George I rode the roller-coaster of Greek politics for half a century. He survived censure, insurrections, intrigues, and at least one assassination attempt before the one that killed him. He accepted his destiny, and did what he sensed was his duty, but he made it clear, repeatedly, in public and in private, that he was ever ready to step down from the throne if his services were no longer required.
His grandson, Prince Philip, felt much the same way. It infuriated the Duke of Edinburgh if he was portrayed in the press as someone who revelled in the life of a prince and believed in the survival of the Crown above all else. He didn’t. ‘If a monarchy serves a purpose, and if, on the whole, most people are mostly comfortable with it, so be it,’ he told me. ‘If not, fine, let’s stop buggering about and have done with it.’ The Queen would be saddened no longer to be Queen of Canada or Australia (we know how the Queen feels about the Commonwealth, old and new), but Prince Philip was ready to say, as he did, in Canada in 1969, ‘It is a complete misconception to imagine that the monarchy exists in the interests of the monarch. It doesn’t. It exists in the interests of the people. If at any time any nation decides that the system is unacceptable, then it is up to them to change it.’
George I of Greece was a family man, by all accounts a good man, decent, God-fearing, and happily married. That said, according to the memoirs of the well-connected Prince von Bülow (gossipy, gripping, but generally considered reasonably reliable), George I did allow himself ‘an occasional relaxation’ at Aix-les-Bains, on his annual French holiday away from his queen. When his eldest son, Constantine, followed his father’s example, the crown prince’s dismayed wife, Sophie (another of Queen Victoria’s grandchildren), turned to her father-in-law for guidance. ‘You must consult your dear mother-in-law,’ he is supposed to have told her. ‘She will be able to give you the best advice on this point.’
Over ten years, Alice and Andrea had four daughters: Margarita (1905–81), born in the none-too-comfortable Royal Palace in Athens, and Theodora (1906–69), Cécile (1911–37), and Sophie (1914–2000), all born at Tatoï, the royal family’s cherished country estate near by. Life at home was fairly placid: Alice rode, sewed, read, played with her children, corresponded with her family. In the streets it was a little livelier. This was a turbulent decade in Greek politics (yet another one), the ups and downs including a coup d’état and the resignation of all the royal princes from the Greek army in 1909, followed by their reinstatement at the outset of the first of the Balkan wars in 1912. An incidental side effect of the princes’ period outside the army was that they did not venture out socially as much as previously: accustomed to appearing in public in uniform, they felt under-dressed – emasculated, even – in civilian clothes.
During much of this period Alice and her daughters were abroad, visiting her parents and other members of the extended family in Germany, England, Malta, and Russia, joining house parties, attending weddings, christenings, funerals. In May 1910 Alice and Andrea were in London when Edward VII died. They attended his funeral. Alice’s father had been a friend of the King’s (they had shared Mrs Langtry, after all); Queen Alexandra was Andrea’s aunt.
In March 1913 King George I of Greece was murdered outside a café in Salonika, shot in the back by a single bullet from a lone assassin. A motive was never established. The murderer, a Greek, apparently deranged, threw himself to his own death from an upstairs window on the way to his cross-examination. In his will the old King left some words of counsel for his son and successor, now King Constantine I: ‘Be calm and never forget that you are reigning over a southern people who are easily roused and may in a moment do and say many things which they will probably forget a few hours after. For this reason never fall into a passion and never forget that it is preferable that the King should suffer rather than his people.’
He also left Andrea and Alice a useful annuity and gave them his house, Mon Repos, on the pretty island of Corfu. (The British had given Greece the Ionian islands at the time of George I’s accession.) Alice mourned the loss of her father-in-law. He had been a good friend to her, had taken her seriously, and admired and encouraged her good works.
