Louis Mountbatten, 1st Marquess of Milford Haven

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Admiral of the Fleet Louis Alexander Mountbatten, 1st Marquess of Milford Haven, GCB, GCVO, KCMG, PC (24 May 1854 – 11 September 1921), formerly Prince Louis Alexander of Battenberg, was a minor German prince who married a granddaughter of Britain's Queen Victoria and pursued a distinguished career in the United Kingdom's Royal Navy, eventually serving as First Sea Lord from 1912 to 1914. He was the father of the 1st Earl Mountbatten of Burma and of Queen Louise of Sweden, and was the maternal grandfather of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, consort of Queen Elizabeth II. One of his younger brothers, Prince Alexander of Battenberg (1857-1893), was selected with the approval of Europe's Great Powers to mount the throne of Bulgaria, where he reigned as sovereign Prince from 1879 to 1886.

Contents 1 Early life 2 Naval career 3 Marriage and Children 4 Adoption of the Surname Mountbatten 5 Titles from birth to death 6 Sources

[edit] Early life

His Illustrious Highness Count Louis (Ludwig) Alexander of Battenberg was born in Graz, Austria, the eldest son of Prince Alexander of Hesse and by Rhine (1823-1888) by his morganatic marriage to Countess Julia von Hauke (1825-1895). Denied his father's dynastic rights and rank in Hesse, from birth he shared the countly title and "Illustrious" style conferred upon his mother at the time of her marriage, automatically becoming His Serene Highness Prince Louis of Battenberg when she was elevated to Princess of Battenberg with the style of Serene Highness by decree of her husband's brother, Grand Duke Ludwig III of Hesse and by Rhine on 21 December 1858.

[edit] Naval career

Influenced by his cousin's wife, the future Grand Duchess Alice of Hesse, a daughter of Queen Victoria's, Louis became a naturalized British subject and joined the Royal Navy in 1868, at the age of fourteen. He began his career as a midshipman on the Royal Alfred where, despite his royal connections he was shown no favoritism. In 1876, he served in the ship which conducted the Prince of Wales on an official tour of India, thereby becoming a protégé of his future king, Edward VII. During the 1882 Egyptian intervention, he served as a lieutenant on Inconstant and was decorated with the Egyptian Medal and the Khedive Bronze Star. In September 1883, Queen Victoria appointed him lieutenant in her yacht, Victoria and Albert, which assured his promotion to commander two years later. Prince Louis rose to the rank of captain and became an aide-de-camp to the Queen in 1891. Although the Queen felt he was discriminated against because of his princely title and therefore occasionally intervened to promote his career, Louis welcomed battle assignments that provided opportunities for him to acquire the skills of war and to demonstrate to his superiors that he was serious about his naval career. Posts on royal yachts and tours actually impeded his progress, but it would have been ungrateful as well as unwise to demur. He was promoted to rear admiral in 1904, vice admiral in 1910, and admiral in 1912. During that time, he served as Director of Naval Intelligence (1902-1905), Commander-in-Chief of the Atlantic Fleet (1908-1911), commander of the Third and Fourth Divisions of the Home Fleet (1911), and Second Sea Lord (1911). He became a Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath (K.C.B.) in the military division in 1908, having received the K.C.B. and Knight Grand Cross (G.C.B.) in the civil division of the same order in 1884 and 1887, respectively.

On 9 December 1912, Prince Louis assumed the post of First Sea Lord, the senior uniformed officer in the Royal Navy. In that capacity, he was responsible to the First Lord of the Admiralty (at the time, Winston Churchill) for the readiness of the fleet and the preparation of naval strategy. On the eve of World War I he unilaterally made the crucial decision to cancel the scheduled dispersal of the British fleet following practice manoeuvres in order to preserve the Royal Navy's battle readiness, despite the fact that this was likely to be construed as a provocative act by Germany. Nonetheless, with the outbreak of the war, rising anti-German sentiment among the British public, newspapers, and elite gentlemen's clubs (where resentment was inflamed by Admiral Lord Charles Beresford despite Churchill's remonstrances) drove Churchill to ask Prince Louis to resign as First Sea Lord on 29 October 1914. He held no official post for the remainder of the war and, although assured that he would be returned to command post-war, he was asked to retire from the Navy's active list in 1918, which he did amidst an outpouring of appreciation from his naval comrades.

