If Meghan Markle Gives Birth To A Baby Girl Will She Name Her Alice In Honor Of Prince Philip’s Mom?
If Meghan Markle gives birth to a baby girl in Spring 2019 and it is called Alice, as many bookmakers are predicting, will it signify a deliberate choice on Meghan and Prince Harry’s behalf to name the royal baby after Prince Philip’s mom?
Sporting Life reports that bookmakers have put Alice as the favorite at 12-1 for a girl and Arthur at 12-1 for a boy.
The name Alice has a royal lineage. The current Queen’s uncle, the late Duke of Gloucester had a wife named Alice, and it was also the name of the second daughter of Queen Victoria.
Less widely known is that Alice was also the name of Prince Philip’s mom, and if Meghan Markle does choose the same name for her baby, it will no doubt be well received by the Duke of Edinburgh and the Queen in a way that a name such as Diana probably wouldn’t
The Daily Mail reports that Princess Alice of Battenburg was a great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria, She was also congenitally deaf and suffered from schizophrenia.
Before she was committed to a sanatorium in Switzerland, Princess Alice married Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark and was a well-loved member of the Greek royal family. After she was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia in 1930, she was forcibly removed from her family and sent to Dr. Ludwig Binswanger’s sanatorium in Kreuzlingen.
None other than Sigmund Freud diagnosed sexual frustration as the root cause of the Princess’ delusions and recommended “X-raying her ovaries in order to kill off her libido.”
Despite Princess Alice pleading that she was not insane, she stayed at the asylum for two years before being released to lead a bohemian like existence in Central Europe.
When World War II broke out, although her only son, Prince Philip, was fighting for the allies in the British Royal Navy, she had sons-in-law fighting for the Germans. In particular, one of her daughters married a member of the NSDAP and the Waffen-SS.
During the war, Princess Alice earned renown for hiding a family of Greek Jews who sought refuge from the Gestapo. When the conflict ended, Princess Alice sold off all her jewels and founded the Christian Sisterhood of Martha and Mary. As head of the religious order, she built a convent and orphanage in a poor suburb of Athens.
In 1967 she went to live with her son and daughter-in-law in Buckingham Palace and earned some renown as an eccentric figure who would prowl the corridors dressed as a nun smoking Woodbines before her death two years later on December 5, 1969.
No doubt someone as widely read and well-versed in history as Meghan will be only too aware of Princess Alice’s story, and if Meg does decide to call her baby daughter Alice, it will probably be because the Duchess has been inspired by the “mad nun’s” story.
Besides which, as Meghan Markle obviously knows, Alice has far more of a regal ring and touch of sophisticated class about it than Britney, Beyonce, Kim, or heaven forbid, Paris, ever could.
