Tea at Trianon: Princess Alice of Battenberg

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Tuesday, October 22, 2019

Princess Alice of Battenberg

From Harper's Bazaar:

Born in 1885 at Windsor Castle, and growing up in the UK, the German Empire, and Greece, Alice was at odds with her royal status, preferring to live without a title and focus her time and efforts on her religion and charity work. Alice, who was born deaf, married Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark in 1903, and when Philip was around 10 years old, she was diagnosed with schizophrenia and sent to a hospital where she was treated by Sigmund Freud.

She had become deeply religious and converted to the Greek Orthodox Church, proclaiming to be receiving divine messages and have healing powers. Freud claimed her so-called delusions spurred from sexual frustration, and recommended she undergo x-rays of her ovaries in order to stave off her libido, and induce an early menopause.

Princess Alice pleaded her sanity, and tried to leave the sanatorium countless times, before eventually being released in in the mid-30s. Meanwhile, Philip was separated from his four older sisters, Margarita, Theodora, Cecilie and Sophie, and was sent to live in England with his uncles, Lord Louis Mountbatten and George Mountbatten, and his grandmother, the Dowager Marchioness of Milford Haven. After convalescing, Princess Alice ensconced herself in an itinerant existence, travelling around Europe incognito. Tragedy struck the family again in 1937, when her daughter Cecilie, who was 26, son-in-law Georg Donatus, and two of her grandchildren were killed in an air accident at Ostend. (Read more.)

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