The Battenbergs Hid Their Identity and Quietly Took Over the British Throne – HT
42 Halfmoon Street, Piccadilly. The 11th of September, 1921. A 67-year-old man collapses in a rented flat. His wife is not in the room. She walked to the pharmacy on the corner to collect a prescription. When she returns, he is already dead. The man’s death certificate will record the cause as heart failure following influenza.
It will record his age as 67. It will record his name as Louis Alexander Mountbatten, first Marquess of Milford Haven. That is not the name he was born with. That name was taken from him 4 years earlier in a royal proclamation issued from Buckingham Palace in the 8th year of the reign of his cousin, King George V.
He was born Prince Louis of Battenberg. He had served the British Royal Navy for 46 years. He had risen to First Sea Lord, the professional head of the service, on the 9th of December, 1912. And in October 1914, he had been forced out of that office because he had been born in Austria to a family with a German title. The story of this man dying in a rented flat in Piccadilly is the story of how his family’s name was ritually erased by the British state.
And is also the story of how across three generations, the family he founded quietly put that same name back. Not on a minor German duchy, not on a foreign throne, but on the British crown itself. His grandson would marry the next Queen of England. His great-great-grandson sits on the throne today. And the surname that the British royal family uses on its marriage certificates, the surname that appeared on the birth certificate of a prince born in 2018, didn’t exist before July 1917.
It is a translation. A literal English translation of a German word that an angry British public would not tolerate during the First World War. The man dying in the Piccadilly flat did not live to see any of this. He believed his career had been ended by the country he had served. The country had, in a sense, dismissed him twice.
Once from the Admiralty, and once from his own name. The resignation had come in October 1914. He had been at the Admiralty 11 weeks when the Lusitania had not yet been sunk, but the press had already turned on him. Horatio Bottomley’s magazine, John Bull, had attacked him publicly as early as November 1911, 3 years before the war began, calling it a crime against the empire to trust the secrets of national defense to any official born abroad.
The campaign had intensified week by week through the autumn of 1914. By late October, the First Lord of the Admiralty, a young politician named Winston Churchill, had concluded that Prince Louis could no longer remain in office without damaging the government. On the 28th of October, 1914, Prince Louis drafted a letter of resignation from his residence at Kent House on the Isle of Wight.
The letter is preserved in the University of Southampton Archives. It is short, clean, and precise. He wrote that he had been driven to the painful conclusion that his birth and parentage were impairing his usefulness on the board of Admiralty. He wrote that he felt it his duty as a loyal subject of His Majesty to resign.
He did not complain. He did not defend himself. He submitted the letter the following day. Churchill’s reply was also preserved. Churchill wrote that the navy of today, and still more the navy of tomorrow, would bear the imprint of Prince Louis’ work. It was a private letter, written with genuine feeling from a man who knew exactly what had been done to a colleague.
The public, however, did not see that letter. The public saw only that a German prince had been removed from command of the British fleet, and that was what the public had demanded. The resignation was only the first thing the war would take from him. To understand why Prince Louis was vulnerable in 1914, the story has to move back six decades to a different empire and a different scandal.
The Battenberg line didn’t exist before 1851. It was invented. The invention was the consequence of a marriage that a Russian emperor had forbidden. In the autumn of 1851, a Hessian prince named Alexander was serving as an officer in the Russian Imperial Army. His elder sister, Marie, had married the future Tsar Alexander II, and was the Empress of Russia.
Prince Alexander had been attached to the Russian court as a valued royal guest, and was being groomed for a dynastic marriage to an imperial niece. Instead, he had fallen in love with one of his sister’s ladies-in-waiting. Her name was Julia Hauke. Her father had been Count Jan Maurice Hauke, a Polish general of German descent who had served as Deputy Minister of War for Congress Poland.
He had been shot dead in Warsaw on the 29th of November, 1830, on the opening night of the November Uprising by Polish Army cadets who considered him a Russian collaborator. His orphan daughter had become a ward of Tsar Nicholas I. By autumn of 1851, Hauke was 6 months pregnant with Prince Alexander’s child. On the night of the 4th of October, the two of them slipped out of the Winter Palace in St.
Petersburg and traveled to Breslau in Prussia. They married there on the 28th of October, 1851. The Tsar was incandescent. Prince Alexander was struck off the Russian Army list. Family tradition records that he was dishonorably discharged. He took Austrian service instead. The problem was not only the Tsar’s anger. The problem was that Julia Hauke was not of equal birth to a Hessian prince.
