Tragic life of Kate Middleton's great-great-aunt echoes fate of Prince William's great-grandmother
LONDON, UK: An Australian historian has reportedly found that Kate Middleton's great-great-aunt and Prince William's great-grandmother have a lot in common. As per the findings of Michael Reed, a historian at Ilim College in Australia, both women not only worked as nuns but also received treatment for mental health.
Gertrude Middleton was reportedly the sister of the Duchess of Cambridge's great-grandfather – Noel Middleton. On the other hand, Prince William's great-grandmother was Princess Alice of Battenberg, who was the mother of late Prince Philip. It has been said that Gertrude as well as Alice served as nurses in the First World War after becoming nuns. But their stories did not end there as they experienced their fair share of trauma.
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Reed said, “They basically lived parallel lives, a few years apart. Both were volunteer nurses in connection with the Red Cross – Gertrude during the First World War, and Princess Alice during the first and second. They both acted as dedicated social workers for the homeless and disadvantaged and proved to be generous financial benefactors. But most startling of all was the revelation that Gertrude, like Princess Alice, had been a patient in a mental hospital. Their stories are both fascinating and sad.”
According to reports, in her earlier days, Gertrude studied at a boarding school for girls, which was quite close to the University of St Andrews in Scotland, where Kate and William had their first meeting as undergraduates. The royal working member and her great-great-aunt have some similarities too. For example, Gertrude used to play tennis like Kate. She was also into lacrosse. Gertrude even knew how to play the piano just like the mother-of-three, who surprised everyone with her performance during a Christmas carol concert in 2021.
While Gertrude joined the Anglican Convent of the Epiphany in Cornwall as the nun, Alice founded a Greek Orthodox nursing order of nuns, the Christian Sisterhood of Martha and Mary. However, later in life, the former one had to go to the Lawn Hospital for Mental and Nervous Diseases in Lincoln in the 1930s. But in March 1942, at the age of 66, she died. Princess Alice was moved to a sanatorium in Switzerland in 1930. She breathed her last in 1965 at Buckingham Palace. She was 84 at the time.
Earlier several reports have also talked about the Duke of Edinburgh’s difficult past. After his death in April 2021, the news of his childhood resurfaced with BBC saying, “he had endured an exceptionally turbulent childhood. He was little more than a year old when his father was sent into exile by an army court martial following Greece's calamitous defeat in a war with Turkey.”
Even though the family ultimately got shelter in Paris, the setup did not last long because in 1930, his mother suffered the mental breakdown as described above and ended up in the sanatorium. On top it, Philip’s father Prince Andrew of Greece “freed himself from many of his responsibilities as father too, shutting up the family home at St-Cloud and thereafter leading a rather aimless life, drifting between Paris, Monte Carlo and Germany, interspersed with sporadic fruitless interventions in Greek affairs,” the BBC added.