Princess
Alice of Battenberg (Victoria Alice Elizabeth Julia Marie; 25 February 1885 – 5
December 1969) was the mother of Prince Philip and mother-in-law of Queen
Elizabeth II.
A
great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria, she was born in Windsor Castle and grew
up in Great Britain, Germany and Malta. A Hessian princess by birth, she was a
member of the Battenberg family, a morganatic branch of the House of
Hesse-Darmstadt. She was congenitally deaf. After marrying Prince Andrew of
Greece and Denmark in 1903, she adopted the style of her husband, becoming
Princess Andrew of Greece and Denmark. She lived in Greece until the exile of
most of the Greek royal family in 1917. On returning to Greece a few years
later, her husband was blamed in part for the country's defeat in the
Greco-Turkish War (1919–1922), and the family was once again forced into exile
until the restoration of the Greek monarchy in 1935.
In 1930,
she was diagnosed with schizophrenia and committed to a sanatorium in
Switzerland; thereafter, she lived separately from her husband. After her
recovery, she devoted most of her remaining years to charity work in Greece.
She stayed in Athens during the Second World War, sheltering Jewish refugees,
for which she is recognised as "Righteous Among the Nations" by
Israel's Holocaust memorial institution, Yad Vashem. After the war, she stayed
in Greece and founded a Greek Orthodox nursing order of nuns known as the
Christian Sisterhood of Martha and Mary.
After the
fall of King Constantine II of Greece and the imposition of military rule in
Greece in 1967, she was invited by her son and daughter-in-law to live at
Buckingham Palace in London, where she died two years later. In 1988, her
remains were transferred from a vault in her birthplace, Windsor Castle, to the
Church of Mary Magdalene at the Russian Orthodox convent of the same name on
the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem.
Early life
Alice was
born in the Tapestry Room at Windsor Castle in Berkshire in the presence of her
great-grandmother, Queen Victoria. She was the eldest child of Prince Louis of
Battenberg and his wife, Princess Victoria of Hesse and by Rhine. Her mother
was the eldest daughter of Louis IV, Grand Duke of Hesse, and Princess Alice of
the United Kingdom, the Queen's second daughter. Her father was the eldest son
of Prince Alexander of Hesse and by Rhine through his morganatic marriage to
Countess Julia Hauke, who was created Princess of Battenberg in 1858 by Louis
III, Grand Duke of Hesse. Her three younger siblings, Louise, George, and
Louis, later became Queen of Sweden, Marquess of Milford Haven, and Earl
Mountbatten of Burma, respectively.
She was
christened Victoria Alice Elizabeth Julia Marie in Darmstadt on 25 April 1885.
She had six godparents: her three surviving grandparents, Grand Duke Louis IV
of Hesse, Prince Alexander of Hesse and by Rhine, and Julia, Princess of
Battenberg; her maternal aunt Grand Duchess Elizabeth Feodorovna of Russia; her
paternal aunt Princess Marie of Erbach-Schönberg; and her maternal
great-grandmother Queen Victoria.
Alice spent
her childhood between Darmstadt, London, Jugenheim, and Malta (where her naval
officer father was occasionally stationed). Her mother noticed that she was
slow in learning to talk, and became concerned by her indistinct pronunciation.
Eventually, she was diagnosed with congenital deafness after her grandmother,
Princess Battenberg, identified the problem and took her to see an ear
specialist. With encouragement from her mother, Alice learned to both lip-read
and speak in English and German. Educated privately, she studied French, and
later, after her engagement, she learned Greek. Her early years were spent in
the company of her royal relatives, and she was a bridesmaid at the wedding of
the Duke of York (later King George V) and Mary of Teck in 1893. A few weeks
before her sixteenth birthday, she attended the funeral of Queen Victoria in St
George's Chapel, Windsor Castle, and shortly afterward she was confirmed in the
Anglican faith.
