Princess Alice of Battenberg

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Princess Alice of Battenberg
Princess Andrew of Greece and Denmark
Full name Victoria Alice Elizabeth Julia Marie
Born 25 February 1885
Windsor Castle, Windsor, Berkshire
Died 5 December 1969
Buckingham Palace, London
Buried Church of Maria Magdalene, Gethsemane
Consort to Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark
Issue Margarita
Theodora
Cecilie
Sophie
Philip, Duke of Edinburgh
Royal House House of Oldenburg
House of Hesse
Father Louis of Battenberg
Mother Victoria of Hesse and by Rhine

Princess Alice of Battenberg, later Princess Andrew of Greece and Denmark (25 February 1885 - 5 December 1969) was a great-granddaughter of the British Queen Victoria who married into the royal house of Greece. She was the mother of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, who became consort of Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom. She was also the elder sister of Lord Mountbatten, Lady Louise Mountbatten (13 July 1889 - 7 March 1965), who became the second wife of Gustav VI Adolf of Sweden and George Mountbatten, 2nd Marquess of Milford Haven.

Contents

[edit] Early life

Her Serene Highness Princess Victoria Alice Elizabeth Julia Marie of Battenberg was born in the Tapestry Room at Windsor Castle in Berkshire in the presence of her great-grandmother, Queen Victoria.[1] She was the eldest child of Prince Louis of Battenberg (24 May 1854 - 11 September 1921) and his wife Princess Victoria of Hesse and by Rhine (5 April 1863-24 September 1950). Her mother was the eldest daughter of Princess Alice, Grand Duchess of Hesse, the second daughter of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. Her father was eldest son of Prince Alexander of Hesse and by Rhine through his morganatic marriage to Countess Julia von Hauke. At the request of King George V, on 14 July 1917, Prince Louis relinquished the title Prince of Battenberg in the Grand Duchy of Hesse and the style Serene Highness, and Anglicized the family name to Mountbatten. The following day, the King created him Marquess of Milford Haven in the peerage of the United Kingdom.[2]

She was christened in Darmstadt on 25 April 1885. Her godparents were The Grand Duke of Hesse, Prince Alexander of Hesse and by Rhine, Julia, Princess of Battenberg, Grand Duchess Elizabeth Fyodorovna of Russia, Countess Marie of Erbach-Schönberg, and Queen Victoria of the United Kingdom.[3]

Princess Alice spent her childhood between Darmstadt, Jugenheim, Malta (where her naval officer father was occasionally stationed) and London.[4] She was diagnosed with congenital deafness, but learned to lip-read in English and German.[5] She studied French,[6] and later she learned Greek.[7]

[edit] Marriage

She met and fell in love with Prince Andrew (Andreas) of Greece and Denmark, the fourth son of King George I of the Hellenes and Queen Olga, at King Edward VII’s coronation in 1902. They married on 7 October 1903 at Darmstadt. The bride and groom were closely related to the ruling houses of Great Britain, Prussia/Germany, Russia, Denmark, Greece, Hesse and by Rhine, Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Augustenberg, and Württemberg; their wedding was one of the last great gatherings of the descendants of Queen Victoria and Christian IX of Denmark before World War I. From then on, she was typically referred to as Princess Aliki (Princess Alice) in Greece, but she was properly known among English-speakers as Princess Andrew.

Prince and Princess Andrew of Greece had five children:

[edit] Married Life

Whilst Prince Andrew continued his career in the military, she became involved in charity work, acting as a nurse, assisting at operations and setting up field hospitals during the Balkan Wars. In 1913 George V awarded her the Royal Red Cross. But in the midst World War I she and other members of the Greek royal family were forced into exile when her brother-in-law’s neutrality policy became unpopular. For the next few years most of the Greek royal family lived in Switzerland.

