THE PASSING OF PRINCE PHILIP

 THE LAST LIVING LINK WITH THE ROYAL CONTINENTAL NETWORK

 As Prince Philip has been laid to rest in St. George’s chapel, Windsor Castle, our memories are inevitably of his outstanding record of service to Her Majesty the Queen, and our thoughts are particularly for his widow, children and grandchildren as a vibrant patriarch of the family departs.  They are coping in private, with the Queen having their strong support.

 

Many eulogies have been published, providing insights to his service in the Royal Navy, to The Queen in his unscripted role as consort, to the country and the Commonwealth, and in particular to his hundreds of patronages, and his immortal work in the creation and fostering of the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award.

 

The Links to continental royalty

 

In our avid watching of his funeral at Windsor, we should remember the attendance of three German princes – two of his royal continental great-nephews – Philipp, the Prince of Hohenlohe-Langenburg, and Bernhard, Hereditary Prince of Baden -  together with Prince Donatus, Prince and Landgrave of Hesse, Head of the united House of Hesse, into which two of Prince Philip’s sisters married, and from which they are all descended.  They quietly represented the dynastic links to continental royalty of which Prince Philip was the last living connection.

 

Indeed, it is rightly claimed that Prince Philip had more royal blood than his wife, half of whose blood is from the Scottish Bowes Lyon family.  His early life was the product of the impact of European history on royal families.

 

His Danish heritage

 

He was born Prince Philip of Greece and Denmark, a proud dynast of both new and ancient royal dynasties.  He was the grandson of the first King of the contemporary royal dynasty of Greece.  That King, George I, was born Prince Christian William in Copenhagen in 1845.  He was the second son of Prince Christian of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg who, on the extinction of the senior Danish royal line in 1863 became King Christian IX of Denmark. Over his reign King Christian became dubbed “Father-in-law of Europe” two daughters having married King Edward VII and Tsar Alexander III. 

 

Amongst his grandchildren were King George V of Great Britain, the fateful Tsar Nicholas II, King Constantine I of Greece, and King Haakon VII of Norway.  King Christian, within months of succession became embroiled in war with both Prussia and Austria, losing both the Duchies of Schleswig-Holstein, in a crisis described thus by Lord Palmerston “The Schleswig-Holstein question is so complicated, only three men in Europe have ever understood it. One was Prince Albert, who is dead. The second was a German professor who became mad. I am the third and I have forgotten all about it.”

 

His Greek inheritance

 

Prince Christian William found himself drafted in 1863 to be King of Greece.  Greece had shaken off Ottoman rule in 1832, and Prince Otto of Bavaria had been drafted as its first King.  However, local dissatisfaction with him, for failing to take advantage of the Crimean war to attack Turkey, resulted in his deposition in 1862.  The Greeks favoured continuation as a monarchy, and paradoxically settled on Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, Queen Victoria’s second son, as their choice, and he received 95% of the vote in a Greek plebiscite. Nevertheless, that choice was blocked by The Queen and the British government.  Ironically, Prince Alfred ended up as a Sovereign himself, succeeding his uncle as Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha in 1893.

Christian William was elected by the Greek National Assembly in 1863, and took the regnal name of King George of the Hellenes.  George married the Russian Grand Duchess Olga Constantinovna, and had eight children including King Constantine I, from whom the subsequent Greek royal family is descended, and Prince Andrew, Prince Philip’s father.

King George’s turbulent and long reign saw Greece enhanced in prosperity and territory.  Indeed, it was the gaining of Greek Macedonia from the Turks in 1913, and King George’s attendance for the victory parade in Thessalonika, which resulted in the tragedy of his assassination there.

 

A troubled Greek monarchy

 

His son, King Constantine I, who succeeded as King in 1913, was married to Princess Sophia, sister of the German Kaiser, and had understandable sympathies with Germany, keeping his country neutral in the first world war, which culminated in his forced abdication in 1917, and with his eldest son, Crown Prince George and much of the family, went into exile.  He was succeeded by his second son, King Alexander, whose three years reign was ended by his death from sepsis as a result of a monkey bite at Tatoi.   

 

Following another plebiscite, the crown reverted to the elder brother, who became King George II.  A side effect of his return was the return from exile of his uncle Prince Andrew, and his restoration in the army as a Major-General, more of whom later.  Three years later the King was forced out by a revolutionary committee and a Republic was declared. George went into exile in his wife’s native Roumania, Tuscany, and finally London, where he resided at Brown’s Hotel.  Meanwhile, Greek governmental turbulence finally resulted in a plebiscite with a 98% vote for the restoration of the monarchy. George I returned, but was soon under the thumb of his Prime Minister, General Ioannis Metaxas, which damaged his popularity.   

