One of the factors which ensured the stability of Queen Elizabeth II’s 70-year reign was her scrupulous avoidance of any involvement in politics. Unfortunately this was never the case with the Greek monarchy, which was established by the London Conference of 1832, following the end of the Greek war of Independence. In that year, Prince Otto of Bavaria of the House of Wittelsbach became Otto I, King of Greece, a country over which he reigned for 30 years until he was deposed in 1862.
A referendum was held in 1862 to name a new king and it was won with 230,016 out of 240,000 votes by Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh, who was born at Windsor Castle in 1844, the second son of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. However, he declined in the face of opposition from his mother, and the offer was passed to the other candidates who all refused until it reached Prince Vilhelm of Denmark, of the House of Glucksburg, who was directly descended from King George II of Great Britain. Despite having only polled only 6 votes in the referendum, Vilhelm was elected unanimously by the Greek Assembly, and became George I, King of the Hellenes. King George was the grandfather of Philip, Duke of Edinburgh, who was born on Corfu as Prince Phillip of Greece and Denmark, abandoning those titles before becoming a naturalised British subject and marrying the then Princess Elizabeth.
It was inevitable that the Greek monarchy would become enmeshed in the politics of the Great Powers which effectively ruled the continent in the 19th and early 20th centuries. It was also inevitable that it would side with the conservative forces in the country, a tendency which led to the eventual abolition of the Greek monarchy in 1974.
Until their return to Greece from exile in 2013, ex-King Constantine and his family lived in London, and they have close ties with the British royal family. Constantine’s eldest son Pavlos represented his family at the royal funeral. He was interviewed by the British media before the event and various news outlets including the BBC and Channel 4 caused adverse comment by referring to him as “Crown Prince of Greece”. On Kathimerini’s podcast The Greek Current on 20th September, Alexander Kitroeff, Professor of History at Haverford College, Pennsylvania, reviewed the troubled history of the Greek monarchy and explained why the term grates with modern Greeks.