Princess Alice of Battenberg was born on February 25, 1885, at Windsor Castle, the eldest child of Prince Louis of Battenberg and his wife, Princess Victoria of Hesse. She grew up alongside her three siblings, and from an early age, her family noticed she struggled with speech. Her grandmother, Princess Alice of Battenberg, sought out specialists, and the problem was finally diagnosed as congenital deafness. The condition did not stop her from learning to communicate.
Her mother refused to treat her differently from her brothers and sisters, allowing her to learn lip reading and fight her own battles rather than shielding her. Alice became a skilled lip reader in German and English, her first languages, and later learned to read lips in Greek and French as well. As a young royal, Alice played her part in the formal events of the era. She served as a bridesmaid at the wedding of the future King George V and Mary of Teck, and she was present at the funeral of her great-grandmother, Queen Victoria, the monarch whose long reign had defined the world into which Alice was born.
In 1902, during the coronation of King Edward VII, she met Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark, a meeting that would change the course of her life. The two married on October 6, 1903, in a civil ceremony followed by two religious services. The European royal families attended in force, and nearly everyone present was a close relative of either the bride or the groom. The couple had five children: Margarita in 1905, Theodora in 1906, Cecile in 1911, Sophie in 1914, and Philip in 1921.
In 1908, Alice and Andrew traveled to Russia for the wedding of Grand Duchess Maria and Prince William of Sweden. During that stay, Alice had a meaningful conversation with her aunt, Grand Duchess Elizabeth Feodorovna, a woman deeply admired for her religious devotion. Alice witnessed the beginning of her aunt’s plans to found a religious order of nurses, and the experience resonated deeply within her. When she returned to Greece, however, the political situation had grown far more unstable.
A nationalist Greek military league was rising, and her husband was forced to resign from the army. The First World War brought new challenges. Prince Andrew returned to military service, and Alice showed her courage by working as a nurse amid the death and despair around her. The global order was shifting violently, as the Russian, Ottoman, and German empires collapsed.
The Russian Revolution struck Alice personally. Two of her aunts, sisters of her mother, fell into the hands of the Bolsheviks. Her aunt Tsarina Alexandra was assassinated along with her husband and five children. Her other aunt, Elizabeth, was taken with other members of the Russian imperial family to the Ural Mountains, where they were thrown into an abandoned mine shaft.
Stones and sticks were hurled down after them, along with a grenade, and they lingered for days, wounded, until death came. According to the accounts, they remained resigned, singing psalms and praying. Alice mourned these deaths deeply but again felt admiration for the strength, kindness, and determination her aunt Elizabeth had shown to the very end. She fought tirelessly to save her Russian relatives, sending letters to the British prime minister, but her efforts accomplished nothing.
After the war, a new wave of political and social change shook the European dynasties, and Alice’s own family was not spared. The anti-German mood in Britain forced her father to resign his title as Prince of Battenberg at the request of King George V, who anglicized the family name to Mountbatten. Alice, however, never changed her surname. In 1920, the family returned briefly to Greece and settled on the island of Corfu, where Alice gave birth to her last child, Prince Philip, in 1921.
But the Greek army’s defeat in the Greco-Turkish War brought another revolution. A revolutionary committee seized power and forced King Constantine into exile. Prince Andrew, who had served as commander of the Second Army Corps during the war, was arrested and accused of treason, facing a possible death sentence. Several former ministers and generals who had been detained were executed, and British diplomats feared Andrew would share their fate.
After a questionable trial, he was condemned to perpetual exile. Alice, her husband, and her children fled Greece aboard a British ship under the protection of George V. The family lost its entire fortune and settled in a small house in Paris, lent to them by Princess Marie Bonaparte, Alice’s sister-in-law. In Paris, Alice became involved in charity, helping Greek refugees at a benevolent store.
But financial strain and emotional tension began to erode her marriage. Sinking into a deep depression and vulnerable, she found comfort in religion, converting to the Greek Orthodox Church in 1928. The brutal murders of her relatives in Russia had begun to affect her, and her religious fervor intensified. She came to believe she possessed healing abilities and claimed her hands were holy.
Soon her declarations became more disturbing. She said she heard voices, that she had a relationship with Jesus Christ, and that they even had carnal relations. Alice was clearly suffering from religious delusions, and her family grew deeply distressed. Her mother, especially worried, recognized that her daughter needed medical supervision.
Marie Bonaparte, a psychoanalyst, suggested Alice consult a respected doctor at a clinic in Berlin. Alice resisted, insisting nothing was wrong with her. But the doctor manipulated her by claiming that Jesus had ordered her to come, and she finally accepted treatment. After therapy sessions, the doctor diagnosed her as a paranoid schizophrenic, likely arising from sexual frustration, believing her mental delusion was the result of repressed sexual desire.
The case was presented to Dr. Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis. Freud made a recommendation that remains shocking in the history of psychiatry: that Alice’s ovaries be exposed to high-intensity X-rays. The treatment was meant to dry out the ovaries, accelerate menopause, and make her sterile, as it was believed at the time that this would rejuvenate the patient.
The results were devastating. The X-ray exposure, combined with shock treatments meant to speed up the process, only caused further harm that Alice would suffer for the rest of her life. She was later moved to another clinic in Switzerland, where she spent more than two years held against her will. During that time, she missed the weddings of all her daughters.
Her son Philip, then only ten years old, deeply felt his mother’s absence. He later said simply that it happened and there was not much he could do about it, so he moved on. But the situation clearly affected him. The boy lived with various relatives until he finally went to live permanently with his uncle, Louis Mountbatten.
