In fact, back in 1962, when the then Prime Minister Harold Macmillan came to the palace for his weekly audience with the Queen, he found her engrossed in BBC commentary of John Glenn’s first circling of the Earth, historian Robert Lacey reports. “After a perfunctory greeting, Elizabeth turned her attention back to the radio,” he writes inThe Crown, The Inside History.
Later, she did indeed meet the three men who made the first mission to walk on the moon — Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins.
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But it is how writer Peter Morgan uses the seventh episode of series three ofThe Crown, called “Moondust,” to explore Philip’s exploration of a different kind, his Christian faith, that has caught the attention of viewers.
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When you see it inThe Crownit “makes it seem he is disenchanted with the moon men and this turns to the Christian faith but in reality he had found the faith — in the old fashioned church he had originally spurned — a few years before the men landed on the moon.”
Historian Hugo Vickers, in his bookThe Crown Dissected, confirms Philip’s deep thinking about his faith in this period. “In a discussion I once had with Princess Anne about her grandmother, Princess Alice, she told me that her father liked to wrestle with all questions of religion. He likes to argue, and he is prepared to be swayed.”
Queen Elizabeth with the Apollo 11 astronauts at Buckingham Palace, 1970.Hulton Archive/Getty
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Philip did, as the episode portrays at the end, find a lifelong friend in Robin Woods, who had set up the St. George’s House retreat in Windsor – three years before the moon landings. Woods had “a powerful influence onPrince Philip’s religious life,”writes Vickers. “Today there are more books on religion and ornithology in Prince Philip’s extensive library at Buckingham Palace than on any other subject.”
source: people.com