The tradition of royal princesses, born to privilege, with time on their hands and status at their disposal, both setting an example and at the same time achieving a degree of self-fulfilment, by giving practical service to the community, is a relatively young one. Prince Albert, Queen Victoria’s Prince Consort, very much encouraged it. In Darmstadt, Victoria and Albert’s daughter, Alice, had established a sisterhood of young women, known as ‘Alice’s nurses’, committed to giving service to the community as trained district nurses. In Russia, this Alice’s daughter (young Alice’s aunt), Ella (married to Grand Duke Serge), established a convent of nursing sisters and built a church for her community. In Greece, George I’s wife, Queen Olga (another Russian grand duchess by birth), founded four separate hospitals, as well as building a prison for women and a reformatory school for boys.
These women were models for Alice. She was inspired by their example, both by the practical hands-on alleviation of suffering that the nurses could achieve, and, especially in Aunt Ella’s case, by the spiritual zeal that fuelled it.
There is certainly a thread of spiritual zeal that runs through the family to this day. Prince Philip was deeply interested in the spiritual – as is his son, Prince Charles. Philip’s library contained several hundred volumes on religious and spiritual matters. He told me that he was a ‘committed Christian’, even if, as he put it, ‘I have a few questions to ask.’ He also told me that his mother and his great-aunt Ella had used their faith ‘to a purpose’ and that he had tried, in his way, to do the same. ‘I wanted to do something practical.’ With Prince Hassan of Jordan and Sir Evelyn Rothschild, for example, he actively encouraged dialogue between Christians, Muslims, and Jews with a series of inter-faith conferences. And in 1986, as president of the World Wide Fund for Nature, he organised a meeting between leaders of the major faiths during WWF’s twenty-fifth anniversary conference in Assisi. He proposed the creation of ARC – the Association of Religion and Conservation. To what purpose? ‘To encourage the members to feel their responsibility to God’s creation and care for the natural environment.’
When I asked the Duke to talk on the record about his interest in religion, he declined: ‘If I start talking about religion, the press will say I’m barking. You’ll say I’m barking.’ For many years, some people said his mother, Princess Alice, was barking.
Foreshadowing Alice’s spiritual crisis, in 1905 her Aunt Ella renounced the grand-ducal life completely and declared with pride to her nursing sisters, ‘I am about to leave the brilliant world in which it fell to me to occupy a brilliant position, but together with you all I am about to enter a much greater world – that of the poor and the afflicted.’
When she arrived in Athens in 1904, still a teenager, the first community work young Alice undertook was assisting at the Greek School for Embroidery, where girls were taught a specific skill that would help them support their families. Eight years later, in 1912, at the onset of the Balkan wars, Alice would galvanise the young embroiderers and set them to the task of making and mending warm and durable clothes (jackets, scarves, hoods) both for the troops and for refugees.
The first Balkan war – in which Greece, alongside Bulgaria, Montenegro, and Serbia, sought to reclaim territory from the Turkish European empire and secure Crete for Greece – saw Prince Andrea back in uniform, as a lieutenant colonel with the 3rd Regiment of Cavalry. When he was posted to Larissa, an established garrison town on the old Turkish border, Alice accompanied her husband, but she went with a mission of her own: to establish her own first-aid field hospitals at the front. She sent her mother written reports: ‘I went to the Military Hospital and saw the arrival of some 15 to 20 wounded soldiers from a skirmish at Elassona who had taken 14 hours coming here over utterly impossible roads, over a fearful mountain pass – Melouna – at the frontier, where huge boulders and rock
s stuck out of the road, and on hearing of their agony and the impossibility of bringing severely wounded at all to Larissa, and news which reached us of the army’s tremendously rapid advance, I instantly decided to move my hospital to Elassona.’
Over the next three months – first at Elassona, then at Servia, then elsewhere in Macedonia, and finally at Epirus – Alice displayed the most extraordinary courage, compassion, determination, energy, and organisational skill. She set up hospitals, she marshalled nurses, she bullied doctors, she commandeered vehicles, houses, a school. She attended the sick, she tended the dying, she assisted at an amputation. For days she barely ate or slept and did not change her clothes. She witnessed the full horror of war. ‘But, God!’ she told her mother, ‘What things we saw! Shattered arms, and legs and heads, such awful sights – and then to have to bandage those dreadful things for three days and three nights. The corridor full of blood, and cast-off bandages knee-high.’
