Princess Cecilie of Greece and Denmark, Hereditary Grand Duchess of Hesse (; 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.
Biography Childhood The Balkan Wars and the First World War
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.
Exile in Switzerland 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.
At the beginning of 1919, Cecilie reunited with her paternal grandmother, the Dowager Queen Olga, spared by the Bolsheviks thanks to the diplomatic intervention of the Danes. In the months that followed, Cecilie attended a family reunion with her maternal grandparents, and met her aunt Louise and uncle Louis Mountbatten. For Cecilie, who now formed a duo with her younger sister Sophie, exile was not only synonymous with sadness; it was also an opportunity for long family reunions and walks in the mountains.
Brief return to Greece On 2 October 1920, King Alexander, cousin of Cecilie, was bitten by a domestic monkey during a walk in Tatoi. Poorly cared for, he contracted sepsis, which prevailed on 25 October, without any member of his family being allowed to come to his bedside. The death of the sovereign caused a violent institutional crisis in Greece. Already stuck, since 1919, in a new war against Turkey, Prime Minister Eleftherios Venizelos lost the 1920 Greek legislative election. Humiliated, he retired abroad while a referendum reinstalled Constantine I on the throne.
Prince Andrew was received triumphantly in Athens on 23 November 1920, and his wife and four daughters joined him a few days later. Cecilie then returned to live in Corfu with her family. At the same time, Princess Alice found out that she was pregnant again. On 10 June 1921, the family welcomed Philip (1921–2021), later the Duke of Edinburgh. The joy that surrounded this birth, however, was obscured by the absence of Prince Andrew, who joined the Greek forces in Asia Minor during the Occupation of Smyrna. Despite worries about the war, Cecilie and her siblings enjoyed life at Mon Repos, where they received a visit from their maternal grandmother and their aunt Louise in the spring of 1922. In the park near the palace, built on an ancient cemetery, the princesses devoted themselves to archeology and discovered some pottery, bronze pieces and bones.
During this period, Cecilie and her sisters also participated, for the first time, in a number of great social events. In March 1921, the princesses attended in Athens the wedding of their cousin Helen to Crown Prince Carol of Romania. In July 1922, they went to the United Kingdom to be bridesmaids at the wedding of their uncle Louis Mountbatten to the wealthy heiress Edwina Ashley, whose beauty fascinated Cecilie.
However, the military defeat of Greece against Turkey and the political unrest that it caused disrupted the life of Cecilie and her family. In September 1922, Constantine I abdicated in favor of his eldest son, George II. A month later, Prince Andrew was arrested before being tried by a military tribunal, which declared him responsible for the defeat of the Sakarya. Saved from execution by the intervention of foreign chancelleries, the prince was condemned to banishment and cashiering. The prince and his relatives hurriedly left Greece aboard in early December 1922.
Teenage years and young adulthood In the UK and France
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.
Engagement and family difficulties 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.
Although her two elder sisters were still single, and the relative poverty of her parents was not unrelated to this situation, Cecilie's family did not give up on finding a good match for her. Now Crown Princess of Sweden, her aunt Louise was planning to betroth her to Crown Prince Frederik of Denmark, but the plan did not succeed. It was finally from Germany that a suitor for the young girl arrived. Since her childhood, Cecilie had in fact been in contact with her cousins, Princes Georg Donatus and Louis of Hesse, whom she first met in 1919, while she was living in exile in Switzerland. The relationship between the princess and Georg Donatus turned into a romance during the year 1929 and the two were unofficially engaged in early 1930. At that time, Cecilie was just 18 years old and Georg Donatus, the pretender to the throne of Hesse, was 23.