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Philip’s cousin Alexandra, Queen of Yugoslavia would suggest Andrea and Alice had also been prompted by their loyalty to her father, another Greek king, Alexander I, who had died of sepsis contracted from a monkey bite the year before Philip’s birth.
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Like her husband, she had no Greek blood.Īt Philip’s birth in 1921, however, husband and wife made a tactful gesture to the Greek people: they named their fifth child and only son Philippos, a name borne by legendary rulers of the ancient Greek kingdom of Macedon, including Philip II, the father of Alexander the Great. Alice was a great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria and named after her British grandmother, Victoria’s second daughter Alice.
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He, too, chose a German bride, though in the case of Princess Alice of Battenberg, a highly anglicised German princess. Prince Philip’s father was the seventh of George and Olga’s eight children, seven of whom survived to adulthood. The marriages of his children and grandchildren consolidated these German links, and the style of address used by children of the Greek royal family reinforced the idea of a dynasty that, reigning in Greece, was not Greek: they were known, as Prince Andrew’s tombstone records, as princes and princesses of Greece and Denmark. Despite his father’s position as King of Denmark, King George’s ancestors included numerous German royalties. Instead three married members of the Russian imperial family, relations of their mother, and their eldest son chose as his wife Princess Sophie of Prussia, a sister of the Kaiser. It was the same year in which George’s sister Alexandra married Queen Victoria’s heir, Albert Edward, Prince of Wales – the great-grandfather of the British princess George’s grandson would later marry. He had been born Prince Christian William Ferdinand Adolf George of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glucksburg, and the year that he became king of Greece, his father succeeded to the throne of Denmark as Christian IX. He took the title George I in his family, he was known as William. His paternal grandfather was only 17 when, in 1863, the Greek National Assembly elected him to be their king. The Greek royal family into which Prince Philip was born is Danish in origin. There a simple inscription adorns the tomb of Prince Philip’s father, Prince Andrew, or Andrea, of Greece: ‘ Andrea Vasilopais (son of a King) Prince of Greece Prince of Denmark 1882-1944’. At the former Greek royal palace at Tatoi, outside Athens, the family cemetery lies amid wooded slopes at the southern end of an estate that once covered 40,000 acres of pine-scented foothills of Mount Parnes.