Born in 1921 on a kitchen table on the island of Corfu, Prince Philip came into the world a descendant of most of Europe’s greatest dynasties. As his biographer Ingrid Seward noted in Prince Philip Revealed, he had “more blue blood running through his veins than his wife, the Queen.”
The Duke of Edinburgh’s relatives and ancestors included the people who endowed him with his independence, stubbornness, and strong sense of duty as well as humor— all of which made him uniquely well-suited to be the longest-serving prince consort in British history.
The third child of Queen Victoria and her beloved Albert, Princess Alice was born in 1843. Growing up she was known as the kindly peacemaker in her large family, an intellectual with a melancholy martyr streak. According to Jerrold M. Packard, author of Victoria’s Daughters, Alice frequently attempted to break her “golden chains,” visiting tenants in their cottages on the royal estates, and once running away from her nanny at church to sit in the commoner’s pews.
As a teenager, Alice was credited with nursing her father, Albert, on his deathbed in 1861. Nicknamed “the angel in the house” by a family friend, she also was believed to have kept a devastated Victoria from descending into total madness. On July 1, 1862, Alice married the handsome and rather uncomplicated Louis of Hesse and Rhine, and set off to start a new life in conservative Darmstadt (now part of Germany).
Remarkably progressive for her time, Alice was determined to shake things up in her new home. “If one never sees poverty and always lives in that cold circle of Court people,” she pointedly wrote her mother, “one’s good feelings dry up, and I feel the want of going about and doing the little good that is in my power.”
In frequent touch with her hero Florence Nightingale, Princess Alice set about radically transforming health care in Hesse. Over time she would open the Alice Hospital, and the Princess Alice Women’s Guild, which trained nurses. She also promoted the rights of women (much to many aristocratic women’s chagrin) with the Darmstadt Women’s Day, and invited liberal theologian David Friedrich Strauss to her home, leading her mother-in-law, Empress Augusta, to dub her a “complete atheist!”
Queen Victoria was also threatened by her progressive daughter, who she called “sharp and grand and wanting to have everything her own way.” According to Victoria, Alice had dared ask her sisters about their sex life and gynecological health, much to their mother’s horror. After the accidental death of her favorite son Frittie in 1873, her melancholy streak increased. “I wish I were dead,” she wrote, “and it probably will not be too long before I give Mama that pleasure.”
Princess Alice died of diphtheria on Dec. 14, 1878, the first child of Victoria and Albert to die. She left behind five living children—Victoria, Irene, Ernest, and the doomed Ella and Alix, who were murdered during the Russian Revolution. For more on Ella, read below.
Canonized as a saint in the Russian Orthodox church, Grand Duchess Ella of Russia would have an enormous impact on her family. Gentle, compassionate and energetic, Ella was the unrequited love of her cousin the future Kaiser Wilhelm II, who put down sword long enough to write poetry in her honor.
In 1884, Ella married the much older, extremely uptight Grand Duke Sergei of Russia, governor of Moscow. A society star, it was Ella who encouraged the romance between her painfully shy sister Alix and the future Tsar Nicholas II. But Ella’s gay life of balls, sledding, and charity events ended in 1905, when her husband was assassinated by revolutionaries. According to Robert K. Massie, author of Nicholas and Alexandra:
The Grand Duke… had just said goodbye to his wife in their Kremlin apartment and was driving through one of the gates when a bomb exploded on top of him. Hearing the shuddering blast, Ella cried, “It’s Serge,” and rushed to him. What she found was not her husband, but a hundred unrecognizable pieces of flesh, bleeding into the snow. Courageously the Grand Duchess went to her husband’s dying coachman and eased his last moments by telling him that the Grand Duke had survived.
From that day forward, Ella appeared to channel her mother Alice of Hesse. She visited her husband’s killer in prison, asking him to pray with her for forgiveness. She opened the Convent of Martha and Mary in Moscow and became an abbess- though she made sure that her flattering pearl gray robes were designed by society painter Mikhail Nesterov. Through her convent, Ella fed thousands, and nursed nearly as many. Ella also saw right through Rasputin, and in 1916 warned her sister, now Empress Alexandra, that he would destroy the royal family.
The Empress was furious and ordered her sister a carriage. The two doomed siblings never saw each other again. During the Russian revolution, Ella’s childhood love, now Kaiser Wilhelm II, attempted to save her, but to no avail. On July 18, 1918, the day after the horrific murder of Nicholas, Alexandra and their five children, Ella and another group of royals were thrown into an abandoned mine shaft in the Urals. Though grenades were thrown in after them, a curious peasant heard the victims singing hymns.
