From Prince Harry remarking to Prince William that his bride-to-be, Kate Middleton, looked beautiful, to Princess Beatrice opting to borrow her wedding dress from her grandmother the Queen, Royal Weddings are always full of joyous, memorable moments.
With his stiff upper lip and playful sense of humour, it would be easy to assume that the Duke of Edinburgh was not as romantically inclined as some of the rest of his family, but as a new biography by royal expert Ingrid Seward reveals, that is actually far from the case.
In Prince Philip: Revealed, Seward divulges the little known fact that the Duke had a secret message inscribed inside the Queen's wedding band, a message that only three people have ever seen.
Talking about how the exiled Prince had little to his name when he married the then-Princess Elizabeth, she writes: 'At least Philip didn't have the expense of a wedding ring, as the people of Wales supplied a nugget of Welsh gold from which the ring is made,' explaining that as is traditional, the Royal Family's rings were made from gifted Welsh gold. 'She never takes it off and inside the ring is an inscription. No one knows what it says, other than the engraver, the queen and her husband.'
The couple were married on 20 November 1947, having known each other since the Queen was 13. They have been married for 73 years, most recently celebrating their Platinum wedding anniversary in 2017. On their Golden wedding anniversary in 1997, the Queen said: 'He is someone who doesn't take easily to compliments but he has, quite simply, been my strength and stay all these years, and I, and his whole family, and this and many other countries, owe him a debt greater than he would ever claim, or we shall ever know.'
