Although Prince Philip once described himself as ‘a discredited Balkan prince of no particular merit or distinction’, the blood in his veins is royal on both his mother and father’s side and they could claim royal connections going back generations. Both he and Princess Elizabeth were great-great-grandchildren of Queen Victoria and as such were distant cousins. Philip’s father, Prince Andrea, was the son of King George I of Greece, a Prince of Denmark who had been handed the Greek throne. The family were Danish rather than Greek, if they were anything, though it would be more accurate to describe him as a member of the inter-related tribe of German princelings who had come to occupy many of the thrones of Europe. One of the King’s sisters, Alexandra, married the Prince of Wales, later King Edward VII, and another married Alexander III, the Emperor of Russia. Philip’s mother, Princess Alice of Battenberg, was born in the Tapestry Room at Windsor Castle in the presence of her great-grandmother Queen Victoria and died some eighty-four years later at Buckingham Palace.

Prince Philip’s father was tall, handsome and intelligent and an officer in the Greek army. He had four brothers who loved playing practical jokes on each other. Prince Philip recalled: ‘Anything could happen when you got a few of them together. It was like the Marx brothers.’

When Philip’s parents got engaged in 1903, the Prince and Princess of Wales (later King George V and Queen Mary) gave a party for them at Marlborough House in London attended by King Edward VII, who declared that ‘no throne in Europe was too good for Alice’. Their wedding in the Grand Duchy of Hesse-Darmstadt, the ancestral home of the Battenbergs, was a lavish affair that October, attended by royalty from across Europe, including Queen Alexandra of England and a great gathering of European grand dukes, princes and princesses.

For days before the ceremony, there were spectacular parties in Darmstadt. Tsar Nicholas II of Russia brought the Russian Imperial Choir with him from St Petersburg to entertain the congregation. At the Russian Orthodox ceremony, the second of three the couple went through, Alice, who had been born profoundly deaf, misheard the questions. She said ‘no’ instead of ‘yes’ when asked if she freely agreed to the marriage and said ‘yes’ instead of ‘no’ when asked if she had promised her hand to another. Although she could lip read, on this occasion she was thwarted by the voluminous facial hair of the Russian priest.

The formalities completed, there was a family banquet at which Tsar Nicholas over-indulged himself to such an extent that he hit Alice in the face with a satin shoe as she drove away in the royal carriage. She managed to catch the shoe and hit the Tsar over the head with it, leaving him in the road roaring with laughter.