Prince Philip’s funeral a fillip for the royals April 18, 2021, 9:39 AM IST An eclectic mind in a peripatetic body! The poignant image of a suddenly tiny Queen Elizabeth II, clad in black, sitting alone under the soaring rafters of the 640-year-old St George’s Chapel cannot but have moved even the most hardened viewer. Her head was bowed so that the cameras could not intrude into her grief as she sat facing the coffin containing her loyal companion of over 73 years, Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, the longest ‘serving’ royal consort in British history. Most, if not all of us, have marvelled the long-standing marriages of the generations before us, and the unimaginable closeness of such couples. They had grown up—not merely grown old—together so even their personalities seem to have merged with time, each one instinctively complementing the other. When death does part such couples, the pain of final separation, the loss, the loneliness and the deep void cannot be fathomed.