Maximilian, Margrave of Baden obituary

Philip himself had been partly educated in Germany at the Schule Schloss Salem, owned by the Margrave of Baden. In addition to Theodora, another of Philip’s sisters Princess Sophie had also married a German prince, Christoph Ernst August of Hesse. A nephew of Kaiser Wilhelm II and a great-grandson of Queen Victoria, more to the point, he had also been an active Nazi and an Oberführer in the SS.

It was reported that even Queen Elizabeth, later the Queen Mother, had doubts about Philip’s engagement to her daughter and in private referred to her future son-in-law as “the Hun”.

With memories of the Second World War still raw, it was unsurprising that the British government advised the royal family that it was politically inexpedient for Philip’s German relatives to be seen at the wedding and so Maximilian and his parents remained in Baden. Maximilian spent the day of his uncle’s wedding with his parents at Marienburg Castle, a Gothic revival palace near Hanover, where they toasted Philip and his new bride in absentia.

The party was joined by other similarly shunned German relatives of the British royal family, including the Duke and Duchess of Brunswick and Prince Louis and Princess Margaret of Hesse.

However, six years later the wounds of war had sufficiently healed for Maximilian to attend the coronation of his aunt Queen Elizabeth II with his parents and siblings as the official guests of the Duke of Edinburgh. It was at the ceremony that the 20-year-old future Margrave met his four-year-old cousin, the future King Charles III, while Maximilian’s mother was said to have got on famously with the new Queen and became her favourite sister-in-law. During the official state visit to West Germany in 1965, intended as the culmination of a 20-year process of reconciliation between the two countries, the Queen and Prince Philip were hosted at Salem Castle by Princess Theodora and her son, who by then had succeeded his father as the Margrave of Baden.

Maximilian was an honoured guest at the royal family’s party at Windsor in 2017 to celebrate the 70th wedding anniversary of Prince Philip and Queen Elizabeth.

He was unable to attend the state funeral of Elizabeth II at Westminster Abbey last year, when he was represented by his wife, the Margravine, Archduchess Valerie of Austria, and by Prince Bernhard, who succeeds his father as Margrave of Baden. He is survived by three further children, Princess Marie, Prince Leopold and Prince Michael.

Maximilian Andreas Friedrich Gustav Ernst August Bernhard, Prince of Baden, was born in 1933 in Salem, Germany, the eldest of three children to Berthold, Margrave of Baden, and Princess Theodora of Greece and Denmark. He was educated at the Schule Schloss Salem, founded by his grandfather and Kurt Hahn, who later established Gordonstoun School in Scotland, where Prince Philip and his three sons, Charles, Andrew and Edward, were pupils.

After the war, Maximilian — or Max von Baden as he was known — studied agriculture and forestry to manage the family estates, which included four castles and more than 2,000 hectares of forests and vineyards. He inherited the estate at the age of 30 in 1963 on the death of his father, along with the title of Margrave of Baden and an historical claim to the former Grand Ducal throne of Baden, created by Napoleon in 1806. Under pressure to produce his own heir, he became engaged to his first cousin, Princess Beatrix of Hohenlohe-Langenburg, the daughter of his mother’s older sister Princess Margarita, who like her husband, Gottfried, Prince of Hohenlohe-Langenburg, had been an active member of the Nazi Party. However, the engagement was called off and in 1966 he married Archduchess Valerie, the daughter of Archduke Hubert of Austria and Princess Rosemary of Salm-Salm.

He spent many years overseeing the family’s vineyards, which had been in operation since at least 1366, regarding it as a legacy and a familial obligation. “The motto of our family is ‘Fidelitas’, meaning loyalty and reliability,” he said. Fine white Rieslings became a speciality and the company’s premium red was given the name Fidelitas.

However, due to some poor investments he found himself in hock to his bankers for a sum in the region of 120 million marks (£42 million) and was forced to sell the contents of his castle at Baden-Baden. Amid a controversy, which was likened by the British media to the Duke of Devonshire announcing the sale of the treasures of Chatsworth, he initially offered the contents to the regional government of Baden-Württemberg as a job lot for $40 million.

The offer was refused and in 1995 some 25,000 items were auctioned by Sotheby’s in a sale lasting 15 days and which brought in $55 million, at the time a record. The provenance of the items was certified by the detailed inventories the family had maintained since the mid-17th century.

The sale also included some 750 old masters and 19th-century paintings. However, apart from a priceless set of 500-year-old panels from an altarpiece commissioned for the chapel at the family’s castle in Salem from Durer’s contemporary, Bernhard Strigel, a Sotheby’s spokesman noted that the family had “already sold its best pictures in 1790”.

Three years later he appointed his son and heir, Bernhard, as administrator of the family’s assets and the Baden-Baden castle was sold in 2001 to a German consortium. However, the Margrave was not quite left homeless and continued to live with his wife in another of the family’s ancestral seats at Salem Castle.

Maximilian, Margrave of Baden, first cousin of Charles III, was born on July 3, 1933. He died after a long illness on December 29, 2022, aged 89