 

In 1940 Mussolini started an Italian invasion, but the Greeks fought back, pressing Mussolini’s forces back into Albania, which they had previously occupied. Germany came to his rescue in 1941, and Greece fell under German occupation.  George and his government fell back on Crete, and following the island’s fall, evacuated to Egypt.  In due time, the allies regained Greece from the Axis, and following yet another positive referendum, George returned to the throne, only to die in 1947. 

 

He was succeeded by his brother Paul, who had married the Kaiser’s granddaughter, Princess Frederica of Hanover.  He in turn was succeeded in 1964 by his 24 year-old only son, a previous Olympic gold medallist in sailing, Constantine II. The new King married later that year to Princess Anne Marie, daughter of King Frederik IX of Denmark, thus closing the dynastic circle.  The new king also faced torrid political enmities, an inheritance from the wartime divisions, which culminated in the 1967 Colonels’ coup. Constantine went into exile in London, The restoration of democracy did not result in monarchical restoration, but in a referendum, which on this occasion they did not win  - 69% voted for a Republic.  Constantine remained in exile, only returning to Greece in 2011.

 

His father – Prince Andrew of Greece

 

Prince Andrew was born in 1882, fourth son of King George I.  He went into the Army, and saw service in the Balkan wars.  When his brother King Constantine was deposed in 1917, he joined him in exile in Switzerland.  Following his return to Greece in 1920, on his brother George II’s succession, he resumed his military career, being appointed a Major-General.  He commanded a Greek army corps during the Greco-Turkish war. 

 

There had been a massive Greek community in Anatolia for centuries, accepting the suzerainty of the Ottomans.  The city of Smyrna, now Izmir, had a greater Greek population at the time than Athens.  During the first world war, the allies had promised much of Anatolia to both Italy and Greece.  In the turbulence following the war the Ottoman regime collapsed. The Italians were frustrated and consequently withdrew  In 1919, the Greeks landed an army at Smyrna and proceeded hundreds of miles eastwards towards Istanbul, being stopped at the battle of Sakarya in which Prince Andrew served. A rout developed and the Turks under Mustafa Kemal entered Smyrna in 1922, which soon developed into massacre and the burning of the city.  Prince Andrew, in disagreement with his commander, was sent on leave back to Greece. The ancient Greek community in Anatolia was obliterated.

 

The result of the massive defeat was a military mutiny and King Constantine was deposed in 1922.  Prince Andrew was arrested, court-martialled, and found guilty of "disobeying an order". Many of his fellow-officers were shot, but with British assistance, he went into exile in a British cruiser, HMS Calypso, having been rescued from his home in Corfu.   The family went into exile and the family settled in St. Cloud near Paris.  Following the collapse of his family, Prince Andrew left for the French Riviera, where he became trapped in Vichy France, and died in December 1944 in Monte Carlo.

 

His mother – Princess Alice of Battenberg

 

A great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria, Princess Alice was born at Windsor Castle in 1885.  Her grandmother was Princess Alice, who had married Louis IV, Grand Duke of Hesse and the Rhine, a sovereign German State which had like Denmark been defeated by the Prussians in 1866, but didn’t lose its throne due to its dynastic links with Britain and Russia.

 

Her grandmother, Princess Victoria of Hesse, the eldest daughter, faced dynastic disapproval when in 1884 she married her father’s morganatic first cousin, Prince Louis of Battenberg. He was the son of Prince Alexander of Hesse and the Rhine, who had accompanied his sister Marie to St. Petersburg for her marriage to Tsar Alexander II, and had remained there.  He fell in love with his sister’s lady-in-waiting, Countess Julie von Hauke, an orphaned German-Polish ward of Tsar Nicholas I. They eloped to Breslau and married in 1851.  A furious Tsar sacked him from the Russian army in which he was serving.  Alexander was allowed to return to Hesse with his bride, but the marriage was deemed morganatic, with Julie taking the title of Princess of Battenberg, a ruined castle in northern Hesse. 

 

 

 

 

The Battenbergs

 

Despite the inauspicious beginnings, Alexander and the Princess of Battenberg had a distinguished family of five children.  Their second son, Prince Alexander, became the first Prince of Bulgaria, until being deposed in 1886.  Their third son, Prince Henry, married Queen Victoria’s youngest daughter, Princess Beatrice, and their daughter became Queen Victoria Eugenie of Spain. 

 

The eldest son was Prince Louis of Battenberg. born in Austria, and brought up in Italy and Germany, resolved to become a naval officer, and enrolled at the age of fourteen in the world’s greatest navy of the day,  the Royal Navy,. He rose through a long career to become an admiral and First Sea Lord in 1912.  The outbreak of the first world forced him, a German prince, to resign his office. In 1917, in common with the British royal family (and Queen Mary’s Teck family who took the name Cambridge, and whose brothers became Marquess of Cambridge and Earl of Athlone) took an anglicised family name, Mountbatten, relinquishing his title of Prince.  The King made him Marquess of Milford Haven in compensation.

