1. Princess Alice of Battenberg was the mother of Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, mother-in-law of Queen Elizabeth II, and paternal grandmother of King Charles III.
35 Facts About Princess Alice of Battenberg
1. 2.
Princess Alice of Battenberg lived in Greece until the exile of most of the Greek royal family in 1917.
3.
In 1930, Princess Alice of Battenberg Andrew was diagnosed with schizophrenia and committed to a sanatorium in Switzerland; thereafter, she lived separately from her husband.
4.
Princess Alice of Battenberg 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.
5.
Princess Alice of Battenberg was born in the Tapestry Room at Windsor Castle, Berkshire, in the presence of her great-grandmother Queen Victoria.
6.
Princess Alice of Battenberg was the eldest child of Prince Louis of Battenberg and his wife, Princess Victoria of Hesse and by Rhine.
7.
Princess Alice of Battenberg's mother was the eldest daughter of Louis IV, Grand Duke of Hesse, and Princess Alice of the United Kingdom, the Queen's second daughter.
8.
Princess Alice of Battenberg's 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.
9.
Princess Alice of Battenberg was christened Victoria Princess Alice of Battenberg Elizabeth Julia Marie in Darmstadt on 25 April 1885.
10.
Princess Alice of Battenberg 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-Schonberg; and her maternal great-grandmother Queen Victoria.
11.
Princess Alice of Battenberg spent her childhood between Darmstadt, London, Jugenheim, and Malta.
12.
Princess Alice of Battenberg's mother noticed that she was slow in learning to talk, and became concerned by her indistinct pronunciation.
13.
Princess Alice of Battenberg's 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 in 1893.
14.
Princess Alice met Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark, 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.
15.
Princess Alice of Battenberg adopted the style of her husband, becoming "Princess Andrew".
16.
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.
17.
Princess Alice of Battenberg Andrew attended the laying of the foundation stone for her aunt's new church.
18.
Princess Alice of Battenberg became deeply religious and, in October 1928, converted to the Greek Orthodox Church.
19.
Princess Alice of Battenberg was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, first by Thomas Ross, a psychiatrist specialising in the treatment of shell shock, and subsequently by Sir Maurice Craig, who had treated the future King George VI before he had speech therapy.
20.
Princess Alice of Battenberg was forcibly removed from her family and placed in Ludwig Binswanger's sanatorium in Kreuzlingen, Switzerland.
21.
Princess Alice of Battenberg Andrew remained at Kreuzlingen for two years, but after a brief stay at a clinic in Merano in northern Italy, was released and began an itinerant, incognito existence in Central Europe.
22.
Princess Alice of Battenberg maintained contact with her mother but broke off ties to the rest of her family until the end of 1936.
23.
Princess Alice of Battenberg moved out of her small flat and into her brother-in-law George's three-storey house in the centre of Athens.
24.
Princess Alice of Battenberg worked for the Red Cross, helped organise soup kitchens for the starving populace and flew to Sweden to bring back medical supplies on the pretext of visiting her sister, Crown Princess Louise.
25.
Princess Alice of Battenberg organised two shelters for orphaned and lost children, and a nursing circuit for poor neighbourhoods.
26.
The occupying forces apparently presumed Princess Alice of Battenberg Andrew was pro-German, as one of her sons-in-law, Prince Christoph of Hesse, was a member of the NSDAP and the Waffen-SS, and another, Berthold, Margrave of Baden, had been invalided out of the German army in 1940 after an injury in France.
27.
Princess Alice of Battenberg Andrew honoured the promise and saved the Cohen family.
28.
Princess Alice of Battenberg Andrew returned to the United Kingdom in April 1947 to attend the November wedding of her only son, Philip, to Princess Alice of Battenberg Elizabeth, the elder daughter and heir presumptive of King George VI.
29.
Princess Alice of Battenberg had some of her remaining jewels used in Princess Elizabeth's engagement ring.
30.
Princess Alice of Battenberg trained on the Greek island of Tinos, established a home for the order in a hamlet north of Athens, and undertook two tours of the United States in 1950 and 1952 in an effort to raise funds.
31.
Princess Alice of Battenberg later claimed she had had an out-of-body experience.
32.
Increasingly deaf and in failing health, Princess Alice of Battenberg Andrew left Greece for the last time following the 21 April 1967 Colonels' Coup.
33.
Princess Alice of Battenberg died at Buckingham Palace on 5 December 1969.
34.
Princess Alice of Battenberg left no possessions, having given everything away.
35.
Princess Alice of Battenberg was a person with a deep religious faith, and she would have considered it to be a perfectly natural human reaction to fellow beings in distress.