Philip: The Final Portrait

by Gyles Brandreth

  Prince Philip of Greece must have been a beautiful baby: the early photographs show a cherubic child, bonny, smiling, a little chubby. He had the blondest hair and the bluest eyes and was the darling of a household crowded with women. From London, Alice’s mother, Victoria, now Marchioness of Milford Haven, wrote to one of her friends: ‘I knew you would rejoice with us at Alice having a boy. Poor Andrea had the bad luck of leaving the day before the event & so has not seen his son.’ Andrea had just been given command of the Greek army’s 12th Division in Asia Minor and, on 9 June 1921, embarked on the campaign that would prove his undoing. It would be several months before he set eyes on his baby boy.

  Victoria, in fact, got to see Philip before Andrea did. In September, Louis Milford Haven died, aged sixty-seven, and Alice came to London to console her mother, bringing Philip with her. Alice showed off her son to her assorted English relations, including, of course, her own youngest brother, Dickie Mountbatten, now nearly twenty-two and already smitten with his bride-to-be, the young Edwina Ashley.

  Just a month before Louis Milford Haven’s death, George V had honoured him – and thrilled him to the core – by appointing him Admiral of the Fleet. Louis might have had a German accent, but he had done the state some service. And the King now offered Louis’s widow a home: an apartment in Kensington Palace, where she lived for the rest of her long life.

  Prince Philip’s grandfather was a naval officer of real distinction. Coming to an exact assessment of the merits of Prince Philip’s father as a military commander is not so easy. Andrea enjoyed life as a soldier – his life was soldiering. He was committed and conscientious, without question, but, ultimately, his career ended in failure.

  The trigger for his downfall was, as I say, the conduct of the campaign launched in the month of Prince Philip’s birth. The Greeks and Turks were at war over the possession of Anatolia, once Turkish territory but awarded to Greece after the First World War. There may not have been a great deal to choose between the military capacity of the two sides, but there is little doubt that the Greek forces were seriously over-extended, poorly equipped, inadequately led, and simply unable to sustain a successful campaign in the Anatolian desert, so far away from base.

  From the outset, Andrea had been convinced that the Asia Minor campaign was doomed. His own division was manned by new recruits, inexperienced and ill-equipped, and he had no faith in the campaign’s overall commander, one General Papoulas, a soldier, according to Andrea, notable for his ‘ignorance of the science of war’.

  On 9 September 1921, Papoulas sent an order to Andrea in the desert to make an ‘immediate violent attack’ on the enemy to the north. Andrea considered the proposal absurd – ‘a cry of ill-concealed panic’, he called it – and replied to his commander-in-chief, ‘Attack by 2nd Corps in the direction indicated impossible.’ He had an alternative plan, involving different troop movements and no attack. He acted on his plan and sent word to Papoulas that he had done so. Under the circumstances, Papoulas’s reaction does not seem surprising: ‘Astonished at plan of abandoning positions. I order corps to remain in its position. Only person competent to judge and decide is myself as Commander-in-Chief. Cancel all orders of transfer movements.’

  This order Andrea obeyed, but the following day, outraged to discover that overnight the commander-in-chief had relieved him of his chief of staff, he volunteered his own resignation. He sent word to Papoulas: ‘It is absolutely impossible for me to continue in command of corps. Please order my immediate relief.’

  Papoulas felt unable to oblige: ‘I desire, and the situation demands, you should remain in your place.’ Andrea did as he was told. The Turks attacked. The Greeks responded. The battle was neither lost nor won, but the drive towards Ankara was halted and then abandoned. Andrea and his men were in retreat.

  If, today, you read Towards Disaster, Andrea’s own account of what took place, you are left feeling (or, at least, I am left feeling) that the Prince protests too much. When ordered to attack, he did not do so. Further, he informed his commander-in-chief of his alternative plan of action as he was undertaking it. In his apologia he concedes that the message he sent Papoulas ‘was not in accordance with ordinary practice’, but asserts, ‘beyond that, it does not constitute an infraction of orders, nor does it show any lack of fighting spirit’. This much – but no more – he is ready to accept: ‘There is, however, a breach of formality, and this lies in the fact that in the message the correct phrase “subject to approval” was omitted, but the omission of this phrase cannot possibly form the basis of an accusation for disobedience and abandoning one’s position.’

