Done & Dunne

While Louis and Edwina Mountbatten would have a 38-year-long marriage, it isn't quite right to say it was a happy union. That first six months or so though - when they traveled through Europe and the United States, meeting Charlie Chaplin, Cecil B. DeMille, and dining with President Warren G. Harding - was a magical time for the couple. Once they returned to England and settled into married life, things quickly went sideways. With Louis frequently at sea for long periods as a Naval officer, and Edwina living large on her huge pile of inherited money, perhaps they were destined to have an unusually promiscuous marriage.

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As many will already know, it was the youngest child of Prince Louis of Battenberg and Princess Victoria of Hesse and by Rhine who would become a prominent figure in the lives of the modern world of the Windsors. Young Louis Battenberg, later Louis Mountbatten, was known as Dickie to his confidants, and was stung early when his father, First Sea Lord of the British Navy, was removed from his post at the outbreak of WWI because of his German origins. The episode would motivate his son to excel in a Naval career to reclaim the title, and the then-Mountbattens' familial closeness with the House of Windsor would give him an avenue to real political power and influence.

Edwina Ashley, future wife of Louis Mountbatten, was born into a family of means, but not of emotional connection. While her grandfather, Sir Ernest Cassel, was kind and involved, her parents left her sister and Edwina to mostly be raised by governesses. After her mother's death, Edwina's father married for a second time to a woman Louis would later describe as "a wicked woman." Edwina was ultimately able to find refuge in her grandfather's home, where as a teenager she became a sophisticated society hostess and a friend to many in the monied elite. Sir Ernest Cassel's death, when Edwina was about 20, made her one of the richest women in England. Upon her engagement to the much-less-rich Louis Mountbatten, Sir Anthony Eden noted in his diary, "Edwina Ashley is engaged to Lord Louis Mountbatten. What a waste."

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Prince George of Battenberg, later the 2nd Marquess of Milford Haven, was the third child of Louis Battenberg and Princess Victoria of Hesse and by Rhine, and was by all accounts a pretty good dude. Like his father, he set his sights on a naval career, and excelled at the Royal Naval College in Dartmouth, entering the Royal Navy in time to participate in World War I.

His 1916 marriage to Countess Nadajda de Torby, called Nada by her friends, would become a source of significant scandal in 1934, when a former maid became a key witness in the high profile custody battle over young heiress Gloria Vanderbilt. The mail alleged on the stand that Nada and the girl's mother, Gloria Morgan Vanderbilt, were lovers, and the story was so salacious for its time that the judge cleared the courtroom entirely.

After the family dropped "Battenberg" in favor of "Mountbatten" in 1917, at the height of anti-German sentiment in England, George Mountbatten would continue being one of the few stable presences in the life of Prince Philip, and Queen Elizabeth II, his eventual niece-in-law, was extremely fond of George. His death at the young age of 45, from bone marrow cancer, was yet another tragedy in young Philip's life, while Nada would remain close friends with Edwina Mountbatten, her sister-in-law, and the wife of Philip's next mentor, Louis Mountbatten.

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The second child of Prince Louis of Battenberg (later, Louis Mountbatten, Marquess of Milford Haven) and Princess Victoria of Hesse and by Rhine was Princess Louise, born July 14, 1889. While most royal were promptly shuttled into marriage, Louise was an independent, progressive young woman whose heart was set on marrying for love.

There were suitors, to be sure, but Louise was insistent that she would never marry a king or a widower, and of course, that the union be based on love. This led her down some blind alleys, most notably with a Scottish portrait and landscape artist living in Paris, whom she met when they worked together at a military hospital during the First World War. Alexander Stuart-Hill was charming but eccentric, and was decidedly not rich. Fearing her family's reaction, Louise kept the pair's engagement secret for two years; by the time she revealed her secret, her parents asked that she delay marriage until the war had ended.

After Alexander visited the Mountbattens a few times, earning the nickname 'Shakespeare' from his would-be in-laws, Louis Mountbatten had to sit his poor daughter down and explain to her that there were people called homosexuals, and he believed her fiance was one. It's unclear precisely how this resolved between Louise and Alexander, beyond the fact that the engagement ended in 1918.

Princess Louise would find love at last, however, and in a most unexpected place. Sweden's Crown Prince Gustaf Adolf, recent widower of Louise's mother's cousin, visited London in 1923 and took a real shine to Louise, then into her 30s. Sure, he was a widower, and sure, he was destined to be King of Sweden, but at long last, Louise had fallen in love with someone who loved her back. Her new in-laws loved her, and she became the devoted step-mother of Gustav's children. As Princess and then Queen Consort, she was beloved by the people of Sweden for her rejection of royal airs, belief in gender equality and civil rights, humanitarian work during World War II, and democratic reforms to the monarchy.

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After Louis Battenberg's (later Louis Mountbatten) successful campaign to marry Princess Victoria of Hesse and by Rhine, the couple set about having babies. The first of these, Princess Alice, was born in 1885, and came into the world congenitally deaf. Given the era, no particular accommodations were made for her, and while her condition caused many to underestimate her, she compensated by learning to lip-read (in several languages) and spoke English, German, French, and, later, Greek.

Her marriage to Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark was happy only for a while, but the pair had five children. Alice occupied herself with charity work, and when hostilities broke out between Greece and Turkey, she served as a nurse at the front line, earning the deep affection of the Greek people. During the First World War, Greece exiled the royal family, and setting up in Paris, Alice and Andrew became estranged. He would ride out the rest of his life in the south of France with his mistress, while Alice's life became strange and complicated.

She fell in unrequited love, though history has not retained the identity of her affection, and developed a religious fervor. She was hospitalized in sanitariums and treated with cutting edge techniques for schizophrenia, like hitting her abdomen with X-rays to destroy her ovaries. During her convalescence, which she wanted out of, her daughters married without her knowing and her youngest son, Prince Philip, gradually grew from a child to a man, with no real connection to his mother or father.

Alice spent World War II in Athens, caring for the poor and hungry, and sheltering a Jewish family. When the Nazi occupiers came to search her home, she leaned into her deafness, pretending not to understand what they wanted until they were so bamboozled they left empty handed. She founded a religious order, but when Greece again abolished the monarchy, her son Philip, now married to Queen Elizabeth II, ensured her safe passage to Great Britain, where she lived out her days simply and humbly, as a quiet resident of Buckingham Palace.

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