April 18, 1917: Birth of Princess Frederica of Hanover, Queen of the Hellenes. Part I.

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Brunswick-Lüneburg, Ernst August of Brunswick, Frederica of Hanover, George II of the Hellenes, German Emperor Wilhelm II, Paul I of the Hellenes, Prince Edward, Prince of Wales, Queen of the Hellenes, Sofia of Spain, Titles Deprivation Act 1917, Victoria Louise of Prussia

Frederica of Hanover (18, April 1917 – February 6, 1981) was Queen consort of the Hellenes from 1947 until 1964 as the wife of King Paul, thereafter Queen mother during the reign of her son, King Constantine II.

Born Her Royal Highness Friederica, Princess of Hanover, Princess of Great Britain and Ireland, and Princess of Brunswick-Lüneburg on April 18, 1917 in Blankenburg am Harz, in the German Duchy of Brunswick, she was the only daughter and third child of Ernst August, then reigning Duke of Brunswick, and his wife Princess Victoria Louise of Prussia, herself the only daughter of the German Emperor Wilhelm II.

Her Royal Highness Friederica, Princess of Hanover, Princess of Great Britain and Ireland, and Princess of Brunswick-Lüneburg

Both her father and maternal grandfather abdicated their thrones in November 1918 following Germany’s defeat in World War I, and her paternal grandfather, Ernest Augustus, Crown Prince of Hanover, 3rd Duke of Cumberland and Teviotdale, was stripped of his British Royal Dukedom the following year, for having sided with Germany in World War I.

Her paternal grandfather, Ernest Augustus of Hanover and Duke of Cumberland was the most senior male-line descendant of George I, II, and III, the Duke of Cumberland of Great Britain and was the last Hanoverian Prince to hold a British royal title and the Order of the Garter.

Ernest Augustus, Crown Prince of Hanover, 3rd Duke of Cumberland and Teviotdale

In 1914 the title of a Prince of Great Britain and Ireland was additionally granted to the members of the house by King George V. These peerages and titles however were suspended under the Titles Deprivation Act 1917.

However, the title Royal Prince of Great Britain and Ireland had been entered into the family’s German passports, together with the German titles, in 1914. After the German Revolution of 1918–19, with the abolishment of nobility’s privileges, titles officially became parts of the last name. So, curiously, the British prince’s title is still part of the family’s last name in their German passports, while it is no longer mentioned in their British documents.

On 29 August 1931, Ernst August, Duke of Brunswick, as head of the House of Hanover, declared the formal resumption, for himself and his dynastic descendants, of use of his former British princely title as a secondary title of pretense, which style, “Royal Prince of Great Britain and Ireland”, his grandson, the current head of the house, also called Ernst August, continues to claim.

Ernst August, Duke of Brunswick: Father

In 1934, Adolf Hitler, in his ambition to link the British and German royal houses, asked for Frederica’s parents to arrange for the marriage of their seventeen-year-old daughter to Prince Edward, the Prince of Wales.

In her memoirs, Frederica’s mother described that she and her husband were “shattered” and such a possibility “had never entered our minds”. Victoria Louise herself had once been considered as a potential bride for the very same person prior to her marriage. Moreover, the age difference was too great (the Prince of Wales was twenty-three years Frederica’s senior), and her parents were unwilling to “put any such pressure” on their daughter.

Victoria Louise of Prussia: Mother

To her family, she was known as Freddie.

Marriage

Prince Paul of Greece proposed to her during the summer of 1936, while he was in Berlin attending the 1936 Summer Olympics. Paul was a son of King Constantine I and Frederica’s great aunt Sophia of Prussia, sister of German Emperor Wilhelm II.

Accordingly, they were maternal first cousins once removed. They were also paternal second cousins as great-grandchildren of Christian IX of Denmark. Their engagement was announced officially on September 28, 1937, and Britain’s King George VI gave his consent pursuant to the Royal Marriages Act 1772 on December 26, 1937.

HM Queen Frederica of the Hellenes

They married in Athens on January 9, 1938. Frederica became Hereditary Princess of the Hellenes, her husband being heir presumptive to his childless elder brother, King George II.

During the early part of their marriage, they resided at a villa in Psychiko in the suburbs of Athens. Ten months after their marriage, their first child, the future Queen Sofia of Spain, was born on November 2, 1938. On June 2, 1940, Frederica gave birth to the future King Constantine II.

War and Exile

At the peak of World War II, in April 1941, the Greek Royal Family was evacuated to Crete in a Sunderland flying boat. Shortly afterwards, the German forces attacked Crete. Frederica and her family were evacuated again, setting up a government-in-exile office in London.

In exile, King George II and the rest of the Greek Royal Family settled in South Africa. Here Frederica’s last child, Princess Irene, was born on May 11, 1942. The South African leader, General Jan Smuts, served as her godfather. The family eventually settled in Egypt in February 1944.

After the war, the 1946 Greek referendum restored King George II to the throne. The Hereditary Prince and Princess returned to their villa in Psychiko.

