The Last Princess (31 page)

His only office was to be a family man with wife and children living with the Queen of England without any further occupations or responsibilities of his own. A few weeks intermittently of such a life would have been a most recuperative existence for a man taking a well-earned rest after a long period of hard work… Yet the very contract of his marriage provided that he should bear the burden of perpetual leisure.
¹¹

Aggravating Liko's frustration was the knowledge that his petticoats existence made him a figure of ridicule. As early as November 1887 Henry Ponsonby wrote to his wife, ‘One of the Society papers – the low ones – gives a sketch of Prince Henry's life here and says he tries to get through the day by playing billiards with Sir Henry Ponsonby, “no mean wielder of the cue–but an astute courtier who never permits himself to beat his opponent”. I never saw Prince Henry playing billiards at all.’
¹²
Potentially more damaging was the fact that similar opinions were voiced by members of his wife's family. To his aunt, Beatrice's sister Louise, Prince George of Wales wrote in May 1887, ‘I'm very glad you spent a pleasant time in Rome… So Liko arrived before you left and began abusing your clothes, you certainly ought to have snubbed him and told him you had not so much money as Beatrice has to spend on your clothes,
damn
his impertinence, he has nothing else to do I suppose but look at people's clothes, poor creature.’
¹³

The truth was Liko had remarkably little to occupy his time. The Queen maintained that, for any wife, ‘Your first duty is to your dear… Husband to whom you can never be kind enough,”
¹⁴
but made an exception in Beatrice's case, insisting that her first duty remain to her mother. While Beatrice's days continued to be spent at her mother's beck and call, Liko chain-smoked cigars, husband and wife meeting at meals. At the time of his death, one of the few tangible achievements with which Liko could be credited was having persuaded the Queen to relax her draconian rules on smoking at court. Even Beatrice, long after his death, wrote, ‘His was but a simple life, with no great incidents.’
¹⁵
During the Queen's spring holiday in Grasse in 1891 Liko spent a day with Beatrice visiting a crystallized-fruit factory belonging to Joseph Negre.
¹⁶
However much husband and wife enjoyed this undemanding engagement, it did not add to Liko's feeling of purpose.

In 1889 the Queen threw Liko a scrap by appointing him governor of the Isle of Wight and Honorary Colonel of the Isle of Wight Rifles, on the death of the last governor, the nonagenarian Lord Eversley. The appointment was formalized at a
reception at Carisbrooke Castle in July. Liko approached the Ruritanian office with a degree of seriousness. When the SS
Eider,
with a crew of 167 and carrying 227 passengers, ran aground half a mile from the island's shore on Sunday night, 31 January 1892, Liko arrived the following afternoon to offer encouragement and assistance in what became a large-scale four-day rescue operation. Rowland Prothero remembered Liko's delight on being shown by the Keeper of Prints at the British Museum a gallery of portraits of previous governors. But his assessment of the potential of the role shows that he harboured no illusions concerning its significance: ‘The duties and responsibilities of my office do not present much scope for activity,’ he commented.
¹⁷

Mostly unemployed outside the home and impotent within it, Liko turned his attention to his children, revelling in each new birth. He took control of their education, as the Prince Consort had with Beatrice's siblings a generation earlier, leaving detailed instructions about their schooling in his will.
¹⁸
Like the Prince Consort, he played games with the children, he attended lessons, and indulged them with presents brought back from his sailing trips including, prophetically, for Ena a metamorphic fan from Seville that could be made larger or smaller–Ena would grow up to become Queen of Spain. His attentions partly made up for Beatrice's detachment from her children. In 1896 the Countess of Lytton recorded a conversation with the Empress of Germany – the ‘insignificant’ Dona – in which ‘the Empress spoke so nicely about her baby, nurse and education, fearing Princess Beatrice did not see enough of her children’.
¹⁹
Trained from infancy to consider only what was conducive to her mother's ease and well-being Beatrice put her mother before her children and sought principally to tame the latter, channelling all voluble ebullience along more gentle paths. Her efforts were mostly unnecessary. The Queen embraced her Battenberg grandchildren wholeheartedly. She took pleasure in their noise and their antics in a manner that would have been inconceivable twenty years earlier when her oldest grandchildren were of similar age, and that, ironically, the Queen had discouraged in Beatrice herself. Only
one factor marred Liko's pleasure in his family: ‘As his four children grew older,’ his sister remembered, ‘he often sighed for a home of his own.’
²⁰
But that was not a concession the Queen was prepared to grant.

The weekly journals which recorded at the time of Beatrice's engagement that the couple would begin married life at Frogmore in Windsor Great Park, as Helena and Christian had done nineteen years earlier, were quickly disabused. The Queen gave Beatrice and Liko rooms at Windsor between the south turret and the Victoria and York towers, with adjacent rooms overlooking the Long Walk.
²¹
At Osborne she granted them a degree of belated autonomy with the building of the Durbar Wing in 1891, which included a self-contained suite of rooms above the large Durbar Room, with their own private entrance. This was as close as the couple got to a house of their own, and Beatrice continued to occupy these rooms after Liko's death for the remainder of the Queen's lifetime. In this situation, lacking anywhere concrete that he and Beatrice could call home, Liko found his thoughts inevitably returning to the homes of his childhood, particularly Heiligenberg, that magical house that long continued to draw Battenbergs like moths to a flame.

