THE BATTENBERG/MOUNTBATTEN FAMILY
JULIE HAUKE, 1825-1895, PRINCESS OF BATTENBERG
Grandmother of Earl Mountbatten, great-grandmother of Prince Philip Duke of Edinburgh, great-great grandmother of King Charles III, and great-great-great grandmother of Felipe VI of Spain.
Julie Therese Salomea Hauke was born in 1825, a younger child of Johann Moritz Hauke, a Polish general in the service of Russian Tsar Nicholas I, who controlled part of Poland at the time. The son of a schoolmaster at the Warsaw Lyceum, Hauke became Deputy Minister of War and was created a Polish Count by the Tsar in 1829, but was killed in a rebellion the following year.
His wife Sophie died soon after and his children became wards of the Tsar. All the Count’s children were entitled to use title ‘count’ or ‘countess’ but were not of high aristocratic status. Julie Hauke (note not with the aristocratic ‘von’ as is often written) had a good education at the Smolny Institute for Noble Maidens in St Petersburg and eventually came to Court as a maid-of-honour.
Julie Hauke aged about 15
When Princess Marie of Hesse went to Russia to marry the Tsarevich Alexander she was only just 16 and was accompanied by her brother Prince Alexander of Hesse, who after the marriage in 1841 was allowed to stay in Russia, awarded a massive annual pension and made a colonel in the army, even though he was still only 18 and had done nothing to earn either. The Tsar was never very fond of him, but he remained at Court spending the best part of the next ten years living the life of a, sometimes rather dissolute, playboy.
Julie Hauke became maid of honour to Alexander’s sister Marie, whose position was equivalent to that of Princess of Wales in the United Kingdom, and on occasion passed notes between Alexander and his latest love interest. However, one day he recorded in his diary ‘Julie Hauke is looking lovely’. When she became pregnant by him in 1851 he did not abandon her, but the scandal of a prince of a ruling German royal family marrying a commoner was enormous and they fled Russia in disgrace. He was 28 and she 26.
Julie and her husband Prince Alexander of Hesse
A morganatic marriage meant Julie could not take Alexander’s title and, although he could keep his royal title of His Grand Ducal Highness, Prince Alexander of Hesse, it cost him his place in the Hessian succession. For the sake of their children his family gave Julie the courtesy title Countess of Battenberg that would include them, upgraded to Her Serene Highness the Princess of Battenberg in 1858, but, being of lower status than a Royal Highness, she was never truly accepted into most royal circles – except by Queen Victoria, who welcomed two of Julie’s sons into her own family.
With no means of support, Prince Alexander joined the Austrian army as a mercenary with the rank of brigade-colonel, but his morganatic marriage was always a problem for his commoner wife who kept a fairly low profile socially and in some cases was openly shunned and humiliated by her ‘betters’. This has been seen by some biographers as one of the reasons why her grandson Earl Mountbatten would go to such lengths to remind people of his descent from Queen Victoria, and frequently name-drop his Russian royal relations into conversations including Nicholas II, the last Tsar.
Prince Alexander’s sister and her husband Tsar Alexander II remained on good terms with his family, but their son, who succeeded as Tsar Alexander III, was hostile towards them.
With the death of Tsar Nicholas I in 1855, the Prince was welcomed back to Russia for visits to his sister Marie and her husband, the new Tsar Alexander II, and took on a diplomatic role for the Tsar, even though he remained in the Austrian Army, but Julie never went back with him. However, his sister and her husband regularly visited them both at the little castle at Heiligenberg, left to Prince Alexander by his mother, and later at the fine new Alexander Palace in Darmstadt – a gift from Tsar Alexander to his brother-in-law for services rendered.
The photo below shows a family group in Darmstadt in 1864, with the erstwhile errant couple, now parents of a daughter and four sons, posing with the Prince’s family.
From left standing: Julie, Princess of Battenberg; her husband’s elder brother and next in line to the throne Prince Karl (Charles); Karl’s younger son Prince William; Karl’s heir Prince Louis of Hesse; Prince Gustav Vasa (visiting from Sweden); Prince Alexander of Hesse, Julie’s husband.
Seated left and centre: Julie’s two sisters-in-law Elizabeth, Princess Karl, and the Tsarina of Russia, formerly Marie of Hesse; right: Princess Alice, wife of Prince Louis and third child of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. Julie’s son, Louis of Battenberg, married Alice’s daughter, Victoria of Hesse; Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, was their grandson.
Four years after the picture was taken, Julie and Alexander’s 14-year-old eldest son, Prince Louis of Battenberg, startled his parents by announcing he was planning to join the British Navy. He went on to have an illustrious career but ran into difficulties when his adoptive country was at war with Germany, and resigned, expecting to continue duties after the end of hostilities, but was overlooked. In 1917 King George V decreed that his foreign relations domiciled in Britain must forgo their titles, whereupon the Battenbergs reversed and anglicised their name to Mountbatten and were created Marquesses of Milford Haven.
Prince Louis of Battenberg, Julie’s eldest son, who died in 1921, seen here with his sons. Lord Louis, on the left, later became Earl Mountbatten of Burma, and George succeeded their father as 2nd Marquess of Milford Haven. Earl Mountbatten was assassinated by the IRA in 1979; his brother had died of cancer in 1938. They had two sisters, Alice, who was the mother of Prince Philip, and Louise, the second wife of the King of Sweden.