Under the house law of Hesse and by Rhine, the marriage was morganatic. Their children couldn’t inherit the Hessian throne. They could not bear their father’s title. They could not be called prince or princess of Hesse. They would exist inside royalty, but outside succession, and that status was permanent. Alexander’s elder brother, Grand Duke Louis III of Hesse, attempted to soften the blow.
On the 5th of November, 1851, a week after the Breslau wedding, he created Julia, Countess of Battenberg. Seven years later, on the 26th of December, 1858, he elevated her to Princess of Battenberg with the style of Serene Highness. The name itself was chosen because it was unused. Battenberg was a small town on the River Eder in northern Hesse, named after a medieval comital dynasty that had died out in 1314.
The castle was a ruin. The name carried no competing claims. It was, in essence, a vacant title, pulled off a shelf to dress a marriage that should not have happened. The Hessian house law that excluded Julia’s children from a minor German crown would, six generations later, prove irrelevant the question of whether her great-great-grandson’s surname belonged on the British throne.
But in 1851, no one in the Winter Palace or at Schloss Heiligenberg could have imagined such a future. The Battenbergs entered European royalty as an embarrassment, tolerated rather than welcomed, carrying a title that had been invented for them by an apologetic brother-in-law. They had five children.
One daughter, Marie, born in Strasbourg in February 1852, only 4 months after the Breslau wedding. Four sons. Louis in 1854, Alexander in 1857, Henry in 1858, and Francis Joseph in 1861. Because they could not inherit thrones, they would have to marry them. That became the family strategy, pursued with remarkable success for exactly one generation.
The second son, called Sandro within the family, rose fastest and fell hardest. At the age of 22 in April 1879, he was elected Prince of Bulgaria by the Grand National Assembly at Veliko Tarnovo. It was a new country. Bulgaria had been created at the Treaty of Berlin only 9 months earlier, and the great powers had installed a minor German princeling to rule it.
Sandro took the oath of the Tarnovo Constitution on the 8th of July, 1879. He commanded the Bulgarian Army personally at the Battle of Slivnitsa in November 1885, defeating Serbia in 3 days. 8 months later, on the night of the 20th to 21st of August, 1886, pro-Russian officers stormed his palace in Sofia, forced him to sign an abdication at gunpoint, and transported him to the Russian frontier.
A counter-coup briefly restored him. Then a telegram arrived from Tsar Alexander III of Russia. >> [gasps] >> The Tsar wrote that he could not agree to Sandro’s return to Bulgaria, and that His Majesty knew well what he should do. Sandro abdicated a second time and left the country. He was given the consolation title of Count von Hartenau.
He married an opera singer. He died of peritonitis in Graz on the 17th of November, 1893. He was 36 years old. The third son, Henry, reached a higher prize. In the summer of 1884, at his brother Louis’ wedding in Darmstadt, he met Princess Beatrice, the youngest daughter of Queen Victoria. Victoria refused to speak to Beatrice for 7 months after she learned of the engagement.
She communicated with her daughter only by notes passed across the breakfast table. On the 27th of January, 1885, she finally consented at a Privy Council on condition that Henry renounce his Prussian military commission, naturalize as a British subject, and live permanently at the British court. He accepted. They were married at St.
Mildred’s Church at Whippingham on the Isle of Wight on the 23rd of July, 1885. Henry chafed at the court life. In late 1895, he volunteered for the Fourth Anglo-Ashanti War and sailed for West Africa as military secretary to Sir Francis Scott. He contracted malaria at Prasu in the Gold Coast.
He died aboard HMS Blonde off Sierra Leone on the 20th of January, 1896. He was 37 years old. Queen Victoria’s journal entry, recorded in her own hand 2 days after receiving the news, survives in the Royal Archives. She wrote that a terrible blow had fallen on them all, especially on her poor darling Beatrice, and that their dearly loved Lecko had been taken from them.
Beatrice’s own reaction, also recorded in the Queen’s journal, was five words, “Life has gone out of me.” The eldest son, Louis, the man who would die in the rented Piccadilly flat 35 years later, took a different route to British royalty. He did not wait to be married. He naturalized at the age of 14. On the 3rd of October, 1868, he entered the Royal Navy as a cadet aboard HMS Victory at Portsmouth.
