Some people consider Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh,
Consort of Queen Elizabeth II, to be ever so slightly eccentric in his remarks
and behaviour, but he is nothing in comparison to his late mother, Princess
Alice of Battenberg, who married his father, Prince Andrew of Greece, in 1903.
Many would say that Prince Philip looks remarkably like his late father but
gets at least some of his personal characteristics from his mother.
It did not help that Alice, a great-granddaughter of Queen
Victoria, was born with a serious hearing impediment that got steadily worse as
she got older. She was certainly intelligent, and she was able, on occasion, to
use her deafness to her advantage.
However, her interest in spiritualism and religion led her
to indulge in increasingly bizarre behaviour. It was one thing to play the Ouija board and believe that packs of cards
were conveying messages from the dead, but quite another to say that she was
going out to dinner with Jesus, with whom she was apparently having an
extra-marital affair, or to believe that she had her own group of disciples in
Bedfordshire.
In 1930, when her son Philip was only nine years old, she
was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and removed from her family to be
lodged in a series of psychiatric institutions. Philip was sent to England to
live with his uncles, Louis and George Mountbatten (the name change from
Battenberg had been done to make the name sound less German during World War
I).
Contact between Alice and her family only resumed in 1937
when they met at the funeral of one of her daughters, Cecilie, who had been
killed, together with her husband and two of her three children, in a plane
crash. After the funeral Alice returned to Athens to work among the poor.
It is understandable that she would have been confused by
the war that broke out in 1939, given that all her four daughters had married
into German nobility, who fought on the German side and at least one of whom
was a member of the SS, whereas her son was fighting on the British side as a
member of the Royal Navy (which was where he met Princess Elizabeth). When Philip married Elizabeth in 1947 none of
the surviving daughters were invited to the wedding, due to the German
connections.
Alice’s husband, Prince Andrew, had died in 1944, after
which she devoted herself to founding an order of nuns, although she was never
ordained as one herself. She took to dressing in a nun’s habit, including at
the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth in 1953.
She lived out her final years in Buckingham Palace, still
dressed as a nun. The Palace staff described her as “strange but likeable”. She
died in 1969, have declared her wish to be buried in Jerusalem. When one of her
daughters objected that her family would find it difficult to visit her grave,
her reply was that there was “a perfectly good bus service”.
There does not appear to have been an ounce of ill-will in
her, except to the German army that occupied Greece. There is plenty of
evidence that she endured many personal hardships during the war years and
performed many good deeds at personal risk, including sheltering Jews and distributing
rations during the curfew.
It is hardly surprising, though, that her son, having had
such a disturbed upbringing, has been notable for trying to instil the values
of self-discipline in his own family, with varying degrees of success. It is
also notable that he has always had a strong independent streak that has got
him into trouble at various times. This would seem to have been inherited from
his mother.
© John Welford
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