[edit] Marriage and Children

On 30 April 1884 in the presence of Queen Victoria, Prince Louis of Battenberg married Princess Victoria of Hesse and by Rhine (5 April 1863-24 September 1950) at Darmstadt. His wife was the eldest daughter of Queen Victoria's second daughter Alice (26 April 1843-14 December 1878), by Louis IV, Grand Duke of Hesse (12 September 1837-13 March 1892). Prince and Princess Louis of Battenberg were first cousins once removed and their marriage produced four children ¹:

• HSH Princess Alice of Battenberg (15 February 1885-5 December 1969) m. HRH Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark (2 February 1882-3 December 1944). Among her children is Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh
• HSH Princess Louise of Battenberg, later styled Lady Louise Mountbatten (13 July 1889-2 March 1965) m. Crown Prince Gustaf Adolf of Sweden, later King Gustaf VI Adolf (11 November 1882-15 September 1973)
• HSH Prince George of Battenberg, who became George Mountbatten, Earl of Medina in 1917, and succeeded his father as 2nd Marquess of Milford Haven in 1921, (6 November 1892-4 April 1938) m. Countess Nadejda (Nada) de Torby (28 March 1896-22 January 1963), morganatic daughter of Grand Duke Michael Mikhailovich of Russia by Countess Sophie von Merenberg, herself the daughter of a morganatic marriage between Prince Nicholas of Nassau and Natalia Aleksandrovna Pushkin, daughter of Russia's most renowned author, and great-granddaughter of Peter the Great's African protégé, Abram Petrovich Gannibal
• HSH Prince Louis Francis of Battenberg, later 1st Viscount Mountbatten of Burma and 1st Earl Mountbatten of Burma (25 June 1900-August 27, 1979) m. Edwina Ashley (28 November 1900-21 February 1960), co-heiress of the vast banking fortune of her maternal grandfather, Sir Ernest Cassel; daughter of Wilfred Ashley, later Lord Mount Temple; and male-line great-granddaughter of the 7th Earl of Shaftesbury.
• ¹ In 1881, prior to his marriage, Prince Louis of Battenberg allegedly fathered an illegitimate daughter, Jeanne Marie Langtry Malcolm, by actress Lillie Langtry, also a one-time mistress of Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, who was later acknowledged by Lord Mountbatten of Burma. As to whether Mountbatten was in fact the father has never been completely verified.

[edit] Adoption of the Surname Mountbatten

Persistent rumors that the British Royal Family must be pro-German given their dynastic origins and many German relatives, prompted the King to abandon his subsidiary German dynastic titles and adopt an English surname. At the behest of King George V, Louis relinquished the title Prince of Battenberg in the Grand Duchy of Hesse, as also the style of Serene Highness, on 14 July 1917. At the same time, Louis also anglicized his family name, changing it from "Battenberg" to "Mountbatten," having considered but rejected "Battenhill" as an alternative. On 17 July, the king created him Marquess of Milford Haven, Earl of Medina, and Viscount Alderney in the peerage of the United Kingdom.[1] The King's British relatives in the Teck, Schleswig-Holstein and Gleichen families underwent similar changes. Louis's wife ceased to use her own title of Princess of Hesse and became known as the Marchioness of Milford Haven. His three younger children ceased to use their princely titles and assumed courtesy titles as children of a British marquess; his eldest daughter, Princess Alice, had married into the Greek royal family in 1903, and never had occasion to use the surname Mountbatten. However, her only son, Prince Philip of Greece and Denmark, adopted the name when he became a British subject in 1947.

While the transition in names and titles was being effected, Louis spent some time at the home of his eldest son, George. After anglicizing his surname to Mountbatten and becoming Marquess of Milford Haven, Prince Louis wrote in his son's guestbook, "Arrived Prince Jekyll, Departed Lord Hyde".