When their bodies were discovered by the White Army later that year, the young Prince John’s head was found bound in Ella’s handkerchief.
Not only would the death of the Russian royals impact his mother, but Philip was also much affected by their fate. In 1957, he stated, “I would like to go to Russia very much—although the bastards murdered half my family.” Decades later, he donated his own DNA which helped identify the remains of the family of Nicholas and Alexandra.
Debonair, charming, and tragically careless, Prince Andrew, according to one relative, could treat anything life threw at him as a joke. His son Philip agreed, claiming that hanging out with his father and uncles was like watching the Marx Brothers. It was laughter born of great discord.
In 1903, Andrew, the son of King George I of Greece, married the beautiful Alice, daughter of Victoria (the oldest child of Princess Alice and Louis of Hesse). It was a “wedding of the century,” paid for by Tsar Nicholas II and attended by the cream of royal Europeans. During the couple’s honeymoon, it’s said that he told his profoundly deaf bride that her wedding gift was a motorcycle, causing her to burst into tears.
It did not take long for the trouble to begin. George I was assassinated in 1913, and Andrew’s growing family was thrown into periods of exile. As an army leader during the Greco-Turkish war of 1919-1922, he was accused of disobeying orders, leading to the decimation of the Greek Army at Smyrna. He was court-martialed, and fled with his family (including an infant Philip) aboard the warship Calypso, sent by King George V of England.
Publicly, Andrew appeared to take it all in stride. No doubt thinking of his bloody family history, he told the Los Angeles Times in 1923 : “As it is I am banished for life, but it is better to be banished for life than to quit breathing for the rest of your life.” He also joked that he had enough funds and would not have to “go into the movies or enter business.”
Andrew, Alice and their five children eventually moved into a borrowed home in Saint-Cloud, France. In 1930, he wrote Towards Disaster, his version of the events that had led to his court-martial. That same year, the family disintegrated. Alice was sent to a sanitarium, all four daughters were married, and Philip was sent to live with relatives in England.
Perpetually cash strapped, Andrew became a jet-setting drifter, occasionally appearing in Philip’s life to joke with him or tell him platitudes like: “To be a prince one had to excel like a prince… a prince in fact must always prove himself.”
The exiled prince’s last years were spent in Monte Carlo with his fascinating mistress, the (self-titled) Comtesse Andrée de la Bigne. The golden haired Andrée was a well- known actress and the daughter of a famous Parisian courtesan, Valtesse de la Bigne. Andrew died in 1944 of a heart attack after a party, unable to see his children due to the war. Though the material possessions he left his son included only some cufflinks and engraved hairbrushes, in manner they were very much alike.
“He was so like him,” his daughter Sophie recalled. “Philip had the same mannerisms, movements, way of standing, walking and laughing—the colossal sense of humor, really seeing the funny side of things always, and making everybody else laugh.”
While her estranged husband went the playboy route after the turmoil that displaced their family, Philip’s mother, Alice, went to the other extreme, driven by a religious zeal and family legacy of nursing and service.
Much has been written of the eccentric Alice, daughter of her namesake Alice of Hesse, oldest daughter of Victoria. According to Hugo Vickers, author of the definitive Alice: Princess Andrew of Greece, after decades of war and displacement as a member of the Greek royal family, the exquisitely beautiful Alice became increasingly obsessed with otherworldly ideas, including the occultist practice of automatic writing. By 1929, her condition had become serious. According to Vickers:
She became intensely mystical and would lie on the floor in order that she could develop ‘the power conveyed to her from above’. She believed that she had developed the power to heal in her hands and she used this effectively on the rheumatism of the children’s nanny… By June she was claiming that she could stop her thoughts like a Buddhist.
Alice was sent to a sanitarium in Switzerland, where she was diagnosed with the dubious diagnosis of a “neurotic-prepsychotic libidinous condition” and subjected to horrific treatments, including the “exposure of the gonads to X-rays, in order to accelerate the menopause.” Philip was occasionally taken to visit his ailing mother, which he often found frightening.
However, the tragic death of her daughter Cecilie in 1937 appears to have led to a turning point in Alice’s life. She insisted on staying in occupied Athens during the war, saving the life of the Jewish Cohen family and aiding the sick. When asked by one German general (probably aware of her daughter Sophie’s marriage to a prominent Nazi) what he could do for her, she replied: “You can take your troops out of my country.”
In honor of her martyred Aunt Ella, Alice founded the Greek Orthodox Order of the Christian Sisterhood of Martha and Mary, and began dressing as a nun while not giving up all earthly pleasures. As her mother, Victoria, noted wryly, “What can you say of a nun who smokes and plays Canasta?”
