Princess Cecilie of Greece and Denmark, Hereditary Grand Duchess of Hesse (Greek: Καικιλία, romanized: Kaikilía; 22 June 1911 – 16 November 1937) was by birth a Greek and Danish princess who became titular Hereditary Grand Duchess of Hesse and by Rhine through her marriage to Prince Georg Donatus, pretender to the throne of the Grand Duchy of Hesse. She was also the third-eldest sister to Prince Philip of Greece and Denmark (later Duke of Edinburgh).
The third of five children of Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark and Princess Alice of Battenberg, Cecilie had a happy childhood. In her early years, however, she witnessed the Balkan Wars (1912–1913), followed by the First World War (1914–1918) and the Greco-Turkish War (1919–1922). For the young princess and her relatives, these conflicts had dramatic consequences and led to their exile in Switzerland (between 1917 and 1920), and then in France (from 1922 to 1936). During their exile, Cecilie and her family depended on the generosity of their foreign relatives, in particular Marie Bonaparte (who offered them accommodation in Saint-Cloud) and Lady Louis Mountbatten (who supported them financially).
The year 1929 was a turning point in Cecilie's life. She formed a relationship with her maternal cousin, Georg Donatus, Hereditary Grand Duke of Hesse. Around the same time, her mother was struck by a mental health crisis which led to her confinement in a Swiss psychiatric hospital until 1933. After marrying Georg Donatus in 1931, Cecilie moved to Darmstadt. There she gave birth to their three children, Ludwig (1931–1937), Alexander (1933–1937) and Johanna (1936–1939), before becoming pregnant with her fourth child in 1937. Initially distant from the Nazi movement, she joined the Nazi Party at the same time as her husband in May 1937.
Soon after, the princess and her family (except for Johanna who stayed behind), embarked on a trip to the United Kingdom, where they were to attend the wedding of her brother-in-law Louis, Prince of Hesse and by Rhine, to Margaret Campbell Geddes. However, the aircraft in which they were travelling crashed in flames near Ostend, instantly killing all the passengers. Repatriated to Darmstadt, their remains were buried in the Grand Ducal new mausoleum of Rosenhöhe Park on 23 November 1937. Johanna was adopted by her uncle but died from meningitis in 1939.
Contents
Biography
Childhood
The third daughter of Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark and Princess Alice of Battenberg, Cecilie was born at Tatoi Palace, near Athens, on 22 June 1911. Baptised on 10 July, her godparents were King George V of the United Kingdom, Ernest Louis, Grand Duke of Hesse, Prince Nicholas of Greece and Denmark and Grand Duchess Vera Konstantinovna of Russia.
Cecilie spent a happy childhood within a united household that was already made up of two daughters, Margarita (1905–1981) and Theodora (1906–1969), and was further expanded with the arrival of Sophie (1914–2001). The favorite child of her father, she grew up in Athens, Tatoi and Corfu, where her father inherited Mon Repos after King George I's assassination in 1913. Coming from a cosmopolitan dynasty, Cecilie and her sisters communicated in English with their mother, but they also used French, German, and Greek with their relatives and their governesses. The girls also traveled abroad with their family at a very young age. In 1911 and 1913, Cecilie thus went to the United Kingdom and Germany, where she was introduced to her mother's relatives.
Cecilie's early years were marked by the instability that the Kingdom of Greece experienced at the start of the twentieth century. Between 1912 and 1913, Greece engaged in the Balkan Wars, during which Prince Andrew served under Crown Prince Constantine while Princess Alice worked as a nurse for wounded soldiers. They were, however, especially affected by the First World War, which created division between different branches of their family as Greece set aside its neutrality due to the Triple Entente. Cecilie and her sisters were in the royal palace of Athens when it was bombarded by the French Navy during the battle in the capital on 1 December 1916.
In June 1917, King Constantine I was finally deposed and driven out of Greece by the Allies, who replaced him on the throne by his second son, the young Alexander. Fifteen days later, Cecilie's family was in turn forced into exile in order to remove the possibility of the new monarch being influenced by those close to him. Forced to reside in German-speaking Switzerland, the small group first stayed in a hotel in St. Moritz, before settling in Lucerne, where they lived with uncertainty about their future.
