Princess Alice of Battenberg

• 1. Introduction

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  Princess Alice of Battenberg, who after her marriage was known as Princess Andrew of Greece and Denmark, once faced a German general in occupied Athens. He asked whether there was anything he could do for her. She answered, "You can take your troops out of my country".

  The woman who gave that reply was deaf, living in modest rooms, and surrounded by relatives who fought on opposing sides. She was the mother of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, and the paternal grandmother of King Charles III. Yet her own life was far stranger than that bare description suggests.

  How did a child born among queens end up hiding hunted families in a war-torn capital? What happened when doctors and a famous psychoanalyst decided she was ill, and why did she insist she was sane? And why does a princess from Windsor rest today on a hillside in Jerusalem?

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• 2. Born Among Queens

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  At 4:40 pm on the 25th of February 1885, a baby girl was born in the Tapestry Room at Windsor Castle. Her great-grandmother, Queen Victoria, was in the room. The child was christened Victoria Alice Elizabeth Julia Marie in Darmstadt on the 25th of April.

  She was the eldest child of Prince Louis of Battenberg and Princess Victoria of Hesse and by Rhine. Her mother was the eldest daughter of Louis IV, Grand Duke of Hesse, and of Princess Alice, the Queen's second daughter. Her father's line was less grand. His father, Prince Alexander of Hesse and by Rhine, had married Countess Julia Hauke in a morganatic marriage, and in 1858 Julia was made Princess of Battenberg.

  Three younger siblings followed: Louise, George and Louis. They would become a Queen of Sweden, a Marquess of Milford Haven and an Earl Mountbatten of Burma. Alice's six godparents included Queen Victoria and her aunt Grand Duchess Elizabeth Feodorovna of Russia. Her childhood moved between Darmstadt, London, Jugenheim and Malta, where her naval officer father was sometimes stationed.

  Her mother noticed that the little girl was slow to talk and that her pronunciation was blurred. It was her grandmother, the Princess of Battenberg, who recognised the real problem and took her to an ear specialist. The verdict was congenital deafness. With her mother's encouragement, Alice learned to lip-read and to speak in both English and German. She was taught privately, studied French, and picked up Greek after her engagement.

  Royal occasions punctuated her youth. In 1893 she was a bridesmaid when Prince George, Duke of York, married Princess Mary of Teck. A few weeks before her 16th birthday, she stood in St George's Chapel at Queen Victoria's funeral, and soon afterwards she was confirmed in the Anglican faith. In 1902 she travelled to London for the coronation of King Edward VII, and there she met a Greek prince.

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• 3. A Wedding of Dynasties

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  On the 6th of October 1903, Alice married Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark in a civil ceremony at Darmstadt. His family called him Andrea. He was the fourth son of King George I of Greece and Olga Constantinovna of Russia. The next day brought two religious services, a Lutheran one at the Evangelical Castle Church and a Greek Orthodox one at the Russian Chapel on the Mathildenhöhe.

  The guest list read like a map of Europe. Bride and groom were closely related to the ruling houses of the United Kingdom, Germany, Russia, Denmark and Greece. The wedding was one of the last great reunions of the descendants of Queen Victoria and King Christian IX before the First World War. Alice took her husband's style and became Princess Andrew. Five children followed: Margarita, Theodora, Cecilie, Sophie and Philip.

  While Andrew pursued his military career, Alice turned to charity work. In 1908 she travelled to Russia for the wedding of Grand Duchess Marie and Prince William of Sweden. There her aunt Elizabeth Feodorovna described plans for a religious order of nurses. Alice was present when the foundation stone of her aunt's new church was laid. Before the year ended, Elizabeth began giving away her possessions to prepare for a more spiritual life.

  Back in Greece, the couple found a country on edge. The Athens government had refused to back the parliament of Crete, which wanted union with the Greek mainland. Discontented officers formed a nationalist Military League. Their pressure led to Andrew's resignation from the army and cleared the way for Eleftherios Venizelos to take power.

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• 4. War and Exile

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  In 1913, King George V awarded Princess Andrew the Royal Red Cross. She had earned it during the Balkan Wars, when Andrew was reinstated in the army and she worked as a nurse. She assisted at operations and set up field hospitals.

