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Victor, born a Prince of Battenberg in 1900 but re-named Mountbatten with the rest of
his clan and given the courtesy title of Lord in 1917. Always inexplicably known to
family and friends as ‘Dickie’, Lord Louis, as a great-grandchild of Queen Victoria, was
her father’s cousin. Like most of the royal family he was of German origin, a descendant
on both sides of the princely house of Hesse (albeit ‘tainted’ in the eyes of purists by
strains of illegitimacy and a morganatic marriage). His ruling passion was the
genealogy of his family with its web-like veins of royal connections to the Windsors, the
Wittelsbachs, the Romanovs, Habsburgs and Hohenzollerns. Lord Louis, as he was
known to the public, had been at Cambridge with Elizabeth’s father, but had dropped
the less interesting second son to go on a world tour with his brother, the Prince of
Wales. It would not be unfair to say that Dickie stuck to the Prince of Wales like glue
until the Abdication, when he returned to his former allegiance to the new King George
VI. George VI was amused by him, saw through him to a certain extent, but liked his
naval jokes, shared his passion for uniforms and decorations, and admired his
undoubted qualities of leadership and initiative. The Queen, however, did not share his
affection for his cousin. She disliked what she, in her straightforward way, saw as his
eye for the main chance and tendency to change sides when it suited him; she did not
sympathize with the ‘fast’ lifestyle which he and his wife, the fabulously rich Edwina
Ashley, pursued. Later she disapproved even more of their ‘champagne socialist’ views.
Mountbatten had looks, charm, brains and a twin ambition – to advance his family to
an unassailable position and to avenge the insult to his father, Prince Louis of
Battenberg, who had been sacked from his post as First Sea Lord in the autumn of 1914
simply because of his German blood.
Mountbatten was to use the royal connection for all it was worth; even he, however,
perhaps did not realize at the outset that the Great Leap Forward would come through
his nephew, Prince Philip of Greece, then aged eighteen, a cadet in his first year at
Dartmouth Royal Naval College. Prince Philip was, by blood at least, more royal than
his uncle and more closely linked to the British royal family. Born in 1921, he was the
son of Mountbatten’s elder sister, Princess Alice, and Prince Andrew of Greece. On his
mother’s side he was a direct descendant of Queen Victoria; through his father he was,
like his first cousin, Princess Marina, descended not only from the Greek/Danish royal
family but also from the Russian imperial family, his grandfather, George I of the
Hellenes (Queen Alexandra’s brother ‘Willy’), having married the Grand Duchess Olga,
granddaughter of Tsar Nicholas I. Prince Philip’s father was one of their seven children.
Prince Philip was the youngest child and only son of Prince Andrew and Princess Alice;
he had four sisters and was seven years younger than the youngest of them.
Life had been difficult and rootless for him almost from the start. Born in 1921 on the
kitchen table of the family villa, Mon Repos, in Corfu, he was a refugee less than a year
later when George V sent a British warship to rescue his family from the latest Greek
coup (his father, Prince Andrew, was almost shot by the leaders and probably would
have been had it not been for British intervention). The Greek royal family had never
been rich in royal terms; as nominal rulers of one of the poorest countries in Europe and