  Prince Philip was like his father. As he grew older, he came to look like him – though Andrea had more protuberant ears, a moustache, and a monocle. By several accounts, they shared a joshing sense of humour and a capacity for charming the ladies. And from my reading of Prince Andrea’s Towards Disaster and my observation of Prince Philip in action, I reckon they also had in common a stubborn streak, a wilful contrariness, a need to have the last word, and a slightly exasperated (occasionally despairing) sense that they were right and the other chap didn’t know what he was talking about.

  Andrea and Papoulas remained at odds and, at the end of September 1921, the Prince was granted three months’ leave and returned to Corfu to meet his baby son for the first time. Within eight weeks, however, he was called back to active service, first as a member of the Supreme Army Council, then as commander of the 5th Army Corps. General Papoulas was replaced by one General Hadjianestis (for whom Andrea had rather greater regard), but the fighting went no better. Within the year, the Turks had triumphed and the Greeks were in full retreat, forced back, literally, into the sea. Asia Minor was lost, the collapse was complete, the casualties horrendous. There were more than a million Greek refugees.

  In the aftermath of the catastrophe, there was a military coup: a colonels’ revolt. King Constantine I was overthrown and sent once more into exile. General Hadjianestis and five others were put on trial and swiftly executed. Andrea was arrested, charged with disobeying orders and abandoning his post in the face of the enemy, and tried in Athens, in the Chamber of Deputies, by a jury of junior officers. He was found guilty and expected to be sentenced to death. ‘I think you might add,’ Prince Philip said to me when he saw the draft of this paragraph, ‘that my father was charged by the new republican government as a scapegoat.’

  There is a telling photograph that was taken of Andrea during his trial. He is impeccably dressed in an elegant lounge suit, with a white handkerchief in his breast pocket, folded exactly as Prince Philip would fold his all his life. In the picture Prince Andrea sits staring into the middle distance, his attaché case unopened on the table in front of him. He looks gaunt and anxious, but unbowed.

  At Mon Repos, Alice, under police surveillance, and denied access to her husband, was sending desperate messages in every direction, pleading for help from all quarters. Internationally, there was little desire to get involved in Greek politics, but, in London, Alice’s brother, Dickie, saw the King and lobbied the Prime Minister, and Lord Curzon, the Foreign Secretary, arranged for a British agent – Gerald Talbot, previously naval attaché in Athens, and a man with useful contacts among the high command of the new regime – to slip discreetly into Greece ‘to see what might be done’. The upshot was a secret deal, negotiated by Talbot, whereby Andrea was spared his life but condemned to ‘perpetual banishment’.

  For many years, in the British press and elsewhere, Prince Philip was nicknamed ‘Phil the Greek’. Briefly, he had been sixth in line to the throne of Greece, but he has no Greek blood in him and no particular fondness for Greece or the Greeks. As he said to me, more than once, ‘A grandfather assassinated and a father condemned to death does not endear me to the perpetrators.’ Prince Philip thought of himself as British or Danish, with elements of German and Russian. He never thought of himself as Greek. I remember talking to him once about divided Cyprus: he was evidently more sympathet
ic to the Turks than to the Greeks. About the traumatic events of 1922 he was less forthcoming: ‘I was barely a year old when the family went into exile. What do you expect me to remember?’

  His sister Sophie, who was eight at the time, did remember and did talk about the experience before she died. ‘It was a terrible business,’ she recalled. ‘Absolute chaos.’ The British had sent a cruiser, HMS Calypso, to carry the family into exile. When Andrea was released from gaol, he was driven straight from his prison to the quayside. On Corfu, Alice, her lady-in-waiting, the governess, the nanny, the four girls and baby Philip, were bundled into cars, loaded with all the possessions they could muster in the hours before their escape, and taken in a small boat from the island harbour to the Calypso waiting offshore. Sophie’s abiding memory of the flight from Mon Repos was of the smell of smoke from the grates in every fireplace: Alice had instructed her daughters to burn everything: letters, papers, documents; to leave nothing behind.