  The First World War split Greece. King Constantine I, her brother-in-law, kept the country neutral, while the elected government of Venizelos favoured the Allies. On the 1st of December 1916, French forces bombarded Athens, and Alice sheltered with her children in the palace cellars. By June 1917 the neutrality policy had collapsed. Constantine abdicated, and she and other royals went into exile, mostly in Switzerland.

  The war was also dismantling her wider family. Her father's naval career had collapsed under anti-German feeling in Britain. At King George V's request, on the 14th of July 1917, he gave up the title Prince of Battenberg and anglicised the family name to Mountbatten. The next day he was created Marquess of Milford Haven. In 1918 two of her aunts, Empress Alexandra Feodorovna and Grand Duchess Elizabeth Feodorovna, were murdered by Bolsheviks. The Russian, German and Austro-Hungarian empires had fallen, and her uncle Ernest Louis, Grand Duke of Hesse, lost his throne.

  Constantine's restoration in 1920 brought Alice and Andrew back briefly. They lived on Corfu at Mon Repos, which Andrew had inherited when his father was assassinated in 1913. It did not last. Greece lost the Greco-Turkish War, and a Revolutionary Committee led by Colonels Nikolaos Plastiras and Stylianos Gonatas seized power. Constantine was forced out again.

  Andrew, who had commanded the Second Army Corps, was arrested. Several former ministers and generals seized with him were shot after a short trial. British diplomats feared he would share their fate. A show trial ended instead in banishment. The family escaped aboard the British cruiser HMS Calypso, under the protection of the naval attaché, Commander Gerald Talbot.

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• 5. The Sanatorium

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  In a small house at Saint-Cloud, on the edge of Paris, the exiled family found shelter, lent to them by Princess George of Greece and Denmark. Alice worked in a charity shop for Greek refugees. She grew deeply devout, and in October 1928 she converted to the Greek Orthodox Church. That winter she translated into English her husband's defence of his conduct in the Greco-Turkish War. Soon afterwards she began saying that she received divine messages and had the power to heal.

  By 1930 her behaviour had become more erratic, and she claimed to be in contact with the Buddha and Christ. A psychiatrist named Thomas Ross, who specialised in shell shock, diagnosed paranoid schizophrenia. Sir Maurice Craig, who had treated the future King George VI before his speech therapy, agreed. The diagnosis was confirmed at Ernst Simmel's sanatorium at Tegel, Berlin.

  She was then forcibly removed from her family and placed in Ludwig Binswanger's sanatorium at Kreuzlingen in Switzerland. The institution was famous and respected, and its patients included the dancer and choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky, who was there at the same time. Binswanger also diagnosed schizophrenia. He and Simmel consulted Sigmund Freud, who decided her delusions arose from sexual frustration. His proposed remedy was "X-raying her ovaries in order to kill off her libido." Throughout, she insisted she was sane and repeatedly tried to leave.

  Her family dissolved around her. Her four daughters married German princes in 1930 and 1931, and she attended none of the weddings. She and Andrew drifted apart. Young Philip went to Britain to stay with his Mountbatten uncles and his grandmother, the Dowager Marchioness of Milford Haven.

  After two years at Kreuzlingen and a short stay at a clinic in Merano, Italy, she was released. She then lived an itinerant, incognito life in Central Europe. She kept in touch with her mother but cut off the rest of her family until the end of 1936. In 1937 an air accident at Ostend killed her daughter Cecilie, her son-in-law Georg and two grandchildren. At the funeral she saw Andrew for the first time in six years. Philip and Lord Louis Mountbatten were there too. In 1938 she went back to Athens alone, to work among the poor from a two-bedroom flat near the Benaki Museum.

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• 6. Occupied Athens

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  By April 1941, when Axis forces occupied Athens, the German ambassador there was her own cousin, Prince Victor zu Erbach-Schönberg. Her family stood on both sides of the war. Her sons-in-law were fighting for Germany, while her son served in the British Royal Navy. Most of the Greek royal family waited out the war in South Africa. She stayed in Athens with her sister-in-law Princess Nicholas, and moved into her brother-in-law George's three-storey house in the city centre.

  She worked for the Red Cross and helped run soup kitchens for a starving population. Once she flew to Sweden to fetch medical supplies, with a visit to her sister, Crown Princess Louise, as cover. She set up two shelters for orphaned and lost children, along with a nursing circuit serving poor districts.

