“In 1953, at the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, Princess Alice was
dressed from head to foot in a long gray dress and a gray cloak, and
a nun’s veil. Amidst all the jewels, and velvet and coronets, and the
fine uniforms, she exuded an unworldly simplicity. Seated with the
royal family, she was a part of them, yet somehow distanced from
them. Inasmuch as she is remembered at all today, it is as this
shadowy figure in gray nun’s clothes...”Princess Alice, mother of
Prince Phillip, was something of a mystery figure even within her own
family. She was born deaf, at Windsor Castle, in the presence of her
grandmother, Queen Victoria, and brought up in England, Darmstadt,
and Malta.In 1903 she married Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark,
and from then on her life was overshadowed by wars, revolutions, and
enforced periods of exile. By the time she was thirty-five, virtually
every point of stability was overthrown. Though the British royal
family remained in the ascendant, her German family ceased to be
ruling princes, her two aunts who had married Russian royalty had
come to savage ends, and soon afterwards Alice's own husband was
nearly executed as a political scapegoat.The middle years of her
life, which should have followed a conventional and fulfilling path,
did the opposite. She suffered from a serious religious crisis and at
the age of forty-five was removed from her family and placed in a
sanitarium in Switzerland, where she was pronounced a paranoid
schizophrenic. As her stay in the clinic became prolonged, there was
a time where it seemed she might never walk free again. How she
achieved her recovery is just one of the remarkable aspects of her
story.
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