Exile was not the only source of concern for the family, however. Following the Russian Revolution in 1917, some of Cecilie's Romanov relatives were murdered in Russia. Shortly after these events, the Grand Ducal family of Hesse, to which Cecilie was closely related through her mother, was overthrown along with all the other German dynasties during the winter of 1918–1919. Finally, the family went through some health problems, with Cecilie contracting the flu and scarlet fever in 1920.
Teenage years and young adulthood
After a journey of several weeks, which led them successively to Italy, France and the United Kingdom, Cecilie, her parents and her siblings settled in Saint-Cloud in 1923. Settled in a house adjoining that of Princess Marie Bonaparte, the family depended for seven years on her generosity, and two other aunts of Cecilie: first Princess Anastasia and then Lady Louis Mountbatten. Marie Bonaparte financed the studies of her nieces and nephew, while Lady Mountbatten got into the habit of offering her nieces her "used" clothes. In fact, Cecilie's parents had little income and the children were the regular witnesses to their money problems and their difficulty in maintaining a household.
Deprived of their Greek nationality after the proclamation of the Second Hellenic Republic in March 1924, Cecilie and her family received Danish passports from their cousin King Christian X. In Saint-Cloud, the small group spent a relatively simple life. Cecilie and her siblings continued their studies in private institutions, and, during their free time, their father took them regularly to Paris or to the Bois de Boulogne. He also spent long hours playing tennis with them. Every Sunday, the family was received for lunch by Princess Marie Bonaparte and Prince George of Greece and Denmark. Cecilie and her family also regularly met Prince Nicholas of Greece and Denmark and his wife Elena Vladimirovna of Russia, who had also chosen France to spend their time in exile with their daughters. Finally, they often saw their cousin Princess Margaret of Denmark, who settled in the Paris region after her marriage to Prince René of Bourbon-Parma.
Cecilie and her relatives made frequent stays abroad, and in particular in the United Kingdom. In 1923, the princess was invited to London to be a bridesmaid at the wedding of her aunt Louise Mountbatten to the future Gustav VI Adolf of Sweden. She returned to England in 1925 for the funeral of her great-aunt, Queen Alexandra. In 1926, she went to Italy for the funeral of her paternal grandmother, Queen Olga. A few weeks later, she returned to spend the summer in Great Britain, with her maternal grandmother, the Dowager Marchioness of Milford Haven.
Considered by her maternal grandmother, the Dowager Marchioness of Milford Haven, as the prettiest of the four daughters of Andrew and Alice, Cecilie made her debut in the United Kingdom, during the summer of 1928. Aged 17, she took part in her first ball at the Earl and Countess of Ellesmere's Bridgewater House, before attending the Cowes Week and then being invited by King George V to stay a few days in Balmoral, Scotland.
Marriage and settling in Germany
With her sister Sophie having become engaged almost at the same time as her to another member of the House of Hesse, Prince Christoph of Hesse, Cecilie made the preparations for her wedding in the company of her younger sister, aged 16. The two princesses thus went to London, in the spring of 1930, in order to obtain new clothes. Shortly after, they returned to Paris to put together their trousseau and buy their wedding dresses.
The nuptials of Sophie and Christoph were celebrated at Schlosshotel Kronberg in Kronberg im Taunus on 15 December 1930. The wedding of Cecilie and Georg Donatus took place at the Neue Palais in Darmstadt on 2 February 1931. To the surprise of the foreign guests, who expected a much colder welcome from a population that had dethroned Grand Duke Ernest Louis in 1918, the wedding aroused the enthusiasm of the people, who gathered in droves to attend the event and cheer their former princely family.
The couple were married in a double religious ceremony, both Orthodox and Lutheran. The ceremony brought together some fifty guests from all over Europe, but took place in the absence of the bride's mother Princess Alice, who was still hospitalized in Switzerland.
After their marriage, Cecilie and Georg Donatus moved to Schloß Wolfsgarten, the main residence of Grand Duke Ernest Louis and his wife Grand Duchess Eleonore, since their deposition. In Hesse, the young couple led a relatively simple life, punctuated by frequent stays abroad. Cecilie was involved in several charitable organizations and became the head of Alice Frauen Verein, an association dedicated to women. She also quickly gave birth to three children: Prince Ludwig (born 25 October 1931), Prince Alexander (born 14 April 1933) and Princess Johanna of Hesse (born 20 September 1936).