Reading her letters to her mother,7 you can see she was appalled by what she saw, and exhausted by the experience, but she was exhilarated too. There is manic energy here: touches of Joan of Arc as well as Florence Nightingale. Her forcefulness rubbed some people up the wrong way; it left others worrying about the effect on her health when she came down from her ‘high’. What no one doubted was her courage and commitment. In November 1913 George V decorated her with the Royal Red Cross, ‘in recognition of her services in nursing the sick and wounded among the Greek soldiers during the recent war’.
The Balkan wars, of course, were merely the curtain-raiser for the Big Show, the 1914–18 conflict. Constantine I was resolved that Greece should remain neutral. Britain and the Allies were where Greece’s traditional allegiance lay, but Germany under the Kaiser looked formidable and might not prove magnanimous in victory. It was a difficult call. King Constantine hedged his bets. Besides, his family had close kith and kin on both sides of the argument.
In London in October 1914, Alice’s father, Louis of Battenberg, First Sea Lord since 1912, resigned. He was married to a granddaughter of Queen Victoria, he had served with great distinction in the Royal Navy for forty-six years, but he was German. There was no denying it. He had a home in Germany, he spoke German, he kept German staff. The Daily Mail did not look kindly on any of that. And Winston Churchill, now First Lord of the Admiralty, wanted him replaced in any event. The Battenberg family was devastated. His younger son, Dickie, a fourteen-year-old naval cadet, vowed to avenge the slight.8
Louis of Battenberg’s wife, Victoria, railed against the stupidity of those responsible. ‘The King is a nobody,’ she declared. In fact, the King was somebody of some substance and, though several parts German himself, determined, for reasons of patriotism and self-interest, to assert the Britishness of the British Crown. In 1917 George V disowned the German connection. The House of Saxe-Coburg, also known as Wettin, also known as Wipper, would henceforward be known as the House of Windsor. (The Kaiser, on hearing the news, was reported to have quipped that he was ‘off to the theatre to see The Merry Wives of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha’.) The Queen’s brothers, from the proud House of Teck, would become the Marquess of Cambridge and the Earl of Athlone, and the Battenbergs would be transliterated into the Mountbattens. Queen Victoria’s ‘dear Ludwig’ was given a peerage and a title with a comforting British ring to every syllable: Marquess of Milford Haven.9
Louis was forcibly retired, but his sons, with their new names, continued to serve in the British navy. Alice professed herself resigned to whatever fate might have in store for them. ‘I can’t be grateful enough that I was given the nature of a fatalist,’ she wrote to a friend. ‘All my life I have felt that all of us have our appointed time on earth & that nothing will alter it. Perhaps the way my mother & little sister were swept away by that vile diphtheria has helped me to strengthen the feeling … I feel too that if it is Georgie’s time to go, he will go & my Dickie too, but not otherwise, & so I hope I shall not worry more than is inevitable when Dickie goes to sea.’
In the event, Georgie died in April 1938, of cancer of the bone marrow, aged forty-five, three days after his mother’s seventy-fifth birthday. Dickie died, full of years (and honours), aged seventy-nine, murdered by the IRA in August 1979. At the time, the Chicago Tribune calculated that no single family in recorded history, including the Borgias and the Cosa Nostra families of Sicily, Chicago, and New York, was more susceptible to violent death among its members than the family of Queen Victoria and her descendants.
In 1917, in the aftermath of the Bolshevik revolution, George V was unwilling to send a British warship to rescue his first cousin, the overthrown Tsar Nicholas II. In July 1918 the Tsar and Tsarina (Alix, Alice’s aunt) and their children were executed and Alix’s sister, the Grand Duchess Ella – Alice’s aunt and inspiration – and other members of the Russian royal family were thrown alive down a mine shaft, where they were heard singing psalms before Bolshevik soldiers killed them by throwing a grenade into the mine shaft after them. Eighty years on, in July 1998, Ella, now recognised as a saint by the Russian Orthodox Church, was one of ten twentieth-century martyrs whose carved effigies above the Great West Door of Westminster Abbey were dedicated in the presence of Prince Philip and the Queen.
