Princess Alice of Battenburg sat in the front row of Westminster Abbey in June 1953, watching her son’s wife crowned Queen Elizabeth II. She was 68 years old, dressed in a gray nun’s habit, and almost no one in the cathedral recognized her. The great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria, Alice was born deaf in 1885 at Windsor Castle. She learned to read lips in four languages and spent decades mastering the art of appearing unremarkable in rooms full of people who underestimated her.
At 18, she fell in love with Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark. They married in 1903 in a grand ceremony attended by the Tsar of Russia. Alice became the mother of five children, the youngest of whom, Philip, was born in 1921 on a kitchen table in Corfu. Her life was shaped by upheaval.
The Greek royal family was twice exiled, and in 1922, Andrew was nearly executed. A British warship evacuated the family, with the infant Philip carried aboard in a fruit box. They settled in Paris, where Alice ran a charity shop for Greek refugees. By 1928, Alice’s behavior began to alarm her family.
She spoke of religious visions and described communicating with God. She was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and institutionalized in 1930, while her mother deliberately took nine-year-old Philip on a picnic so the men could remove her without a scene. At the Berlin clinic, the psychiatrist treating her, a protégé of Sigmund Freud, consulted the famous analyst. Freud recommended exposing her ovaries to high-intensity X-rays.
The procedure, based on a theory that her religious experiences stemmed from sexual frustration, was carried out. She was then transferred to a sanatorium in Switzerland, where she remained for two years. Alice was kept in the facility while her daughters married one by one. She missed three of her children’s weddings.
When a photograph of her daughter Cecilia and a newborn grandchild arrived, Alice tore it up. Meanwhile, her husband Andrew abandoned her for a French actress and settled on a yacht off Monte Carlo. She was released in 1932, but her trust in her family had been dissolved. She cut her hair, wore simple clothing, and moved quietly through Europe.
In 1938, she returned to Athens, where she organized soup kitchens and medical relief through the Red Cross. In 1937, her daughter Cecilia died in a plane crash in Belgium, along with her husband and two sons. Alice buried her child, standing near the husband who had left her. It was one of the last times they were in the same room.
When Germany invaded Greece in 1941, most of the royal family fled. Alice stayed. During the Nazi occupation of Athens, she hid a Jewish family—Rachel Cohen, her daughter, and her son—in the upper floors of her house, directly across from the residence of the local archbishop, where a German guard was posted day and night. When the Gestapo came to question her, Alice, who had spent 60 years deaf but reading lips, pretended not to understand what they were asking.
The officers eventually left. Her ruse saved three lives. She never spoke publicly about what she had done. When a German general reportedly asked if there was anything he could do for her, she replied that he could take his soldiers out of her country.
Her husband Andrew died in 1944 in Monte Carlo, leaving Philip a fraction of an inheritance and £17,500 in gambling debts. After the war, Alice sold most of her jewelry to fund her charitable work. When Philip decided to propose to Princess Elizabeth, she gave him what remained: diamonds from her mother’s tiara, which he had crafted into an engagement ring. In January 1949, Alice founded the Christian Sisterhood of Martha and Mary, a Greek Orthodox nursing order inspired by her aunt, Grand Duchess Elizabeth, who had been murdered by Bolsheviks and later made a saint.
Alice traveled to the United States to raise funds and wore a nun’s habit, though she never took formal vows. After the military coup in Greece in 1967, Philip persuaded his mother, then 82, to move to Buckingham Palace. She lived there for two years, down the hall from the son she had been separated from for much of his life. Before her death, she sent Philip a letter.
In it, she wrote: “Be brave and remember I will never leave you and you will always find me when you need me most. ”
She died on December 5, 1969, at Buckingham Palace, largely forgotten. She was first buried at Windsor Castle, but had requested to be laid to rest in Jerusalem, near her aunt at the Church of Mary Magdalene on the Mount of Olives. Her remains were transferred there in 1988.
In 1993, Yad Vashem recognized Princess Alice of Battenburg as Righteous Among the Nations for hiding the Cohen family during the Holocaust. The following year, Philip planted a tree in her name at the memorial. He told those gathered that his mother never considered her actions special. She was a person of deep faith who regarded it as a matter of duty.
Then he added, “She would have been embarrassed by all this fuss. ”