2 February 1882 - Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark

Prince Andrew was born at the Tatoi Palace just north of Athens on 2 February 1882,
the fourth son of George I of Greece. A member of the House of
Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg, he was a prince of both Greece and
Denmark, as his father was a younger son of Christian IX of Denmark. He was in the
line of succession to the Greek and more distantly to the Danish throne.

He learned Greek as well as Danish, German, French, English and Russian.
In conversations with his parents he refused to speak anything but Greek. He attended
cadet school and staff college at Athens, and was given additional private tuition in
military subjects by Panagiotis Danglis, who recorded that he was "quick and intelligent".

Love and Marriage

In 1902, Prince Andrew met Princess Alice of Battenberg during his stay in London
on the occasion of the coronation of King Edward VII, who was his uncle-by-marriage
and her grand-uncle. Princess Alice was a daughter of Prince Louis of Battenberg and
Princess Victoria of Hesse and by Rhine, King Edward's niece. They fell in love, and the
following year, on 6 October 1903, Andrew married Alice in a civil wedding at Darmstadt.

The following day two religious wedding services were performed: one Lutheran in the
Evangelical Castle Church, and another Greek Orthodox in the Russian Chapel on the
Mathildenhöhe. Prince and Princess Andrew had five children, all of whom later had 

children of their own.

Career

In 1909, the political situation in Greece led to a coup d'état, as the Athens government
refused to support the Cretan parliament, which had called for the union of Crete (still
nominally part of the Ottoman Empire) with the Greek mainland. A group of
dissatisfied officers formed a Greek nationalist Military League that eventually led to
Prince Andrew's resignation from the army and the rise to power of Eleftherios Venizelos.

A few years later, at the outbreak of the Balkan Wars in 1912, Andrew was reinstated
in the army as a lieutenant colonel in the 3rd Cavalry Regiment,and placed in command 

of a field hospital. During the war, his father was assassinated and Andrew inherited a 

villa on the island of Corfu, Mon Repos. In 1914, Andrew (like many European princes) 

held honorary military posts in both the German and Russian empires, as well as 

Prussian, Russian, Danish and Italian knighthoods.

During World War I, he continued to visit Britain, despite veiled accusations in the 

British House of Commons that he was a German agent.His brother, King Constantine, 

who was the Kaiser's brother-in-law, followed a neutrality policy, but the 

democratically elected government of Venizelos supported the Allies. By June 1917, 

the King's neutrality policy had become so untenable that he abdicated and the Greek 

royal family were forced into exile. For the next few years, most of the Greek royal 

family lived in Switzerland.

Exile

For three years, Constantine's second son, Alexander, was king of Greece, until his
early death from an infection due to a monkey bite. Constantine was restored to the 

throne, and Andrew was once again reinstated in the army, this time as a major-general.

The family took up residence at Mon Repos.

Andrew was given command of the II Army Corps during the Battle of the Sakarya, 

which effectively stalemated the Greco-Turkish War (1919–1922). Andrew had little 

respect for his superior officers, whom he considered incompetent. He was ordered to 

attack the Turkish positions, which he considered a desperate move little short 

"of ill-concealed panic".

Refusing to put his men in undue danger (suffering lack of food and ammunition),

Andrew followed his own battle plan, much to the dismay of the commanding general, 

Anastasios Papoulas.

Relieved of his chief of staff, and given a dressing-down by Papoulas, in September 

Andrew asked to be removed from command but Papoulas refused. Andrew's troops 

were forced to retreat. He was placed on leave for two months, until he was transferred 

to the Supreme Army Council. In March 1922, he was appointed as commander of the 

V Army Corps in Epirus and the Ionian Islands. Papoulas was replaced by General 

Georgios Hatzianestis.

The Greek defeat in Asia Minor in August 1922 led to the 11 September 1922 Revolution, 

during which Prince Andrew was arrested, court-martialed, and found guilty of 

"disobeying an order" and "acting on his own initiative" during the battle of the 

previous year. Many defendants in the treason trials that followed the coup were 

shot, including Hatzianestis and five senior politicians.

British diplomats assumed that Andrew was also in mortal danger. Andrew, 

though spared, was banished for life and his family fled into exile aboard a British 

cruiser, HMS Calypso.[26] The family settled at Saint-Cloud on the outskirts of Paris, 

in a small house loaned to them by Andrew's wealthy sister-in-law, Princess George of 

Greece. He and his family were stripped of their Greek nationality, and traveled 

under Danish passports.

In 1930, Andrew published a book entitled Towards Disaster: The Greek Army in Asia 

Minor in 1921, in which he defended his actions during the Battle of the Sakarya, 

but he essentially lived a life of enforced retirement, despite only being in his forties.

During their time in exile the family became more and more dispersed. Alice 

suffered a nervous breakdown and was institutionalized in Switzerland. Their daughters 

married and settled in Germany, separated from Andrew, and Philip was sent to school in 

Britain, where he was brought up by his mother's British relatives. Andrew went to live 

in the South of France.

On the French Riviera, Andrew lived in a small apartment, or hotel rooms, or on 

board a yacht with Countess Andrée de La Bigne. His marriage to Alice was 

effectively over, and after her recovery and release, she returned to Greece. In 1936, 

his sentence of exile was quashed by emergency laws, which also restored land and 

annuities to the King. 

Andrew returned to Greece for a brief visit that May. The following year, his pregnant 

daughter Cecilie, his son-in-law and two of his grandchildren were killed in an air 

accident at Ostend; he met Alice for the first time in six years at the funeral, 

which was also attended by Andrew's sixteen-year-old son Prince Philip.

World War II

During World War II, he found himself essentially trapped in Vichy France, while his son,
Prince Philip, fought on the side of the British. They were unable to see or even
correspond with one another. Andrew's three surviving sons-in-law fought on the
German side: Prince Christoph of Hesse was a member of the Nazi Party and the
Waffen-SS; Berthold, Margrave of Baden, was invalided out of the Wehrmacht in 1940
after an injury in France; Prince Gottfried of Hohenlohe-Langenburg served on the
Eastern Front and was dismissed after the 20 July plot. For five years, Andrew saw
neither his wife nor his son.

Death

He died on 3 December 1944, in the Hotel Metropole, Monte Carlo,
Monaco, of heart failure and arteriosclerosis in the closing months
of the war in Europe. He became 62 years old. 

Andrew was at first buried in the Russian Orthodox church in Nice, but in 1946 his 

remains were transferred, by the Greek cruiser Averof, to the royal cemetery at 

Tatoi Palace, near Athens.

Prince Philip and then-private secretary, Mike Parker, traveled to Monte Carlo to 

collect items belonging to his father from Andrée de La Bigne; among these items: 

a signet ring which the Prince wore from then onwards, an ivory shaving brush he 

took to using, and some clothes he had adapted to fit him. 

Prince Andrew left to his only son seven-tenths of his estate, but he also left behind a 

debt of £17,500, leading Philip's maternal grandmother, Victoria, Marchioness of 

Milford Haven, to complain bitterly of the extravagance the Greek prince had been led 

into by his French mistress.