The admitting board noted a small flat chest, slight lateral curvature of the spine, and defective vision. They admitted him anyway because no one on the Board of Admiralty wished to disappoint his great aunt, the Queen. He married Princess Victoria of Hesse, granddaughter of Queen Victoria, at Darmstadt on the 30th of April, 1884.
By 1912, he’d worked his way to the top of the service. He was the most senior officer in the most powerful navy on Earth. Then came 1914. The war produced a quality of public hatred that no one in Britain had prepared for. The Aliens Restriction Act, passed on the 5th of August, 1914, 1 day after the declaration of war, 75,000 people in Britain of German or Austrian birth were required to register with the police.
After the Lusitania was sunk on the 7th of May, 1915, 7 months after Prince Louis’ resignation, the registrations escalated into riots. Between the 10th and 15th of May, mobs destroyed German-owned shops in Liverpool, London’s East End, Manchester, Salford, and Sheffield. Pork butchers with German surnames were beaten in the streets.
The Asquith government responded by interning most male enemy aliens between the ages of 17 and 55. Wagner was dropped from the Proms. German music was banned from some concert halls. Families with German surnames Anglicized them quietly. The Royal Family itself was German, more German by recent ancestry than any other dynasty in Europe.
And the public knew it. On the 29th of October, 1914, Prince Louis resigned. He had served the Royal Navy for 46 years. He’d been First Sea Lord for less than 2 years. His last act in the office had been to hold the fleet together in the opening weeks of the war, the period that would determine whether Britain survived at sea.
He was dismissed for having been born in Graz. Which version of history are you more persuaded by? That Prince Louis was the victim of a hysterical press demanding a scapegoat, or that in a war for national survival, having a foreign-born officer at the top of the navy was politically impossible, no matter how loyal he had proved? I keep coming back to the letter.
He never defended himself. He never asked for a hearing. I’d like to know how you read that. 3 years later, the campaign against the Royal Family’s Germanness reached the family itself. On the 13th of June, 1917, in the first mass daylight bombing raid on London, a German Gotha bomber dropped a 50 kg bomb on the Upper North Street Council School in Poplar.
It penetrated three floors and detonated in the infants’ classroom. 18 children were killed. 16 of them were between 4 and 6 years old. The coffins were carried in procession through the streets of Poplar on the 20th of June. The raid killed 162 people across London in total. It did not start the anti-German campaign, but it accelerated a decision that had already been taken in private at Buckingham Palace.
The King, George V, had been consulting his private secretary, Lord Stamfordham, on a new name for the Royal House. The existing name was Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, the name of Prince Albert’s German Duchy, and it had become politically unusable. Stamfordham considered and rejected several options. Tudor-Stuart was discarded because of the associations with Henry VIII and Mary I.
Plantagenet was judged archaic. Fitzroy carried the connotation of illegitimacy. Welf Wetting was still audibly German. Windsor was eventually chosen because it was English, ancient, and unclaimed. Edward III had been known in his lifetime as Edward of Windsor. When the decision was announced, Lord Rosebery wrote to Stamfordham observing that he had christened a dynasty.
The proclamation was issued on the 17th of July, 1917, at the court at Buckingham Palace in the 8th year of the reign. The full text is preserved in the London Gazette, issue 30,186, page 7,119. The King declared that his Royal House and Family would henceforth be styled the House and Family of Windsor. He relinquished for himself and for his descendants all German titles and dignities.
He required all male-line British subjects descended from Queen Victoria to bear the name of Windsor. In a single document, the British Royal Family ceased in law and in public style to be German. 3 days before the proclamation, on the 14th of July, 1917, Prince Louis of Battenberg had formally relinquished his Hessian title. He and his family adopted an Anglicized surname, Mountbatten, which was a literal English translation of Battenberg.
Battenberg became Mountbatten. One working alternative, Battenhill, had been considered and rejected as clumsy. On the 7th of November, 1917, Prince Louis was created Marquess of Milford Haven, Earl of Medina, Viscount Alderney, and Baron Milford Haven. The dukedom he was offered, he declined on the grounds that he could not afford to support it.
That evening, writing in his son George’s guest book, Louis recorded the day in a single sentence. Prince Hyde departed Lord Jekyll. It was the only joke he ever made about it. The son who watched his father sign away the name Battenberg that summer was 17 years old. His name was Louis, too. Louis Francis Albert Victor Nicholas Mountbatten, known to his family as Dickie.
