The Last Princess (21 page)

Though she kept her counsel, in the early 1880s Beatrice was beginning to realize that, like her brothers and sisters, she too had a life beyond the Queen.

THIRTEEN

‘If only she could marry now’

Louis of Battenberg was handsome and dashing, like a Raphael when he was young, like a Velazquez when he was older, according to his sister's memoirs. He was also strong-minded and intelligent. He was only fourteen when, independent of his parents, he forswore his German nationality, became an Englishman and joined the Royal Navy. He was the son of that buccaneering Alexander of Battenberg whom the Queen had invited to Windsor for the birth and christening of Victoria of Hesse. Louis had inherited his father's adventurous spirit as well as his bold good looks and winning charm.

In 1884 Louis married Victoria of Hesse. They were cousins, Victoria a favourite granddaughter of the Queen, who gave the match her qualified blessing, writing to the bride-to-be, ‘I think that you have done well to choose only a Husband who is
quite
of your way of thinking and who in many respects is as English as you are – whose interests must be the same as yours and who dear Mama [the Queen's daughter Alice] liked… One only drawback do I see – and that is “the fortune”.’
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Possibly the Queen drew a sigh of relief that the dashing naval man had succeeded in allying himself with her family only to the extent of marrying a granddaughter. Four years previously the Queen had acted with chilling ruthlessness to stamp out embryonic hopes – real or imaginary – Louis may have harboured of marrying Beatrice.

Beatrice met Louis, romantically, at a ball. Under the Queen's watchful gaze they danced together. Afterwards the Queen invited Louis to dinner at Osborne and placed him between herself and Beatrice. During the whole evening Beatrice did not utter a single
word to Louis, who retired chastened and nonplussed. Years later he discovered the explanation for this extraordinary evening. The Queen had forbidden Beatrice to talk to him, and had placed them together precisely so that Beatrice, through her silence, could rebuff any thoughts of romance on Louis's part. Just to be certain, the Queen instructed the Admiralty that Louis was to be sent abroad and, for the time being, employed only on foreign stations. He departed the country on 24 August 1880, his ship the unfortunately named
Inconstant.
Scandalmongers persisted in coupling his name with Beatrice's, and far away from home Louis read in a foreign newspaper of his secret betrothal to the Queen's youngest daughter. But Beatrice had done her mother's bidding: her connection with Louis of Battenberg existed only in rumour -and the realm of might-have-beens.

The Queen's assessment of Beatrice's character at seventeen, made to her eldest daughter – ‘I may truly and honestly say I never saw so amiable, gentle and thoroughly contented a child as she is. She has the sweetest temper imaginable… and is unselfish and kind to everyone’
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– is characteristic of her references to Beatrice in her correspondence relating to the latter's teenage years and early twenties. Repeatedly the Queen commends Beatrice's sweetness, the amiable and gentle nature she would manipulate with such steely selfishness when occasion demanded. Biographers have queried this unwavering even-temperedness, but no evidence survives to negate the Queen's appraisal or to suggest that it represents simply self-serving, the Queen salving her conscience for appropriating Beatrice's life to her own ends by interpreting the appearance of a sweet nature as complicity. Happily Beatrice made the Queen's wishes her own. This remarkable disposition may have arisen from true goodness of spirit, from fear or from a degree of self-containment. What is undoubtedly the case is that the family betrothals of the early 1880s, greeted by Beatrice with every appearance of selfless pleasure, would have tried lesser natures in a similar position.

From Balmoral in November 1881 Beatrice wrote to her brother Leopold within hours of hearing of his engagement to
Princess Helen of Waldeck-Pyrmont: ‘You know too well my love and devotion to you not to believe that my good wishes come from the bottom of my heart and are no mere empty words. May her you have chosen make you as happy as you deserve to be and brighten your life which has been so sorely tried.’
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Later she wrote to Helen, ‘How thankful I am for the happiness you are giving my dear Brother.’
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Beatrice was twenty-four. Louis of Battenberg had been banished for over a year. Beatrice's prospects of marriage appeared non-existent. The previous year, in a letter to one of Beatrice's nieces, the Queen had described her daughter as ‘too young to understand many things which only a wife and Mother can’.
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Helen was four years younger than Beatrice.

A marriage of a sibling was one thing. The marriages of Beatrice's nieces and nephews, beginning with that of Charlotte of Prussia in 1876 and escalating through the following decade until Victoria and Louis's marriage in 1884, posed different challenges for the long-suffering Beatrice. Although she had been brought up to value her mother's happiness more highly than her own, her only recourse in the face of what became increasingly frequent pinpricks of humiliation was silence. She remained attentive at her mother's side and did not share with outsiders any feelings save congratulations for those more fortunate than herself – on the brink of discovering freedom and independence in marriage.

For Leopold and his Helen, happiness was to be short-lived. The former died on 28 March 1884 m Cannes, his widow pregnant with a posthumous son. His mother's gloomy court was plunged once again into mourning. Wrestling with her own grief for the brother she loved so much more than he loved her – ‘She feels it so dreadfully,’ the Queen reported
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– Beatrice had also to contend with her mother's low spirits. The Queen was still depressed by the death of John Brown the previous spring: ‘It is in short the constant missing of that merry buoyant “nature” of my dearest Brown which depresses me so terribly and which makes everything so sad and joyless! – And this I carry everywhere about with me.’
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Now she reeled from this new blow. Ever present was her anxiety over the safety of General Gordon in
Khartoum, a campaign in which she interested herself closely, in direct opposition to her detested Prime Minister, Gladstone. Fears for Gordon's safety and exasperation at Gladstone's refusal to act on those fears made the Queen frequently irritable. Added to this was her continuing infirmity. At least a light shone on the horizon: Victoria's marriage to Louis in Darmstadt in April. The wedding was postponed to the end of the month to make way for Leopold's funeral, but it was not cancelled.

