— MOTHER SUPERIOR ALICE-ELIZABETH, PRINCESS ANDREW OF GREECE AND DENMARK —
A Tale of the Crown & the Wimple
In early May 1941, a shiny Mercedes pulled up outside the elegant Athens town house owned by Prince George of Greece. George was a not unimportant figure: the son of one King of Greece, the brother of a second and the uncle of a third (the unfortunate King Alexander, who died after getting into a fight with a monkey) and a fourth (the only scarcely more fortunate George II, who had been forced into exile on three separate occasions). However, the pair of jackboots that stepped out of the car and onto the doorstep that spring day had not been polished as a show of deference to the house’s royal owner but, rather, in honour of one of his guests. George had generously agreed to let Alice, the wife of his feckless and wayward brother Andrew (who was spending the war in Monaco with his French mistress), reside there, after he discovered that she had been living in a two-bedroom apartment in downtown Athens.
When Nazi forces finally captured the Greek capital, on 27th April 1941, it was only a matter of time before they made their way to find Alice, who had been born Princess of Battenberg and whose daughters had married the Prince of Hesse and the Margrave of Baden, both officers in the Wehrmacht. As members of Germany’s old aristocracy (most of whom were, at best, frosty towards the new Third German Empire that Hitler was trying to forge), their presence in the Nazi forces was a great propaganda coup. Consequently, when it was discovered that their mother-in-law was living in a newly conquered city, the Nazi high command immediately dispatched a high-ranking officer to pay a social call.
Whether this scion of the Wehrmacht had been briefed before his visit about the Princess’s character is not known. Either way, he clearly felt that a combination of old Prussian deference and modern German charm was what was required to win over a woman who, however straitened her wartime circumstances may have been, was still a great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria. As they sat taking coffee in Prince George’s rooms, the Nazi leaned in and, with the air of a strapping young nephew deigning to visit an aged relative, asked the little old lady perched on the chair opposite whether there was anything he could do for her. Her little eyes, sunk into a sparrow-like face, narrowed, looked him up and down, from his Brylcreemed hair to those oh-so-carefully polished boots, and replied, in a cut-glass German accent the general could only dream of, ‘Yes. You can take your troops out of my country.’ And with that, she left the room.
To demand the unilateral withdrawal of Hitler’s forces in the presence of a senior Nazi was gutsy, but this astonishing display of aristocratic sangfroid was the least of the little old lady’s achievements. From hiding Jews to distributing food, winding up the Gestapo to nursing the injured, the exploits of Alice of Battenberg, the Princess turned would-be nun, as she struggled against Fascism in her adopted home of Athens, were all conducted with a glint of steel behind her beady stare and with a devout faith in her heart.
†
‘He hath put down the mighty from their seat, and hath exalted the humble and meek’
This is the manifesto at the heart of the Magnificat, the song that is sung by the Virgin Mary in the Gospel according to St Luke and is at the heart of numerous Christian liturgies, from the chanted antiphonal hymn used in morning worship across Eastern Orthodoxy to the thousands of settings that exist for its use in Anglican Evensong. Yet, for all its centrality in worship, it points to a tension that Christianity has never really managed to resolve: what is its relationship with power?
In AD 312, just before the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, the Roman emperor Constantine had a vision of the cross in the sky and, after winning the battle, converted to Christianity – a faith that had, until that point, been the creed of a tiny and brutally persecuted minority. By the time of the Edict of Thessalonica in AD 380, the faith that had started with the judicial murder of its leader by the Romans had become the state religion of the Roman Empire. A faith that had developed much of its credal identity on the margins of power now found itself at the centre of the most important political entity on earth. To say this presented something of a theological quandary would be an understatement. Ought Christians to reject the trappings of power or embrace them to do good? Many groups maintained (and still do) that Christianity’s default political position must be one of absolute radicalism, rejecting power structures of any kind – a line of thought that led, several centuries later, to the somewhat farcical sight of well-meaning Anglican Vicars trotting over to Russia in order to praise the government of Joseph Stalin, whom they naïvely saw as the Virgin Mary’s best bet.
