The Last Princess (14 page)

The idea for a public service of thanksgiving for the Prince's near escape probably originated with the Prince himself; it was enthusiastically taken up by members of his family, Gladstone and the government – all, in fact, except the Queen, who disliked the sort of spectacle proposed above all and behaved with singular obstructiveness throughout the two-month-long planning period. She successfully insisted, against all precedents, that the occasion be a semi-state affair, allowing her to wear ordinary morning
clothes and travel in an ordinary carriage without the accompaniment of bands and massed soldiery. She was also adamant that the Prince and Princess of Wales not have a carriage of their own, but travel with her – in an open landau shared with their eldest son, eight-year-old Albert Victor and the Queen's youngest daughter Beatrice, the two children flanking the Prince. On other matters, such as increasing the number of guests invited to the cathedral, she was forced to give way, to the greater success of the occasion, as
The Times
reported when all was finished: ‘Those who say the British people do not love shows mistake them sadly.’
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As it turned out, the Queen enjoyed herself thoroughly, describing 27 February 1872 as ‘a day that can never be forgotten!’ ‘Could think and talk of little else, but today's wonderful demonstration of loyalty and affection, from the very highest to the lowest.’
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With the Prince's recovery, popular support for republicanism dissipated overnight. ‘Thank God for this! Heaven has sent this dispensation to save us,’ as the Duke of Cambridge wrote to his mother.
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At the Queen's side throughout the celebrations was her youngest daughter, looking ‘very nice in mauve, trimmed with swan's down’ and carrying a swan's-down muff.
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Afterwards, enjoying the loud cheers of the crowd from the balcony of Buckingham Palace was a family reduced to five: the Queen, Alfred, Arthur, Leopold and Beatrice, or, as the Queen put it in a phrase that betrays the hierarchy of her affections, ‘Beatrice and my three sons’.
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Firmly established beside her mother, with none of her sisters present, the last princess had become, in the eyes of the crowd below, the only princess. For the remainder of her mother's life Beatrice would occupy such a position of prominence in the public imagination, an unusual degree of notability in a family over which the Queen cast an exaggeratedly long shadow.

NINE

‘The flower of the flock’

NIA combination of guilt and pity inspired the extremely generous confirmation present Beatrice received from her siblings in January 1874. With the exception of the Crown Princess – the richest of her sisters – Beatrice's brothers and sisters joined forces in order to buy her a single significant gift. Leopold coordinated the purchase, writing to his favourite sister Louise on 18 December 1873,

I must now ask you about a confirmation present for Beatrice; we have all agreed to give one present together, so as to give a handsome one. We have selected a most lovely bracelet, pendant and earrings from Phillips', costing £150 [equivalent to £9000 in 2005]—Bertie and Alix meant to give £49, – Affie and Arthur £25 each, I £15 and Alice and Lenchen each £12, and I was asked to write to you about it. I suppose you are sure to agree to this arrangement but all the same I should like an answer.
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Louise did not refuse her contribution of £12.

Robert Phillips of London's Cockspur Street was a fashionable West End jeweller working in the so-called ‘archaeological’ taste. His customers included Sir Austen Layard, archaeologist and excavator of the Assyrian city of Nineveh, who commissioned from Phillips necklaces made from ancient coins and Assyrian cylinder seals; and Louise's husband the Marquess of Lome, whose wedding gifts to the princess had included a tiara by Phillips in the form of leaves and buds of bog myrtle, the emblem of the Campbell clan. Beatrice's present was not of course a tiara, a piece of jewellery, as in Louise's case, particularly associated with marriage; but the suite of modish, finely made jewels may
have been intended by its donors as a token compensation for their youngest sister's exclusion from that state, as well as an acknowledgement that – her mother's ‘Baby’ notwithstanding – at almost seventeen, she was indeed an adult. With the diamond necklace and matching long earrings that, in similar designs, had been the Queen's confirmation present to all five of her daughters, and the Duchess of Kent's pearls, which the Queen herself had worn since her mother's death – the last a token of singular esteem on the Queen's part – Beatrice would from now on have a choice of grown-up gew-gaws to wear at the Queen's dinners she had begun attending irregularly at the age of fifteen.

