This April 9 marks one year since Philip, Duke of Edinburgh and husband of Queen Elizabeth II passed away just weeks shy of his 100th birthday. After 73 years together, there have been many words and pacts that have been made, but one in particular takes on special relevance as it is something the Duke made the Queen promise before his death.
In 2020, after the announcement of the confinement measures due to the covid-19 pandemic, Queen Elizabeth and the Duke of Edinburgh settled in Windsor Castle with a small number of staff, this significant privacy was used by the couple to spend more time together and is that since the Duke had retired from his official duties in 2017, the couple had been a bit distant.
Spending several months at the castle helped them to regain the complicity they had always had and it was there that the pact was made between the duke and the queen.
Secret pact between Duke of Edinburgh and Queen Elizabeth
Richard Kay, journalist of the Daily Mail, revealed details of the promise that the queen made to her husband before her death. According to the communicator, the pact consists in that the one who stayed alone would keep a short time of mourning and then fully enjoy the rest of his days, something that, considering the last months of the queen, it is seen that she is determined to respect.
“A secret agreement in case one should die before the other,” revealed the journalist, who added that “whoever is left alive will be able to mourn, but not for too long, so that he can enjoy the life ahead of him,” the pact was the duke’s idea.
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“The two often talked about how each would react without having the other by their side and came to the conclusion that the tears should not last too long in order to make way for life,” the journalist noted.
The queen has kept her pact, because despite health problems she returned to work to show off her “extraordinary resilience, as well as an unwavering sense of duty,” as Kay explains in the Daily Mail.