Marlene Wagman-Geller

     Princess Diana owned a red sweater with dozens of white sheep and with one black, perhaps a tongue-in-cheek nod to her status with her in-laws. Another royal who experienced similar alienation was Princess Victoria Alice Elizabeth Julia Marie, known as Alice, born in Windsor Castle in the presence of her great-grandmother, Queen Victoria. The baby was the daughter of Princess Victoria of Hesse and by Rhine and Prince Louis of Battenberg. She was the eldest of four; her siblings became the Queen of Denmark, Marquess of Milford, and Earl Mountbatten of Burma. Born deaf, she mastered lip reading in several languages and could tell what the actors were really saying in silent films.

        At age seventeen, Alice attended King Edward VII’s 1902 London coronation where she fell “really, deeply in love” with Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark, the fourth son of King Constantine I. The couple married a year later in Germany; their wedding gifts were valued at $750,000, $23 million in contemporary currency. One of these presents, a diamond tiara, compliments of Tsar Nicholas II and Tarina Alexandra of Russia, would currently carry a price tag of $14 million. The couple lived in Greece’s royal palace where they raised their four daughters and their youngest, the long-awaited son. Philip was born on a kitchen table in Corfu at Villa Mon Repo, their Greek summer home. When he married the British Princess Elizabeth, he used gems from the tiara as the setting for her engagement ring and bracelet. 

      During the Balkan War of 1912, Alice volunteered at battlefield hospitals. She wrote to her mother, “God what things we saw. Shattered arms, legs and heads-such awful sights.”         World War I shook the foundation of Alice’s world. In 1916, the family had to take refuge in the palace cellars at the French bombardment of Athens. The following year, King Constantine’s pro-German alliances in World I necessitated his abdication. The new military government court-martialed Prince Andrew after the ill-fated Asia Minor Campaign between Greece and Turkey after the Great War. Fearing for their safety, the family fled Greece on the British cruiser, the HMS Calypso. The eighteen-month-old Philip made his escape in a makeshift cot made from an orange box. Two of Alice’s aunts, Tsarina Alexandra Feodorovna and Grand Duchess Elizabeth Feodorovna, met violent deaths at the hands of the Bolsheviks. 

       In 1929, Alice’s family became increasingly concerned about her mental health; she acted erratically and claimed she had received divine messages. She spoke of conversations with Jesus and confessed they often flirted. At one point, she even hinted that something even more was going between the two of them. After suffering from a nervous breakdown in 1930, she left for treatment at a Berlin clinic where Dr. Ernest Simmel diagnosed her as a paranoid schizophrenic. Simmel consulted his colleague, Dr. Sigmund Freud, who concluded that her madness was the result of an aborted love affair and that the Princesses’ mental health problems were the result of “sexual frustration.” His suggestion was to x-ray Alice’s ovaries in order to “cool her down-kill her libido” by bringing on menopause. Against her will, the doctors committed her to Kreuzlingen, a sanatorium in Switzerland where she remained for two years before her transfer to a clinic in Meran, a northern Italian village. Andrew only visited twice as he was otherwise engaged in the South of France, playing card games on yachts with various girlfriends. After her release, Andrew lived on the French Riviera with his lover, Countess Andrée de La Bigne, while Princess Alice travelled incognito in Europe. Philip saw little of either parent during his childhood where he bed-surfed with various relatives. At one, he signed the guest book, “Philip…No fixed abode!”  For several years, Alice cut all ties with her family; although husband and wife led separate lives, they never divorced. Alice reconnected with her family at the funeral of her daughter, Cecilie, who, along with her husband and two children, had perished in a 1937 plane crash over Osten, Belgium. The tragic event entailed a mother and son reunion; also in attendance was Nazi bigwig, Herman Goring.

     Partially to cope with the tragic deaths and her other sorrows, Alice found solace in religion. She returned to Greece, donned a gray habit-her uniform for the remainder of her life-and became a member of the Greek Orthodox Church. To fund the convent she established, the Christian Sisterhood of Martha and Mary, she sold her priceless possessions. Her mother was appalled at her daughter’s lifestyle and stated, “What can you say of a nun who smokes and plays canasta?”