This tension exists not only in the abstract world of theology but in the lives of individuals as well. Of course, in some cases – men like Jozef Tiso, or Tomás de Torquemada, the instigator of the Spanish Inquisition – it has led to abuses of power in order to justify what they felt to be the right path. In other cases, the marriage of humility and power has been more creative, from Thomas Becket to Oscar Romero. Perhaps the strangest example of this contrast was found in the figure of a women who was born at Windsor Castle on 25th February 1885 but who died having given all her possessions away; who was christened with the title ‘Her Serene Highness’ and with the Queen-Empress Victoria as a godmother but who would later take the name Sister Alice-Elizabeth as an Orthodox nun; who had seen her world utterly destroyed by the First World War, and who spent the latter part of her life resisting the new world that Nazism was trying to forge in the Second World War.
The young Alice had an equally astonishing childhood, in the middle of an inordinately complex network of intermarriages around the extended family of the British Queen. As a child, the young Alice was carted between Germany, Britain and Malta by her parents Prince Louis of Battenberg and Princess Victoria of Hesse and the Rhine (the European monarchy may have had many qualities that made them preferable to dictators, but creativity with names had been bred out many moons ago). Very early on, as the toddler Princess displayed clear difficulties with speaking, it became clear that Alice was, in fact, deaf. Rather than view this as a reason to cast the child aside and focus on her healthy siblings, her mother and grandmother ensured she was given the most advanced medical care as well as special tutoring, including being taught how to lip-read. By the time she was a teenager, Alice could lip-read and speak English, French and German fluently. At the age of seventeen, she added Greek to that list of accomplishments after it was announced she was to be married to Prince Andrew, the seventh child of George I, a middle-ranking Danish prince who had been invited to become King by the Greeks in 1863 when their previous monarch proved to be less than satisfactory.
The marriage was not an especially happy one. Although the couple were united by their shared love for Greece and her people, they were of quite different temperaments. Prince Andrew was a dashing, impetuous cavalry officer, famed for sleeping with almost everyone – male or female – whom he encountered. By contrast, Alice, now known by her husband’s name of Princess Andrew, threw herself into charity work and, as her mother had, took an earnest interest in her children, of whom there were to be four girls and one boy, Philip, who, as a young man, would go on to win the heart of Princess Elizabeth, the heir to the British throne. A significant incident in the early years of the couple’s marriage was their trip to Russia in 1908 to attend the wedding of a Russian princess and a prince of Sweden. There, Alice saw her aunt – the German-born Grand Duchess Elizabeth Fyodorovna – for the first time in many years.
Elizabeth had been married to Grand Duke Sergei of Russia until he was blown to pieces by a revolutionary terrorist in 1905. After her husband’s death, she became intensely religious and threw herself into acts of charity, eventually giving all she had away and becoming a nun, starting her own order of sisters dedicated to providing medical care to the very poorest. Her efforts earned her the particular hatred of Vladimir Lenin, who said of her that ‘virtue with a crown on is a greater enemy to the Revolution than a hundred tyrant Tsars’. When the Revolution came, Lenin personally ordered her murder. She and a number of companions were taken outside the town of Alapayevsk and thrown down a mine shaft, followed by a number of grenades. Somehow, Elizabeth survived this ordeal and was heard by the Bolshevik men to be singing hymns from the bottom of the pit. They responded by filling the shaft with bracken and setting it on fire. The Grand Duchess’s setting down of the gilded tiara and picking up of the wimple, as well as her later stubborn refusal to flee when her adopted country came under the sway of murderous ideologues, was to make a lasting impression on her niece.
†
The Russian Revolution wasn’t the only political upheaval to shake Europe in the early years of the twentieth century, and Greece had more than its fair share of unrest. In 1909, troops at the Goudi barracks in eastern Athens revolted, leading to a coup espousing similar ideas to the so-called progressive nationalism that had recently swept the ailing Ottoman Empire. As a result of the reforms, led by a group of officers dissatisfied at the traditional way in which the army had been run, Prince Andrew lost his military commission and was forced back to civilian life. This period on Civvy Street was short-lived; in 1912, as the region – Greece included – descended into the warm-up for the First World War – the Balkan Wars – Andrew was reinstated to a command post (though, admittedly, to the somewhat back-seat job of running a field hospital), while Alice threw herself into nursing work. A year later, the country was in turmoil again as Alice’s father-in-law, King George I, was assassinated. A year after that, the mechanised slaughter of the First World War commenced, with one side of the Princess’s family pitched in total war against the other. By 1917, her brother-in-law, King Constantine, was forced to abdicate in the face of fierce protests against his policy of keeping Greece neutral as Europe ripped herself apart.