Marriage
Princess
Alice met Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark (known as Andrea within the
family), the fourth son of King George I of Greece and Olga Constantinovna of
Russia, while in London for King Edward VII's coronation in 1902. They married
in a civil ceremony on 6 October 1903 at Darmstadt. The following day, there
were two religious marriage ceremonies; one Lutheran in the Evangelical Castle
Church, and one Greek Orthodox in the Russian Chapel on the Mathildenhöhe. She
adopted the style of her husband, becoming "Princess Andrew". The
bride and groom were closely related to the ruling houses of the United
Kingdom, Germany, Russia, Denmark, and Greece, and their wedding was one of the
great gatherings of the descendants of Queen Victoria and Christian IX of
Denmark held before World War I. Prince and Princess Andrew had five
children, all of whom later had children of their own.
Private
collection of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh.
After their
wedding, Prince Andrew continued his career in the military and Princess Andrew
became involved in charity work. In 1908, she visited Russia for the wedding of
Grand Duchess Marie of Russia and Prince William of Sweden. While there, she
talked with her aunt Grand Duchess Elizabeth Feodorovna, who was formulating
plans for the foundation of a religious order of nurses. Princess Andrew
attended the laying of the foundation stone for her aunt's new church. Later in
the year, the Grand Duchess began giving away all her possessions in
preparation for a more spiritual life. On their return to Greece, Prince and
Princess Andrew found the political situation worsening, as the Athens
government had refused to support the Cretan parliament, which had called for
the union of Crete (still nominally part of the Ottoman Empire) with the Greek
mainland. A group of dissatisfied officers formed a Greek nationalist Military
League that eventually led to Prince Andrew's resignation from the army and the
rise to power of Eleftherios Venizelos.
Successive
life crises
With the
advent of the Balkan Wars, Prince Andrew was reinstated in the army, and
Princess Andrew acted as a nurse, assisting at operations and setting up field
hospitals, work for which King George V awarded her the Royal Red Cross in
1913. During World War I, her brother-in-law King Constantine I of Greece
followed a neutrality policy despite the democratically elected government of
Venizelos supporting the Allies. Princess Andrew and her children were forced
to shelter in the palace cellars during the French bombardment of Athens on 1
December 1916. By June 1917, the King's neutrality policy had become so
untenable that she and other members of the Greek royal family were forced into
exile when her brother-in-law abdicated. For the next few years, most of the
Greek royal family lived in Switzerland.
The global
war effectively ended much of the political power of Europe's dynasties. The
naval career of her father, Prince Louis of Battenberg, had collapsed at the
beginning of the war in the face of anti-German sentiment in Britain. At the
request of King George V, he relinquished the Hessian title Prince of
Battenberg and the style of Serene Highness on 14 July 1917, 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. The following year, two of
her aunts, Empress Alexandra Feodorovna of Russia, and Grand Duchess Elizabeth
Feodorovna, were murdered by Bolsheviks after the Russian revolution. At the
end of the war the Russian, German and Austro-Hungarian empires had fallen, and
Princess Andrew's uncle, Ernest Louis, Grand Duke of Hesse, was deposed.
On King
Constantine's restoration in 1920, they briefly returned to Greece, taking up
residence on Corfu at Mon Repos (inherited by Prince Andrew on his father's
assassination in 1913). But after the defeat of the Hellenic Army in the
Greco-Turkish War, a Revolutionary Committee under the leadership of Colonels
Nikolaos Plastiras and Stylianos Gonatas seized power and forced King Constantine
into exile once again. Prince Andrew, who had served as commander of the Second
Army Corps during the war, was arrested. Several former ministers and generals
arrested at the same time were shot following a brief trial, and British
diplomats assumed that Prince Andrew was also in mortal danger. After a show
trial, he was sentenced to banishment, and Prince and Princess Andrew and their
children fled Greece aboard a British cruiser, HMS Calypso, under the
protection of the British naval attaché, Commander Gerald Talbot.
