The Last Princess (22 page)

Planting a tree at the opening of the Duthie Park in Aberdeen, Beatrice had indeed fallen back on the weather to supply her with the quip that charmed those who attended her. But charmed they were, whatever the picture painted by an exasperated dinner partner or a portraitist of middling capacity. Beatrice was a victim of the Queen's determined curtailment of experience -even her reading of that royal favourite Tennyson, we have seen, was vetted by her mother. Although this curtailment shaped her character and proscribed her social abilities, it did not overwhelm her nature completely.

Struggling to persuade his mother to allow him to go to university in Oxford, Leopold, the cleverest of the Queen's sons, had written to her,

To meet with such companions of my own age as would be carefully selected would tend to take away that shyness of manner and general dullness of spirit in conversation and at all times indeed, of which you now so naturally and so much complain, and which must of necessity belong to one who has for so long led such a comparatively solitary life.
¹⁴

Leopold's analysis of his social defects held true for Beatrice too – with the significant difference that, in Beatrice's case, her behaviour did not cause the Queen to complain. Leopold was a man and, as such, though she treated him as a child, the Queen expected from him a role of greater action and initiation; the role she decreed for Beatrice was entirely passive. She did not wish her last daughter to dazzle in society, as her eldest daughter had. She wanted Beatrice to remain contented at her side; the admiration of any third party would only threaten that artificial equilibrium. Dullness was the Queen's trump card – an all-pervading dullness of manner, conversation and spirit that would
only finally be banished in the marriage she sought so hard and so long to prevent.

The Queen pursued her course with determination. Henry Ponsonby received a rebuke from his royal mistress, delivered by lady-in-waiting Lady Ely, after discussing a forthcoming marriage at dinner. The Queen's message requested that he refrain from bringing up the subject of marriage at table in front of Princess Beatrice.

Imagining herself all-seeing, the Queen struggled to impose on Beatrice a species of ostrich policy: if Beatrice did not hear about marriage, she would not think about it or desire it. The Queen overlooked only one factor – physical attraction. It was a surprising oversight for a woman whose own marriage had embraced such a potent element of sexual chemistry. When it happened to Beatrice, the Queen would be too preoccupied elsewhere to notice. Ironically, the culprit was once again a prince of Battenberg.

FOURTEEN

The Handsomest Family in Europe

For the Battenbergs, the handsomest family in Europe, it was to be third time lucky. First the Queen had suspected Louis of intentions towards Beatrice and dispatched him unhesitatingly to romantic oblivion overseas. Then his brother Alexander, known as ‘Sandro’, chosen for the precarious distinction of becoming reigning Prince of Bulgaria, claimed that he, too, might have married Beatrice had circumstances (namely the Queen and the instability of the Bulgarian throne) been different. In April 1884 the third brother Henry fell in love with Beatrice on sight. She returned his feelings and true love carried all before it. But the path was far from smooth.

Writing to his mother in Scotland, the Queen's doctor James Reid described Darmstadt at the time of Victoria of Hesse's marriage to Louis of Battenberg as ‘a dull place and none of us will be sorry to return’.
¹
As so often in their polite but unsympathetic relationship – Reid privately referred to Beatrice as ‘Betrave’, a ‘witty’ corruption of the French for ‘beetroot’ – the doctor's opinion and that of the princess diverged widely. For Beatrice, the sleepy Rhinish town of white houses and broad chestnut avenues, wrapped about by lush country, was not Reid's ‘dull place’ but the bucolic Eden remembered by Meriel Buchanan in the 1890s: ‘There were glorious beech woods where lilies of the valley and violets grew in profusion, there were green fields of cowslips and buttercups, there were great pine forests that were full of sandy rivers where one could gallop one's horses for miles.’
²
Darmstadt in the spring of 1884 was a romantic and special place – where Beatrice fell in love.

