family were ‘rather amusing about being exiled, for they so frequently are …’1 Their apparent insouciance belied the strain that they had been under.
On arrival in Italy, they continued by train, with the infant Philip crawling all over the carriage and licking the window panes, oblivious to the drama. At Rome, they thanked the Pope for his help in securing their release.2 The British ambassador lent them 14,000 lire and private arrangements were made for their entry into France, as they had no passports either.3 An extra sleeping carriage was then attached to the overnight express to Paris, where they arrived on 8 December and went straight to the hotel apartment of Andrea’s brother Christopher. Thereafter a tense Andrea ‘denied himself to all callers’, instructing the hotel management that no one be permitted even to send up a card.4
Talbot had promised Plastiras and Pangalos to take Andrea straight to London – or else more executions were threatened – but there was nervousness in London about members of the Greek royal family suddenly turning up, especially while Parliament was sitting, and the prime minister (Bonar Law) wrote urging George V not to encourage them to settle in England.5 The king was only too happy to assent to this. As he saw it, he had already saved Andrea’s life, and bearing in mind the antagonism directed towards him the last time the Greek princes came to London, during the war, he felt that Andrea and his family should not ‘unduly estimate the inconvenience’ of remaining in Paris until after Parliament had prorogued.6,7 While they waited there, Talbot went on ahead to London to make his report, and was promptly knighted by the king for his role in rescuing his cousin.
On 17 December, with Parliament in recess, Andrea and Alice and their family slipped into Britain at Dover, their arrival going unnoticed by the British press. Likewise, when Andrea went to see George V two days later,8 his visit was not advertised in the Court Circular. Their experiences over the past few months had visibly aged both him and his wife. Photographs from the time show the monocled Andrea looking far in advance of his years, his furrowed brow a manifestation of the ordeals he had been through, while Alice’s sister Louise was shocked at how worn out she looked compared to the previous summer, when she had come over for Dickie’s wedding.9
Still smarting at his treatment, Andrea told an American newspaper that he had
ample documentary material for an appeal, and when the right time arrives I hope to publish the facts. Then the people of my country can judge for themselves whether I was rightly convicted. At present all the evidence that reaches me is convincing that the Greeks as a whole disagree with what has happened. I believe I can say without egotism that the nation is in sympathy with me, and I am confident that, when hot passion and political prejudice have subsided somewhat and my statement of my case is placed before them, the people will decide in my favour.10
However, the American chargé d’affaires in Athens said that it was ‘a great mistake’ that Andrea and his brothers were ‘carrying on a kind of propaganda abroad against the present regime in Greece and abusing them quite openly wherever they go’. Not only did it annoy those in power and make them more hostile to the exiled princes’ nephew, the king, but it was also particularly ill timed at a moment when private promises had been extracted through diplomatic channels to respect Andrea’s property and possessions on Corfu.11
Andrea was still undecided as to where they were going to live, but planned in the meantime to visit his brother Christopher in America.12 As guests of his brother, he and Alice could at least expect to be well looked after, not least since Christopher’s wife, Nancy, was extremely rich, having inherited a fortune from her first husband, the tin-plate tycoon William B. Leeds, when he died in 1908.13
After spending Christmas with Victoria at Kensington Palace, Andrea and Alice sailed for New York in January 1923, leaving the two elder girls, Margarita and Theodora, with their grandmother in England14 and the two younger ones and Philip with their uncle, Prince George of Greece, and his wife, Marie Bonaparte, in Paris. In mid-Atlantic news reached them that Andrea’s brother, Constantine, had died in Sicily. The exiled king’s death had met with a subdued reaction in Athens. ‘A few weeping people were loitering outside the gates of the Palace the next day,’ reported the British counsellor, but otherwise, ‘tears were shed in private houses.’ His name, wrote the counsellor, had been inextricably linked in the minds of the Greek people with the dream of Constantinople, and at one time he had acquired a popularity unattained by any of the other kings of Greece. But parallel to this, ‘he was hated by a constantly varying number of his fickle subjects’ and ‘rightly or wrongly, he was accused of having sympathised entirely with Germany during the war’.15
Andrea and Alice arrived in New York dressed in mourning clothes. After they landed, Christopher took them straight up the Woolworth Building, at that time the tallest structure in the world, for a panoramic view of the city. Andrea bought models of it to give to his children and to the waiting reporters he enthused about New York’s skyscrapers. He also pronounced the outfits worn by American women ‘very neat indeed’. The reporters were curious about their small entourage – consisting of only a valet and a maid – and when one of them asked Andrea why he did not have a gentleman-in-waiting to attend to social matters, he laughed and replied: ‘I’m a democrat!’16
Andrea and Alice stayed in America for two months, during which time they travelled by train to Montreal to attend a memorial service for King Constantine,17 and also spent time in Washington, DC, and at Palm Beach in Florida with Christopher and Nancy – who did not let on that she was dying of cancer – before sailing back across the Atlantic on 20 March. As he prepared to board the Cunard liner Aquitania, Andrea told the press that he would not ‘risk the chance of being executed’ by going back to Greece.18 The prospect of living in Britain among a suspicious and rather hostile people did not greatly appeal either – George V would presumably have intimated to Andrea the difficulty of their staying there when he saw him in December – and so instead they decided to settle in Paris, which was already home to a cluster of Greek and Russian émigré royalty and would remain their base for the remainder of the decade.
To begin with they were lent a suite of rooms in a palais on the edge of the Bois de Boulogne, but Andrea found he could not afford the household that came with it, so they soon moved across the Seine to a small lodge in the garden of 5 rue du Mont-Valérien, in the smart hilltop suburb of St Cloud, six miles west from the city centre and commanding spectacular views eastwards towards Montmartre and the Eiffel Tower. Both properties belonged to Marie Bonaparte, Princess George of Greece, the wife of Andrea’s elder brother, an intriguing figure known in the family as ‘Big George’. His eventful career had included a spell in the Greek navy – during which he acquired a quarterdeck vocabulary in four languages19 – and a period as high commissioner of Crete. Earlier he had saved the life of his cousin, the future Tsar Nicholas II, by parrying the sabre of a would-be assassin in Japan.
Marie herself was a restless, exotic woman, destined shortly to become one of Sigmund Freud’s leading disciples and benefactors, and thus central to the establishment of psychoanalysis and sexology in France. She was the great-granddaughter of Napoleon’s renegade younger brother Lucien, although her great wealth came from her maternal grandfather, François Blanc, who had accumulated a vast fortune from property in Monaco and as owner of the casinos at Monte Carlo and Homburg. She had been in love with the tall and handsome Big George when they married in 1907, she aged twenty-five, he thirty-eight, but she soon became disillusioned on account of his disinterest. For one thing, he refused ever to let her kiss him on the lips and their wedding night, she recorded, culminated in ‘a short, brutal gesture’ from him and an apology: ‘I hate it as much as you do. But we must do it if we want children.’20 By the time Andrea and his family came to live in the grounds of their large mansion at St Cloud, where Marie had been born, Marie and George were spending much of their time apart, she carrying on with a succession of lovers, most recently the French prime minister, Aristide Briand, he often away in Denmark with his father’s younger brother Waldemar, ten years George’s senior and the love of his life.
George had formed this unusual attachment after being entrusted to his uncle’s care at the age of fourteen, when