Alice resisted her confinement firmly, insisting she was sane, and attempted escape several times. On one occasion she nearly succeeded, only to be detained at a train station. When she was finally released, Alice had no home to return to. Her husband had taken a mistress, and she became a solitary, isolated figure, traveling across central Europe incognito, keeping contact only with her mother and distancing herself from the rest of the family.
In 1937, tragedy struck when her daughter Cecile, pregnant at the time, died in a plane crash along with her husband and two of their children. Cecile and her husband had been members of the Nazi Party, and the funeral was held in Germany. It was the first time in seven years that Alice saw her entire family together. Grieving the loss of Cecile brought forward the complexities of Alice’s relationship with her family and her role as a mother.
She reestablished contact with everyone and returned to Athens in 1938, where she continued her work with the less fortunate. During the Second World War, Alice found herself in a delicate position. Her son fought in the British Royal Navy, while her sons-in-law fought on the German side. She settled into a small apartment in central Athens and looked for ways to help.
She worked actively with the Red Cross, organizing and distributing soup to the starving population, and made trips abroad under the pretext of visiting her sister Louise, though her real purpose was to acquire medical supplies. She also helped create shelters for orphaned and abandoned children and worked as a nurse in impoverished neighborhoods. In September 1943, the German army occupied Athens, and Greek Jews seeking refuge were in grave danger. Around sixty thousand Jews were deported to concentration camps, and only about two thousand survived.
During this critical period, Alice hid a Jewish widow and her two children who were seeking protection from the Gestapo and deportation. She sheltered them and saved them from almost certain death in the camps. When Athens was liberated in October 1944, the city remained in turmoil, with communist guerrillas confronting the British for control of the region. Alice faced extreme food shortages, surviving mostly on bread and butter.
In December 1944, she learned of the death of her husband, Andrew. The news brought sorrow, as the hope of a postwar reunion was gone. She continued to take risks, distributing food rations on the streets despite the curfew. When warned about the danger of stray bullets, she replied with characteristic determination, saying that one does not hear the shot that kills you, and since she was deaf, why should she worry about it.
In 1947, her only son, now Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten, announced his intention to marry Princess Elizabeth, the eldest daughter and heir of King George VI. Alice had no money and could not buy an extravagant gift for her future daughter-in-law. Instead, she took one of her tiaras, one of the few pieces of jewelry she still possessed, and handed it to her son. She told him to take the best stone from it and have it made into a ring for her future daughter-in-law.
That diamond tiara had been a gift from the tsars of Russia when she married Prince Andrew in 1903. Philip had an engagement ring and a bracelet made for Elizabeth. Alice returned to England in April of that year to attend her son’s wedding. Philip’s sisters were not invited due to the anti-German sentiment prevailing in Britain after the war.
In 1949, Alice founded a religious order of Greek Orthodox nurses, aiming to help and protect vulnerable elderly people and orphans in poor neighborhoods of Athens. The order struggled with declining donations and vocations and eventually disappeared, but Alice continued to keep her religious habits and work actively for charity. In 1960, she visited India at the invitation of a minister, but the journey was interrupted when she began to feel unwell. She later said she had an out-of-body experience.
Facing health problems and growing deafness, she left Greece for the last time after the coup of the colonels on April 21, 1967, which brought down the monarchy and created social instability in the country. At eighty-two and very frail, Alice was persuaded by her son and her daughter-in-law, Queen Elizabeth II, to leave Greece forever and come to London, where she lived permanently at Buckingham Palace. After decades of selfless devotion to others, Alice finally found security and stability in Britain. But the courage she had shown during the war was not properly recognized until many years later.
She had a habit of smoking a cheap, foul-smelling cigarette called Goodbeyes, a brand usually associated with working-class men, and the smell of smoke allowed the court to detect her arrival before actually seeing her. Her peculiar way of moving, with her nun’s habit, was an unusual sight. Some in the palace considered her mad and did not take her seriously. She presented a striking contrast to the Queen Mother, her son’s mother-in-law, a figure of great eloquence, elegance, and diligence in royal duties.
Alice was the opposite, notorious for contradictory habits like smoking in religious dress. Still, she was loved by the children. Prince Charles and Princess Anne enjoyed spending time with her, and she charmed them with stories about Queen Victoria. After nearly two years of growing closer to her son and his family, Alice fell ill.
On December 5, 1969, at the age of eighty-four, she died peacefully in her sleep. Her death caused little alarm. She was not well known, nor were her acts of charity. Her funeral was a very discreet event, consistent with a life that had always valued service over status.
Her son, Prince Philip, remarked that it was extraordinary that she had been born at Windsor Castle and, after a life full of challenges, wars, tragedies, and separations, had returned to that Castle before her death, marking a complete circle in her journey. Her remains were placed in the royal crypt of St. George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle on December 10, 1969. Before dying, she had expressed her wish to be buried at the Convent of Saint Mary Magdalene on the Mount of Olives, near her aunt, Grand Duchess Elizabeth Feodorovna.
That wish was not easy to fulfill, and it was not until August 3, 1988, that her remains were transferred to their final resting place. On October 31, 1994, her surviving children, Prince Philip and Princess Sophie of Hanover, traveled to Jerusalem for a ceremony honoring their mother posthumously for having hidden the Cohen family in her home in Athens during the Second World War. In 2010, Alice was recognized as a hero of the Holocaust by the British government. She was a princess unlike any other, forced to fight through wars and family turmoil, and perhaps her greatest battle was with herself, her own problems and inner struggles.
Amid so many conflicts, she did the only thing she could control: she devoted herself constantly to the care of those most in need.