, the gaffes the tabloids loved and the brilliance they often ignored.
Perhaps he thought of Wood Farm on the Sandringham estate — his real home in his final years, where he had been happiest, carriage-driving through the Norfolk countryside, reading voraciously, exchanging books with the Master of the Household and demanding a two-page written analysis on completion. Where Penny Mountbatten had visited often, and the Queen had come by train on weekends, giving him — as she always had — a loose rein.
Perhaps he simply enjoyed the beer.
The following morning, he got up and had a bath. Then he said he did not feel well. And quietly, without ceremony, without fuss, without — and this would later prove significant — saying goodbye, Prince Philip slipped away. It was April 9, 2021. He was 99 years old. He had been living with pancreatic cancer, diagnosed nearly eight years earlier, far longer than any doctor had predicted.
The Queen was not there when he died.
She had often, over the decades, asked the staff to let her know when Philip was leaving somewhere. The answer, more than once, had been: “His Royal Highness left 20 minutes ago.” He had never been a man who waited around for goodbyes. And in the end, he didn’t make an exception.
According to royal biographer Hugo Vickers, whose meticulous account of Queen Elizabeth’s final years draws on accounts from those close to her, the Queen took a particular line on the manner of her husband’s death. She was, he was told, “absolutely furious that, as so often in life, he left without saying goodbye.”
It is perhaps the most human thing imaginable — a widow of 73 years of marriage, furious at her husband for dying the way he had lived: on his own terms, without fuss, without a formal farewell. It was entirely Philip. And she, who had known him better than anyone, surely knew it.
Their marriage had never been the soft, gentle kind. “He made her suffer,” a childhood friend of the Queen had once said. The first six or seven years had been difficult — him restless, impatient, abruptly ending his naval career when her accession robbed him of the only professional identity he had truly wanted. A retired courtier recalled that in the 1950s, Philip had simply “got bored with the whole royal business, all those stuffy engagements, all that handshaking.” He chafed against the role of consort in an era when there was no script for it.
And yet. When the biographer Hugo Vickers once challenged him on a line he had written about Philip’s father abandoning the family, Philip’s response had been swift and dismissive: “Nonsense. I had a three-day holiday with him every summer.” He was not a man given to self-pity. He processed his own difficult history — a rootless childhood, a mother who had a breakdown and vanished from his life for seven years, a father who retreated to a shallow life in the South of France — and moved on.
He provided, as the Queen famously put it, her “strength and stay.” She had come, over the decades, to handle him expertly. “When he wanted something,” she once joked, “I tell Philip he can have it, and then make certain he doesn’t get it.”
In the lockdown years of HMS Bubble — the Queen’s nickname for their strict Windsor isolation during the Covid pandemic — the two of them had returned, in a way, to something simpler. Twenty-two staff. Four rooms. No ladies-in-waiting. Philip reading Robert Harris novels and demanding written analyses. The Queen riding her pony Emma for 45 minutes in the grounds. Seven truckloads of birthday cards on her 94th.
By then, Philip’s short-term memory was deteriorating. He had told people he did not want to reach 100 — “particularly disliking the fuss attendant at such events,” as Vickers puts it with characteristic understatement. In February 2021 he had been admitted to hospital, and Prince Charles had arrived from Highgrove looking forlorn. His doctors had, it emerged, nearly lost him twice during heart surgery at St Bartholomew’s. He had returned to Windsor on March 16.
In those final 24 days, he had remained present in ways that surprised people. He had sent the foreword to a book on Wolfsgarten — an 18th-century German hunting lodge — to his nephew Rainer von Hessen. It arrived by post on the morning of April 9, shortly before news broke of the Duke’s death. In so far as he was able, he had been working till the end.
At his funeral, Covid restrictions limited mourners to 30 — something that, as Vickers notes, would have delighted the Duke enormously. No great state procession. No massed crowds. A pared-down farewell in St George’s Chapel, Windsor, with a lone piper playing a lament, walking up the North Quire Aisle while the television cameras followed him — leaving the descent of the coffin into the Royal Vault entirely private.
The most enduring image of the day was of the Queen, masked and alone in her pew.
She pressed on. She always pressed on. In the days between Philip’s death and the funeral she had spoken to the Prime Minister, received a new Lord Chamberlain, taken telephone audiences with the Governor-General of Australia and the Prime Minister of Canada. The following Sunday, she watched a Zoomed matins service. It ended with music. That week, the chosen piece was You’ll Never Walk Alone.
She had not, in the end, retreated into grief. She was furious at him. And she carried on.
It was, when you think about it, the most Philip thing she could have done.
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