Prince Philip’s Family

by The Laird o’Thistle
August 19 2007

(Edited 1/17/2018 by Susan – Added links to Unofficial Royalty biography articles of the members of Prince Philip’s family)

(Edited 4/11/2021 by Susan – Prince Philip died on April 9, 2021, at the age of 99, just two months short of his 100th birthday. Added links below which are all related to Prince Philip’s family.)

Parents and Siblings

Spouse, Children, and Grandchildren

The Laird o’ Thistle – Special Edition – The Passing of Prince Philip

Over the years of writing this column, I have made sorties into the histories of the various parts of the British royal family’s antecedents and in-laws, including sketches of the Bowes-Lyon family and Prince Philip’s forebears in the Danish royal family. What I have not done, heretofore, is to take a close look at the Duke of Edinburgh’s immediate birth-family, his parents and siblings. And so while the Queen and her husband finish up their summer retreat at Balmoral before this autumn’s celebrations of their diamond wedding anniversary, it seems a good time to finally take a peek at the family of Prince Andrew of Greece.

Sketches of Prince Philip’s life often briefly note that he was essentially the product of a broken home, and raised much as an orphan by his Mountbatten relatives in Britain. That is certainly true, but the circumstances of the story are really quite more complex and fascinating.

Prince Andrew of Greece (1882-1944) was a younger son of King George I of the Hellenes and Queen Olga, a granddaughter of Czar Nicholas I of Russia. Andrew was thus a nephew of Britain’s Queen Alexandra and an uncle of Princess Marina the Duchess of Kent. He married Princess Alice of Battenberg in 1903. Trained as an army officer, a few years after his marriage Prince Andrew resigned his commission in the face of the rising power of militarist nationalist forces. He later re-upped and ran a field hospital during the Balkan Wars of 1912-1913. In 1917 he went into exile in Switzerland with his brother King Constantine, whose attempt to keep Greece neutral in WWI had failed. Returning to Greece when Constantine was restored in 1920, Andrew was given a command of the Second Army Corps in the Battle of Sakarya in the Greco-Turkish War. After the coup of 1922 he was court-martialed and sent into exile with his family, including the infant Prince Philip. Others similarly tried were executed, but the intervention of the British is believed to have helped preserve Prince Andrew from that fate. Although the sentence against him was quashed in 1936, Prince Andrew never returned to Greece to live. After his separation from Princess Alice in 1930, he eventually settled in the South of France with his mistress and died at Monte Carlo a few weeks before his 63rd birthday.

Interestingly, in some pictures of Prince Andrew of Greece, one can see a bit of a resemblance to his grandson Prince Andrew, the Duke of York. And perhaps the Duke of York also fell heir to a few of his grandfather’s reputed playboy tendencies.

Prince Philip’s mother, Princess Alice of Battenberg (1885-1969) was the daughter of Prince Louis of Battenberg and Princess Victoria of Hesse. She was born at Windsor Castle in the presence of her great-grandmother, Queen Victoria. Alice was the niece of Czarina Alexandra, and also of the now sainted Grand Duchess Elizabeth of Russia. Her sister Louise later became Queen of Sweden; and her brothers were George, Marquess of Milford Haven, and the late Lord Louis Mountbatten. Early in life, it was discovered that Alice had a congenital deafness, but in time she became a proficient lip reader and spoke English, German, French, and Greek. In 1893 she was a bridesmaid at the marriage of the future King George V and Queen Mary. She met her future husband at the coronation of King Edward VII in 1902, and they married the following year. In 1908 she and Prince Andrew visited Russia and were there at the time her Aunt Elizabeth was inaugurating her religious order. During the Balkan Wars, Alice began to serve as a nurse. Sharing the on again, off again, the fate of the Greek royals, after their 1922 evacuation the family settled for a time in Paris. During this period Princess Alice became increasingly religious. In 1930, when Prince Philip was only nine years old, she was diagnosed with schizophrenia and hospitalized in Switzerland. She thus missed attending the wedding of all four of her daughters. During her convalescence, she and Prince Andrew became permanently separated, and she actually lived largely incognito and out of touch with most of her family during those years.

In 1938 Princess Alice re-emerged from her long seclusion and returned to Athens, where she began working among the poor. She was one of only two members of the Greek royal family to remain in Greece throughout WWII. In the latter days of the war, she sheltered and saved members of the Cohen family from deportation to the death camps by the Nazi occupation forces, an act for which she was eventually added to the roll of “Righteous Gentiles” honored at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Memorial in Israel. In 1947 she visited Britain to attend the wedding of her youngest child, Prince Philip, to Princess Elizabeth. In 1949 she founded a nursing order of Orthodox nuns modeled on the order founded by her martyred aunt, the Grand Duchess Elizabeth. (Even though her elderly mother wondered aloud what sort of nun smoked so heavily, and played canasta?) At the coronation in 1953, she wore a strikingly simple outfit modeled on her sisters’ habits, but the order eventually failed to attract sufficient applicants and disbanded. In 1960 she made a pilgrimage of spiritual exploration to India, where she either fell ill or — according to her own estimate — had a profound out-of-body experience. In 1967 she left Athens for the last time after the Colonels’ Coup and ended her days living at Buckingham Palace. Initially buried at St. George’s Chapel at Windsor, in 1988 her remains were moved to the Convent of Mary Magdalene on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem, where she was interred close by the remains of her aunt, the Grand Duchess Elizabeth.

