Prince Philip spoke at the first assembly held at St George’s House about ‘The Role of the Church in Society Today’. This was the first of many discussion groups where Philip expounded his views on religion and the natural world. Philip believed that, as the house was hidden away within the castle walls, it was particularly suitable to attract people in positions of leadership within government, industry, commerce and the churches as a place for discreet discussions of mutual and national interest. Here the Queen and Prince Philip are as one, and every so often indications emerged that she was privately very environmentally conscious and, like her husband, especially concerned about global warming.

One such indication surfaced in November 2014, at a private lunch at Buckingham Palace attended by Dame Julia Slingo, the Met Office’s chief scientist, when it was reported the Queen had talked about unprecedented flooding at Balmoral that summer and ‘wondered if it was caused by climate change’. This echoes an account reported by Sir Richard Branson of the Queen and Barack Obama ‘animatedly’ discussing global warming over dinner.

Indeed, her concern goes back a long way, at least to the 1990s. In October 1997, she seriously contemplated including a passage on global warming in her speech to a Commonwealth prime ministers’ conference. Experts on the issue were discreetly sounded out on what it might be ‘helpful’ for her to say, and ministerial aides were told to ‘expect something green from the Queen’. In the event, the intervention was toned down to an oblique reference to ‘environmental challenges, which especially affect the smaller states’. For Prince Philip, however, conservation has almost become a religion, with his passionate concern for the future of the planet being something he has passed on to his children and grandchildren.

Prince Philip’s faith continued to deepen, compared with his attitude in the early 1960s. His correspondence with the Rt Revd Michael Mann, who was Dean of Windsor between 1976 and 1989 (‘the best job in the Church of England,’ as he described it), has been made public in a book entitled A Windsor Correspondence. Mann, who died in 2011 aged eighty-seven, rose to become Domestic Chaplain to the Queen after serving as a soldier in the Second World War and then being told, while working for the Colonial Office in Nigeria, that he only had six months to live. Fortunately, the diagnosis was incorrect. In overseeing the wellbeing of St George’s Chapel, he was admired for the adroit way he handled its finances. He also proved a lively preacher, seldom speaking for longer than seven minutes, believing that if a preacher could not make his points in this time he never would.