They briefly returned to Greece, taking up residence at Mon Repos in Corfu,[8] on King Constantine’s restoration in 1920. But after the defeat of the Hellenic Army in the Greco-Turkish War, a Revolutionary Committee under the leadership of Syntagmatarkhis (Colonel) Nikolaos Plastiras and Syntagmatarkhis Stylianos Gonatas seized power and forced King Constantine I of the Hellenes into exile once again.[9] Alice's husband Prince Andrew, who had served as commander of the Second Army Corps during the war, was arrested.[4] After a show trial, Prince and Princess Andrew and their children fled Greece aboard a British cruiser, HMS Calypso, under the protection of Commander Gerald Talbot.[10]

The family settled in a small house loaned to them by Princess George of Greece at Saint-Cloud, on the outskirts of Paris, where the princess helped in a charity shop for Greek refugees.[11] She became deeply religious, and on 20 October 1928 entered the Greek Orthodox Church. That winter, she translated her husband’s defence of his actions during the Greco-Turkish War[12] into English.[13] In 1930, after suffering a severe nervous breakdown, Princess Andrew was diagnosed a paranoid schizophrenic at Dr Ernst Simmel’s sanatorium at Tegel, Berlin.[14] She was forcibly removed from her family and placed in a sanatorium in Kreuzlingen, Switzerland.[15] Another patient there at the time was Vaslav Nijinsky.[16]

During Princess Andrew's long convalescence, she and Prince Andrew drifted apart, her daughters all married German noblemen between 1930 and 1931, and Prince Philip went to England to stay with his uncles, then-Lord Louis Mountbatten and George Mountbatten, 2nd Marquess of Milford Haven, and his grandmother, the Dowager Marchioness of Milford-Haven.

She remained at Kreuzlingen for two years, but after a brief stay at a clinic in Merano, was released and began an itinerant existence in Central Europe. She maintained contact with her mother, but broke off ties to the rest of her family until the end of 1936.[17] In 1937 her daughter Cécile, son-in-law and two of her grandchildren were killed in an air accident at Ostend, she and Prince Andrew met for the first time in 6 years at the funeral (Prince Philip, Dickie Mountbatten and Goering also attended.[18] In 1939, she returned to Athens, living in a two-bedroomed flat near the Benaki Museum, alone to work with the poor.[19]

[edit] World War II

During World War II, most of the Greek royal family remained in exile in South Africa.[20] However, Princess Andrew was in the difficult situation of having son-in-laws fighting on the German side and a son in the Royal Navy. She and her sister-in-law, Princess Nicholas of Greece (the mother of Princess Marina, Duchess of Kent), lived in Athens for the duration of the war.[21] She moved into her brother-in-law George's three-storey house in the centre of Athens. She worked for the Red Cross organization, helped organize soup kitchens and flew to Sweden, on the pretext of visiting her sister, to bring back medical supplies.[22] After the fall of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini in September 1943, the German Army occupied Athens, where the majority of Greek Jews had sought refuge. During this period, Princess Andrew hid Rachel Cohen and two of her five children, who sought to evade the Gestapo and deportation to the death camps.[23]

As one of Alice’s sons-in-law, Christoph von Hessen, was a member of the NSDAP and the Waffen-SS, and another, Berthold von Baden, had been invalided out of the German army in 1940 after an injury in France, the occupiers presumably assumed Alice would be pro-German. Once, she was visited by a German general who asked her, "Is there anything I can do for you?" "You can take your troops out of my country," she replied.[22]

Prince Andrew died towards the end of World War II, just as hopes of a post-war reunion of the couple were rising.[21]

[edit] Widowed life

Princess Alice, leading her family from Westminster Abbey following the coronation of her daughter in law, Queen Elizabeth II.
Princess Alice, leading her family from Westminster Abbey following the coronation of her daughter in law, Queen Elizabeth II.

Princess Andrew returned to Great Britain in April 1947 to attend the wedding of her only son, then-Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten, R.N. to HRH The Princess Elizabeth, the elder daughter and heir presumptive of King George VI that November. She had some of her remaining jewels used in Princess Elizabeth’s engagement ring.[24] She sat at the head of her family on the left side of Westminster Abbey, opposite the King, Queen Elizabeth and Queen Mary. It was decided not to invite Princess Andrew's daughters to the wedding because of the depth of anti-German sentiment in Britain following World War II. In January 1949, the princess founded a nursing order of Greek Orthodox nuns, the Christian Sisterhood of Martha and Mary, modeled after the convent that her aunt, the martyr Grand Duchess Elizabeth Fyodorovna had founded in Russia in 1909. She trained on the Greek island of Tinos, and established a home for the order in a hamlet north of Athens. She attended the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in June 1953 wearing a version of her nun's habit: a conservative two-tone grey long dress and a flowing nun-like headdress. The order eventually failed through a lack of suitable applicants.

