The Last Princess (23 page)

As early as i86 0 the Queen, herself still happily married to
the Prince Consort, had expressed strong reservations about the implications of marriage for women. In the years since Alice's, Helena's and Louise's weddings, that dislike had broadened. No longer did it focus specifically on the Queen's daughters and her tangible loss of their companionship. As she grew older, resisting change in many forms, the Queen opposed the marriage of anyone near to her: child, courtier or servant. Twice within a week she wrote to her eldest daughter lamenting Leopold's engagement: ‘To me his marrying at all is a grief, and a shock which I can't get over’;
⁹
‘You say you can't be enthusiastic about Leopold's bride! I never can be about any marriage…’
¹⁰
In the case of Victoria of Hesse, the Queen's approbation rested on Victoria assuring her that her marriage would not take her away from her father – a doubtless well-intentioned claim the Queen showed surprising credulousness in believing given that Victoria was marrying an officer in the British Royal Navy while the Grand Duke her father, a German national and reigning prince, lived in landlocked Hesse. Victoria's marriage was not a match made by the Queen; in 1880 the Queen had written to the Grand Duke reminding him that Victoria's first duty was to stay with him.

Increasingly the Queen's thoughts on marriage focused on sex, and the toll it exacted on an innocent girl. For too long the Queen had deceived herself that Beatrice was a child, lily-like and pure, a stranger to sexual impulses. Any idea of Beatrice marrying was tantamount to the Queen sanctioning a massacre of the innocent. ‘To me there is something so dreadful, so repulsive in that one has to give one's beloved and innocent child, whom one has watched over and guarded from the breath of anything indelicate [that she] should be given over to a man… body and soul to do with what he likes. No experience in [life?] will ever help me over that.’
¹¹
For so long the Queen had averted that moment in Beatrice's case. Though she rejoiced at her daughter's beauty at seventeen – its blonde innocence at her confirmation, and rosebud prettiness in Graves's portrait of the same year – she must have felt certain, looking at Sohn's picture painted only a year ago, that now finally she was safe. Her
adverse reaction to the news that she was wrong was not solely the anger of a domestic tyrant thwarted in her plans for her own comfort, though this was a factor, but revulsion at the imminent despoiling of a daughter she had described as an angel and a dove, the terror of an ageing matriarch losing the child who had become her all in all, and an expression of simple incredulity. The Queen could not believe that Beatrice wanted to be married. She blamed the hapless Leopold, in death as in life an irritant to his mother; in Leopold's lifetime Beatrice had never thought of marriage. Nor could the Queen conceive that events had reached such a pass without her noticing.

The Queen's reaction took the form of silence. Beatrice's eldest son, the Marquess of Carisbrooke, told biographer David Duff that for seven months, from May to November 1884, mother and daughter continued to live side by side without the Queen addressing a single word to Beatrice. Rather she communicated by note – on those occasions, such as at the breakfast table, when she delivered the note herself, with eyes averted. The easy, intimate intercourse that had characterized the Queen and Beatrice's relationship for over twenty years, a relationship more devotedly loving on both sides than the Queen shared with any other of her children, ended overnight.

Beatrice disappeared from the Queen's letters. In June the Queen requested that the Crown Princess's daughter Moretta not communicate with Beatrice on the subject of her troubled relationship with Sandro of Battenberg. Later the same month she told her eldest daughter, ‘We (Beatrice and I) are very sad! And for me pleasure has for ever died out of my life,’
¹²
a statement of affecting sincerity on the part of the sixty-five-year-old widow who needed a loved one on whom to rely. Not until the end of December is Beatrice's name mentioned again by the Queen to the Crown Princess: ‘[Helena] has told you of the pain it has caused me that my darling Beatrice should wish… to marry, as I hate marriages, especially of my daughters.’
¹³
Beatrice is also absent from her mother's Journal during this period, though at such a moment the Journal, surviving only in Beatrice's own rewritten version, is an unreliable source. The Queen focused
the approbation she had previously reserved for Beatrice on other members of her family, in November commending Leopold's widow Helen to the Crown Princess on account of her being ‘such a good example to all… always thinking of others and not herself’
¹⁴
– presumably in marked contrast to the currently wayward Beatrice. She also confided in Bertie's wife Alexandra. O n 24 August Alexandra wrote to her mother-in-law:

I must not close my letter without telling you, dearest Mama, how much I felt your again having placed so much confidence in me on a subject which I know has given you such pain even to mention to anyone, as you have always nursed the hope of keeping your one little ewe lamb entirely to yourself. I can therefore well understand what a terrible shock it must have been to you when you heard she had formed a new interest.
¹⁵

Alexandra chose her words carefully. Significantly, she went on to suggest that Beatrice's marriage need not radically alter the Queen's previously happy domestic arrangements. ‘We must hope … that it will all be for the best, and that she will continue for many a long year to be the same help and comfort to you that she has always been.’
¹⁶
If the Queen could not change Beatrice's mind – and by the end of August it had become clear that she could not – she must find a way of bending her daughter's desires to her own happiness.

The solution was that the Queen allow Beatrice to marry Henry on condition that he renounce all independence, his career, his nationality and his home, and agree to live with Beatrice and the Queen as they had lived previously. No t until December did the Queen offer Beatrice this lifeline. By then Bertie, the Grand Duke (himself once intended by the Queen and her son as a husband for Beatrice) and the Crown Princess had added their voices to that of the Princess of Wales in support of Beatrice's happiness, the Crown Princess shrewdly cunning in reminding the Queen of the deep love felt for his last-born daughter by the Prince Consort. By then, as the Queen must have known, Beatrice was sufficiently worn down to accept almost any terms she cared to issue.