Illness
The family
settled in a small house loaned to them by Princess George of Greece and
Denmark at Saint-Cloud, on the outskirts of Paris, where Princess Andrew helped
in a charity shop for Greek refugees. She became deeply religious and, in
October 1928, converted to the Greek Orthodox Church. That winter, she
translated into English her husband's defence of his actions during the
Greco-Turkish War. Soon afterward, she began claiming that she was receiving
divine messages and that she had healing powers.
In 1930,
Princess Andrew began to behave in a very disturbed manner and claimed to be in
contact with Christ and the Buddha. She was diagnosed with paranoid
schizophrenia, first by Thomas Ross, a psychiatrist who specialised in
shell-shock, and subsequently by Sir Maurice Craig, who treated the future King
George VI before he had speech therapy. The diagnosis was confirmed at Ernst
Simmel's sanatorium at Tegel, Berlin. Princess Andrew was forcibly removed from
her family and placed in Ludwig Binswanger's sanatorium in Kreuzlingen,
Switzerland. It was a famous and well-respected institution with several
celebrity patients, including Vaslav Nijinsky, the ballet dancer and
choreographer, who was there at the same time as Princess Andrew. Binswanger
also diagnosed the princess with schizophrenia. Both he and Simmel consulted
Sigmund Freud, who believed that her delusions were the result of sexual
frustration. He recommended "X-raying her ovaries in order to kill off her
libido." Princess Andrew protested that she was sane and repeatedly tried
to leave the asylum.
During
Princess Andrew's long convalescence, she and Prince Andrew drifted apart, her
daughters all married German princes in 1930 and 1931 (she did not attend any
of the weddings), and Prince Philip went to the United Kingdom to stay with his
uncles, Lord Louis Mountbatten and George Mountbatten, 2nd Marquess of Milford
Haven, and his grandmother, the Dowager Marchioness of Milford Haven.
Princess
Andrew remained at Kreuzlingen for two years, but after a brief stay at a
clinic in Merano in northern Italy, was released and began an itinerant,
incognito 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. In 1937,
her daughter Cecilie, 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 six
years at the funeral. (Prince Philip and Lord Louis Mountbatten also attended.)
She resumed contact with her family, and in 1938 returned to Athens alone to
work with the poor, while living in a two-bedroom flat near the Benaki Museum.
World War
II
During
World War II, Princess Andrew was in the difficult situation of having
sons-in-law fighting on the German side and a son in the British Royal Navy.
Her cousin, Prince Victor zu Erbach-Schönberg, was the German ambassador in
Greece until the occupation of Athens by Axis forces in April 1941. She and her
sister-in-law, Princess Nicholas of Greece, lived in Athens for the duration of
the war, while most of the Greek royal family remained in exile in South
Africa. She moved out of her small flat and into her brother-in-law George's
three-storey house in the centre of Athens. She worked for the Red Cross,
helped organise soup kitchens for the starving populace and flew to Sweden to
bring back medical supplies on the pretext of visiting her sister Louise, who
was married to the Crown Prince. She organised two shelters for orphaned and
lost children, and a nursing circuit for poor neighbourhoods.
The
occupying forces apparently presumed Princess Andrew was pro-German, as one of
her sons-in-law, Prince Christoph of Hesse, was a member of the NSDAP and the
Waffen-SS, and another, Berthold, Margrave of Baden, had been invalided out of
the German army in 1940 after an injury in France. Nonetheless, when visited by
a German general who asked her, "Is there anything I can do for you?",
she replied, "You can take your troops out of my country."
After the
fall of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini in September 1943, the German Army
occupied Athens, where a minority of Greek Jews had sought refuge. The majority
(about 60,000 out of a total population of 75,000) were deported to Nazi
concentration camps, where all but 2,000 died.During this period, Princess
Andrew hid Jewish widow Rachel Cohen and two of her five children, who sought
to evade the Gestapo and deportation to the death camps. Earlier, in 1913,
Rachel's husband, Haimaki Cohen, had aided King George I of Greece. In return,
King George had offered him any service that he could perform should Cohen ever
need it. Years later, during the Nazi threat, Cohen's son remembered this, and
appealed to Princess Andrew, who, with Princess Nicholas, was one of only two
remaining members of the royal family left in Greece. Princess Andrew honoured
the promise and saved the Cohen family.