Alice and her family fled as well, spending most of their time in Switzerland in what was to be the first of many exiles. In 1920, after the unfortunate monkey-induced death of King Alexander, King Constantine returned to Greece and reappointed his brother Andrew to a military role. Alice spent most of this time on Corfu, where, in 1921, her last child of five, Philip, was born. The return did not last long and, after a failed military expedition against Turkey (in which Prince Andrew’s refusal to follow orders during the pivotal Battle of Sakarya attracted particular criticism), Andrew, Alice and their children were forced into exile once more, this time to Paris, where, to their anguish, they were treated as Danish, rather than Greek, citizens.
The family settled down into a relatively humdrum existence in the suburbs of the French capital. Alice became even more devoted to charity work, even spending afternoons doing shifts at a second-hand shop devoted to raising money for refugees from the continuing crises in Greece and Asia Minor. This increase in her philanthropic endeavours was accompanied by a greatly heightened religiosity, inspired by the memory of her now martyred aunt Elizabeth. After contact with the Greek Orthodox Cathedral of St-Étienne in Paris, on 20th October 1928, Alice gave up her Protestant faith and followed her aunt into the Orthodox Church.
Not long after, she began to experience dramatic visions, including one where she was informed by Heaven that she was to develop healing powers. Her husband, and many others, believed she had gone mad. In 1930, as her family was dispersed across Europe – with her daughters marrying into what remained of the German Royal Houses, her son sent to boarding school in England and her husband eloping to the Riviera with his French actress mistress – Princess Alice was committed to the Bellevue clinic at Kreuzlingen in Switzerland where, she was informed, she would be treated for her mental breakdown. Despite the sanatorium’s exclusive reputation, her royal status did not mean that she was treated any more kindly than other patients with mental health issues were at the time. The centre’s director, a Dr Binswanger, who had authorised her forcible removal from her family, diagnosed her with paranoid schizophrenia. Another doctor who examined her case was the famous Sigmund Freud. He, unsurprisingly given his own obsessions, decided that it was sexual frustration and recommended subjecting the unfortunate Princess to a series of X-rays designed to radiate her ovaries out of existence and so suppress her libido. Predictably, given such treatment, Alice loathed her time in Switzerland and made several attempts to escape. Her protestations of sanity eventually won out and in 1932 she was released.
After a brief stay in the Tyrolean spa town of Merano to recuperate from the horrors of her treatment, the Princess, now estranged from her husband and out of touch with her children, spent five years wandering aimlessly around Europe. Financed by various handouts from relatives, she stayed in bed and breakfast establishments in decaying resorts, living among her own thoughts as the continent around her descended into madness. Despite Dr Freud’s extreme treatment, her visions persisted. Once, as she sat on the terrace of a Cologne boarding house where she regularly stayed, gazing into the sky, the son of the couple who ran the establishment came over and asked what it was she was looking at. ‘St Barbara’ came the reply. She was jolted out of this blissfully low-profile existence in 1937 when, as it had so often before, tragedy stuck her family. Back in 1931, her third daughter, Cecilie, had married the Hereditary Grand Duke of Hesse. It was a happy marriage and, by late 1937, the Grand Duchess was heavily pregnant with her fourth child. The little family (with the exception of the youngest child, Johanna) boarded a plane on 16th November to attend a family wedding in London. As the aircraft approached the Belgian port of Ostend, fog impeded the pilot’s sight, sending the plane careering into a factory chimney. Everyone on board was killed.
The news was enough to bring the dispersed family back together again. The funeral was to be the first time she had seen her husband in nearly seven years. It was enough, too, to jolt Alice out of the strange, transitory existence that had seen her float around Europe. Despite being united in grief, no reunion between husband and wife was forthcoming. If the intention of Alice’s time in Switzerland was to ‘cure’ her of her religious beliefs, it had had the opposite effect. If anything, she now clung to her faith more than ever, to the extent that she would never have countenanced divorcing Andrew, despite his flagrant infidelity while she had been at her lowest ebb.