It strikes me that some elements of Princess Alice’s story… particularly her spiritual quest and her attraction to Orthodox religious life… anticipated the similar interests of her grandson, the Prince of Wales.

Prince Andrew of Greece and Princess Alice had five children:

Princess Margarita (1905-1981) who married H.S.H. Gottfried, Prince of Hohenlohe-Langenburg in 1931. Gottfried (1897-1960) was a grandson of Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, the son of Queen Victoria who became the Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. Princess Margarita and her husband had six children born between 1933 and 1944, including Prince Kraft, Hereditary Prince of Hohenlohe-Langenburg (b. 1935).

Princess Theodora (1906-1969) who married Berthold, Margrave of Baden in 1931. Berthold’s father, Prince Max, was the patron of Prince Philip’s mentor, Kurt Hahn, in the founding of Salem School shortly after WWI. (Hahn, a Jew and a critic of the Nazi regime was briefly imprisoned in 1933, and then relocated himself and his educational effort to Britain. He founded Gordonstoun, modeled on Salem, up in northern Scotland in 1934.) Prince Philip lived briefly with Princess Theodora and her husband as a teenager, before going on to begin his studies under Hahn at Gordonstoun. Theodora and Berthold had three children, including H.R.H. Maximilian, Margrave of Baden (b. 1933). Theodora’s daughter, Margarita (b. 1932), was the first wife of Prince Tomislav of Yugoslavia and resided in Britain. Theodora died just five weeks before her mother, Princess Alice.

Princess Cecilie (1911-1937) who married Hereditary Grand Duke George Donatus of Hesse, also in 1931. Cecilie’s husband was the first cousin of her mother, Princess Alice, born in 1906 to GD Ernst of Hesse and his second wife. Cecilie and George had three children and were expecting a fourth at the time of their death in a plane crash while en route to a wedding in London in 1937. Two of the three children were also killed in the crash, and the surviving daughter died of meningitis two years later. The stillborn fetus of the fourth child was found in the plane wreckage, indicating that Cecilie had gone into labor. A few months before their deaths George and Cecilie had joined the Nazi Party.

Princess Sophie (1914-2001) was married first to Prince Christoph of Hesse-Cassel in 1930. Christoph was a nephew, via his mother, of Kaiser Wilhelm II, and a grandson of Princess Royal Victoria, elder sister of Edward VII. The Hesse-Cassel dynasty was only distantly related to the Hesse-Darmstadt family of Princess Alice. Prince Christoph was killed in an air crash in Italy in 1943. Princess Sophie and Prince Christoph had five children.

Princess Sophie was married secondly to Prince George of Hanover in 1946. Prince George (1915-2006) was the second son of the Duke of Brunswick, the brother of Queen Frederika of Greece, and the uncle of the current Prince Ernst August of Hanover who is married to Princess Caroline of Monaco. Sophie and George had three children.

Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh (b. 1921) who married Queen Elizabeth II of Great Britain.

Although Prince Philip was largely raised apart from his sisters, and even fought on the opposite side from some of their husbands in WWII, in later years he was able to become particularly close to his closest sibling in age, Princess Sophie, and her husband Prince George of Hanover. Her death in late 2001 occurred just shortly before those of Princess Margaret and the Queen Mother. It is said that Prince Philip also has fairly close ties with his nieces who settled in Britain.

Of course, these various relatives belong not just to Prince Philip, but also to his children. And while the public is used to thinking of Princess Margaret’s children as the cousins of Charles, Anne, Andrew, and Edward, it is not so used to thinking of the various Hohenlohe-Langenburg, von Baden, Hesse-Cassel and Hanover relatives in the same way. Yet they are in the same positions as the Bowes-Lyon cousins of an earlier era, and the Spencer cousins of the rising generation in their status. They are the Mountbatten-Windsors’ “continental cousins,” so to speak.

Prince Philip’s complaint back at the time that his children were virtually robbed of his adopted surname is famous. “They’ve turned me into a bloody amoeba!” The historical tragedy of his birth-family is not dissimilar. In the public discourse over the years, he’s been thought of mostly in terms of his foster-family, the Mountbattens. And he is close to his Mountbatten cousins. But there was another family that time and circumstance largely robbed from him. Even so, the signs of the significance of that family pop up intriguingly in the spiritual interests of one son, and the looks and predilections of another. The no-nonsense Princess Anne bears among her baptismal names that of her more mystical grandmother, Princess Alice. And even Prince Edward’s recent trip to Israel included time to honor his grandmother’s memory… the grandmother who lived off somewhere in another part of the same house as him when he was a little child.

Though not much has been heard recently about the idea that the Queen should take the opportunity of their 60th wedding anniversary to finally designate her husband Prince Consort, I still very much hope that she does. The Duke of Edinburgh is now a very old man, albeit pretty hale and hearty, and he is the last of his family. In the course of sixty years he has devoted himself to the service of his wife’s family, and over the course of his life, he has devoted himself to the service of his chosen country. He may also be the last foreign royal to ever marry a British monarch. Although he may stick his foot in his mouth from time to time, there is never any doubt where his loyalties lie. Prince Philip has brought his own distinctive blend of influences into the dynamics of the Mountbatten-Windsor family as surely as did Diana Princess of Wales, and they have shaped the House of Windsor in ways that will continue to be played out for generations. But before all that, Philip was shaped by Andrew, and Alice, and his other nearest kin.

Yours Aye,

– Ken Cuthbertson