Princess Alice of Battenberg

The mother of the late Duke of Edinburgh

Some people considered the late Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, Consort of Queen Elizabeth II, to be ever so slightly eccentric in his remarks and behaviour, but he was nothing in comparison to his mother, Princess Alice of Battenberg, who married his father, Prince Andrew of Greece, in 1903. Many would have said that Prince Philip looked remarkably like his father but got at least some of his personal characteristics from his mother.

It did not help that Alice, a great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria, was born (in 1885) with a serious hearing impediment that got steadily worse as she got older. She was certainly intelligent, and she was able, on occasion, to use her deafness to her advantage.

However, her interest in spiritualism and religion led her to indulge in increasingly bizarre behaviour. It was one thing to play the Ouija board and believe that packs of cards were conveying messages from the dead, but quite another to say that she was going out to dinner with Jesus, with whom she was apparently having an extra-marital affair, or to believe that she had her own group of disciples in Bedfordshire.

In 1930, when her son Philip was only nine years old, she was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and removed from her family to be lodged in…