        During World War II, Alice lived in Athens where she devoted her life to helping the poor. She had long divested herself of any aristocratic trappings and lived in a two-bedroom apartment. Alice hid the Jewish Rachel Cohen and her children in her Athens home, a situation made even more tense when her daughters and their SS officer husbands visited. On another occasion, interviewed by a suspicious Gestapo, she used her deafness as an excuse for not understanding their questions. They dismissed the cigarette smoking, princess nun as a doddering old woman. Because of Alice, the Cohen family survived and today lives in France.

       In 1967, after the take-over of the military dictatorship, Colonels’ Coup, Philip invited his mother to live with him in Buckingham Palace. She only accepted when her daughter, Sophie, the Princess George of Hanover, told her that the invitation had also come from her daughter-in-law, Queen Elizabeth II. Her response, “Lilbet said that? Right, we go this afternoon.” During her time at the palace, Alice became close to Princess Anne who called her Yaya, the Greek word for grandmother. The Windsors, rather than banishing the older woman to the attic like Mr. Rochester did his first wife, gave her a suite of rooms. An earlier occupant of the accommodation had been the Duchess of Windsor when she had returned to England to attend her husband’s funeral, a moment captured in a photograph where she is seen watching the Trooping of the Colour procession, her face wreathed in mourning. Fellow palace residents became used to the anomaly of an older woman, dressed in a nun’s garb, who smoked incessantly. The press was taken with the eccentric blue blood, and Philip dubbed her “the Royal Saint.”

     Princess Alice’s funeral took place at St. George’s Chapel in Windsor Castle in 1969, the venue where she had been born eighty-four years before. Intensely private until the end, she destroyed all her papers and only left behind-of her once fabulous treasures-three dressing gowns. She had sold her magnificent collection of jewels and other treasures to benefit the poor. She also left behind a note to her son with whom she had shared a difficult relationship, “Dearest Philip, be brave, and remember I will never leave you, and you will always find me when you need me most. All my devoted love, your old Mama.” In Prince Philip’s replies to letters of sympathy at his mother’s passing, he replied that hers had been “a life of wars, revolutions, separations, and tragedies.” And there had been so much more he could have added.

        A decade later, Jerusalem’s Yad Vashem gave the royal-turned-nun posthumous recognition when it named Princess Alice Righteous Among the Nations, Israel’s highest honor for those who saved Jews during the Holocaust. Prince Philip and his sister accepted the honor on her behalf. In 2010, the British government deemed her a Hero of the Holocaust.

      Alice, who always chose to live away from the royal radar, made posthumous headlines. Her wish had been to be buried near her aunt and role model, the martyred Grand Duchess Elizabeth, a Russian Orthodox saint who had also established a convent and helped the poor. The gravesite she had pinned her hope on was the church of St. Mary Magdalene in Gethsemane in Jerusalem. Nineteen years after Alice’s passing, her eldest daughter, Princess George of Hanover, flew in with her coffin. The princess’s body, protected by armed Israeli border police, had been granted her final request. The United Kingdom parliament did not approve of Prince Philip attending the internment due to Israel’s issues with the Palestinians.

     In 1994, there was, at last, redemption between Philip and his “old Mama,” one that may have laid to rest any residue anger he harbored against the woman who had been more intent on saving the world than being a parent. A relative of the Cohens had suggested that a Jerusalem street be named after Princess Alice in acknowledgment for her heroic role during the Holocaust. When the British government permitted Philip to visit to his mother’s Jerusalem grave, he responded to the Cohen’s request, “I suspect that it never occurred to her that her action was in any way special. She was a person with deep religious faith, and she would have considered it to be a totally human action to fellow human beings in distress.” The Prince’s words represented the reconciliation between Princess Alice, and, to use her term of endearment for Philip when he was little, her “Bubbikins.”