  The sea – not having much respect for royalty – was rough. The ship’s officers were more gracious, giving up their cabins for the royal refugees and providing an on-board concert to distract and entertain the children and their parents. The exiles were taken across the Adriatic sea to Brindisi, on the heel of Italy, ‘a ghastly place’, according to Sophie, ‘the worst town I’ve ever been in’. From there, as dawn broke, they took a train to Rome. On the train, Philip made himself filthy, crawling everywhere. ‘He was very active,’ said Sophie. He even licked the windowpanes. His mother reprimanded him. ‘Leave him alone,’ said nanny.10

  Their hope and expectation had been to travel on to London, but George V, while ready to help save his cousin’s neck, was not so eager to offer him sanctuary. Buckingham Palace took the view, endorsed by the Foreign Office, that it would be politically more comfortable if the exiled Greek prince could settle somewhere quietly on the continent, out of controversy’s way. What about Palermo in Sicily, where the overthrown King Constantine had taken refuge?

  In the event, the exiles and their entourage (a family of seven, plus six servants) went on from Rome to Paris, then – after several days of awkward diplomatic wrangling – briefly to London and then, finally and permanently, back once more to the French capital. Paris dictated itself as the city in which to settle because Andrea’s elder brother, Prince George, now fifty-three, was already living there and had a home to spare that was large enough to accommodate the royal refugees.

  In 1907 Prince George (known in the family as ‘Big George’) had married Marie Bonaparte, great-granddaughter of the Emperor Napoleon’s brother, Lucien, and, rather more usefully, granddaughter of the celebrated Monsieur Blanc, founder of the casino at Monte Carlo. She was an interesting woman: an heiress, an antiquarian, a dog-lover, a psychoanalyst of some distinction, and a friend and patroness of Sigmund Freud. George and Marie and their two children (Peter and Eugénie, aged fourteen and twelve in 1922) lived in a substantial mansion at St Cloud, on the outskirts of Paris. In the garden they had a lodge and this became Andrea’s and Alice’s family home for the rest of the 1920s.

  When the exiles had arrived in Rome they were, literally, penniless (the British Ambassador had to lend them money to pay for the train tickets to Paris), but, once they were able to make contact with their bankers, they were not without some means. They were not poor, they did not go hungry, but they were impoverished, and now, to an extent, dependent on the kindness of others. As well as Big George and his wealthy wife, Marie Bonaparte, their principal benefactors were Andrea’s younger brother, Christo, and his wealthy wife, Nancy Leeds, and Alice’s younger brother, Dickie, and his wealthy wife, Edwina Ashley. Edwina was especially generous, in all sorts of ways. When he was just a toddler, she took out an insurance policy for Philip. When she had her dresses made, she asked the dressmaker to include extra seams so that, in due course, the dresses could be let out and passed on to Alice and her girls.

  Prince Philip made it clear to me that what memories he had of life in Paris in the 1920s were good ones. By all accounts, he was a cheerful, active, inquisitive, friendly little boy. He did not lack companionship. He had doting sisters. Big George had children. Another of the brothers, Prince Nicholas, lived in St Cloud, with his young daughters. There were other cousins in the neighbourhood and family lunches in Big George’s big house every Sunday. ‘It was a normal family life, as far as I was concerned,’ said Prince Philip. ‘I did not sense anything untoward.’

  Nevertheless, for Philip’s parents life was now very different from anything they had known before. They dined with family and friends. They travelled quite extensively: to America (without baby Philip) and the south of France, on holiday, to Italy and England and Germany, to visit assorted royal relations. They kept themselves occupied, but they had no occupation. In Paris, Alice gave some of her time to a small Greek shop called Hellas in the Faubourg St Honoré, raising money to help Greek expatriates, and Andrea, who had for so long lived the life of a professional soldier, now spent the best part of most days sitting about in clubs and restaurants, meeting with other Greek exiles, talking politics, regretting the fate that had befallen Greece. He was, by all accounts, enormously charming and, under the circumstances, surprisingly cheerful. He had enthusiasms: he loved animals, he enjoyed painting, he read, he wrote. In his enforced retirement (he was just forty in 1922), Towards Disaster, published in London in 1930, was his most significant undertaking, written by him in Greek and translated into English for him by Princess Alice. Alice admired her husband, as a soldier and as a man. She hoped and, sometimes, believed that the family might return to Greece one day. Briefly, energetically, but to little effect, she worked on a plan to install Andrea as president of a reformed Hellenic republic.

