So, unhappy 103rd anniversary, Alexander, King of Greece, for today was the day in 1920, having seen combat in the Balkan Wars as a teenager, and only becoming king at the age of 23, you expired at just 27 from… er, a monkey bite.
The news also, intriguingly, made the Leeds Mercury, with the sub-head MORGANATIC WIFE (because he had caused scandal by marrying Aspasia Manos, who was the daughter of King Constanine’s Master of the Horse, and therefore not royal, but a ‘commoner’).
But the really remarkable thing about his untimely demise is the fact that Winston Churchill wrote: “It is perhaps no exaggeration to remark that a quarter of a million persons died of this monkey’s bite” — and that without it, the UK might never have had Prince Philip…
Alexander, like his nephew Philip, was not even faintly Greek. The country was ruled by the Bavarian Wittelsbach dynasty from 1831, and — after a revolution in 1862 — by Prince William of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg, who called himself George I, King of the Hellenes.
His coronation gift from Britain was the Ionian Islands — well, of course (on one of which, Corfu, Prince Philip was born, on a kitchen table). Greece won lots more territory in the region from the Ottomans in the Balkan Wars, which made George very popular.
Unfortunately, he was assassinated by Alexandros Schinas, who may have been an agent of foreign powers, supposedly told George’s widow Queen Olga that he had acted alone, and who mysteriously fell from a high window a few weeks afterwards.
So, George was replaced by his son Constantine, who refused Kaiser Wilhelm’s invitation to join WWI on the Germans side, but — being married to the Kaiser’s sister — was seen as pro-German, and was forced from the throne by Eleftherios Venizelos, who went on to be Greek Prime Minister.
Venizelos wanted Constantine out of the way so that Greece could get stuck into WWI and use the conflict to expand more into the Balkans and Asia Minor. Having achieved that, he installed young Alexander as a puppet king, did all the actual ruling himself, and managed to wangle Greece a chunk of the Ottoman Empire in the post-war peace conferences.
Then, one day, Alexander went for a stroll in the gardens of the Tatoi Palace with Fritz, his German Shepherd. Fritz got into a territorial dispute of his own with a Barbary macaque which belonged to one of the staff. Alexander got between them, and another macaque bit him.
His leg went septic, but none of the attending doctors wanted to be the one to cut it off, which would have saved him, so he died. The Greek people chose his predecessor, Constantine, to be his successor, so he returned from exile — and exiled Venizelos.
Constantine went back to the business of trying to get land off the Turks — and lost, badly. One of his generals was his younger brother Prince Andrew, whose wife, Princess Alice of Battenberg, gave birth to young Philippos on that kitchen table while his dad was away.
After a disastrous defeat by what became Turkey — in which Smyrna was burnt to the ground, killing anything from 10,000 to 125,000 people (estimates, as you can see, vary) — Constantine was deposed again in another coup, and Andrew was put on trial accused of disobeying an order.
During the trial, he was asked how many children he had, and responded
Poor things — what a pity they will soon be orphans!
But diplomatic pressure from Britain won him exile instead of execution, and Baby Phil famously left the country in an orange crate.
So, when Philip joined a navy, it wasn’t the Greek one, but the British, and he just happened to be at the Royal Naval College when the king visited. Someone had to escort the king’s daughters, and Lord Louis Mountbatten, Philip’s uncle, made sure it was him.
So, in one of the odder what-ifs of history, it’s possible that if one man hadn’t been bitten by a monkey, Greece would be much bigger than it is, Turkey would be smaller, and wouldn’t be called Turkey, and Queen Elizabeth II would have married someone completely different.
