The Last Princess (13 page)

The summer before Louise's wedding, Beatrice had written to Lady Car, ‘As it is not my turn to go out with Mama, I will take the opportunity of writing to you.’
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Louise was still her mother's helpmeet, but Beatrice knew already that the opportunity of writing to her governess existed only because it was
not
her turn to dance attendance on her mother. She had begun her training early.

The Queen was quick to censure an ‘unamiable’ nature, less quick to commend its reverse. She made an exception in Beatrice's case, but even with Beatrice could not bring herself to believe that an amiable nature alone would guarantee her submission in the long term. And so by failing to trust, the Queen placed herself at an impasse of her own making, a situation full of the contradictions at which she excelled. She required a grown-up daughter at her constant beck and call, but could only be certain of that daughter's acquiescence by forbidding her the sort of
grown-up thoughts that she had seen led inexorably towards marriage. Without a degree of intellectual and emotional maturity, no one could adequately take on the task of the Queen's extensive correspondence or successfully act as go-between from monarch to minister, matriarch to child, but the intellectually mature had a habit of independent thought that was anathema to the Queen. Five years earlier it had accounted for her reservations over the suitability of Louise as Helena's successor: ‘She is not very discreet, and is very apt to take things always in a different light to me.’
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Beatrice, the Queen must have known, was not Louise: for a decade the Queen had schooled her to entertain no thoughts but her own. Still the Queen worried. She had a single solution: her ‘Baby’ must remain her baby, unspoilt by worldly or romantic thoughts, preserved in unnaturally prolonged childishness as she had grown up in an environment of unnaturally prolonged grief.

The atmosphere at court, in which sober, decorous amusements were the order of the day, assisted the Queen in her plan. As early as 1865 she had forbidden her daughters to read novels. She preferred instead poems ‘in all shapes’
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on account of their more elegant, less perfervid expressions of emotion than those found in contemporary fiction. But poems, too, were subject to censorship, even Tennyson causing the Queen concern on occasion. On reading his ‘Queen Mary’ – ‘I am not so set on wedlock as to choose/But where I list, nor yet so amorous/That I needs must be husbanded’ – the Queen admired it ‘immensely excepting the coarseness which ought to have been omitted… Beatrice read it (with all those parts omitted)…’
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“Beatrice was eighteen at the time. Predictably, with the human instinct for hankering after forbidden fruit, she would later claim she could not bear poetry, preferring prose.
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In 1868 the Queen had published
Leaves from the Journal of Our Life in the Highlands.
In its first year, the book sold 103,000 copies in a cheap edition published at 2s. 6d,
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and the Queen henceforth considered herself an author, her Highland home not merely a peaceful retreat but the inspiration for a
litterateuse.
‘Rather amusing,’ wrote Mary Ponsonby, ‘the literary line the Queen has taken up since her
book was published.’
¹⁴
The Queen had begun to paint again, she knitted and crocheted. ‘I am so fond of painted flowers,’ she wrote to the Crown Princess in January 1871, ‘and have taken to do
[sic]
them myself which I don't think I told you – and really I was surprised at my own comparative success. I will try to do some for you… Do tell this to dear Fritz. I have just croche'd him a comforter which it gave me much pleasure to do, and I sent it to him today and hope he may use it.’
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In years to come conflict in the Near East would see the Queen's ladies, under Beatrice's management, involved in a flurry of bandage-making, the sort of parlour relief work the Queen considered a suitable feminine contribution to the male arena of war. Added to music, riding, skating in the winter, yachting excursions at Osborne in the summer and a constant stream of visiting relatives, along with lessons, which continued until she was sixteen, and her work for the Queen, this left Beatrice limited time in which to entertain the thoughts so worrying to her mother. As Beatrice wrote to Disraeli early in 1881, thanking him for his gift of his latest novel
Endymion,
‘I have had so much writing to do lately, that I am sorry I could not read the book as steadily as I should have liked, but I can assure you that it has not rendered it the less interesting…’
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Objects of interest were in short supply and the only potential fly in the ointment as far as the Queen was concerned was whether Beatrice could adapt herself to the stultifying boredom. ‘I must say I pity you as it must be very dull there,’ Bertie had written to Louise about the long New Year's stay at Osborne in 1869.
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Louise had hungered for the world outside her mother's walls and even, in 1868, successfully persuaded the Queen to allow her to enrol in sculpture classes at the National Art Training School in South Kensington. Bertie did not write in similar vein to his youngest sister. Unlike Louise, Beatrice knew nothing else and looked no further.