Flames played a dramatic part in the visit to Liko's mother at Heiligenberg Beatrice and Liko paid with five-year-old Drino in July 1892. What the Queen described as ‘this dreadful fire’
²²
began at midnight, as the inhabitants of the
Schloss
were retiring to bed. Beatrice was stung by gnats and, assisted by her maid, set off in pursuit of her assailants with a candle. It was a foolish escapade. Inevitably the candle caught a drapery, in this case a mosquito curtain, and the fire took hold, raging through the princess's suite. The castle was quickly evacuated, the firemen called and, in the absence of any wind, the fire contained and fully extinguished by five o'clock in the morning.
²³
But Beatrice's losses had been considerable. Not only was she haunted by her folly and the knowledge of her lucky escape – ‘It is too terrible for poor Auntie that it should have happened in her room!… Really too distressing,’ the Queen wrote to Beatrice's sister-in-
law Victoria of Battenberg, who was also staying at the castle with her daughters Alice and Louise
²⁴
– she had suffered material losses besides. Sophie Hahn, nanny to Victoria's daughter Alice, reported Beatrice darting about in her nightgown, wrapped in a cloak belonging to her mother-in-law, calling for help in saving her jewellery: ‘It was awful hearing Princess Beatrice shouting after her pearls and jewels, but no one could save them.’
²⁵
By the time the castle was safe to re-enter, Beatrice's jewellery was lost, alongside quantities of clothes. That the Queen should write to Victoria of Battenberg about her particular sadness at the loss of Beatrice's pearls suggests that the pearls in question were those once owned by the Duchess of Kent, the Queen's mother and Beatrice's grandmother, which the Queen had given to Beatrice as a particular mark of affection; she does not mention a parure of emeralds which was also destroyed in the conflagration. More easily replaced but giving rise to greater short-term embarrassment for Beatrice was the loss of her false fringe. A pad of tight artificial curls worn over the forehead became fashionable in the 1870s and for many years retained numerous adherents among the women of the Queen's family, chief among them the future Queens Alexandra and Mary – despite the Queen's objections ('The present fashion with a frizzle and fringe in front is
frightful,’
she wrote to the Crown Princess in 1874
²⁶
). Beatrice began wearing a false fringe in her mid-twenties, an assertion of independent taste the Queen did not overrule. When it came to explaining her losses to the fire-insurance assessors the morning after the fire, she resorted to wearing a hat,
²⁷
a precaution that may well have been lost on her interlocutors if, as Marie Erbach suggests, the forehead toupee was an English fashion that would not have been familiar to German insurance men. ‘We must thank God!’ the Queen concluded wearily, ‘that you are all safe!’
²⁸
The Princess of Battenberg took a sanguine view of events, though Marie Erbach records the repairs to Heiligenberg necessitated by the fire continuing into the autumn of 1895.

Holidays in Darmstadt, however, had a way of reminding Liko of the emasculating softness of his life. Throughout 1886 Liko, Beatrice, the Queen and, in Berlin, the Crown Princess
were exercised over the fate of Sandro in Bulgaria; Liko's second brother would eventually be forced to abdicate his fragile throne. On 30 August 1885 his eldest brother Louis was promoted commander in the Royal Navy; within six years he had risen to the rank of captain and would ultimately become First Sea Lord. Measured against such tangible achievements, Liko's own purely nominal position as Honorary Colonel of the Isle of Wight Rifles was exposed for what it was – a paper honour paid to rank not ability. Contrasts are invidious and served to harden in Liko the determination to prove himself independent of his position as the Queen's son-in-law. His dissatisfaction was accelerated by the restrictions of life continually at the Queen's side, which, far from decreasing over time, grew steadily more oppressive: after Lord Guildford died as a result of a hunting accident, Liko was discouraged from the sport on the grounds of its danger. His cruise to Corsica in 1894 w a s abruptly curtailed when Beatrice discovered he had been ‘keeping low company’ at the Ajaccio carnival; she ordered a Royal Navy man-of-war to collect him, thereby forcibly removing him from damaging influences and temptation.
²⁹
Beatrice's peremptoriness and her apparent temporary failure to trust her husband did nothing to increase his resignation to his lot. He requested and was granted permission to spend a week with the Isle of Wight Rifles at its barracks in Hampshire. As he had suspected, the environment suited him perfectly. He wrote to Beatrice, ‘Altogether I feel quite in my element again among soldiers, and I am glad, even for so short a time, to take up once more my old profession. I feel like a fish in water. Everyone seems to have confidence in me.’
³⁰
After almost a decade of obedience and charm it was relaxing to behave without constraints in an environment where every action, however small or trivial, was not dictated by an invalid septuagenarian who continued to be guided by what she interpreted as the wishes of a man who had died when Liko was three years old.

TWENTY

‘Blighted happiness’

According to the report in the
Sierra Leone Messenger
of the consecration of Canon John Taylor Smith as seventh Bishop of Sierra Leone, at Westminster Abbey on 27 May 1897, first among the three hundred communicants to whom the Eucharist was administered by the new bishop was Princess Henry of Battenberg. The previous year Beatrice had given Taylor Smith a pencil case of Liko's inscribed ‘In memory of Prince Henry, from Beatrice, 1896'. By the time of Taylor Smith's consecration, Beatrice had been a widow for sixteen months.

The
London Gazette
printed a ‘Letter from the Queen to the Nation’ on 15 February 1896, in which the Queen gave thanks to her ‘loyal subjects for their warm sympathy’ on the occasion of Liko's death.

I lose a dearly loved and helpful Son, whose presence was like a bright sunbeam in My Home, and My dear Daughter loses a noble devoted Husband to whom she was united by the closest affection. To witness the blighted happiness of the Daughter who has never left Me, and has comforted and helped Me, is hard to bear… My beloved Child is an example to all, in her courage, resignation and submission to the will of God.