In 38 years’ time, to the month, he would hold the same office his father had just been forced to vacate. But that part of the story would not be possible without the generation in between. And it would not make sense without the woman who had been born in the tapestry room at Windsor Castle in the presence of Queen Victoria, and who would spend her life being alternately erased by history and quietly saving people from it.
Princess Alice of Battenberg was born at 20 minutes to 5:00 in the afternoon on the 25th of February, 1885, at Windsor Castle. Her mother, Princess Victoria of Hesse, was Queen Victoria’s granddaughter. Her father was Prince Louis. The Queen was in the room during the birth and recorded the event in her journal.
Alice was diagnosed congenitally deaf in childhood. She learned to read lips in English, German, French, and Greek. At 18, she married Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark at Darmstadt. They had four daughters and eventually a son. In 1917, the same year her father relinquished the Battenberg name, Alice’s husband’s family began losing the Greek throne.
By 1922, after the Greek defeat at Sakarya, Prince Andrew was court-martialed and sentenced to banishment. The British Royal Navy evacuated the family in December 1922 aboard HMS Calypso. Their infant son, 18 months old, was carried onto the ship in an orange crate that served as a makeshift cot. His name was Philip.
Alice’s life collapsed eight years later. In 1930, after a series of religious visions and increasingly erratic behavior, she was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. She was seen by Ernst Simmel at the Kurhaus Schloss Tegel in Berlin. She was seen by Sigmund Freud. Freud recommended that her ovaries be x-rayed to accelerate the onset of menopause, a treatment then considered in certain endocrinological circles a legitimate intervention for hormonal instability.
The recommendation is documented in her patient file at the University of Tübingen in archives. In May 1930, she was transferred, against her will, to Ludwig Binswanger’s Bellevue Sanatorium at Kreuzlingen, Switzerland. Vaslav Nijinsky was a patient in the same facility. She would be institutionalized on and off for most of the next eight years.
Her eldest daughter, Cecilia, eight months pregnant, died on the 16th of November, 1937, with her husband and their two young sons, when their airplane crashed into a factory chimney near Ostend. The remains of a newborn were found in the wreckage. Cecilia had apparently given birth during the flight.
Alice attended the funeral at Darmstadt. It was her first meeting with her husband in six years. She moved to Athens during the war. In 1943, with the Germans occupying Greece and rounding up the Jewish population, she sheltered the widow and children of Haim a Greek Jewish politician who had been a friend of her late father-in-law, in her brother-in-law’s house.
The Gestapo interviewed her. She pretended her deafness prevented her from understanding their questions. The Cohens survived. They left her protection on the 15th of December, 1944. 49 years later, in 1993, Yad Vashem designated her Righteous Among the Nations. Her son, Philip, attended the ceremony in Jerusalem in October 1994 and spoke about her.
He said he suspected it had never occurred to her that her action was in any way special. She was, he said, a person with a deep religious faith, and she would have considered it a perfectly natural human reaction. Alice died in a bedroom at Buckingham Palace on the 5th of December, 1969. She was 84 years old.
Her three surviving daughters had been married to German princes, three of them with Nazi Party connections. None of them had been invited to her son’s wedding in 1947. She was buried in the Royal Vault at St. George’s Chapel, Windsor, and transferred in August 1988 to the Russian Orthodox Church of Mary Magdalene on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem, where she lies today near her aunt, Grand Duchess Elizabeth Fyodorovna, who had been murdered by Bolsheviks in 1918.
Her son, Philip, the boy evacuated in the orange crate, was, by the time of her death, the husband of the reigning Queen of the United Kingdom. That marriage had been engineered in no small part by Alice’s younger brother, Louis Mountbatten, Dickie, was born at Frogmore House in the grounds of Windsor Castle on the 25th of June, 1900.
He entered the Royal Navy, as his father had, and served as a midshipman aboard HMS Lion and HMS Queen Elizabeth in the closing years of the First World War. He went up to Christ’s College, Cambridge for a year after the war, then returned to the Navy. He accompanied the future Edward the VIII on royal tours of Australia and India.
He married the heiress, Edwina Ashley, at St. Margaret’s, Westminster, on the 18th of July, 1922, with the Prince of Wales as best man. Her inheritance from her grandfather, the financier Sir Ernest Cassel, produced a net trust of approximately 1 and 1/2 million pounds. His naval pay as a lieutenant was 310 pounds a year.