Olga Constantinovna of Russia, Queen of the Hellenes

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Alexander of the Hellenes, Andrew of the Hellenes, Constantine I of the Hellenes, George II of the Hellenes, Gran Duchess Olga Constantinovna of Russia, Queen of the Hellenes, Sophia of Prussia

In Switzerland, Constantine I and his family found themselves isolated and without an income. The Greek government under Venizelos did not pay pensions to former rulers and prohibited any contact between the exiles and King Alexander. Already in fragile health, the former king became gradually more depressed. The Russian Revolution and the National Schism deprived Olga of her immovable property and she was forced to live a much less lavish lifestyle than in the past. She did, however, enjoy spending more time with her sons and grandchildren, from whom she had been long separated by the war.

Regency

On October 2, 1920, King Alexander was bitten by a monkey during a walk through the gardens at Tatoi. The wound became infected and Alexander developed sepsis. On October 19, he began to rave and called for his mother, but the Greek government refused to allow Queen Sophia to return to Greece. Worried about her son, and knowing that his grandmother was the only other royal still in favor with the Venizelists, Sophia asked Olga to go to Athens to care for Alexander. After several days of negotiations, the dowager queen obtained permission to return to Greece but, delayed by rough seas, she arrived twelve hours after her grandson’s death on 25 October 25. On October 29, Alexander was buried at Tatoi; Olga was the only member of the royal family at the funeral.

Still opposed to the return of Constantine I and Crown Prince George, the government of Eleftherios Venizelos offered the throne to Constantine’s third son, Prince Paul, who refused to ascend the throne before his father and older brother unless a referendum named him head of state. Only days after Alexander’s death, however, Venizelos was defeated in a general election. On November 17, Admiral Pavlos Kountouriotis, regent since the death of Alexander, retired and the new prime minister, Dimitrios Rallis, asked Olga to assume the regency. She served as regent for about a month until her son Constantine returned to the throne on December 19, after a referendum in his favor.

Second exile and death

Constantine I returned to the throne 18 months into the Greco-Turkish War, launched in May 1919. In September 1921, the Greek defeat at the battle of Sakarya marked the beginning of the Greek retreat from Anatolia. Resentment among the allies for Constantine’s policy during World War I prevented Athens from receiving outside support. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the new leader of Turkey, regained Smyrna and Eastern Thrace, annexed by Athens at the end of World War I.

Following a coup by disgruntled military officers, Constantine I abdicated for a second time on September 27, 1922. With several other members of his family, including Queen Olga, he went into exile in Italy and his eldest son succeeded him for a few months on the throne as George II. Within months, Constantine died in Italy. One of Olga’s sons, Prince Andrew, was among those arrested by the new regime. Many defendants in the treason trials that followed the coup were shot, including senior politicians and generals. Foreign diplomats assumed that Andrew was also in mortal danger, and George V of the United Kingdom, Alfonso XIII of Spain, the French president Raymond Poincaré and Pope Pius XI sent representatives to Athens to intercede on his behalf. Andrew, though spared, was banished for life and his family (including the infant Prince Philip, later Duke of Edinburgh and consort of Queen Elizabeth II) fled into exile in December 1922 aboard a British cruiser, HMS Calypso.

Unlike her children and grandchildren, Olga was given a pension by the government of the Second Hellenic Republic, but she maintained so many of the faithful old servants who had fled Greece with her that she was usually left with no more than 20 pounds sterling per month (worth about £1,100 in 2019 prices) to meet her own expenses. She could, however, count on the support of her family, scattered throughout Western Europe. In the United Kingdom, she shared her time between Spencer House, London, the residence of her youngest son, Prince Christopher; Regent’s Park, where her daughter, Grand Duchess Marie, rented a mansion; Sandringham House, the home of her sister-in-law, Queen Alexandra; and Windsor Castle and Buckingham Palace, where her nephew, King George V, lent apartments.

Olga’s final years were marked by ill health. Lameness restricted her to a wheelchair, and she stayed in Paris several times to undergo treatment for her eyes. Her poor eyesight caused George V much laughter when she mistook a statue of a naked Lady Godiva for one of Queen Victoria. Increasingly dependent, Olga finally settled with her youngest son, Prince Christopher, shortly after the death of his first wife, Princess Anastasia, in 1923. Olga died on June 18, 1926 either at Christopher’s Villa Anastasia in Rome, or at Pau, France.

Despite republicanism in Greece, Olga was still held in high esteem and the republican government in Athens offered to pay for her funeral and repatriate her remains to Greece. Nonetheless, her children declined the offer, preferring to bury her in Italy beside her son, Constantine I, whose body Greece had refused to accept. Her funeral was held on June 22, 1926 at the Orthodox Church in Rome and the next day she was laid to rest in the crypt of the Russian Church in Florence. After the restoration of the Greek monarchy in 1935 she was re-interred at Tatoi on November 17, 1936.

As much of her property had been confiscated by the Soviet Union and the Greek republican government, most of her estate comprised jewelry reported in The Times to be worth £100,000 (equivalent to £5,600,000 in 2019). This was shared between her children and the children of Constantine I. Traumatized by the events of the Russian Revolution, Olga wished to sever all ties with the country in which her family had been massacred. Before dying, she made her grandson, King George II, swear to repatriate the ashes of her daughter Princess Alexandra, buried in the Peter and Paul Cathedral in Saint Petersburg. Her wish was fulfilled in 1940 after his restoration to the Greek throne.