Prince Louis' elder son, George Mountbatten, who received the courtesy title Earl of Medina, succeeded him as 2nd Marquess of Milford Haven in 1921. Prince Louis' younger son, styled Lord Louis Mountbatten after 1917, was created Viscount Mountbatten of Burma in 1946 and then Earl Mountbatten of Burma and Baron Romsey in 1947. He served as the last Viceroy of India.

Lord Milford Haven was appointed a member of the Privy Council and was promoted to the rank of Admiral of the Fleet in recognition of his service to the Royal Navy in August 1921. He died in London on 11 September 1921. His remains were buried at Whippingham Church on the Isle of Wight.

One of his younger brothers, Prince Henry of Battenberg (1858-1896), married Princess Beatrice, the youngest child of Queen Victoria, and took up residence with the Queen in Britain so that his wife could continue to serve as her mother's companion and private secretary. His youngest brother, Prince Franz Joseph of Battenberg 1861-1924 earned a doctorate based on a dissertation about his brother's reign in Bulgaria, wed HRH Princess Anna Petrović Njegoš 1874-1971 in 1897, a daughter of King Nicholas I of Montenegro, and took up residence in Switzerland. His only sister, Princess Marie, wed the head of a mediatized family, Count Gustaf zu Erbach-Schoenberg, who was elevated, along with the couple's male-line descendants, to Prince and Serene Highness by her cousin, Ernest Louis, Grand Duke of Hesse, in 1903. Marie's memoirs have been published in German and English, and include an account of the family's visit to the ruins of the castle of Battenberg in Hesse.

Of the family's two residences in Hesse, the Alexander Palace in Darmstadt returned to the grand duchy as part of the appanaged patrimony of Louis's father, Prince Alexander, from which his children by Julie Hauke were debarred. However, the castle of Heiligenberg in Jugenheim had been bequeathed to Prince Alexander as personal property. During the 1870s, Empress Marie Aleksandrovna, née Princess of Hesse, brought her husband, Tsar Alexander II, her numerous children and a large retinue for annual visits to her brother's little chateau at Heiligenberg, evoking visits from foreign kings, diplomats and matchmaking mothers eager to pay their respects to Russia's Emperor without having to actually travel all the way thither. Not only did these visits put the Hessian grandduchy "on the map", but they enhanced the prestige of the Battenbergs on the Continent. But joint possession of a German property by Louis and Henry in England with their Continental siblings during the Great War proved an untenable embarrassment, so it was sold.

[edit] Titles from birth to death

Here is a list of titles the Marquess of Milford Haven held from birth to death in chronological order:

• His Illustrious Highness Count Louis of Battenberg (1854-1858)
• His Serene Highness Prince Louis of Battenberg (1858-1917)
• Admiral The Rt Hon. Sir Louis Mountbatten, GCB, GCVO, KCMG (1917-1917)
• Admiral The Most Hon. The Marquess of Milford Haven, GCB, GCVO, KCMG (1917-1921)
• Admiral of the Fleet The Most Hon. The Marquess of Milford Haven, GCB, GCVO, KCMG, PC (1921-1921)

[edit] Sources

• Marlene A. Eilers, Queen Victoria's Descendants (New York: Atlantic International Publishing, 1987).
• Richard Alexander Hough, Louis and Victoria: The First Mountbattens (London: Hutchinson, 1974).
• Hugo Vickers, Alice, Princess Andrew of Greece (New York: St. Martin's, 2000).
• Philip Ziegler, Mountbatten (New York: Knopf, 1984).
• mountbattenofburma.com - Tribute & Memorial website to Louis, 1st Earl Mountbatten of Burma

Military Offices
Preceded by: Sir Francis Bridgeman	First Sea Lord 1912–1914	Succeeded by: The Lord Fisher
Peerage of the United Kingdom
Preceded by: New Creation	Marquess of Milford Haven 1917–1921	Succeeded by: HSH Prince George of Battenberg