PRINCE Philip, Britain’s longest-serving consort, was linked by blood and marriage to most of the continent’s royal houses. But how was the Duke of Edinburgh related to Queen Victoria? How was Prince Philip related to Queen Victoria? “If Queen Victoria is considered the grandmother of Europe, Prince Philip is the uncle of Europe,” said Vassilis […]
PRINCE Philip, Britain’s longest-serving consort, was linked by blood and marriage to most of the continent’s royal houses.
But how was the Duke of Edinburgh related to Queen Victoria?
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“If Queen Victoria is considered the grandmother of Europe, Prince Philip is the uncle of Europe,” said Vassilis Koutsavlis, president of the Tatoi Royal Estate Friends Association.
He had British and German blood through his mum, a great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria.
Philip, the son of the exiled Prince Andrew of Greece, was a direct descendant of Elizabeth’s great-great-grandmother, Queen Victoria.
Queen Victoria’s second daughter, Princess Alice, was born in 1843. She ended up marrying Ludwig IV – the Grand Duke of Hesse.
The couple had seven children, the eldest of whom was named Victoria. She married her father’s first cousin, Prince Louis of Battenburg, in 1884.
A year after their nuptials, Victoria gave birth to their first child, Princess Alice of Battenburg – Prince Philip’s mother – at Windsor Castle.
She later tied the knot with Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark in 1903 and they went on to have five children.
Their youngest, Prince Philip, was born in 1921.
But, Princess Alice became a nun after drifting apart from her husband, who died virtually penniless in 1944.
Lord Mountbatten was the maternal uncle of Philip, as his great-grandmother was Queen Victoria and his sister was Princess Alice of Battenberg, Prince Philip’s mum.
He was Prince Charles’s great-uncle and was described by the royal as “the grandfather I never had”.
The Queen, 94, and Prince Philip, 99, were distant cousins.
As both were directly related to Queen Victoria, the two share the same bloodline.
Through their respective links to Victoria, the Queen and the late Duke of Edinburgh are third cousins.
Queen Victoria is the Monarch’s great-great-grandmother.
Elizabeth ascended to the throne in 1952 at the age of 25, and surpassed her great-great-grandmother as Britain’s longest reigning monarch in September 2015.
Born on April 21, 1926, in Bruton Street, central London, Elizabeth grew up not expecting to become queen.
Her father, George VI, only took the crown when his elder brother Edward VIII abdicated in 1936 to marry American divorcee Wallis Simpson.
Philippos Schleswig-Holstein Sonderburg-Glucksburg was born on a dining room table on the Greek island of Corfu on June 10, 1921, the fifth child and only son of Prince Andrew of Greece.
His parents went into exile when he was 18 months old. They sailed from Corfu with the little boy sleeping in a cot made hurriedly from orange boxes.
Philip lived his early life on the move around Europe. It was a troubled childhood.
He was educated at Gordonstoun in Scotland, where his son Prince Charles was later an unwilling pupil, and became a naturalised British citizen.
In a densely wooded estate at the foot of a mountain north of Athens, Philip’s dad, Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark, lies buried.
The Tatoi estate, which housed the royal summer residence, contains the royal cemetery, dotted with the tombs of Philip’s relatives: kings and queens of Greece, princes and princesses of Denmark, grand duchesses of Russia and even a distant relative of Napoleon Bonaparte.
Philip’s grandfather was just 17 years old in 1863 when the Greek National Assembly elected him king, becoming George I to take the place of the equally foreign-born but unpopular King Otto, who had been deposed.
George I married Olga Constantinova of Russia, a member of the Romanov dynasty, and together they had eight children, of whom Andrew, Philip’s father, was the seventh.
Apart from one child who died in infancy, all of George and Olga’s children went on to marry European royals or nobles. For Andrew, that was Princess Alice, a great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria.
Like the Danish king, Victoria was a well-known matchmaker, marrying her children into European monarchies. Several of her descendants still reign in Europe.