Now that, in the never-ending carousel of Greek politics, the monarchy was back in Athens in the person of her husband’s nephew (another George), she decided to move back to one of the few places she had felt an affinity with in her restless existence. A living husband meant that a nunnery was not an option and so she purchased a poky two-bedroom flat in the Kolonaki district of Athens and gave herself over to good deeds. She had planned to take her teenage son with her but was dissuaded when it was pointed out that a continuation of his schooling in Britain would probably do him more good than living in a spartan flat in an Athenian backstreet. Had Alice got her way, the history of Britain would have been notably different. Two years later, when he was still a cadet at the Royal Naval College, he was tasked with chaperoning the young Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret and so was set on the path that would lead him to become, in the words of the honorific bestowed by the Pacific Tanna islanders, ‘man belong Mrs Queen’.
Though she returned to Greece without her son, Alice was not left in peaceful isolation for long. In 1939, Fascist Italy conquered Albania as part of Mussolini’s deeply unlikely plan to build a new Roman Empire with himself as a second Caesar. As with the Romans, it was only a matter of time before Mussolini stretched a chunky, grasping hand towards Greece and, on 28th October 1940, Italian troops invaded, bringing the Second World War to the Greek lands. As was so often the case during the conflict, the reality of the Italian war effort fell rather short of their dictator’s strutting and posturing and the Greek forces, with some British support, managed to turn the tables and themselves invaded Italian Albania. Hitler, fearing that Britain had found the weak underbelly of Fortress Europe, poured German troops into the area and, by April 1941, the Greeks had been beaten back and their capital occupied.
As war began to take its toll on the Greek population, Alice and her sister-in-law Elena Vladimirovna (a cousin of the murdered Tsar) decided to remain when most of the other royals took up the British offer to evacuate them to Cape Town. Both Elena and Alice looked to the example of Grand Duchess Elizabeth during the chaos of the Russian Revolution and decided to join the Red Cross. They moved into their brother-in-law’s house together and began nursing the sick and injured, setting up soup kitchens and caring for those orphaned as a result of the fighting. The sight of the two old ladies, offspring of the crowned heads of Europe, marching with great confidence into Athenian neighbourhoods that no policeman would dare enter bemused the occupiers when they arrived in 1941. But, as that smooth Prussian general mentioned earlier, the Gestapo and many others were to discover, they underestimated Alice and Elena at their peril.
†
Those links to the crowned heads of Europe were to come in handy for Alice, giving her, as they did, an excuse to travel across the war-torn continent with a degree of diplomatic protection and to receive parcels that otherwise would have been treated with suspicion. She marshalled her siblings into helping her in her efforts to alleviate the suffering of Athens’ poorest people. When she was allowed to visit her sister, Louise, who was married to Crown Prince Gustav Adolf of Sweden, Alice (never one for overly close relations between family members) spent most of her visit collecting food and other supplies for the Red Cross, returning to Greece with her luggage stuffed full of aid parcels. She also nagged her younger brother Louis for a steady stream of packages, pulling at his heartstrings with tales of her own privation when, in fact, she would distribute them directly among the poor of Athens. This was all the more remarkable when one considers that Louis was not only splitting his time between Britain and America but, as Lord Mountbatten (the anglicised version of the Battenberg name), was playing an instrumental role in the Allied war effort against Germany.
As the baking Greek summer of 1943 finally came to an end, so too did the Italian occupation of the majority of Greece, including the areas directly around Athens (the Germans having considered the capital itself too important to be given over to Rome). As Mussolini’s government fell, the Germans moved swiftly to occupy the areas that had been under the jurisdiction of their unfortunate southern allies. By the end of August, just under fifty thousand of the country’s seventy-five-thousand-strong Jewish population had been deported from Salonika to Auschwitz. Those who managed to avoid deportation frantically roamed the country trying to find refuge from the death trains that were shunting their friends and family north.
