Elizabeth and Philip: was theirs the last truly royal marriage? The Queen married a man with more royal blood than her own – a circumstance unlikely to be repeated in royal history 11 April 2021 • 6:00am The Queen and Prince Philip were both born of royal blood – but none of their children or grandchildren married royals Credit: Donald McKague The announcement from Buckingham Palace, on the evening of 9 July 1947, made clear that the dashing, blond-haired navalman, newly engaged to the heiress presumptive, Princess Elizabeth, was no ordinary lieutenant of the Royal Navy. Philip Mountbatten, the Court Circular informed an enthusiastic British public, was the ‘son of the late Prince Andrew of Greece and Princess Andrew (Princess Alice of Battenberg)’. At a stroke, the future Elizabeth II had achieved the impossible. Her husband-to-be, naturalised as a British subject in February, was not only an officer with a distinguished record of wartime service in Britain’s navy but of royal blood: a scion of a reigning European dynasty, a first cousin of Greece’s new king, Paul I.