to London to be a bridesmaid at the wedding of her aunt Louise Mountbatten to the future Gustav VI Adolf of Sweden. She returned to England in 1925 for the funeral of her great-aunt, Queen Alexandra. In 1926, she went to Italy for the funeral of her paternal grandmother, Queen Olga. A few weeks later, she returned to spend the summer in Great Britain, with her maternal grandmother, the Dowager Marchioness of Milford Haven. Engagement and family difficulties Considered by her maternal grandmother, the Dowager Marchioness of Milford Haven, as the prettiest of the four daughters of Andrew and Alice, Cecilie made her debut in the United Kingdom, during the summer of 1928. Aged 17, she took part in her first ball at the Earl and Countess of Ellesmere's Bridgewater House, before attending the Cowes Week and then being invited by King George V to stay a few days in Balmoral, Scotland. Although her two elder sisters were still single, and the relative poverty of her parents was not unrelated to this situation, Cecilie's family did not give up on finding a good match for her. Now Princess of Sweden, her aunt Louise was planning to betroth her to Crown Prince Frederick of Denmark, but the plan did not succeed. It was finally from Germany that a suitor for the young girl arrived. Since her childhood, Cecilie had in fact been in contact with her cousins, Princes Georg Donatus and Louis of Hesse, whom she first met in 1919, while she was living in exile in Switzerland. The relationship between the princess and Georg Donatus turned into a romance during the year 1929 and the two were unofficially engaged in early 1930. At that time, Cecilie was just 18 years old and Georg Donatus, the pretender to the throne of Hesse, was 23. The happiness of the princess was however clouded by the situation of her mother, whose mental health deteriorated sharply after the celebration of her silver wedding anniversary with Prince Andrew, in 1928. Struck by a mental health crisis, the princess convinced herself that she possessed healing powers and that she was receiving divine messages about potential husbands for her daughters. She then took herself for a saint and soon declared herself the bride of Jesus. Distraught by the situation, Prince Andrew finally made the decision to place his wife in a sanatorium. He took advantage of his