 

Princess Alice’s later life

 

The eldest daughter of Commodore HSH Prince Louis of Battenberg, R.N., Princess Alice was married in 1903 to Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark.  In quick succession, they had four daughters, and finally a son (Prince Philip) in 1921, dramatically on the dining room table at villa Mon Repos, the royal residence in Corfu.

 

In exile, they lived at St. Cloud, near Paris, in a house made available by Princess Marie Bonaparte, Prince Andrew’s sister-in-law. Princess Alice began to be subject to religious delusions, and was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, finally being forcibly removed to a Swiss sanatorium at the instigation of her mother.  Her four daughters were married in quick succession to German princes, and their son was consigned to the care of relatives.  In due course she regained her freedom and, after an itinerant period, she settled in Athens in 1938, where she remained under the German occupation.  Because of her German relatives the occupying forces assumed she was pro-German.  In fact, she put herself at considerable risk by sheltering a Jewish family who had earlier assisted the royal family.  For this, she was later honoured by Israel as one of the "Righteous among the Nations" 

 

Following the war, she remained in Athens despite the privations and the civil war, working among the poor, and in 1949, founded a nursing order of Greek Orthodox nuns, the Christian Sisterhood of Martha and Mary, modelled after the convent that her aunt, the martyr Grand Duchess Elizabeth Feodorovna, had founded in Russia in 1909. She remained in Athens until after the Colonels’ coup of 1967, when she accepted her son’s invitation to live permanently at Buckingham Palace, where she died two years later. In 1988 her remains were transferred from Windsor and re-interred in the crypt of the Russian Orthodox church of St. Mary Magdalen on the Mount of Olives, Jerusalem, where her beloved martyred aunt, Elizabeth Feodorovna, canonised as a saint by the Russian Orthodox church, also lies at rest.

 

The young Prince Philip of Greece and Denmark

 

With  the breaking up of his family, and the removal of his mother to a sanatorium in Switzerland, the marriages of his sisters, and the departure of his father to the south of France, Prince Philip entered a period of shuffling between his married sisters in Germany and his grandmother and Mountbatten uncles in England, and became ward of his elder uncle, George Mountbatten, 2^nd Marquess of Milford Haven.  He initially attended an American school in Paris, and then, from 1930, Cheam preparatory school, Surrey.  In 1933 he was sent to the school at Schloss Salem, founded by Kurt Hahn in 1920 in the castle of Philip’s brother-in-law, Berthold, Margrave of Baden (which continues today as one of Germany’s elite schools). However, Kurt Hahn, being Jewish, fled Germany on the rise to power of the Nazis, to Scotland, where he founded Gordonstoun school.  Prince Philip remained at Salem for two terms, but his youthful derision for the Nazis caused increasing anxiety for his sister, who was well aware that his behaviour would provoke the Nazis and their lack of a sense of humour.  Accordingly, he was transferred to Gordonstoun, the making of of his education and affinity with Britain.  He returned to Germany in 1937 for the funeral of his sister Cecilie, and her husband and two sons, killed in an aircraft accident. The photograph of him walking through Darmstadt in the funeral procession alongside his German relatives, some of whom had joined the Nazi Party, is a haunting reminder of events at the time. 

 

Many of Germany’s royals, in visceral fear of communism, thought the rising Nazi party would be a bulwark against it and also controllable.  Accordingly many funded and even joined them, only to find themselves dismissed from the Army in 1940, seen by Hitler as a potential threat.

 

The following year, George Milford Haven died, and parental responsibility passed to George’s younger brother, Lord Louis Mountbatten. Prince Philip finished at Gordonstoun, and Mountbatten family traditions meant that he joined the Royal Navy as a cadet at Dartmouth.  The new King, George VI, made an official visit shortly thereafter, together with the Queen and their two daughters.  Cadet Philip Greece was allocated to keep the young princesses amused.  With his youthful charm, and extreme good looks, the elder Princess was entranced – and the rest became history.

 

A distinguished war record

 

Following Dartmouth, he briefly returned to Greece, living with his mother, before returning to Britain on his appointment as a Midshipman. He served in various ships in the Indian Ocean, protecting the convoys of Australian servicemen of their Expeditionary Force and ashore in Ceylon. In 1940 he was transferred to the Mediterranean fleet. He was promoted to sub-lieutenant, and fought in the Battle of Crete and the Battle of Matapan, in which he was mentioned in dispatches for his control of the searchlights in the battleship HMS Valiant.  Appointed Lieutenant in 1942, be served as first lieutenant in the fast escort HMS Wallace, taking part in the allied invasion of Sicily, during which deployed a burning decoy which saved the ship from attack for enemy aircraft. In 1944, he joined the destroyer HMS Whelp in the Pacific Fleet, and witnessed the Japanese surrender in Tokyo Bay.   He returned to Britain in 1946, having maintained a correspondence with the young Princess Elizabeth.