In the Second World War, he commanded HMS Kelly, which was sunk off Crete on the 23rd of May, 1941, with the loss of 130 men. He became Chief of Combined Operations in 1942 and oversaw the raid on Dieppe in August that year, in which over were killed, wounded, or captured. He became Supreme Allied Commander of Southeast Asia in 1943 and took the Japanese surrender at Singapore in September 1945.
In February 1947, Clement Attlee appointed him the last Viceroy of India. He advanced the transfer of power from June 1948 to the 15th of August, 1947. Sir Cyril Radcliffe was given five weeks to draw the border between the new states of India and Pakistan. The partition that followed displaced somewhere between 10 and 15 million people and killed somewhere around a million.
Mountbatten served as the first Governor-General of independent India until June 1948. Then came the appointment. On the 18th of April, 1955, Louis Mountbatten became First Sea Lord of the Royal Navy. His father had been forced out of that same office on the 29th of October, 1914. The gap was 40 years, five months, and 20 days.
No one in Britain mentioned the symmetry aloud. It did not appear in the newspapers. It was not in the Navy’s official announcement. The office had passed through 17 other holders between one Louis and the next, and the name the son carried into the Admiralty building was not the name the father had carried out of it. But the appointment sat at the center of a pattern the family had been executing, without announcing, since the proclamation of 1917.
I covered a similar dynamic in the Farouk video a few weeks ago. The grandson of Egypt’s last king returning to Cairo and being asked by a government clerk to prove his father was Egyptian. The pattern there was blunt, bureaucratic humiliation of one generation, quiet return [clears throat] of the next. In the British case, the family didn’t need to return.
They had married into the thing that had rejected them. Dickie Mountbatten had spent the previous decade engineering that marriage. Philip of Greece, Alice’s son, had served in the Royal Navy since 1939. He had met Princess Elizabeth briefly in 1939 when she was 13 and he was 18, and had been assigned to escort her around the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth.
The correspondence that followed was mostly wartime letters. By 1946, they were engaged. George VI required them to wait. The King’s private secretary, Sir Alan Lascelles, wrote privately that Philip was rough, ill-mannered, uneducated, and would probably not be faithful. The Queen Mother reportedly referred to him as the Hun.
Philip’s three surviving sisters, the ones who had married German princes, were not invited to the wedding. On the 28th of February, 1947, Philip was granted British naturalization. He renounced his Greek and Danish royal titles. On his uncle Dickie’s suggestion, he adopted his mother’s Anglicized surname.
He became Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten. Nine months later, on the 20th of November, 1947, he married Princess Elizabeth at Westminster Abbey. By letters patent dated the previous day, he had been created Duke of Edinburgh, Earl of Merioneth, and Baron Greenwich. If you’re getting something out of this, if the way these pieces fit together is landing for you the way it did for me when I was researching it, subscribing is the one thing that tells YouTube these stories belong in front of more people. It costs nothing.
It helps considerably. >> [gasps] >> George VI died at Sandringham on the 6th of February, 1952. Elizabeth was in Kenya when the news reached her. She flew home as Queen. Nine days later, after the funeral, there was a dinner at Broadlands, Dickie Mountbatten’s country house in Hampshire. One of the guests was Prince Ernst August of Hanover, a cousin of the royal family.
At some point during the evening, Dickie Mountbatten said, either to Ernst August or in his hearing, that the house of Mountbatten now reigned over the land. Ernst August carried the remark to Queen Mary, the widow of George V. Queen Mary was 84 years old and had buried two sons on the throne. She remembered in precise detail her husband’s proclamation of 1917.
She summoned Winston Churchill, who was again Prime Minister. Churchill brought the matter to cabinet on the 18th of February 1952. The cabinet minutes record that the government considered the name of the royal house to be a matter of constitutional importance and that the name Windsor should continue. On the 9th of April 1952, Elizabeth II issued an order in council.
The text declared that she and her children should be styled and known as the house and family of Windsor and that her descendants, other than female descendants who marry and their descendants, should bear the name of Windsor. The order used almost word for word the language of her grandfather’s proclamation of 17 July 1917.
It was read as a rebuke to her uncle-in-law and it was intended as one. Philip reacted with a private bitterness that lasted years. He told his friends that he was nothing but a bloody amoeba and the only man in the country who was not allowed to give his name to his own children.
The quotation has been carried in four authorized biographies with the wording varying slightly in each. The substance has never been disputed. The compromise, however, was not a defeat. It was a delay. On the 8th of February 1960, 11 days before the birth of Prince Andrew, the first child born to a reigning British monarch since 1857, the Queen issued a second order in council.