Alice’s last years were spent with her son at Buckingham Palace. Before her death in 1969, she wrote him a letter: “Dearest Philip, be brave, and remember I will never leave you, and you will always find me when you need me most.”
She was buried next to her hero Ella at the foot of the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem. When her daughter Sophie objected, saying it was too far from England, Alice replied. “Nonsense, there’s a perfectly good bus service!”
After the dissolution of his family in 1930, a nine-year-old Prince Philip was eventually placed in the loving care of his mother’s brother George Milford Haven. A brilliant, bohemian naval hero, George was married to the avant- garde, globe-trotting Nada, granddaughter of the poet Alexander Pushkin. They were members of the champagne soaked “palace gang,” a group of jetsetters led by the Milford Havens, George’s brother Dickie and his fascinating wife, Edwina.
At the Milford Haven estate of Lynden Manor, Philip was free to practice his jazz saxophone, play badminton on the court made just for him and his cousin David, and tinker with his Uncle’s $60,000 miniature railroad. He also may have come across the Milford Haven’s legendary pornography collection. According to biographer Barbara Goldsmith, the collection included books featuring incest, bestiality, bondage and flagellation with titles like Lady Gay: Sparkling Tales of Fun and Flagellation.
Whatever the couple’s adult peccadillos, they treated Philip like a son, paying for his boarding school and showering him with love. In 1934, Nada made national headlines when she was drawn into the explosive custody battle over heiress Gloria Vanderbilt. During a court hearing, a French maid accused Little Gloria’s mother, also named Gloria, of kissing her dear friend Nada in a Cannes Hotel.
“Mrs. Vanderbilt was in bed reading a paper, and there was Lady Milford Haven beside the bed with her arm around Mrs. Vanderbilt’s neck- Lady Milford’s arm around Mrs. Vanderbilt’s neck—and kissing her just like a lover,” the maid insisted.
The story became an international scandal, and the Milford Havens were summoned to the Palace for crisis talks. Nada denounced the claim as a malicious lie, while Philip’s older sister Margarita also publicly defended her Aunt and Gloria Sr. The scandal eventually blew over, but the calm was short lived. George died of cancer in 1938, paving the way for his brother, the legendary Louis “Dickie” Mountbatten to become the dominant paternal influence in Philip’s life.
Philip was doted on by his four older sisters, Theodora, Margarita, Cecilie and Sophie. His favorite was Cecilie, lovely, cheerful and ten years his senior. In 1931, Cecilie married the handsome Georg Donatus, Grand Duke of Hesse, with her little brother serving as train bearer.
But tragedy struck on November 16, 1937, when what TIME Magazine referred to as the “the Curse of Hesse” struck again. Donatus and eight-month pregnant Cecilie were on their way to England to attend the wedding of his brother Prince Ludwig and Margaret Geddes. Two of their three children were on board as was Donatus’ mother, Eleonore.
According to reports, the plane went down outside of Ostend, Belgium after crashing into a smokestack. It appeared the pilot had been attempting a blind emergency landing, and the wreckage gave a clue as to why. Next to the body of Cecilie was a newborn baby- leading investigators to believe Cecilie had gone into premature labor while in the air, causing the pilot to attempt to land.
Studying at Gordonstoun, 16-year-old Prince Philip was in profound shock when told of his beloved sister’s death. He went to the funeral, held in Nazi controlled Darmstadt, and walked next to his sister Sophie’s husband, Christoph of Hesse, a future Luftwaffe officer dressed in an SS uniform. He later said that Christoph was “a very gentle person,” and was “kind and had a good sense of humour. So, he was actually the complete opposite of what you would expect.”
According to Ingrid Seward, other royal family members wore the infamous brown shirts, and throngs of commoners gave the Nazi salute as the funeral cortege passed. The repercussions of his family’s Nazi ties have reverberated throughout the decades, even though Philip valiantly served for the British during WWII. According to Seward, during the 2008 inquest into Princess Diana and Dodi Al-Fayed’s deaths, Mohamed Al-Fayed claimed Philip would never accept Dodi into the family. During one examination, Mohamed displayed his “proof.” Seward writes:
“All this stems from your belief that Prince Philip is not only a racist but a Nazi as well?” Al-Fayed replied: “That’s right. It is time to send him back to Germany where he came from. If you want to know his original name, it ends with Frankenstein.” He started waving about a photograph taken in 1937 at the funeral.
Though his sisters were banned from his 1947 wedding because of their German husbands, they were invited to the Queen’s 1953 coronation. His last surviving sister Sophie, said to be funny and forthright, often joined him at the Royal Windsor Horse Show. She died in 2001, Philip’s last remaining link to his fascinating family.
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