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Biography

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Andrew Willoughby Ninian Bertie was born in London on 15 May 1929, the elder son of the Honourable James Bertie, a younger son of Montagu Bertie, 7th Earl of Abingdon, and of Lady Jean Crichton-Stuart, daughter of John Crichton-Stuart, 4th Marquess of Bute. Through both parents he belonged to the British Catholic aristocracy and was connected with several historic recusant families. He was educated at the Jesuit college of Beaumont in Old Windsor and then read History at Christ Church, Oxford. He also studied at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London. After national service he was commissioned into the Scots Guards. The combination of a Catholic upbringing, a classical and historical education, and military service formed the background from which he later entered the religious and chivalric life of the Order of Malta.

After leaving the army he spent more than twenty years as a schoolmaster, teaching modern languages, especially French and Spanish, at Worth School, the Benedictine independent school in West Sussex. He was widely described as a gifted linguist; in later life he was reported to speak English, French, Italian, Spanish, German, Dutch, Russian and Maltese. In 1956 he was admitted to the Sovereign Military Hospitaller Order of Saint John of Jerusalem, of Rhodes and of Malta. He progressed from the rank of Knight of Honour and Devotion to simple vows in 1977 and, in 1981, made his solemn profession as a Knight of Justice. By that profession he embraced the full religious life of the Order, including the vows of poverty, chastity and obedience, and thereafter lived as a celibate religious. He never married and had no children.

On 8 April 1988 the Council Complete of State elected him the seventy-eighth Prince and Grand Master of the Order, in succession to Fra' Angelo de Mojana di Cologna. He was the first Englishman to hold that office since the thirteenth century. As Grand Master he enjoyed the rank of a sovereign prince, the style of Most Eminent Highness, and the international standing of a head of state, the Order remaining a subject of public international law with diplomatic relations around the world. He was received in audience by Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI and by many civil heads of state, and he travelled extensively on behalf of the Order's diplomatic and humanitarian work. The government of the Order during his magistracy was exercised from Rome, principally from the Magistral Palace in Via Condotti and from the Villa del Priorato di Malta on the Aventine Hill.

During a magistracy of nearly twenty years Bertie encouraged the growth of the Order's medical, social and disaster-relief activities, carried out through national associations, volunteer corps and the Order's worldwide humanitarian agency. He maintained the Order's character as both a Catholic religious institute and a sovereign entity devoted to the defence of the faith and service to the poor and the sick, the historic charism of the Hospitallers. After a period of illness he died in Rome on 7 February 2008. His funeral was celebrated on 16 February 2008 in the Basilica of Santa Maria in Aracoeli. He was buried in the Church of Santa Maria del Priorato on the Aventine Hill in Rome. He was succeeded as Grand Master by Fra' Matthew Festing. Bertie has not been beatified or canonized, and he is not the subject of an established liturgical cult or list of patronages.

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