It lay to the south of Frankfurt, sheltered by hills, with long
views towards the Rhine. The administrative capital of the Grand Duchy of Hesse and by the Rhine, it was the site of the Hesse family's two principal palaces, the Alte Schloss and the Neues Palais, the latter built by Beatrice's sister Alice with a passing nod to Osborne and Thomas Cubitt's grand London houses of the 1850s. The Grand Duchy itself was a mid-sixteenth-century creation, a collection of territories north and south of Frankfurt but excluding the city itself, and east and west of the Rhine. Poor by Prussian standards, it nevertheless furnished the Hesse family with some thirty castles and palaces.

Among those plentiful residences were the Alexander Palace in Darmstadt and Heiligenberg, ten miles south of the town, on a mountain bluff amid the wooded hillsides, a farmhouse that had spread its wings to surround a courtyard and grown into a comfortable
Schloss
with towers, stables, a ballroom, a pergola hung with wisteria, a terrace of shady lime trees and, on a clear day, views as far as France. These were respectively the winter and summer homes of Alexander of Battenberg, his commoner wife Countess Julie von Hauke, created Princess of Battenberg, and the five children of that marriage, on account of Julie's non-royal rank, semi-royal, of morganatic blood: Marie, Louis, Sandro, Henry and Franz Josef. The Battenberg children were cousins once removed of Alice's children, the Queen's Hesse grandchildren, and so by marriage connections of the British Royal Family.

Setting out for Darmstadt in the wake of Leopold's funeral, the Queen had no intention of strengthening that connection beyond welcoming Louis as the husband of a much-loved granddaughter. She did not know that, like his elder brother, Sandro too had entertained thoughts of marrying Beatrice, nor did she consider the third brother Henry, who was younger than Beatrice, though only by a year. Sandro the Queen imagined deeply in love with another of her granddaughters, the Crown Princess's second daughter Victoria of Prussia, called in the family ‘Moretta’. As the Queen understood it, Sandro loved Moretta and Moretta loved Sandro, but Bismarck and the Tsar of Russia, both bugbears of the Queen's, opposed the union on political grounds. The
Queen had no idea that, having renounced Moretta, Sandro would later claim that he had sought to marry her only at the Crown Princess's instigation, and that his first choice of bride had been Beatrice. ‘I might even at one time have become engaged to the friend of my childhood, Beatrice of England,’ Sandro wrote to a friend, ‘had not Bulgaria's remoteness, the Princess's love of her home and the Queen's reluctance to be parted from her daughter formed insuperable obstacles.’
³

It is hard to see when Sandro imagined he had advanced any sort of suit with Beatrice sufficiently far to evaluate the factors opposing their match. A letter written by the Crown Princess to her mother refers to a visit made by Sandro to the imperial court at Berlin at the beginning of April 1881, but the suggestion of the princess's letter is that the Queen either did not know Sandro or had not seen him for some time: ‘We were so much struck with Sandro Battenberg when he was here. He is grown so handsome and seemed so nice and sensible, manly and yet modest. I am sure you would have been pleased with him.’
⁴
It is extremely unlikely that Sandro could have paid attentions to Beatrice without encountering the Queen and becoming known to her, particularly given the evidence of the Queen's and the Crown Princess's surviving correspondence. When, three years later, Sandro reappears in the letters, it is in the guise of suitor to the Crown Princess's daughter Moretta. No reference is made by either writer to any previous interest shown by Sandro in Beatrice, a peculiar omission: though Beatrice may have seen her sister's letters to the Queen, there is no reason to assume she saw the Queen's side of the correspondence. Of the three possible explanations for a deliberate omission of this nature on the Queen's part – fear that Beatrice would see the letters; fear that any third party intercept the letters; an overwhelming aversion to the whole subject that made its very mention distasteful – all are either unlikely or uncharacteristic of the Queen. A more plausible explanation for Sandro's claim is that, elected Prince of Bulgaria, he cast about for a wife. His first choice fell on Beatrice. The Battenbergs were loosely related to the British Royal Family and marriage to the Queen of England's daughter would have
brought Sandro significant political benefits, including a strong ally against Russian acquisitiveness. By marrying her previous daughter Louise to a subject the Queen had shown that she was less inflexible in the matter of purity of royal blood than the emperors of Germany or Russia were like to be, and may not have discounted his suit on the grounds of the Battenbergs’ morganatic heritage.