 

The transition from Greek to Briton

 

In the coming months he abandoned his Greek and Danish royal titles and adopted the surname of his mother’s family, Mountbatten, and became a British naturalised subject.   The engagement of Princess Elizabeth to Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten, R.N. was announced in July 1947, between third cousins, and both descendants of Queen Victoria.  Born into the Greek Orthodox church, he was received into the Church of England by the Archbishop of Canterbury in October 1947.  On the morning of their wedding on the 20^th November 1947, he was made Duke of Edinburgh, Earl of Merioneth and Baron Greenwich.   On the death of the Duke, those titles were succeeded to by Prince Charles, and will revert to the Crown with the next reign, when they will be available for reassignment.

 

The post-war sensitivity about his sisters and their families

 

Whereas Princess Alice attended the royal wedding in Westminster Abbey in 1947, cutting a solitary figure in her nun’s habit. Prince Philip’s four sisters were discreetly not invited, so soon after the war, having married German princes, some with awkward war records.  His eldest sister, Princess Margarita had married Gottfried, Prince of Hohenlohe-Langenburg, who had joined the Nazi party in 1937 and served as a Wehrmacht Major, being severely wounded on the Russian front, only to be dismissed from the army after the abortive attempt on Adolf Hitler's life in 1944.

 

His second sister, Princess Theodora, married Berthold Margrave of Baden. He served in the Wehrmacht, but was invalided out in 1940, after being injured in France.  Princess Cecilie, Prince Philip’s third sister, had married Hereditary Grand Duke George Donatus of Hesse and by Rhine. She was killed in 1937 with her husband and two sons in an air-crash at Ostend, ironically on their way to Britain for the marriage of her brother-in-law to a Briton.  As we saw earlier, Prince Philip attended their funeral at Darmstadt.

 

Prince Philip’s fourth sister, Princess Sophie, was the last living of his siblings, dying in 2001, at the age of 87. Her first husband was Prince Christoph of Hesse-Cassel who had joined the Nazis in 1931, and had become an Oberführer in the SS, while working as a Director of the Air Ministry. He served in Tunisia, Sicily and Italy, returning from which he was killed in an air-crash.  Princess Sophie went on to marry another descendant of Queen Victoria, Prince Georg Wilhelm of Hanover.

 

From his four sisters, Prince Philip had numerous nephews and nieces and their descendants, three of whom attended the funeral at Windsor. Over the years he privately visited them at their homes.

A sacrificed naval career

 

Prince Philip continued with his naval career He was posted to the Mediterranean fleet, a posting on which he was accompanied by his wife, Princess Elizabeth, when they resided at the Villa Guardamangia in Malta.  He was appointed first Lieutenant of the destroyer HMS Chequers.  In 1950 he was promoted to Lieutenant Commander and achieved his first command, of the frigate HMS Magpie. Two years later he was again promoted – to the rank of Commander.  Sadly, due to the deterioration of the health of the King, he had to forego his naval career in January 1952.  It has been suggested that his outstanding talents would have taken him, like his grandfather and uncle before him, to the high office of First Sea Lord, a destiny he sacrificed to his duty to his Sovereign and wife.

 

A Loyal consort – Her Majesty’s strength and stay

 

He took on Royal duties with his wife, making a coast to coast visit to Canada.  They then set out on a bigger venture to visit multiple Commonwealth countries.  However on the first stage, in Kenya, the tragic news reached them of the death of King George VI on the 6^th February 1952 – and their lives changed forever. Together they set out on the new duty as Sovereign and loyal consort.  Through vagaries and vicissitudes they carried out their roles together for sixty nine years, while bringing up a family, and welcoming grandchildren and then great-grandchildren.

 

Adieu Prince Philip – we will never see your likes again

 

Much has been written in recent days of the outstanding service provided by Prince Philip over the years of this reign of record longevity which need not be repeated here.  Suffice to say, with his passing, the last link of the contemporary British Monarchy with that historic ancient network of European Royalty has been severed.   It was his early years, during which he absorbed the consequences of monarchies losing touch with the experiences and aspirations of their peoples, which gave him the insight and experience on which he drew in his unscripted role as Consort to the British Monarch.  He was a strong behind-the-scenes influence on bringing our monarchy into the contemporary age as a relevant and essential part of our constitution and national life.  We owe him an extraordinary debt, and will miss him – Her Majesty’s “strength and stay” and a unique personality in our national life.

 

The Continental royal relatives of the late Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, can be found in fine detail in volumes of the series 

THE ROYAL HOUSES OF EUROPE   by Jacques Arnold.