Alice and her four daughters spent much of the First World War in Athens. Andrea was stationed at Salonika until 1916, when his brother sent him on diplomatic missions to London and Paris to assure the Allies of Greece’s commitment to neutrality. Constantine I did not play his hand well. He was mistrusted by the Allies, wholly at odds with the Greek Prime Minister, Eleutherios Venizelos, and no longer in step with the Greek people. In June 1917 he was overthrown, driven into exile in Switzerland and replaced, not by the Crown Prince, George (who was thought might be sympathetic to the German cause), but by his second son, Alexander. Andrea, Alice, and the girls joined the exodus to St Moritz. The hotel accommodation was reasonably priced and the weather quite congenial. The skiing and the skating were both excellent. There are worse spots to endure the humiliation of exile than the shores of a Swiss lake.
Greek politics being what it is, by 1920 they were all back. King Alexander, aged twenty-seven, died of blood poisoning, having been bitten by a monkey. In a plebiscite, King Constantine I was restored to the Greek throne by a vote of 1,010,788 to 10,887, and Prince Andrea, now sporting a monocle, slipped back into uniform, promoted to the rank of major general. He was thirty-eight. Alice was thirty-five. Seven years after the birth of their fourth daughter, they were due to have another child. On 10 June 1921, on the dining-room table at Mon Repos, Prince Philip was born.
Chapter Two
‘If one is not caressed … one develops thorns.’
Beryl Bainbridge (1934–2010), According to Queeney
The sun was high, the day was hot, the scent of orange and lemon, of cypress and magnolia, filled the air. Mon Repos, built by the British in 1824, is a handsome villa by the sea, a family mansion (not a palace), spacious and comfortable, and its setting (at least, in 1921, before Corfu became a major-league holiday destination) near-idyllic. The house, surprisingly cool in summer, was surrounded by olive groves, wisteria, and wild flowers growing in the long grass. Prince Philip was only born on the dining-room table because the doctor felt that it would more convenient than Princess Alice’s bed.
‘He is a splendid, healthy child, thank God,’ his mother reported to one of the family back in Darmstadt. ‘I am very well too. It was an uncomplicated delivery & I am enjoying the fresh air on the terrace.’ Though the years of wars and revolution – the years of her marriage, in fact – had taken their toll on Alice – on her health, on her spirits, on her looks – her life was not without its consolations. She was a princess and she was treated like one. She had a lady-in-waiting. She had domestic staff. She had a French governess for her daughters and an English nanny, Mrs Nicholas, for her son.
The standing of European royalty might not be what once it was – for a start, the crowned heads of Germany, Austria, an
d Russia were no more – and the position of the monarchy in Greece had always been precarious, but, nonetheless, Alice and her family – though they faced high drama in their lives, and pain, and personal tragedy – were mostly spared the mundane drudgery that is – and, especially, was – the lot of most working people. Alice and Andrea were not rich – by the standards of the Windsors, say, or the Dukes of Westminster – and there were to be times when their financial worries would be considerable – but they were not truly poor, ever, and all their lives, in one shape or form, there were servants hovering and there was deference in the air.
This is true of royalty, even today, a hundred years on. Prince Charles is – as his father was – generally unstuffy, good-humoured, and easy to talk to, but he is a prince and always treated like one. Cars come, guards salute, breakfast is served, valets press your suits, the fairies clean your shoes. Over the years I watched Prince Philip padding alone along the long, narrow corridors of Buckingham Palace, barely noticing as nodding footmen stepped aside, pages bowed, and private secretaries backed discreetly into doorways. If you were due to meet him in his study, whether for the first time or the thirty-first, his equerry would invite you to stand in the room, at a specific angle in a particular spot, and remind you to bow as His Royal Highness entered and to call him ‘Sir’. I didn’t and don’t have a problem with any of this: I am in favour of due respect, I like old-fashioned courtesy, I even still try to stand up when a lady enters the room: I mention it here only because if this is the way you have lived your life – as Prince Charles does; as Prince Philip and his parents did – it will affect you.
Philip: The Final Portrait Page 5