Very close to her family, Cecilie was concerned about the situation of her mother, who remained institutionalized until the beginning of 1933. During this period, the relationship between Alice and her children became complicated. Cecilie maintained correspondence with her mother, and visited her once in Kreuzlingen. However, Alice was angry with those close to her for having her institutionalized and her anger manifested itself in fits of rage, which pushed her, for example, to tear up the photograph that Cecilie sent her after the birth of her first child.
Titular Grand Duchess of Hesse and by Rhine
In 1937, Cecilie became pregnant again. At the same time, the health of her father-in-law, Grand Duke Ernest Louis, deteriorated sharply. Suffering from lung cancer, the former ruler hoped to live long enough to attend the wedding of his second son, Louis, to Hon. Margaret Campbell Geddes, scheduled to take place in London on 23 October 1937.
However, the Grand Duke died a fortnight before the ceremony, on 9 October, making Georg Donatus the new head of House of Hesse-Darmstadt. Under these circumstances, the marriage of Prince Louis was postponed to 20 November, in order to give his family time to organize the funeral of Ernest Louis, which took place on 12 October.
With Prince Louis' wedding approaching, Cecilie and her family went to Frankfurt on 16 November 1937 to board a plane of the Belgian company Sabena which was to take them to London, via a stopover in Ostend where it was planned to pick up two other passengers. The small group, which consisted of Cecilie (eight months pregnant), Georg Donatus, their two sons Ludwig (aged 6) and Alexander (aged 4) and the Dowager Grand Duchess Eleonore, was accompanied by Baron Joachim von Riedesel, chosen by Louis to be his witness, and Alice Hahn. According to biographer Philip Eade, Cecilie hated taking the plane and she always dressed in black when she made a trip like this.
The journey started under normal weather conditions, but a thick fog developed as the plane approached the North Sea. Despite the poor visibility, the pilot followed the flight plan and attempted to land at Ostend-Steene airport. However, during the maneuver, the aircraft struck the chimney of a factory, causing the destruction of a wing and an engine of the aircraft. It then crashed against the roof of a building, before being thrown several metres away and catching fire. The accident caused the immediate death of all passengers, including a newborn baby whom Cecilie seemed to have given birth to during the flight.
Despite the death of his family, Prince Louis married Margaret Campbell Geddes, in London, the day after the plane crash. After the wedding, which took place in a climate of extreme gloom, the couple went to Belgium to collect the remains of Cecilie and her family, kept until then at the civil hospital in Ostend. Once back in Darmstadt, Louis and his wife adopted their niece, Johanna, the only child of Cecilie and Georg Donatus not to have taken part in the plane trip due to her very young age. Johanna, however, died of meningitis two years later, on 14 June 1939.
In popular culture
Commemoration
On 16 November 2017 in Darmstadt, the Hessian State Archives, in collaboration with the Foundation of the House of Hesse (Hessische Hausstiftung), held a commemorative ceremony in honor of the victims of the accident in Ostend. On this occasion, wreaths were placed on the vault of Cecilie and her family, in Rosenhöhe.
Documentaries
The plane crash that caused the death of Princess Cecilie and her family was recounted in the sixth episode of the documentary series Mémoires d'exil (1999) by Frédéric Mitterrand.
TV series
The death of Cecilie and her family is also mentioned by the character of Prince Philip, in the third episode ("Windsor") of the first season of the series The Crown (2016), and by a journalist, in the second episode ("A Company of Men") of the second season (2017). It is also depicted in the ninth episode of season 2 ("Paterfamilias"), during a flashback to Philip's early years. In this episode, Princess Cecilie is portrayed by German actress Leonie Benesch. However, this fictionalised version wrongly implied that Philip was to blame for Cecilie taking the flight, whereas in reality "her decision to travel to London had nothing to do with Philip".
Novels
The death of Cecilie and her family is also recounted in the novel A Matter of Honor by Jeffrey Archer (1986). In this fictionalized version, the accident in Ostend is caused by the KGB, which wants to recover the jewels of Tsarina Alexandra Fedorovna, bequeathed to the House of Hesse-Darmstadt after the Russian Revolution.