When Athens
was liberated in October 1944, Harold Macmillan visited Princess Andrew and
described her as "living in humble, not to say somewhat squalid
conditions". In a letter to her son, she admitted that in the last week
before liberation she had had no food except bread and butter, and no meat for
several months.By early December, the situation in Athens was far from
improved; Communist guerrillas (ELAS) were fighting the British for control of
the capital. As the fighting continued, Princess Andrew was informed that her
husband had died, just as hopes of a post-war reunion of the couple were
rising.They had not seen each other since 1939. During the fighting, to the
dismay of the British, she insisted on walking the streets distributing rations
to policemen and children in contravention of the curfew order. When told that
she might have been struck by a stray bullet, she replied "they tell me
that you don't hear the shot that kills you and in any case I am deaf. So, why
worry about that?"
Widowhood
Princess
Andrew returned to the United Kingdom in April 1947 to attend the November
wedding of her only son, Philip, to Princess Elizabeth, the elder daughter and
heir presumptive of King George VI. She had some of her remaining jewels used in
Princess Elizabeth's engagement ring. On the day of the wedding, her son was
created Duke of Edinburgh by George VI. For the wedding ceremony, Princess
Andrew sat at the head of her family on the north side of Westminster Abbey,
opposite the King, Queen Elizabeth and Queen Mary. It was decided not to invite
Princess Andrew's daughters (the groom's sisters) to the wedding because 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, modelled after the convent that her
aunt, the martyr Grand Duchess Elizabeth Feodorovna, had founded in Russia in
1909. She trained on the Greek island of Tinos, established a home for the order
in a hamlet north of Athens, and undertook two tours of the United States in
1950 and 1952 in an effort to raise funds. Her mother was baffled by her
actions, "What can you say of a nun who smokes and plays canasta?",
she said. Her daughter-in-law became queen of the Commonwealth realms in 1952,
and Princess Andrew attended her coronation in June 1953, wearing a two-tone
grey dress and wimple in the style of her nun's habit. However, the order
eventually failed through a lack of suitable applicants.
In 1960,
she visited India at the invitation of Rajkumari Amrit Kaur, who had been
impressed by Princess Andrew's interest in Indian religious thought, and for
her own spiritual quest. The trip was cut short when she unexpectedly took ill,
and her sister-in-law, Edwina Mountbatten, Countess Mountbatten of Burma, who
happened to be passing through Delhi on her own tour, had to smooth things with
the Indian hosts who were taken aback at Princess Andrew's sudden change of
plans. She later claimed she had had an out-of-body experience. Edwina
continued her own tour, and died the following month.
Increasingly
deaf and in failing health, 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 at Buckingham Palace in
London.[3] King Constantine II of Greece and Queen Anne-Marie went into exile
that December after a failed royalist counter-coup.
Death and
burial
Despite
suggestions of senility in later life, Princess Andrew remained lucid but
physically frail. She died at Buckingham Palace on 5 December 1969. She left no
possessions, having given everything away. Initially her remains were placed in
the Royal Crypt in St George's Chapel at Windsor Castle on 10 December 1969,
but before she died she had expressed her wish to be buried at the Convent of
Saint Mary Magdalene in Gethsemane on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem (near
her aunt Grand Duchess Elizabeth Feodorovna, 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, Princess Andrew jested, "Nonsense,
there's a perfectly good bus service!"Her wish was realized on 3 August
1988 when her remains were transferred to her final resting place in a crypt
below the church.
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 honouring her as "Righteous Among the
Nations" for having hidden the Cohens in her house in Athens during the
Second World War.Prince Philip said of his mother's sheltering of persecuted
Jews, "I suspect that it never occurred to her that her action was in any
way special. She was a person with a deep religious faith, and she would have
considered it to be a perfectly natural human reaction to fellow beings in
distress." In 2010, the Princess was posthumously named a Hero of the
Holocaust by the British Government.
No comments:
Post a Comment