Beatrice's initiation into her duties towards her mother took the form of a baptism by fire. The summer of 1871 was the most difficult of the Queen's reign, characterized by family squabbles and demands from her ministers, chief among them the Prime
Minister, Gladstone, to which she was at first reluctant and ultimately physically unable to accede. The problem that exercised the Queen's children and her government was the same: the rising tide of republican feeling in the country, fuelled by the Queen's continuing withdrawal from public life and her apparent dereliction of her duty.

The Crown Princess was at Osborne for the summer, with her husband and four of her children. She discussed the problem separately with Gladstone and her siblings, and in August wrote a letter to her mother. ‘We have each of us individually wished to say this to you… but we refrained for fear of offending… Had not the conviction come upon
us all
(moving as we do in different circles), with an alarming force, that some danger is in the air, that something must be done… to avert a frightful calamity.’
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Not only the Crown Princess but all the Queen's children and even their spouses signed the explosive missive. All except Beatrice. She had been the Queen's lone helper for five months; already in her siblings’ minds she was too close to their mother to be involved in something that challenged her so directly. Perhaps the Crown Princess was reluctant to place Beatrice in an awkward and untenable position, or thought her still too young for something approaching a palace coup; perhaps Beatrice was invited to sign the letter and refused. Whatever the reason, the result was the same, with Beatrice singled out for special isolation within the family, an isolation she shared only with the Queen. It was an important and potentially damaging precedent.

The Crown Princess's letter was never sent. By the middle of August the Queen complained of feeling unwell and excused herself from family meals. Children, ministers and journalists united in choosing not to believe her. Her unwellness did not prevent her departure for Balmoral, as planned, on 17 August, Beatrice and Leopold at her side. Swiftly, however, it became clear that the Queen really was unwell. On 22 August she wrote, ‘Never since I was a girl, when I had typhoid fever at Ramsgate in ‘35, have I felt so ill.’
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The Queen had a throat infection, which was followed by an abscess on her arm. On 4 September
Joseph Lister lanced the abscess, having been specially summoned from Edinburgh for the purpose. In its wake came a severe attack of gout and rheumatoid arthritis. At the beginning of September the Queen was unable to walk, her only exercise being pushed around the castle garden in a chair, Beatrice walking beside her. Her arm was so painful that throughout much of August, September and October she dictated her Journal to Beatrice, a foreshadowing of things to come when, towards the end of the Queen's life, Beatrice acted as her full-time amanuensis, not only writing but also reading for her mother. Unable to move even across her sitting room, and too heavy to be lifted by Beatrice, her maids or dressers, the Queen was carried up and down stairs and even lifted into bed by John Brown.

Unsurprisingly the Queen's physical sufferings affected her state of mind. Her irritability of the beginning of the summer gave way to serious depression. It was not an enjoyable atmosphere for a girl of fourteen. Beatrice welcomed the arrival at Balmoral of Alice and her children. Two months earlier Alice had given birth to her sixth and penultimate child, named after the Queen's daughters Alix Victoria Helena Louisa Beatrice, but she slipped uncomplaining once more into her role of nurse. Alice's attendance on her mother was even more exacting than Beatrice's, since the latter continued to be sent to bed early and did not, as a matter of course, spend evenings with the Queen, part of a deliberate policy the Queen confided to the Crown Princess on Beatrice's sixteenth birthday to ‘keep her as young and child-like as I can.
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To her mother-in-law, Princess Charles of Hesse, Alice described what she found awaiting her at Balmoral:

Mama was weak and unwell when I arrived, as she was getting over two serious illnesses – a very bad throat infection, and then the abscess… on her arm which had to be operated on. Four days after our arrival, a third illness appeared, by far the most painful – rheumatoid arthritis… and she was confined to the sofa and could not move at all without help… I often sat with her… I play to her every evening, either alone or with Leopold.
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Though Alice's ministrations soothed the Queen, her recovery
was slow. In the second half of October she was still confiding to her Journal, ‘A most dreadful night of agonizing pain. No sedative did any good… Had my feet and hands bandaged. My utter helplessness is a bitter trial, not even being able to feed myself… Dictated my Journal to Beatrice which I have done most days lately… Was unable all day hardly to eat anything.’
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The Queen chafed in equal measure at her forced inertia and the indignity of her condition: ‘I can't help thinking that anyone, even inactive, would not like… to be fed like a baby which lasted three days and a half- the food being put into your mouth, your nose blown and everything done for you.’
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She did not appear in public until 5 November, when she attended a kirk service; even then she required John Brown's help to negotiate the steps into the building.

During Alice's stay Beatrice had enjoyed, in the company of her Hesse nieces, a reprieve from the unremitting dourness of this first summer with no sisters at home to divert her. It was to be all too brief. Quite by chance she and her mother had again fallen into that reversal of roles they played out in the tear-stained mornings after the Prince Consort's death, the Queen reduced by illness to infantilism, Beatrice watching and comforting, walking at the side of her mother's wheelchair, writing her diary. Again Beatrice's position was one that contained no element of choice; again her role was to react rather than anticipate or initiate. If in later life she was criticized for indecision or, as one maid of honour would have it, lack of imagination, it is easy to see how that suppression of her own instincts came about. No loving daughter could have responded any differently to a mother so afflicted. Only on 22 November was the Queen able to record in her Journal, ‘Breakfasted for the first time again with my children, and felt it was a step forward and I was returning to ordinary life.’
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But if the Queen and Beatrice imagined their difficulties at an end, they had one further grim surprise in store. The very same day, the Queen ‘heard dear Bertie had “mild typhoid fever”… Felt very anxious.’
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A week later, reports of the Prince's condition were sufficiently alarming for the Queen to set off for Sandringham,
the Waleses’ country house in Norfolk. By 8 December, ‘It was decided to send for Leopold and Beatrice, as the danger seemed so great.’
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Beatrice had been too young for her father's typhoid deathbed, but she was not too young to witness the similar demise of her eldest brother. Such was the pressure of space at Sandringham, on which the Royal Family had descended in numbers, not only Bertie's siblings but such peripheral relations as the Queen's cousin the Duke of Cambridge, that Beatrice had to share a bed with Louise. But despite the overcrowding and atmosphere of despondency, the Queen organized her days much as she would in her own home, overruling the Princess of Wales on all domestic matters and dining alone with her two youngest children, an arrangement that further taxed the house's already overstretched staff.

Matters reached a head on 13 December, and it seemed certain that the Prince would die – if not then, the following day, the tenth anniversary of the Prince Consort's death. Almost miraculously, at the eleventh hour the Prince's condition took a turn for the better. Like that of the Queen, his recovery was slow, and the Queen decided to alter her Christmas plans, remaining at Windsor rather than removing to Osborne. There the Christmas festivities hardly merited the name. ‘This was the first Christmas the Queen had spent at Windsor since the death of the Prince Consort,’ Lady Waterpark recorded in her diary on Christmas Day, ‘but she would not go to Osborne on account of the Prince of Wales's illness. He continued so ill, there were no Trees as usual or Christmas festivities. Our presents were sent to us in our rooms.’
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Even to so amiable and unselfish a child as Beatrice it must have seemed a long year.