The service took place on 9 January, ‘a rainy dull day’,
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at St Mildred's Church, Whippingham, close to Osborne on the Isle of Wight. Rumours of the imminence of Beatrice's confirmation had reached her godmother, the Crown Princess, in Germany as early as March 1872. At that point, with Beatrice not yet fifteen, the suggestion had horrified the Queen, who was determined, for reasons of her own, to put off the event for as long as possible: ‘I shall certainly not have [Beatrice] confirmed till after she is sixteen for all of you sisters have come out too early and been made to grow up too soon. I mean to keep her back much more.’
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In the event, Beatrice was confirmed, like her sisters, at the age of sixteen – though the absence of her eldest sister and the latter's husband meant that the milestone was passed without the customary prop of a single godparent (the Duchess of Kent had died in 1861). Officiating were the Archbishop of Canterbury, the rector of St Mildred's, Canon Prothero, and the Reverend Robinson Duckworth, from 1866 to 1870 Leopold's governor, retained by the Queen as a chaplain to the Household since he was ‘so enlightened and so free from the usual prejudices of his profession… an excellent preacher and good looking besides’.
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It was Duckworth who had prepared Beatrice for this important rite of passage. The triumvirate of clergymen was familiar to Beatrice, since all had officiated at the most recent royal confirmation, that of her brother Leopold in 1869, while St Mildred's, which the Queen reported ‘very full’ on this occasion, had been the Queen's preferred venue for all her children's
confirmation services since the death of the Prince Consort. Also present were Lady Car, who wrote an account of the service to the Crown Princess, and Mrs Thurston, Beatrice's childhood nurse, who had retired from royal service in 1867 to a house near Kensington Palace, where Beatrice continued to visit her.

If Beatrice's siblings, with their munificent present, had hoped to offer her not only some recompense for her lonely servitude at the Queen's side but also recognition of her confirmed adult status, their intent was in direct opposition to the Queen's. The Queen rejoiced that Beatrice, far from seeming grown-up, appeared quite the opposite at her confirmation service. Eighteen years earlier, for her confirmation, the Crown Princess, then Princess Royal, had worn what
The Times
described as a ‘rich silk glace gown, with five flounces pinked, the body richly trimmed with white riband and Mechlin lace’.
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The effect of Beatrice's much more simple gown and her undressed long hair was very different, but exactly what the Queen wished (just as on that previous occasion she had intended her daughter to appear older than her sixteen years and hence prepared for the daunting political alliance into which the Queen and Prince Albert had hastened her in betrothing her to the future king of Prussia). With questionable tact the Queen wrote to the Crown Princess, ‘I never saw anyone look more simple, pure, innocent and sweet than this dear good child did. She looked so very young—and her very plain white silk dress—beautiful complexion and very fine fair hair which she wears quite simply and plainly (and wishes to continue to do) was very suitable.’
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Beatrice herself was more ambivalent about her appearance Sending a photograph of herself in her confirmation dress to Lady Car, she expressed the hope that Lady Car would like the picture, but added quickly, ‘Photographs taken in a room are never very good.’
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As for wishing to continue wearing her hair ‘quite simply and plainly’, in the portrait of Beatrice Henry Richard Graves painted for the Queen in the first quarter of 1874, she wears her hair up, decorated with flowers, with soft ringlets falling on to the back of her neck and one shoulder. Also
in this very pretty, defiantly grown-up picture, Beatrice wears pinned to the fichu of her low-cut gown the Royal Order of Victoria and Albert. The jewelled order, alongside an ‘Indian shawl’, had completed the Queen's confirmation presents to her daughter. Taken as a whole, they comprised a consolation prize to Beatrice for not being allowed to attend the wedding, in St Petersburg, of her second brother Affie to the Grand Duchess Marie of Russia. An occasion of some splendour, the wedding took place on 23 January and was attended by a number of Beatrice's siblings. (In a long-distance courtesy, the Russians added to Beatrice's new trawl of decorations and marked the occasion of the uniting of the two families by awarding her the Grand Cross of the Order of St Catherine.)