Increasingly deaf and in failing health though incessant smoking, Princess Andrew left Greece for the last time following the 21 April 1967 Colonels' Coup. Queen Elizabeth II and the Duke of Edinburgh invited Princess Andrew to reside permanently in Great Britain at Buckingham Palace.[4] King Constantine II of the Hellenes and Queen Anne-Marie voluntarily went into exile that December after a failed royalist counter-coup.

Despite suggestions of senility in later life, Princess Andrew remained lucid but physically frail.[25] She died at Buckingham Palace in December 1969. Initially her remains were placed in the Royal Crypt in St George's Chapel at Windsor Castle. Before she died she expressed her wish to be buried at the Convent of Saint Mary Magdalene in Gethsemane on the Mount of Olives (near to her aunt Grand Duchess Elizabeth Fyodorovna, a Russian Orthodox saint). When her daughter, Princess George of Hanover, complained that it would be too far away for them to visit her grave, she jested, "Nonsense, there’s a perfectly good bus service!"[26] Her wish was finally realized on 3 August 1988 when her remains were transferred to her final resting place in a crypt below the church.[4]

On 31 October 1994, Princess Andrew's two surviving children, the Duke of Edinburgh and Princess George of Hanover, went to Yad Vashem (the Holocaust Memorial) in Jerusalem to witness a ceremony honoring her as "Righteous among the Nations" for having hidden the Cohen family in her house in Athens during the Second World War.[27] Haimaki Cohen had aided King George I in 1912-1913. In return, King George offered him any service that he could perform, should Cohen ever need it. His son remembered this during the Nazi threat, and appealed to one of two remaining members of the Royal Family left in Greece, Princess Andrew (the other was Princess Nicholas). Alice honoured the promise and saved the Cohen family.[23]

[edit] Titles

  • Her Serene Highness Princess Alice of Battenberg (1885-1903)
  • Her Royal Highness Princess Andrew of Greece and Denmark (1903-1969)

[edit] Footnotes and Sources

  1. ^ Vickers, p. 2
  2. ^ Princess Alice of Battenberg never used the Mountbatten surname nor did she assume the courtesy title as a daughter of a British marquess since she had married into the Royal House of Greece in 1903.
  3. ^ Vickers, p. 19
  4. ^ a b c d Hugo Vickers, Alice, Princess (1885–1969), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004)
  5. ^ Vickers, p. 26
  6. ^ Vickers, p. 57
  7. ^ Vickers, p. 71
  8. ^ Inherited by Prince Andrew on his father’s assassination in 1913.
  9. ^ Vickers, p. 162
  10. ^ Vickers, p. 171
  11. ^ Vickers, p. 176-178
  12. ^ Prince Andrew of Greece, Toward Disaster (London, 1930)
  13. ^ Vickers, p. 198-199
  14. ^ Vickers, p. 205
  15. ^ Vickers, p. 209
  16. ^ Vickers, p. 213
  17. ^ Vickers, p. 245-256
  18. ^ Vickers, p. 273
  19. ^ Vickers, p. 281, p. 291
  20. ^ Vickers, p. 292
  21. ^ a b "Princess Andrew, Mother of the Duke of Edinburgh," The Times (London), Saturday 6 December 1969, p. 8, col. E
  22. ^ a b Vickers, p. 293-295
  23. ^ a b Vickers, p. 298-299
  24. ^ Vickers, p. 326
  25. ^ Vickers, p. 392
  26. ^ Vickers, p. 396
  27. ^ Vickers, p. 398

[edit] Reference

  • Vickers, Hugo, Alice, Princess Andrew of Greece (Hamish Hamilton, London, 2000) ISBN 0-241-13686-5
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