There is, of course, the chance, however slender, that Sandro's letter is no more than a statement of fact. That being so, either Beatrice declined his offer of marriage or, as with Louis, the Queen intervened to avert what for her would have amounted to a crisis. In these circumstances the Queen could have been forgiven at this later date for congratulating herself on twice having saved her daughter from amorous Battenbergs. That Beatrice was about to fall, unobserved, at the third fence – taking the opportunity of falling in love with Henry of Battenberg in Darmstadt in April 1884 – shows the degree of the Queen's preoccupation at Louis and Victoria's wedding.

Scarcely mobile; grieving deeply for the death of ‘my beloved Leopold, that bright, clever son who had so many times recovered from such fearful illnesses and from various small accidents’
⁵
concerned (misguidedly or otherwise) for the happiness of her granddaughter Moretta; startled into displeasure by the announcement of the engagement of the bride's sister Ella of Hesse to the Grand Duke Serge of Russia; full of maternal anxiety for the motherless bride Victoria of Hesse; and, when she learnt of it, determined to undo Louis of Hesse's secret remarriage to his Russian mistress, Alexandrine von Kolemine, the Queen found her thoughts too completely occupied to entertain the unlikely prospect of rebellion on Beatrice's part. Unwittingly, she relaxed her customary gimlet vigilance. She failed to notice the instant mutual attraction between the unprepossessing ‘Auntie’ of Sohn's portrait and the handsome, dark-haired army officer. It was left to Beatrice to break the news to her mother – later, when the royal party had returned to Windsor. Then the ferocity of the Queen's reaction shocked even her family. In time she would relent, but she did so only after a struggle. On Darmstadt, the
scene of her fatal weakness, she never looked with the same favour again. Concerning her visit there the following year for a family christening, she wrote to the Crown Princess, ‘I can't say I look forward to that visit as much as I would if the dreadful engagement of Beatrice was not in existence and if I didn't know how unwittingly I was deceived about it there.’
⁶
The Queen had been doubly deceived at Darmstadt: first by the Grand Duke; more significantly, since she swiftly set in motion the process of annulment of Louis's remarriage, by Beatrice. It was the site of Beatrice's liberation.

The Queen could not help the fact that for her the act of loving involved deeply possessive instincts. As early as 1870 she had written to Lord Lome, then engaged to Louise, ‘Mine is a nature which
requires
being loved, and I have lost almost all those who loved me most on earth.’
⁷
Her warning to Louise's fiance was clear: though the Queen had approved their marriage, she had no intention of surrendering her daughter completely. When Louise married, the Queen still kept with her Leopold and Beatrice, in addition to John Brown. By the time Beatrice fell in love with Henry of Battenberg, Leopold and Brown were both dead; Beatrice was the last object of affection the Queen ‘possessed’. That she meant not to lose her had been written in letters of steel at least as long ago as 1870.

As she watched the tapestry of fertile Hessian fields slip past the windows of the royal train carrying her home, Beatrice understood the magnitude of the task that confronted her in winning her mother's agreement to her marriage. Three years earlier, congratulating Leopold on his engagement, Beatrice had written, ‘Mama is after a momentary agitation quite calm, and I only hope she will remain so.’
⁸
That ‘momentary agitation’ may have been an understatement intended to reassure Leopold, a deliberate subterfuge on his sister's part to prevent their mother's thwarted ire from spoiling his happiness. When Beatrice's turn came, the Queen's agitation would be anything but momentary. Then no mollifying sibling provided a screen for her feelings.