Beatrice wore the Victoria and Albert Order again in her portrait by Heinrich von Angeli, painted the following year to commemorate her eighteenth birthday. In both portraits the jewel serves as a reminder of Beatrice's rank. It also brands her clearly in the viewer's eye her mother's daughter, as a farmer tags his cattle or marks the fleece of his sheep, a symbol of possession as much as an ornament.

Despite the Queen's determination that Beatrice remain for ever childlike, she considered Graves's portrait ‘charming’.
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She instructed that it be shown publicly at the Royal Academy the following summer, her pride in her last daughter's prettiness momentarily outweighing any concern she may have felt that Beatrice was undeniably growing up. As a further token of affection the Queen presented Beatrice with Graves's picture of herself, painted at the same time as Beatrice's own portrait. This ‘very nice picture and good likeness’
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hung in Beatrice's sitting room at Buckingham Palace. Even in moments of repose during her rare trips to London Beatrice would not escape her mother's gaze, for ever fixed in paint.

Graves's portrait encapsulates a typically ‘Victorian’ contradiction. Its presentation of Beatrice is not one calculated to deter the advances of romantically inclined young men, combining as it does good looks with strong intimations of a sweet and gentle disposition, the very acme of later Victorian feminine
desirability. Nor is it the result of any decision on Beatrice's part to exploit Graves's talents to signal to the world her accession to womanhood, a considered defiance of her mother. The Queen habitually interfered with all the portraits she commissioned. It is impossible that Beatrice could have sat for Graves without her mother at some point interesting herself in their sittings. Indeed, such was the extent of the Queen's interference with Graves's work, and so badly did Graves respond to it, that the Queen's private secretary Henry Ponsonby had occasion to write to his wife, ‘Henry Graves… says he cannot do [the portraits] yet as his nerves are gone… I suspect that incessant Royal criticisms are more than he can bear.’
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Undertaken after Beatrice's confirmation, the portrait, like that event, might have been expected to herald Beatrice's entry into society and her availability for marriage. But the Queen did not wish her daughter to enter any society save that of her heavily vetted court and that only sparingly, telling the Crown Princess that she did not intend either confirmation or Beatrice's seventeenth birthday three months later to be marked by Beatrice beginning to appear at state parties. She also meant strenuously to prevent her marriage. Yet she commissioned from Graves this dewy-eyed coming-of-age portrait and exhibited the results to the fashionable world at the Royal Academy.

In the matter of Beatrice's spiritual preparation for her journey through life the Queen had not been remiss and, in this respect, she was happy that the service of 9 January marked a new maturity. During the royal visit to Balmoral the previous autumn the Queen and her daughter had encountered the new minister of Crathie kirk, Dr Campbell from Lonmay in Aberdeenshire, who made a strong impression on both. The Queen described in her Journal a Sunday visit to Glencoe: ‘Rested, wrote, and then read prayers with Beatrice, and part of Mr Campbell's sermon, which Beatrice was so pleased with that she copied it entirely.’
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Except in the unlikely event of Dr Campbell having inspired a schoolgirl crush, this is not the typical occupation of a teenage girl yearning for romance and escape. Beatrice approached religion with a degree of seriousness: it would remain throughout
her life one of her chief comforts and she would later count a number of clergymen among her more intimate correspondents. Maid of honour Marie Mallet, who encountered Beatrice during the 1890s, claimed that she delighted ‘in theology and all religious questions. Science is a dead letter,’ and found her ‘more fitted to be a clergyman's wife than a Princess, except of course in matters of finance’.
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