  The occupiers seem to have assumed she was on their side. One son-in-law, Prince Christoph of Hesse, belonged to the NSDAP and the Waffen-SS. Another, Berthold, Margrave of Baden, had left the German army in 1940, invalided by an injury in France.

  The real test came after the fall of Mussolini in September 1943, when the German Army moved into Athens. A minority of Greek Jews had taken refuge there. About 60,000 of the 75,000 Greek Jews were deported to concentration camps, and all but 2,000 of them died. Alice hid Rachel Cohen, a Jewish widow, and two of her five children from the Gestapo. Rachel's husband Haimaki Cohen had helped King George I of Greece in 1913, and the King had promised him any favour he might later need. Cohen's son remembered that promise and appealed to Alice, one of only two royals left in Greece. She kept the promise and saved the family.

  When Athens was liberated in October 1944, Harold Macmillan visited and described her as "living in humble, not to say somewhat squalid conditions". She told her son that in the last week before liberation she had eaten only bread and butter, and that she had had no meat for months. Fighting soon resumed, as the Communist guerrillas of ELAS clashed with British forces for the capital. In the middle of it, she learned that Andrew had died. They had not met since 1939. She still walked the streets handing out rations to policemen and children, ignoring the curfew and alarming the British. Warned about stray bullets, she answered, "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?"

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• 7. Habit and Quest

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  In April 1947 Alice came back to the United Kingdom for the November wedding of her only son, Philip, to Princess Elizabeth, the elder daughter and heir presumptive of King George VI. Some of her remaining jewels went into Elizabeth's engagement ring. On the wedding day George VI created Philip Duke of Edinburgh. Alice sat at the head of her family on the north side of Westminster Abbey, facing the King, Queen Elizabeth and Queen Mary. Her daughters were left off the guest list because of anti-German feeling in postwar Britain.

  In January 1949 she founded the Christian Sisterhood of Martha and Mary, a Greek Orthodox nursing order. She modelled it on the convent her martyred aunt Elizabeth Feodorovna had established in Russia in 1909. Alice trained on the Greek island of Tinos and set up the order's home in a hamlet north of Athens. She toured the United States in 1950 and again in 1952 to raise money. Her mother was bewildered and asked, "What can you say of a nun who smokes and plays canasta?"

  After her daughter-in-law became queen in 1952, Alice attended the coronation in June 1953. She wore a two-tone grey dress and a wimple, echoing a nun's habit. The order never found enough suitable recruits, and it eventually failed.

  In 1960 Rajkumari Amrit Kaur invited her to India, impressed by her interest in Indian religious thought. The trip ended abruptly when Alice suddenly fell ill. Her sister-in-law Edwina Mountbatten, Countess Mountbatten of Burma, was passing through Delhi on her own tour and had to calm the surprised hosts. Alice later said she had had an out-of-body experience. Edwina carried on with her tour and died the following month.

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• 8. Last Wishes

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  The Colonels' Coup of the 21st of April 1967 made Greece unsafe for an increasingly deaf and frail Alice, and she left for the last time. Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip invited her to live permanently at Buckingham Palace. King Constantine II and Queen Anne-Marie of Greece went into exile that December, after a royalist counter-coup failed.

  Some people suggested she had become senile, but she stayed lucid, if physically weak. She died at Buckingham Palace on the 5th of December 1969, aged 84. She owned nothing, having given everything away. Her coffin was first laid in the Royal Crypt at St George's Chapel, Windsor Castle, on the 10th of December.

  Before her death she had asked to be buried at the Convent of Saint Mary Magdalene in Gethsemane, on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem, near her aunt Elizabeth. One of her daughters objected that Jerusalem was too far for visits. Alice joked, "Nonsense, there's a perfectly good bus service!" On the 3rd of August 1988, her remains were moved to a crypt beneath the convent church.

  On the 31st of October 1994, Philip and his surviving sister, Princess George of Hanover, went to Yad Vashem in Jerusalem. There they watched their mother honoured as Righteous Among the Nations for sheltering the Cohens in her Athens home. Philip said of her, "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 British Government named her a Hero of the Holocaust.

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