The Last Princess (11 page)

In time Mrs Anderson made a second recommendation to the Queen about Beatrice's musical education, suggesting that singer and composer Paolo Tosti be invited to train the princess's voice. From Tosti Beatrice may have absorbed her talent for sentimental
songs like ‘Retrospection’, her setting of a poem by Charlotte Elliott published after her marriage in a popular periodical for young women. It is in marked contrast to the earnest sacred works composed by her father, although its tone recalls in part the melancholy lieder Albert had written as a young man, with which Beatrice may have been familiar. Beatrice composed a number of such songs, mostly for her own entertainment, although several were performed in front of a wider audience, including at a party held in August 1892 to celebrate what would prove to be the last birthday of the Queen's old friend and fellow Isle of Wight resident, Alfred, Lord Tennyson.

On 14 August 1874 Lady Waterpark wrote in her diary, ‘A young pianist came [to Osborne], accompanied by her mother, to play before Princess Beatrice. We all assembled in the Drawing room to hear her.’
²⁰
As Beatrice grew up, there would be a series of similar ‘command’ performances, including on her twenty-fourth birthday, ‘a young man of sixteen [who] played on the piano in the Evening beautifully… His name was d'Albert.’
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Music provided Beatrice with a common interest with the only sibling who, after 1871, remained at home with her, and an absorbing pastime that offered her both an escape and a means of expression acceptable to the Queen. It is wrong for the post-Freudian biographer and reader to assume that Beatrice's enjoyment of music signals a struggle to find herself. At no point in her life did Beatrice suggest any uncertainty about who or what she was. Her father died when she was four and a half years old, and she became for her mother ‘the bright spot in this dead home’. From earliest childhood Beatrice was made aware by the Queen of exactly who she was and what was to be her role in life. Children accept as normal the circumstances that surround them. Although Beatrice may have recognized in later life the extreme degree of her thralldom to her mother (certainly, her daughter Ena was in no doubt about it), no direct betrayal to any third party survives to suggest she considered either the circumstances or the effect of her upbringing peculiar.

Of loneliness Beatrice could not be unaware, but this, too, she accepted as normal. Happily, her fondness for music leavened
the solitary hours. It was a fondness that endured lifelong. To commemorate her eightieth birthday in 1937, Beatrice received from the people of the Isle of Wight not a silver bibelot or trinket of jewellery but a Carolean organ of royal provenance in full working order. It was the present she had herself requested when she learnt of the islanders’ intention of honouring her. Such was the quality of the piano she owned as an adult – a Steinway DuoArt Pedal Electric Grand – that, on its removal from Kensington Palace after her death, it entered the collection of the Musical Museum and was used to make archive recordings for the BBC.

SEVEN

‘Auntie Beatrice sends you
many loves’

On I March 1877 Princess Alice wrote to her seventeen-year-old niece Charlotte of Prussia. Charlotte was newly engaged and about to be confirmed, an event her aunt would be unable to attend. Expressing her disappointment at this, Alice added, ‘The Cousins – who being at lessons send you their love – are so sorry that they know their Prussian Cousins so little – it has been unfortunate that of late years you have been able to see so little of each other.’
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Alice's letter encompasses important preoccupations of the women of Queen Victoria's family: confirmation (usually taken to indicate that a daughter had reached adulthood and might henceforth be considered marriageable – in Charlotte's case she had jumped the gun somewhat, hence the hasty concertinaing of events); engagement (invariably the ultimate aim of mother, daughter or the Queen, and in some cases all three); and the ties of extended blood relationships. The Queen found it impossible to interest herself in every new grandchild. To the Crown Princess she described unsympathetically the birth of her seventh granddaughter Princess Maud of Wales as ‘very uninteresting… it seems to me to go on like the rabbits in Windsor Park!’
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But her interest would increase as Maud neared an age to be married, and the Queen would never forget that Maud was her granddaughter and that she ought regularly to see her and be permitted, if necessary, to meddle in her upbringing and her future.

As with so much of Beatrice's life, even these three cornerstones of royal existence could not be taken for granted. She was from birth part of a large family; there would be no question but that she would follow her brothers and sisters and be confirmed into
the Church of which her mother was, in private, a vociferous head. But long before Beatrice's confirmation the Queen's determination crystallized that the event would not in the case of the last princess signify any readiness for marriage. The Queen had decided there would be no marriage. In order to be doubly certain, there would not even be any talk of marriage.

Queen Victoria was an only child; the Prince Consort had a single dissolute brother with no legitimate offspring; Beatrice and her siblings had no first cousins. What Beatrice soon acquired instead was numerous nephews and nieces – including Charlotte of Prussia, who was only three years her junior.