In the Queen's defence, it is possible that Beatrice's announcement that she wanted to marry Henry so astonished her mother that, at a loss what to do, she retreated within herself and, in silence, waited for the storm to pass. Afterwards she would tell the Crown Princess, ‘You who are so fond of marriages… cannot imagine what agonies, what despair it caused me when I first heard of her wish! It made me quite ill.’
¹⁷
But such an explanation is at odds with the evidence of inter-family consultation provided by Alexandra's letter and with the Queen's manner of dealing with her children, whom she seldom forgot were also her subjects. Instead her behaviour suggests a considered plan for ultimately forcing Beatrice's acceptance of the only conditions that could render her marriage acceptable to her mother, namely the couple's residence with her, with no independent home of their own, and Beatrice's remaining in her position of unofficial secretary and full-time companion. The Queen acted ruthlessly and cruelly. Her overriding concern was not the happiness of her favourite daughter but her own ease and comfort. After an initial shock she trusted in Beatrice's good nature, on which she had so often favourably commented, to secure the end she was determined to achieve. For twenty years her treatment of Beatrice had tended to erode the latter's sense of herself. Now the Queen learnt that her success was only partial, and that the love of a mother for a daughter cannot provide a substitute for that warmer, romantic love between a man and a woman based on physical promptings that will not bend to the whim of a refractory old woman. If the Queen considered the suffering she inflicted on Beatrice during that long summer of 1884, she did nothing to ameliorate it, sunk too deep in her own unhappiness to help the child she considered the cause of her sorrow.

By the end of the year mother and daughter were reconciled. To the outside world, even to the Queen herself, their relationship resumed its accustomed course as if there had been no breach. But something in Beatrice had changed. For the first time her dealings with the Queen betray a degree of detachment. To her sister-in-law Helen, writing on the first day of her honeymoon,
Beatrice described her parting from the Queen after her wedding: ‘Mama was very kind and motherly, really not saying one word that could jar upon my feelings, and she got through the marriage very well on the whole. Of course, when I took leave of her, she got very upset, poor thing, and both [Henry] and I felt truly sorry for her.’
¹⁸
With each of her children the Queen had seen that growing up meant a loosening of the bonds of affection. In Beatrice's case the Queen had postponed that process as long as she possibly could. Her behaviour of the summer of 1884 finally catapulted Beatrice into the arena of adulthood. It was a oneway journey. Even for this most devoted of daughters there could be no turning back.

FIFTEEN

‘Many daughters have acted virtuously,
but thou excelleth them all’

The address made by ‘the inhabitants of Windsor’ to Princess Beatrice on the eve of her wedding, reported in the Court Circular on 9 July 1885, expressed a widespread popular feeling that the daughter who had for so long considered her mother's well-being before her own was now entering a state of deserved happiness. ‘The devotion of your Royal Highness to our beloved Sovereign has won our warmest admiration and deepest gratitude. May those blessings which it has hitherto been your constant aim to confer on others now be returned in full measure to yourself.’
¹
It was as close to an admonishment of the Queen as nineteenth-century habits of deference could hazard. On the tray of the florid silver tea and coffee service that centenarian philanthropist and financier Sir Moses Montefiore presented to the couple as a wedding present, a Hebrew inscription read simply, ‘Many daughters have acted virtuously, but thou excelleth them all.’

Two deciding factors underlay the Queen's acceptance of the situation that she knew by the end of the summer she was powerless to alter: Beatrice and Henry's agreement to her conditions, and Henry himself – ‘as I like Liko [Henry] very much and as they are both so very devoted to each other, and she remains always with me, I cannot refuse my consent’.
²
There was no question of
force majeure.
Family pressure alone could not have persuaded the Queen to change her mind, just as it had failed to lure her out of seclusion at the end of the 1860s. Nor did the unhappiness of Beatrice – excluded for the first time from her mother's confidence and approbation – supply a motivating factor. The Queen's agreement at first was grudging – as she
explained separately to the Crown Princess, the newly married Victoria of Hesse and her correspondent the Duke of Grafton, she agreed because there were no further grounds for disagreement, a negative capitulation rather than a positive embracing of Beatrice's hopes. She did not indulge in dissimulation: the whole business had been an unpleasant surprise she could happily have done without. ‘It remains a shock to me and there will be things very difficult to get over with my feelings – still as he is so amiable and prepared to do what I wish – I hope all may… turn out well.’
³
Although she gave as one of her reasons the couple's evidently sincere affection, their willingness to put her wishes before their own was the consideration that won the day. Later, the Queen would learn just how right Alexandra had been in encouraging her to hope ‘that it will all be for the best’: Beatrice's marriage made the Queen's domestic life happier than it had been since the death of the Prince Consort. But this came as a surprise to the Queen: assertively curmudgeonly at the outset of Beatrice's engagement, she did not dare to hope for a positive resolution. She continued to issue conditions. ‘I
can't
spare Auntie, and especially at first they must
not
think of travelling or paying visits.’
⁴
There were to be no public displays of affection between the couple (the Queen congratulated herself that Beatrice did not appear to like kissing anyway, a tactful modesty on Beatrice's part), and the Queen prayed earnestly that there would be no children of the marriage – happy so long as her own routine continued unchanged to deny Beatrice this blessing over which she herself had alternately rejoiced and despaired.