Prince Philip's chain-smoking nun mom in 'The Crown' was a real-life hero

Of all the things a regular watcher of The Crown might expect to see in Buckingham Palace, a chain-smoking Greek Orthodox nun with a history of institutionalization and a love of card games might be low on the list. Truth is often stranger than fiction though, and Season 3 of The Crown didn’t have to stray too far from history to introduce Prince Philip’s mother Princess Alice of Battenberg (also known as Mother-Superior Alice-Elizabeth or Princess Andrew of Greece and Denmark) to its story.

Princess Alice appears in “Bubbikins,” the fourth episode of The Crown Season 3, two seasons after her character had a quick cameo in the show’s first episode as a guest at her son Prince Philip and then–Princess Elizabeth’s wedding. Back in the premiere, Elizabeth the Queen Mother and Mary of Teck looked down on Princess Alice, taking note of her nun’s habit and mentioning that she had recently been released from a sanitorium, but “Bubbikins” gives more context for Princess Alice’s place in the royal family.

Princess Alice of Battenberg was born in Windsor Castle in 1885; her mother was Queen Victoria I’s granddaughter and her father was a Prince of Rhine and Hesse. Alice grew up at a tumultuous time for European monarchs — her maternal aunt Alix was the wife of Czar Nicholas II of Russia, who was famously assassinated with his entire family in 1917 (remember Anastasia? She was Alice’s first cousin), and Alice’s eventual marriage to Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark brought her directly into conflict with the decline of royalty following World War I.

Prince Andrew’s brother was King Constantine of Greece, whose sustained neutrality in World War I led to a collapse of his reign. The entire Greek royal family was forced into exile in 1917, including Princess Alice, Prince Andrew, their four daughters, and their young son Prince Philip. After a failed restoration, another banishment, and the near-execution of her husband at the hands of Greek revolutionaries, Princess Alice converted to the Greek Orthodox church and began to experience religious hallucinations. She suffered a nervous breakdown in 1928 and was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia at two separate mental sanitariums. Her doctors subjected her to electroconvulsive therapy and x-rayed her reproductive organs under the assumption that her mental instability was connected to her libido (that treatment was Sigmund Freud’s idea, which tracks).

As seen in The Crown Season 2 episode “Paterfamilias,” Princess Alice was estranged from her family following her institutionalization. Her daughters married German princes and became embroiled in the Nazi party while Philip attended school at Gordonstoun in Scotland. When Alice was released she returned to Athens and resisted the Nazi occupation of Greece by harboring a Jewish family and smuggling them out of the country, an act for which she was posthumously awarded the title “Righteous Among the Nations” by the State of Israel.

Two years after Prince Philip married Princess Elizabeth, Alice sold some of her remaining jewels to found a convent on Tinos, a Greek island (she didn’t sell all of them, she gave a few diamonds to Philip for Elizabeth’s engagement ring). The Crown would make it seem as if Philip didn’t contact his mother between his wedding and her arrival in Buckingham Palace in 1968, but she also attended Queen Elizabeth’s coronation and corresponded with her son — the episode title “Bubbikins” refers to one of the pet names Alice used in her letters to Philip, which she addressed to “Bubby-kins.”

The Crown is also incorrect in assuming Prince Philip didn’t want his mother to live with his family in the palace, when the reality is quite the opposite. When the Colonel’s Coup of 1967 rocked Greece once again, it was Philip who reached out to her and made the arrangements for his mother to come to England. According to Hugo Vickers’ biography Alice: Princess Andrew of Greece, he also visited her in Greece twice in 1967. She arrived in the palace an an honored guest, and lived there until her death in 1969.

The Crown’s ability to take something as complex as the post–WWI fall of European monarchies and distill it into a deeply human story is admirable. Princess Alice may have been an outlier amongst the British royal family, but just about every person depicted on the show lived an even more astounding life in the reality of history.