In the end, of course, he wasn't dead but merely retiring, leaving the establishment and the media's chattering class with their hands wrung trying to make sense of a man who seems to have always perplexed and astonished.

Retiring at the age of 95 - some 30 years after the rest of us expect to give up our day jobs - he leaves as he lived: strangely grand, quaintly inappropriate and royally indifferent.

It goes without saying that the countless eulogies and remembrances of a life lived large in the public eye will far outweigh the second thought he will give us, waving his way to a quiet corner of Windsor Castle.

It will also be a chance to revisit the man who seems to have inhabited the pages of newspapers as long as anyone can remember: a cranky old toff prone to the kind of social gaffes that, half a century earlier, might have passed for light evening conversation in aristocratic circles.

But in more recent times, largely due to the critically acclaimed Netflix drama The Crown, a very different side of him was reintroduced: the younger Philip, dashing and stylish, with stunning good looks and the sort of winning manner that could (and did) charm the tiara off a Princess.

In truth both characterisations belong wholly to the same man and, despite the many decades which separate them, neither is too far from the other.

The most striking thing about the young Prince Philip, when we first met him, was the manner in which he seemed both perfectly suited and wholly unsuitable for the task he was called upon to perform as consort to the woman who would become the most influential world figure of the 20th century.

When he arrived in London as a young man, he had impeccable credentials: he had attended the Cheam School in Britain and Schule Schloss Salem in Germany; later he went to the prestigious Scottish boarding school Gordonstoun and then the Royal Naval College in Dartmouth.

Even a cursory examination of his biographical details would have thrilled even the most laconic editor at Debretts, the yellow pages of the peerage: Philip was born a prince of Greece and Denmark, his godmother was Queen Olga of Greece and his grandfather was the Marquess of Milford Haven.

It was the latter of those two personalities - the Marquess of Milford Haven - and Philip's uncle, Louis Mountbatten - who would shape a royal destiny out of this chiselled-to-perfection young protege.

Scratch the surface, however, and the cracks in Philip's story begin to appear.

He was rather ignominiously born on a kitchen table on the Greek island of Corfu, and evacuated in a wooden box by his family after his uncle, Greece's King Constantine I, was forced to abdicate during the Greco-Turkish War.

Philip's father, Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark, ended up living in a small flat in Monaco. His mother, Princess Alice of Battenberg, became a nun and lived, for a time, in an asylum.

And despite the floridly royal titles they all possessed they were, for the most part, penniless.

Worse, three of his four sisters - the Princesses Margarita, Cecilie and Sophie - had married German aristocrats who had become prominent figures in the Nazi party.

For Britain's royal family, having only a generation and a smidgen earlier shed their own Germanic roots by exchanging the name of the royal House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha for the far more English-sounding House of Windsor, such connections could have easily undone the upstart prince.

The young prince was thus re-invented as Philip Mountbatten, later Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten.

Though many assume his title of Prince is one he had from birth, in fact that birth title was renounced prior to his marriage to then-Princess Elizabeth.

It was not until 1957 when the now-Queen Elizabeth II issued letters patent creating him a Prince of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland that his present title was acquired.

And it even came with a gift with purchase: he was also given the peerage title Duke of Edinburgh (with Earl of Merioneth, Baron Greenwich and Knight of the Order of the Garter thrown in for good measure) and permission to use the definite article - that is, The Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh.

The definite article, one of the genuinely proper treats from the sovereign's titular lolly basket, is usually reserved for the children of the sovereign only.

The young Prince Philip we meet in The Crown - all floppy hair, aspiring aviator, dashing man about town and one-time Doctor Who - is indeed a fair portrayal of the man in his younger married days.

And the particular axes he grinds - notably his preference to stay at Clarence House rather than move to the larger, more miserable-seeming Buckingham Palace, and his wish for his children to take his surname, Mountbatten - are indeed taken from real events.

Of course, Philip would lose on both counts.

He had no choice but to move to Buckingham Palace, which was anointed as the official residence of the sovereign in London.

And he was unable to give his children his surname of Mountbatten, itself a fictitious tweak of the more German-sounding Battenberg; instead they had to take the name of the royal house, Windsor.

One concession came later: an instruction from the Queen that any of her descendants who did not bear royal titles and styles - that is, anyone who wasn't a prince or princess, or styled a royal highness - would be named Mountbatten-Windsor.

That said, there was always a wrinkle in the royal logic.

Mountbatten-Windsor is still sometimes used by members of the royal family when a surname was required - as a rule of thumb, royals don't have surnames - and the first proper example of the rule in modern use, Prince Edward's daughter Louise Mountbatten-Windsor, actually goes by Lady Louise Windsor.

Makes no sense? It isn't supposed to.

It seems slightly romantic, as he sails into retirement, to imagine Philip as the misunderstood man, and yet that's the most likely window into his unusual blend of strength and servitude, and frankness and rudeness.

Despite what might be interpreted as his too-grand manner, he was candid when asked in 1969 about the subject of republicanism: "[Monarchy] exists in the interests of the people," he said. "If at any time any nation decides that the system is unacceptable then it is up to them to change it."

And despite the perception, amplified by low-budget American royal television dramas, that he was a disapproving figure in the collapse of Charles and Diana's marriage, in truth he was a faithful correspondent with Diana to the last, urging her to find a happy way forward.

That is not to say his reputation is not without substance.

This is after all the man who called the Chinese "slitty eyed", who referred to Papua New Guineans as cannibals and who asked indigenous Australians if they still "throw spears at each other?".

He even famously said of his own daughter, Princess Anne: "If it doesn't fart or eat hay then she isn't interested."

And yet, this is also the man who swore, on bended knee at his wife's coronation - a ceremony in which, if you subscribe to the ritual, the newly crowned Queen is in communion with God - to be her "liege man of life and limb".

He is, on casual glance, a character in a royal soap opera well past its prime.

But equally he is an enigmatic piece of a larger royal mosaic which survived a century of war, as the other royal houses of Europe fell, by draping itself in mystery, ceremony and pomp, protected from destructive light by something intangible.

That is the Philip who confounds, who somehow nudges aside the headlines and the appalling social graces, and whose loyalty to his wife's birthright - the throne of Britain and the Commonwealth - is somehow transformed into something mystical and unbreakable.