Prince Philip Gave Up Nothing to Marry the Queen — He Was Broke

In the autumn of 1947, a young naval lieutenant named Philip Mountbatten — a name he had adopted only weeks earlier — walked into Westminster Abbey and married the woman who would become Queen of England. The newspapers said he had sacrificed so much. They pointed to his renunciation of foreign titles, his adoption of British citizenship, and his decision to exchange a royal heritage for a supporting role beside his wife. They were looking at the wrong ledger. Philip had been born a prince of Greece and Denmark on 10 June 1921 at the Villa Mon Repos on the island of Corfu — on the dining room table, as multiple accounts have it, including the family's own records and Philip Eade's 2011 biography, Young Prince Philip*, the definitive account of his early life. Before his second birthday, his family was driven from the country. He was eighteen months old when the Royal Navy light cruiser HMS *Calypso evacuated him from Corfu in December 1922, reportedly carrying the infant in a cot improvised from a fruit box. His father had just been sentenced to perpetual banishment by a military tribunal. The family had no home, no income, and no country.