As early as January, without reference to her own butterfly-wing liaison with Louis, Beatrice had made arrangements with Victoria to accommodate the Queen's special requirements – the sort of long-distance ‘housekeeping’ typical of the tasks the Queen allotted her. ‘Auntie has sent you a Memorandum about our coming and I hope I shall not be giving much trouble,’ the Queen wrote to her granddaughter with commendable disingenuousness. ‘I am, however, still a very poor creature. I can hardly stand at all—and must be led down stairs, – I can go upstairs by holding on by the banisters or a rope against the wall and I must be led and helped in and out of a carriage by my own Servant.’
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Given the feeling of claustrophobia this brief extract inspires even at a remove of more than a century, it is no surprise that, despite her grief over Leopold and unavoidable ‘what-ifs?’ in relation to Louis, Beatrice longed to make the journey to Darmstadt to witness the young couple's happiness (Victoria was six years younger than ‘Auntie’) and enjoy a brief dilution of the Queen's company in pleasant, cheerful surroundings.

Had her father the Grand Duke, Alice's widower, not determined to marry his mistress, a Russian divorcee of questionable reputation, Victoria of Hesse would have looked forward to her English grandmother's arrival in Darmstadt for her wedding. As it was, the Queen would undoubtedly oppose the Grand Duke and a degree of ill will seemed unavoidable. So certain was Victoria that her father's affairs would spoil her wedding that, when the time came, she took to her bed with an attack of highly uncharacteristic nerves.

The arrival of Auntie Beatrice, however, inspired only happy
feelings for the bride-to-be. ‘Auntie’ was kind and gentle, essentially self-effacing and, by this stage, rapidly losing her early bloom. As the Queen called her, so she appeared – an aunt, unlikely now ever herself to be married. In November of the previous year Beatrice had given a sitting to the Queen's latest portraitist, Diisseldorf-born Carl Rudolph Sohn, for a small, full-length portrait that, on completion, must have made its subject despair. Pudding-faced and wearing an expression of stolid resignation, Beatrice stands at the foot of a flight of stone steps. Cylindrical of body, ungainly and without grace despite the lace-trimmed parasol she holds above her head and the spray of roses that hangs from her free hand, she presents to the viewer a dumpy, despairing figure, too overwhelmed by boredom even to look up. Her elaborate, shimmering silk dress, with its full train and pleated underskirt, and the lace shawl so artfully draped over her arm, struggle to imbue this unlovely picture with a semblance of prettiness. Vanished are the princess's bright complexion, the lustre of her hair, the aura of youth on which the Queen so determinedly insisted. In her eyes is neither light nor life; there is no light anywhere save that glinting on the folds of the dress's heavy skirt draped across barrel hips. Sohn's picture is an image of weariness, of the systematic undermining of youthful vigour; a study in lethargic acquiescence. Let us hope, for Beatrice's sake, that this is the picture that encouraged the Queen, four years later, to commission a life-size three-quarter-length portrait of her from Rudolph Swoboda – ‘to replace the very ugly one Sohn did of her’.
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It was not an image of a daughter any loving mother ought to have cherished or even displayed. Nor did it result simply from ineptness on Sohn's part. The artist produced at the same time markedly more successful images of two of the Queen's daughters-in-law, Leopold's Helen and the Duchess of Edinburgh, the latter the possessor of what she herself described as a ‘pig-like face’,
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transformed by Sohn into a mask of bourgeois prosperity. Happily for Beatrice, not only her mother but her Hesse nieces recognized her many sterling qualities and essentially sweet nature. What was less certain, but did not concern the Queen, was whether any likely prince or nobleman,
following in Louis of Battenberg's footsteps, would persevere beyond unpromising first impressions to find out those qualities.

The Queen's private secretary Henry Ponsonby suspected not. He and Beatrice became the Queen's right-hand ‘men’ at the same time – 1870. Since then Ponsonby had watched with concern Beatrice's development under her mother's iron schooling. He was fond of the princess, despite her odd manner, arising from shyness, that several courtiers found disconcerting. Lady Lytton, for example, recorded on 27 April 1897, ‘Princess Beatrice gave me a little parasol from the Queen after luncheon very shyly saying, “Mama thought you would like this” and then turned away.’
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Beatrice was forty at the time. Given the intimate nature of his relationship with the Queen, Ponsonby understood better than most the severe limitations imposed upon Beatrice. ‘If only she could marry now, at once, a good, strong man who would make her do what he wished, I really think she would turn out well,’ he wrote to his wife, former maid of honour Mary Bulteel.

I think she would want a Prince, though for her sake I should like an Englishman. But it must be soon. That manner you dislike is crystallizing, and her want of interest, which I believe comes from fearing to care for anything the Queen hesitates about, will become natural to her unless a good husband stirs her up. But poor girl, what chance has she?
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Ponsonby did not presume to speak to the Queen about Beatrice, and his expression of concern did nothing to widen her horizons or hasten her marriage. Years passed and the oddness of Beatrice's manner – the unfocused, distant gaze of Sohn's portrait and a habit of not appearing to listen to anything addressed to her directly – did indeed crystallize.

Nina Epton, writing in 1971, quoted an unnamed ‘neighbour at dinner’, who painted a cruel portrait of Beatrice in her last unmarried years:

Sitting next to a beautiful princess is a reward for bravery in fairy stories, but if the gallant man were popped down every night next
to Princess Beatrice, he would soon cease to be brave. Not that she has nothing to say, for when the subject moves her, she has a torrent, but what with subjects tabooed, the subjects she knows nothing about, and the subjects she turns to the Queen upon, there is nothing left but the weather and silence.
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