Jun 8, 2020
King Georgios II of the Hellenes in exile at his Claridge’s Hotel suite in London, 1946.
He was reinstated in September but died of arteriosclerosis in Athens the following year. The forbidding monarch rarely inspired people around him; not even his subjects whom he thought were “romantic, but savages”, nor his own wife Elisabeth of Romania. Their marriage was childless, for he was deeply committed to his mistress Joyce Brittain-Jones, with whom he would share a home in Belgravia.
George infamously remarked:
“The most important tool for a King of Greece is a suitcase."
