Earl Mountbatten of Burma, K.G., O.M., 25 June 1900 - 27 August 1979

Abstract

Lord Mountbatten was the youngest of four children born to Princess Victoria of Hesse, one of Queen Victoria’s many granddaughters, and her husband and first cousin once removed, Prince Louis of Battenberg. The small principality to which Prince Louis’s family belonged came under Prussian hegemony following Austria’s defeat by Prussia in 1866, and was absorbed into the new German Empire created by Bismarck in 1871. Neither Prussia nor the new Germany was a sea power; and so, wanting to make the sea his profession, Prince Louis decided to join the Royal Navy. His father, a brother of the Grand Duke of Hesse, reluctantly agreed; and in 1868, Louis, then fourteen, surrendered his citizenship in Germany and form ally became a British subject. He was immediately posted to Nelson ’s old flagship, H .M .S . Victory. A distinguished career culminated in his appointmen t in 1912 as First Sea Lord, an office which he was to hold for only two years. A tide of an ti-German feeling began to flow in the first months of World War I and, once public confidence had been shaken by a series of losses at sea, it was clear that a man of German birth could not continue as First Sea Lord. Prince Louis felt it his patriotic duty to resign. Three years later the family name was changed to Mountbatten , and Prince Louis was created Marquis of Milford Haven.