Beatrice could never remember a time when she had not been an aunt. She was twenty-one months old at the birth of the first of her siblings’ children, William of Prussia, and full of condescension when, the following year, she met William and his tiny sister Charlotte. The meeting was taken up with a tussle for position characteristic of the future Kaiser. As Lady Augusta Bruce described it: ‘Princess Beatrice very patronizing to “nephew and niece” and bearing his roughness with equanimity and wonderful goodness.’
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William refused to call Beatrice aunt, preferring to taunt her with her parents’ name for her, ‘Baby’. Beatrice held her ground and, with a bad grace, William compromised on ‘Aunt Baby’. For Charlotte, the Prince Consort had recommended Beatrice as a role model, amused by his daughter's precocious self-importance as she announced, aged three, that she must write letters to her niece. But Charlotte and Beatrice were never close, and Beatrice had the indignity, far from being a role model for her niece, of following rather than leading. This applied to small things as well as matters of consequence: in 1862 it was Charlotte's full-length portrait by Lauchert that inspired the Queen's commission of a similar portrait of Beatrice the following year; Charlotte became engaged to Prince Bernard of Saxe-Meiningen, a step-grandson of the Queen's half-sister Feodora, when she was only sixteen – Beatrice had to wait another eight years until, aged twenty-seven, she too was able to marry for love, an alliance that would be scoffed at by the ‘foolish, frivolous little Princess’ her niece.
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Happily, Beatrice
fared better with the Crown Princess's third child, Henry, who visited Osborne in 1867. Snow lay thickly on the slopes and terraces surrounding the Queen's seaside home, and even the Queen enjoyed long drives by sledge with Arthur, Louise and Lady Waterpark, sledging temporarily the only way of getting about. Beatrice joined in the fun, and five-year-old Henry's good graces earned him a commendation from his grandmother. ‘Dear little Henry is very well and a great darling and everyone admires him,’ wrote the Queen to her daughter.
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Even the charmless William occasionally had his uses for his aunt: his fourth birthday, in 1863, was the first occasion on which Beatrice joined her mother for grown-up dinner; William's health was drunk, ‘sweet Baby staying up on purpose’.
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Just as Queen Victoria had embraced her position as
‘mamma d'une nombreuse famille’,
so in time she came to relish her role as ‘grandmama of Europe’. Her house filled with paintings, photographs and sculptures of her far-flung descendants, to many of whom she addressed a regular and more than perfunctory correspondence. She was particularly punctilious about birthdays. In later years it was Beatrice who would coordinate this cumbersome communications network, assisted in her task by her consciousness of herself as part of the Queen's sprawling inkblot of a family. This consciousness was not shared by her older siblings, for whom those nephews and nieces, who were all but Beatrice's contemporaries, were simply so many children of their brothers’ and sisters’ marriages, seldom seen and of passing interest. They had not, as Beatrice had, shared holidays with those children, whose visits to the Queen began in the 1860s and increased over the next three decades. Ever at their grandmother's side to welcome them were their uncle Leopold and their aunt Beatrice. Afterwards, in the Queen's letters to her departed visitors, Leopold and Beatrice continued to supplicate for their attention: ‘I send you a photograph of Aunt Beatrice’;
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‘How very unfortunate your Uncle Leopold having hurt his leg!’;
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‘Auntie Beatrice sends you many loves’;
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‘Your Uncle Leopold was imprudent and overdid it fishing and had both legs bad! Why will he not listen? Auntie sends many loves.
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’ In due course,
the visitors sent photographs – of themselves, their husbands and wives, eventually their children. These photographs and the extended dramatis personae they represented came to form part of the backdrop to Beatrice's world. At the Queen's death her houses and most of their contents became Bertie's property. His defiantly new broom swept away such debris of the past, and back to the sitters went the images sent in love and duty. It was an action that would have been inconceivable on Beatrice's part, but by then Bertie's life had been distinct from that of the Queen for almost forty years, from the time of his marriage: the relations who comprised Beatrice's extended ‘cousinhood’ were to her elder brother often only names and faces. Bertie had been painted by Winterhalter as a child and again on his marriage. Winterhalter painted Beatrice as a baby, but the picture the Queen particularly craved from him was never begun: ‘of myself with Beatrice and perhaps a grandchild’.
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That picture would have expressed tangibly the dislocation of Beatrice's position: a daughter of a granddaughter's age, an aunt more akin to a sister.

Growing up, Beatrice existed in a limbo-like middle ground, one foot in one camp, one in another, belonging wholly to neither. Her place at the crossroads of two generations augmented the isolation that was the inevitable result of her mother's special treatment of her. The Queen further muddied the water by referring to Beatrice as ‘really almost as much like a sister as a daughter’.
¹²

The Hessian children whose remote relationship with their Prussian cousins Alice had lamented to her niece Charlotte were on better terms with their Wales cousins and their aunt Beatrice. Victoria of Hesse's memoirs include this account of childish romps at Windsor Castle in the period following Bertie's recovery from typhoid in the winter of 1871:

We were not old enough to understand the anxiety Grandmama was going through when her son was at death's door, and were a very merry party of children. Our wild romps in the great corridor, in which Aunt Beatrice, a girl of thirteen, joined, were often
interrupted by one of the pages bringing a message from the Queen that she would not have so much noise.
¹³

In the heat of the moment, Beatrice clearly overcame the uncertainty and rather priggish disapproval of her Wales nieces she had expressed in a letter to Lady Car the previous summer: ‘Bertie and Alix's two youngest little girls are here; I am sorry to say that Victoria is rather willful
[sic],
and very shy, but I hope that in time she will like us better.’
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‘All our cousins’, wrote Beatrice's niece, Helena's younger daughter Marie Louise of Schleswig-Holstein, ‘were more like brothers and sisters than mere blood relations.’
¹⁵
But the illusion did not hold good when pushed. Due to the overlap of generations, when at last Beatrice married, she became sister-in-law to one of her nieces. She suggested to that niece that from now on she call her sister rather than aunt. The niece demurred, unable at that point to break long habit. Beatrice, after all, had sisters of her own. But they were not her contemporaries, and the absence of a sister close to her in age, any cousin, or a niece to live with her contributed to her loneliness and the shyness that, after Helena's marriage in 1866 and the shrinking of the Queen's family at home, gradually replaced the ebullience of the Prince Consort's golden-haired baby.