  But Alice’s principal preoccupation was not politics. It was religion. As a young woman she had been inspired by the example of her Russian aunt, Ella. Alice thought a great deal about Ella, and the sisterhood she had founded, and the martyrdom she had suffered. Alice read widely and deeply about comparative religion. She took a particular interest in Christian Science. Encouraged by her young brother-in-law, Christo, she dabbled in the occult. This was a period when interest in spiritualism was widespread. In Britain, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was attending séances. In America, Harry Houdini was denouncing false mediums. In Paris, Princess Alice was turning over cards and receiving messages from the spirit world. Increasingly, those who met her found her a little strange.

  Hugo Vickers, in his biography of Alice, suggests that an unfulfilled love affair may have tipped her over the edge. In 1925, the year she turned forty, when her eldest daughter was twenty and Prince Philip just three, she met a married man, an unidentified Englishman, and fell overwhelmingly in love with him. Nothing ‘happened’. According to Vickers, ‘Everything in Alice’s background was strictly conventional. She herself had high moral principles and nothing in her character was flighty or flippant. She was no Edwina Mountbatten or Nada Milford Haven.11 The fact of falling in love and resisting temptation almost certainly needed an outlet of some kind. Without even knowing why, Alice turned to religion as a safe outlet for these repressed feelings.’

  I am not so sure. My instinct is that the hopeless passion – intense yet impossible, feverishly pursued but ultimately abandoned – and the religious fervour – complete with visions, voices, and the acquisition of the gift of healing – had the same root cause: mania, the kind of mania associated with what we now call bipolar disorder or manic depression. I think the evidence is there.

  Alice’s behaviour at this time displays the classic symptoms of bipolar disorder: inappropriate elation, impulsiveness, extreme motor activity. When she embarked on her mission to secure for Andrea the presidency of Greece, she did so with manic energy. She pursued politicians and diplomats, she organised a clandestine meeting with representatives of the League of Nations, she dashed to London to lobby George V face to face at Buckingham Palace. Those she met listened courteously, and then let her down gently. ‘L
adies get carried away,’ said George V, benignly, to his private secretary, adding, ‘I think it would be most unwise for Prince A. to go near Greece.’

  When, in 1928, Princess Alice decided to convert to the Greek Orthodox faith (not unreasonably: this was the church into which her husband and her children had been baptised), the English, Anglican, members of her family took her decision comfortably in their stride. When she took to lying on the floor in order to enhance her mystic powers, when she became convinced that her hands contained the gift of healing, when she announced that she was a saint and the bride of Christ, it was a different matter. The medical experts were called in. Alice was clearly not well. Sometimes she seemed quite happy, seraphically so: she would talk incessantly, laugh immoderately, declare herself to be in a state of ecstasy. At other times she would be listless, seemingly exhausted, unable to do anything, unwilling to eat. She lost weight, she had headaches, she recognised that something was amiss.

  Her gynaecologist, brought to Paris from Athens, concluded that her condition was not menopausal. Her sister-in-law, Marie Bonaparte, suggested she seek help from a fellow Freudian, Dr Ernst Simmel, at his clinic in Tegel, on the outskirts of Berlin. Simmel diagnosed Alice as ‘schizophrenic paranoid’. He concluded that she was suffering from a ‘neurotic-pre-psychotic libidinous condition’. Reading between the lines and stripping away the euphemism, it seems the psychoanalyst’s view of her situation was that she was a woman who was hungry for sex and no longer getting it. This was disturbing the balance of her mind. Freud himself was consulted and proposed, as a palliative treatment, to help subdue her sexual appetite and so calm her nerves, ‘an exposure of the gonads to X-rays, in order to accelerate the menopause’.

  Alice was given the prescribed treatment. Whether or not she knew exactly what was being done to her is unclear, but gradually she began to put on weight and, for a while, to feel better in herself. She returned home, but, in truth, she was no better. She was preoccupied with sex and religion. She was obsessed by her relationship with Christ. Andrea could not cope.