The Queen and Prince Philip Seem to Be Relishing Their Lockdown Lifestyle

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For most married couples, to wish that the twilight of their years will be spent quietly pottering about the house in each other’s company is, longevity permitting, a modest ambition.

For the queen and Prince Philip, however, a joint retirement had never been the expectation. Instead, it had always been understood that Philip, who turned 99 this week, would live out his last few years at Wood Farm in Sandringham. His wife would be on the estate for three or four months of the year, but, for the rest of the time, they would be separated.

No, Prince Philip’s Birthday Snap Is Not Digitally AlteredHAPPY BIRTHDAY!

Tom Sykes, Tim Teeman

It was, they both accepted, just one more toll that the job would exact on the lives of the most senior members of the monarchy.

Of course, as the Netflix show The Crown has shown a new generation of fans so vividly, the queen and Prince Philip have never been ones to live in each other’s pockets. They do not exactly have a distant relationship, but they are well used to not being together. They sleep in separate bedrooms, and have done since at least 1982, a fact which emerged when a prowler broke into the queen’s bedroom. 

Buckingham Palace told The Daily Beast they would not be commenting on the couple’s domestic routines, but even now, supposedly cocooned together at Windsor, sources say, they are not spending every moment of every day in each other’s company—although they were photographed together to mark his 99th birthday.

They have very different interests; she derives much satisfaction from tending to her animals and livestock, especially horses and dogs, while Philip loves horses (he was until recently still carriage-driving, but has apparently been persuaded to stop at least while the pandemic is still raging). He also enjoys more intellectual pursuits than his wife; reading, painting, and browsing his engineering and scientific journals.

“They are for each other, in the best possible way, rather like an old overcoat,” said one notable writer of royal biographies, Penny Junor, “They have been together so long and been through so much together. He drives her mad at times. There are stories that he will lose his temper and threaten to put her out of the car, and she will reply, ‘Well, I’m not prepared to speak to you now, I will do so when you are in a better humor.’

“But they make each other laugh, and that is a good recipe for any relationship.”

The separation that they imagined they would inevitably endure when he retired in August 2017 (and she didn’t) is a legacy of the national trauma that was the 1936 abdication crisis. As a result of that debacle, which saw the rule of the country pass unexpectedly to Elizabeth’s father, George VI, the queen vowed that she would never abdicate, as is the habit of many septuagenarian European monarchs.

A period of relaxation must be welcome. The past year has been far from kind to the queen and her husband. He had a car crash in January 2019, and was later hospitalized over Christmas, while the queen was devastated to see Prince Andrew forced to resign from the royal family as his links to Jeffrey Epstein were exposed.

That Harry and Meghan also left the fold, albeit voluntarily, was a bitter blow on top. It was left up to the queen to bring the parties-in-conflict together, as the news media watched on in real time.

“The queen dedicated herself to ‘a life of service’ when she made her 21st birthday speech in South Africa,” a senior courtier—who refuses to even utter the word ‘abdication’—previously told the Daily Beast, “The word ‘life’ is the important bit.”

Some observers suspect that if Charles and Diana had worked, some form of abdication might have become a possibility, but with Charles the least popular heir apparent in living memory, there is no strategic wisdom in deliberately shortening the reign of a historically popular monarch for an unpopular one.

Now, however, the truth is that the queen has had a kind of abdication forced upon her by Coronavirus quarantine, and the extraordinary silver lining of the pandemic for Her Majesty has been that she has been living together with Philip at Windsor Castle since March 19, when he arrived there by helicopter to celebrate Easter. It was intended to be a long weekend, but Philip never left.

Although Philip and the queen are both, by any reckoning, old, they are remarkably healthy and fit. Philip has astonishing fortitude for a man his age. 

As previously noted, he has refused to give up his beloved hobby of carriage driving and was regularly sighted on the Sandringham estate last year at the reins of a coach and six. Although it is understood that he accepts it will not be possible for him to ride out in Windsor Great Park at the moment, he harbors hopes of doing so again. The queen was been spotted on horseback for the first time in months last week.

The two are living a life of, for them, unprecedented serenity. The Sun reported recently that they are attended to by two teams of 12 servants who are working shifts of three weeks on and three weeks off; each team spends two of their three weeks off at home, a third week is spent in strict quarantine and they are tested for COVID-19 before resuming work.

The queen continues to work, receiving regular “red boxes” of government documents and speaking with Prime Minister Boris Johnson every Wednesday on the phone. 

The reality, however, is that the queen is going to be physically isolated for a minimum of many months, and may never be able to return to her old habit of regular walkabouts.

The queen well knows the risks this brings. Her oft-quoted mantra of, “I have to be seen to be believed” is actually a cautionary reflection on the sad end of the reign of Queen Victoria, who became terrifically unpopular after she retreated from public view following the death of her beloved Prince Albert.

Aware, no doubt, of the risk of slipping from public consciousness she has made an unprecedented number of televised addresses in recent weeks, which have been warmly received by the British public. 

On Thursday the palace released footage of her joining a Zoom call for a carer’s support charity. Her Majesty looked like she was rather enjoying the experience.

It is all, Penny Junor said, evidence that “things will be done differently,” by an elderly queen in the post-COVID-19 world.

But, Junor adds, “I can’t see her taking this as an opportunity to step back and have some kind of de facto abdication. I think, on the contrary, the public addresses she has done have made it crystal clear that she is still there and still interested in people and the country. Walkabouts may be out of the question, but, as things relax, I expect we may see her on the balcony, or giving audiences to ambassadors. They might be seated further apart than before, but there is no shortage of large rooms at Buckingham Palace, and there is also a bit of a garden out back.”

However, the writer Christopher Andersen, author of the New York Times bestseller Diana’s Boys, says: “I have long predicted that the queen would follow in the recent steps of other European monarchs, not to mention the Japanese Emperor and Pope Benedict XVI, and ‘retire,’ in other words, eventually abdicate.

“The queen hasn’t done that yet, of course, but she is clearly enjoying a taste of retirement with Prince Philip, thanks in large part to the pandemic. For the last few years she has told those closest to her that she will eventually step aside and move permanently to Balmoral, but only after the death of her husband. 

“For the moment, I think she and her husband are reveling in each other’s company at Windsor. Maybe this time together with the Duke of Edinburgh will hasten her decision to finally give poor Charles what Diana used to call ‘the Top Job.’”