One such group of desperate refugees was the Cohen family. Haimaki Cohen had been a prominent Greek MP, who, just when the popularity of the royals was at a low ebb, showed kindness to King George I by sheltering him during a flash flood. In return, the King had promised that, if ever there was something the Cohens needed, they had only to ask. Haimaki himself died at the start of the war, with the royal offer unclaimed (not that they would have been much use in Switzerland). He left a widow, Rachel, and five children. As the Nazis began to round up Jews in the summer of 1941 so began a desperate race against time to flee to safety. Freddy, the eldest son, managed to arrange a crossing of the Mediterranean Sea for himself and his two elder brothers to join the Free Greek forces fighting with the British in North Africa, but his mother, sister Tilda and brother Michel were stuck in Greece, with the threat of deportation to certain death growing more likely every day.
Freddy had heard stories about the strange, steely, devout Princess who had refused to leave Athens in the city’s hour of need. With his options running out, his father’s seemingly unlikely boast of the promise of royal favour was as worth a try as anything else. Royal favour, as far as it existed in Greece in 1943, was vested in a pair of difficult little old ladies sitting in a draughty town house surrounded by nurses and icons. To say it was a leap in the dark for the Cohen family would be an understatement. Somehow, Freddy made contact with Alice and, to his surprise, she agreed to hide his mother, sister and brother in the attic of the town house. On 15th October, two huddled, terrified Jewish women were bundled into the back of the Princesses’ house; a little later, they were joined by Michel and there they remained, safe, for the duration of the war.
Despite her persistent rudeness to members of the Nazi high command, Alice was treated with a certain dignity, which generally allowed her to flaunt the rules. Direct disobedience of a Nazi race law, though, was a step too far and, although she had succeeded in saving the Cohens undetected, the ever-watchful Gestapo soon smelled a rat at the residence of the Princess of Greece and Denmark. Their suspicions were compounded by the fact that Alice’s son, Philip, was now known to be serving with the British navy; once again the jackboots were at Alice’s door, except this time the Prussian charm had been well and truly dispensed with. However, if the Gestapo thought they would succeed in their attempts to intimidate the Princess (who, after all, had suffered two years of torture at the Bellevue sanitorium), they were, time and again, sorely mistaken. Expecting the sparrow-like figure to give in immediately, they began questioning her about her links to social and racial undesirables, only to be met by stony silence. After several more questions, Alice decided to put the faltering secret policemen out of his misery and proclaimed, ‘I am deaf and can’t hear what you’re saying.’ The normal methods of intimidation and physical violence were, in this case, out of the question and so, in an unusual reversal of roles, the interrogators left with their tails between their legs. Alice, and the Cohens, were not bothered again.
Even when the Nazis were finally pushed out of Athens in October 1944, Alice made use of her deafness to wave aside officialdom. The liberation had come at an enormous cost and her work doling out food and medical help to the sick of Athens was even more critical than it had been before. As the Nazis withdrew, opposing groups of partisans and resistance fighters (as well as British forces) converged on the Greek capital, all hoping to seize the initiative in shaping the nation that might emerge from the chaos after the war. In a desperate attempt to keep order in the fractious city, the British introduced a strictly enforced curfew. Sentries, however, reported that the order was being repeatedly flouted by one particular offender: Princess Alice, who, having ignored Nazi attempts to stop her visiting the poor and needy, saw absolutely no reason why she should pay attention to the British. Eventually, an officer took her aside and warned her that there was a very real risk she might be accidently shot if she carried on with her nocturnal relief missions. Alice, fixing him with exactly the same avian glare with which she had stared down the German general in 1941, replied, ‘They tell me that you don’t hear the shot that kills you; and in any case I’m deaf, so why would I worry about that?’
Though it didn’t get her shot, her parcel distribution did affect her health in another way. Food was scarce over the winter of 1944–5 and almost anything edible that came Alice’s way was distributed to those who were, as she saw it, in greater need. Indeed, when the future British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan (who was serving as the de facto British governor of the liberated territories around the Mediterranean) paid a visit to her in the autumn, he wrote a note back to Whitehall expressing concern that the great-granddaughter of the Queen-Empress Victoria should be living in such ‘squalid’ conditions. For several weeks that winter she ate nothing but bread and, in a letter to her son, confessed that she could scarcely remember the last time she had eaten meat. Despite these privations, her faith remained resolute; she might have ended the war physically frailer and more gaunt but, spiritually and in her own iron determination, Alice was as tough as ever.
