10 Things You Didn’t Know About Queen Elizabeth And Prince Philip’s Relationship

Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip have been married for 70 years, and while many of us are familiar with Prince Charles and Princess Diana’s relationship and Prince William and Kate Middleton’s, there’s still a lot we don’t know about the monarch’s relationship. We’ve collected these 10 facts about the royal couple, so check out these 10 things you didn’t know about Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip’s decades-long romance:

10. Meeting

Even though they were second cousins once removed, Elizabeth never really knew Philip. They met for the first time at a family wedding in 1934 and then at the coronation of her father King George VI in 1937. It wasn’t until she was 13 years old and he was 18 that they spent time together, which was all the way back in 1939. Her parents had taken Elizabeth and her sister Margaret to Royal Naval College at Dartmouth where Philip was a cadet in training at the school. According to her cousin, Margaret Rhodes, Elizabeth, after the future Queen met Philip, she “never looked at anyone else.”

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9. Courtship

During the Second World War, she would occasionally see Philip when he would visit Windsor Castle and the two corresponded when he was stationed at sea during his service with the Royal Navy. It became especially apparent that there was something special between them in December 1943 when he watched her perform in the Aladdin pantomime, but King George VI thought that his daughter was too young for a serious suitor.

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