On This Day: Princess Marina laid to rest after her colourful life is cut short by a brain tumour

AUGUST 30, 1968: The last foreign princess to marry into the British Royal Family was laid to rest beside her controversial second-cousin husband Prince George on this day in 1968.

Greek-born Marina, Duchess of Kent, who died aged 61 from a brain tumour, was commemorated at a funeral ceremony at St George’s Chapel, Windsor Castle.

The Queen, Marina’s niece by marriage, led mourners in after her coffin was carried inside by eight officers from the three regiments of which she was Colonel-in-Chief.

Among those attending was the princess’s brother-in-law, the abdicated King Edward VIII, for whom it would be his last public appearance in Britain before his death.

Other mourners included the Duke of Edinburgh, who was also born in Greece as a member of its deposed royal family, Prince Charles, Princess Anne, the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret.

They sat next to Marina’s three children - Edward, the present Duke of Kent, Princess Alexandra and Prince Michael of Kent - in the front pew.

The service was conducted by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Arthur Ramsey, and Archimandrite Gregory Theodorus of the Greek Orthodox Church, the religion into which Marina was born on December 13, 1906.

The niece of the last Greek king, who was forced into exile at age 11, was laid to rest at the Royal Burial Ground, Frogmore beside her husband George, who died in a mysterious wartime plane crash in 1942.

His death – alongside 14 others when their RAF flying boat hit a Scottish hillside -  sparked claims that he was assassinated due to his suspected earlier Nazi sympathies.

George, who was also rumoured to be a bisexual drug addict who reportedly counted playwright Noel Coward and writer Barbara Cartland among his numerous alleged affairs, was a deeply controversial figure.

[On This Day: Princess Diana dies]

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Yet he and Marina, whose dazzling 1934 marriage had greatly excited the public, were both enormously popular members of the Royal Family.

And, in particular, her appeal only grew after she was made a widow at the young age of 35 – only three weeks after the birth of her third child Michael.

A British Pathé newsreel marking her death showed her presenting trophies at Wimbledon during her 26 years as President of the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club, a position now filled by her oldest son Edward.

Marina, whose mother was Grand Duchess Helen Vladimirovna of Russia, was also patron of several charities and carried out many royal duties.

At the time of her wedding, the princess, whose name lives on in her granddaughter Marina Ogilvy, was one of a long line of foreign princesses to marry into the Royal Family.

Yet, her marriage and the Queen’s to Prince Philip in 1947, remain the last occasions that another royal has joined the Windsors.

Such intermarriage and limiting of the gene pool has since become unpopular and the family has taken gradual steps to appear as more like as more like ordinary citizens.

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In 1981, Prince Charles chose to wed Lady Diana Spencer, a member of the British nobility, rather than tie the knot with a fellow royal.

And in 2005, following a divorce and Diana’s death, he avoided blood blue again by marrying Camilla Parker Bowles, who has slightly more diluted aristocratic roots.

Charles’s son, Prince William, took an even bolder social step in 2011 by marrying Kate Middleton, who is technically a ‘commoner’ despite having rich parents.