†
Aside from her heroism, the war brought one very significant change to Alice’s life – in December 1944, she learned that she had been widowed. It was somewhat ironic that Alice, who had put her life at risk from Gestapo death squads or stray British bullet hundreds of times, managed to survive the war, whereas her husband, who had spent the entire conflict in a suite at the Hotel Metropole, Monte Carlo, failed to see out the conflict courtesy of an enormous heart attack. With her husband gone to meet his Maker, Alice finally believed herself able to serve hers in the way she had long felt called to do and, after raising the necessary funds to start her own order (even the truculent Alice had enough self-knowledge to realise that putting herself under someone else’s jurisdiction would not have ended well), she became a nun in 1949. She took the name Alice-Elizabeth in honour of the aunt who had long inspired her.
Her family, never the most sympathetic to her religious beliefs, were less than impressed. Her mother (by this point at the well-past-caring age of eighty-seven) exclaimed, ‘Whoever heard of an Abbess who smokes and plays canasta!’ – a reference to Princess Alice’s well-known love of both Woodbines and small-scale gambling, neither of which she felt it necessary to give up after taking the veil. She got her revenge on her family’s haughtiness in a way entirely in keeping with her character: she insisted on appearing at the coronation of her daughter-in-law, Queen Elizabeth II, in 1953, not in a bejewelled gown and tiara like practically everyone else, but in her grey nun’s habit, which did, at least, make her recognisable in photographs. She returned to Greece to run her nunnery, but, perhaps unsurprisingly, the applicants struggled to meet her stringent entrance criteria and, in the end, the order numbered exactly one sister: Mother Superior Alice-Elizabeth herself.
Alice’s spiritual quest took her further afield, not always with great success. A trip to India had to be cut short, to the ire of her hosts, when the nun-Princess began to have an out-of-body experience. As well as India, she also travelled to Rome, where Jacques, one of the Cohen sons who had escaped to Egypt, recognised her at an event. As he approached Alice to thank her for her bravery in hiding his family, she turned her beady eyes and famously sharp tongue on him. She told him she wanted no recognition – she had only done what her faith and her duty had compelled her to do.
Her life ended in the same way that much of it had been spent – in a strange mixture of pomp and poverty, a perfect elision of the sublime and the ridiculous. In April 1967, yet another military coup occurred in Greece and Alice, by now nearly as deaf as she had claimed to be in 1941, fled to stay with her son and daughter-in-law at Buckingham Palace. Despite her advanced age, she retained her nun’s habit (and her smoking habit). As she wandered off down the long corridors of the palace, the servants were invariably able to trace her by the distinct trail of Woodbine smoke that accompanied her everywhere.
On 5th December 1969, Alice died, having given every last one of her possessions to charity. She left strict instructions that she should be buried, as was the popular Orthodox custom, on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem, near the remains of the aunt who had so inspired her. When, as Alice lay dying, her youngest daughter Sophie complained that it would make visiting the grave very difficult, the nun-Princess narrowed her eyes for a last time and snapped, ‘Nonsense! There’s a perfectly good bus service.’
Despite her complaining, Sophie did manage to get to her mother’s grave a number of times, including once with her brother Prince Philip in 1994, when, alongside the visit, they attended the World Holocaust Memorial Centre at Yad Vashem to witness their mother being honoured as ‘Righteous Among the Nations’ for her bravery during the war. Just as she had rejected praise from the Cohens in Rome, her son’s quote at the time of the honouring could almost have come from the lips of Alice herself: ‘I suspect that it never occurred to her that her action was in any way special. She was a person with a deep religious faith, and she would have considered it to be a perfectly natural human reaction to fellow beings in distress.’
Alice-Elizabeth, Princess of Greece and Denmark, was born to the mighty and their (admittedly regularly vacated) seats of power but spent her life ‘exalting the humble and meek’. She was a great-granddaughter of an Empress, a grandmother of a King, a mother superior, a card player, an absent parent, a schizophrenic and a hero. If anyone embodies a Christian response to power, and in particular power misused against the weak, it is her.