If you’ve watched The Crown, you probably remember the scene where a gray-haired nun wanders the halls of Buckingham Palace, smoking cigarettes and baffling the royal staff. It feels like a Hollywood invention. It isn't. That woman was Princess Alice of Battenberg, and honestly, her real life was ten times more intense than anything Netflix could script.
Who was Prince Philip's mother? She was a great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria, a survivor of two world wars, a refugee, a patient of Sigmund Freud, and a woman who literally risked her life to hide a Jewish family from the Gestapo.
She was born in Windsor Castle in 1885. She was deaf from birth. Back then, that usually meant a life of isolation or being treated as "slow," but Alice wasn't having it. She learned to lip-read in multiple languages—English, German, French, and later Greek. It’s wild to think about. Imagine navigating the rigid, gossipy world of European royalty without being able to hear a single word of the whispers around you. She did it with such grace that most people didn't even realize she was deaf.
The Chaos of a Royal Marriage
In 1903, she married Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark. On paper, it looked like the ultimate power couple move. They had four daughters and then, finally, a son: Philip. But the timing was a nightmare. Greece was falling apart. Between the Balkan Wars and the fallout of World War I, the Greek royal family was constantly being kicked out of the country.
By the time Philip was a toddler, the family was fleeing for their lives. They ended up in a suburb of Paris, living on the charity of relatives. This is where things got dark for Alice. The stress of war, exile, and the crushing weight of her responsibilities broke something inside her.
She became intensely religious. She started claiming she was receiving divine messages and that she had healing powers. Today, we’d probably look at this through a lens of extreme PTSD or a manageable mental health condition. In 1930? They called it "paranoid schizophrenia."
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Freud, Sanatoriums, and the Loss of Philip
Her family didn't know what to do. They took her to see Sigmund Freud. Freud, being Freud, decided her visions were the result of "sexual frustration" and recommended X-raying her ovaries to kill her libido. It was barbaric.
She was eventually taken away to a Swiss sanatorium against her will. Philip was just nine years old. He came home from a birthday party to find his mother gone. No explanation. No goodbye. His father, Prince Andrew, basically checked out and moved to the French Riviera to live with a mistress.
Philip was essentially orphaned.
For years, Alice was moved from one clinic to another. She tried to escape multiple times. When she was finally released in the mid-1930s, she drifted across Europe, staying in cheap hotels, largely forgotten by the "glittering" royal circles she once inhabited. She didn't see Philip for years. Think about that: the future Duke of Edinburgh grew up as a nomad because his mother was locked away and his father was gone.
The Secret Heroism of Princess Alice
World War II changed everything. Alice moved back to Athens. While her daughters were married to German princes—literally on the side of the Nazis—Alice was working with the Red Cross to feed the starving people of Greece.
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Then came the moment that defined her.
Rachel Cohen, the widow of a Greek Member of Parliament, was desperately trying to evade the Gestapo. Alice didn't hesitate. She hid Rachel and two of her children in her own apartment, just yards away from the Nazi headquarters in Athens. When the Gestapo got suspicious and came to interview her, she used her deafness to her advantage. She pretended she couldn't understand their questions. She just kept nodding and smiling until they got frustrated and left.
She was absolutely fearless. While the world saw a "crazy" woman in a nun’s habit, she was outsmarting the SS.
A Nun in the Palace
After the war, Alice founded a nursing order of Greek Orthodox nuns called the Christian Sisterhood of Martha and Mary. She gave away every piece of jewelry she owned to fund it. By the time she attended her son’s wedding to the future Queen Elizabeth II in 1947, she was wearing a simple gray habit. She didn't care about the tiaras. She didn't care about the protocol.
The final chapter of her life happened at Buckingham Palace. In 1967, during the Greek military coup, Philip grew worried about her safety. He sent a plane to bring her to London. She lived out her last two years in a small suite in the palace.
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She was eccentric, sure. She walked around in her habit, chain-smoking Woodbines. She and Philip finally reconnected, building a bridge across all those years of trauma and silence. She died in 1969, owning almost nothing. She had given it all away.
Why We Should Remember Her
Alice of Battenberg wasn't just a "background character" in the story of the British monarchy. She was a woman of immense moral clarity who suffered more than most of us can imagine.
If you’re interested in learning more about the complex history of the House of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg (the actual house Philip was born into), there are a few things you should do to get the full picture.
- Look into the Yad Vashem archives. They officially recognized Princess Alice as "Righteous Among the Nations" in 1993 for her role in saving the Cohen family. It is the highest honor Israel bestows upon non-Jews.
- Visit St. Mary Magdalene on the Mount of Olives. This is in Jerusalem. Alice’s dying wish was to be buried there, near her aunt, Grand Duchess Elizabeth Feodorovna. It took nearly 20 years to make it happen, but she is finally there.
- Read "Alice: Princess Andrew of Greece" by Hugo Vickers. This is widely considered the definitive biography. Vickers had access to her private papers and provides a nuanced look at her mental health struggles without being exploitative.
The story of Prince Philip's mother is a reminder that the people we dismiss as "broken" or "difficult" often carry the heaviest burdens and the bravest hearts. She wasn't just a royal; she was a survivor who chose kindness in a century of cruelty.