Princess Alice of Battenberg

Princess Alice of Battenberg (Victoria Alice Elizabeth Julia Marie; 25 February 1885 – 5 December 1969) was the mother of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, mother-in-law of Queen Elizabeth II, and paternal grandmother of King Charles III. After marrying Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark in 1903, she adopted the style of her husband, becoming Princess Andrew of Greece and Denmark.

A great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria, Alice was born at Windsor Castle and grew up in the United Kingdom, 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. 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, Princess Andrew 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, Princess Andrew 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 at 4:40 pm on 25 February 1885 in the Tapestry Room at Windsor Castle, 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.

Alice was christened Victoria Alice Elizabeth Julia Marie in Darmstadt on 25 April. 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, the Princess of 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 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 Prince George, Duke of York, and Princess Mary of Teck (later King George V and Queen Mary) in 1893. A few weeks before her 16th birthday, she attended Queen Victoria's funeral in St George's Chapel, Windsor Castle, and shortly afterward she was confirmed in the Anglican faith.

Marriage

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 in Darmstadt. The following day, there were two religious marriage ceremonies; one Lutheran at the Evangelical Castle Church, and one Greek Orthodox at 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 King Christian IX held before World War I. Prince and Princess Andrew had five children: Margarita, Theodora, Cecilie, Sophie, and Philip.

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, Elizabeth 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 King Constantine 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 Princess Andrew's 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 Princess Andrew's 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 Constantine's restoration in 1920, Prince and Princess Andrew 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.