The text is preserved at the College of Arms. The relevant clause states that while the Queen and her children should continue to be styled and known as the house and family of Windsor, her descendants, other than those enjoying the style of royal highness and the titular dignity of prince or princess and her female descendants who marry and their descendants, should bear the name of Mountbatten-Windsor.
>> [gasps] >> On the same day, the Queen’s press secretary issued a statement explaining the decision. The statement said that the Queen had always wanted, without changing the name of the royal house established by her grandfather, to associate the name of her husband with her own and his descendants and that she had had this in mind for a long time and that it was close to her heart.
The house stayed Windsor. The surname became Mountbatten-Windsor. The first public use of the hyphenated surname came 13 years later. On the 14th of November 1973, Princess Anne married Captain Mark Phillips at Westminster Abbey. When she signed the marriage register, she signed it Anne Elizabeth Alice Louise Mountbatten-Windsor.
She was, strictly speaking, not required to do so. As a princess, she fell under the style exception in the order. But the Queen’s legal adviser had endorsed the broader use. Since then, every Mountbatten-Windsor royal marriage has used the name. Charles in 1981, Andrew in 1986, Edward in 1999, William in 2011, Harry in 2018.
On the 23rd of April 2018, William’s third child was born at St. Mary’s Hospital, Paddington. Four days later, on the 27th of April, Kensington Palace announced the name, Prince Louis Arthur Charles. Every major newspaper interpreted the name as a tribute. Louis, after William’s great-great-grandfather Louis, the first Marquess of Milford Haven, the man who had died in the Piccadilly flat, and Louis, after William’s great-great-uncle Louis, the first Earl Mountbatten of Burma, the man who had been First Sea Lord from 1955.
The man for whom the youngest prince was named had been blown up on a wooden boat in County Sligo nearly 40 years before the child was born. On the 27th of August 1979, Louis Mountbatten was on holiday at Classiebawn Castle, his wife Edwina’s family property in the Republic of Ireland. At 11:39 in the morning, he took his family out on his 30-ft wooden boat, the Shadow V, to check the lobster pots in Mullaghmore Harbor.
A 50-lb gelignite bomb, placed the previous night by Thomas McMahon of the Provisional Irish Republican Army’s South Armagh Brigade, was detonated by radio control. The boat disintegrated. Four people were killed. Lord Mountbatten, 79, his grandson Nicholas Knatchbull, 14, Paul Maxwell, 15, the local boat boy from Enniskillen, Doreen, Dowager Lady Brabourne, 83, who died the following day.
McMahon was arrested at a Garda checkpoint 2 hours before the bomb went off. Forensic analysis of his boots recovered sand from Mullaghmore and green and white paint flakes from the Shadow V. He was convicted on the 23rd of November 1979. He was released in 1998 under the Good Friday Agreement.
On the same day as the Mullaghmore bombing, a second IRA operation at Warrenpoint in County Down killed 18 British soldiers, the deadliest single loss the army suffered during the Troubles. Republican graffiti that appeared in Belfast the following week read, “13 gone and not forgotten. We got 18 and Mountbatten.” Louis Mountbatten’s funeral was held at Westminster Abbey on the 5th of September 1979.
He had planned the service himself over 12 years under the code name Operation Freeman. Prince Charles read Psalm 107. The casket was carried to Romsey Abbey for burial. 39 years later, William and Catherine named their third child, Louis. 42 [snorts] Half Moon Street, Piccadilly. The 11th of September 1921. A 67-year-old man collapses in a rented flat. His wife is not in the room.
She walked to the pharmacy on the corner to collect a prescription. When she returns, he is already dead. He had believed, on the day he died, that he had been ejected from the service of the country he had chosen at the age of 14. He had believed that his family’s Germanness had finished them off in British public life.
He had accepted the new name his cousin, the King, had given him, Mountbatten, Marquess of Milford Haven, as a consolation title for an ended career. He didn’t know that his daughter would hide three Jews from the Gestapo in Athens and be buried on the Mount of Olives. He did not know that his son would take the surrender of the Japanese Empire and be assassinated by a bomb on a lobster boat.
He did not know that his great-great-grandson would carry his first name onto a throne and that the Anglicized surname he had accepted in 1917 as the end of something would be, in 2018, on a birth certificate at Kensington Palace, the marker of something that had not ended at all. He died believing the country had dismissed him.
The country had, in the end, only changed its name.