The Last Princess (36 page)

Although Ena's engagement to the Catholic Alfonso XIII of Spain aroused mixed emotions at home on religious grounds, this postcard was issued showing the couple with their widowed mothers.

Weeks after her fiftieth birthday, on the birth of Ena's eldest son Alfonso (called Alfonsito', left of picture), Beatrice became a grandmother. Alfonso XIII blamed Beatrice for Alfonsito's haemophilia and never voluntarily spoke to her again—but Beatrice remained attached to her Spanish grandchildren.

This stupendous portrait of the fifty-one-year-old princess was painted by Spanish impressionist Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida.

In 1927, Beatrice sat for the second time for society portraitist Philip de Laszlo. His ‘winter’ portrait is handsome, dignified and kindly.

TWENTY-TWO

‘I… can hardly realize what
life will be like without her’

Beatrice presented a pipe and a woollen cap to each of the men of the Isle of Wight Rifles she inspected at Osborne on I February 1900. The company was bound for South Africa and war with the Boers. Beatrice took a particular interest in its well-being. In 1885, in honour of her wedding, the battalion had been renamed after her the Fifth (Isle of Wight Princess Beatrice's) Volunteer Battalion of the Hampshire Regiment. ‘I am glad to have this opportunity of bidding you farewell on the eve of your departure for South Africa on active service,’ she told the company of men.

You know how warm an interest I take in the regiment that bears my name and was, in the past, so closely associated with my dear Husband. He would have rejoiced as I do today, to see so many of you nobly coming forward to fight in defence of your Queen and Empire and I am sure you will always uphold the good name of your regiment. May God protect you all and bring you safe home again.
¹

Beatrice was doubly attached to the regiment. No t only did it bear her name, but it gathered its men from the island of which, since the death of her husband, she had been governor. The Queen made the appointment by letters patent on 8 June 1896:

Now know ye that We… Do by these presents give and grant unto Our dear Daughter Her Royal Highness Princess Beatrice Princess Henry of Battenberg the office of Governor and Captain of all Our Isle of Wight… and the office of Governor of Our Castle of Carisbrooke and of all Our Castles and Fortresses
whatsoever in the same isle… and also the office of Steward of the same isle.
²

As it had been in Liko's case, so it was with Beatrice – the office was a compliment and a crumb of independence tossed by the Queen to the daughter she knew now would never leave her. In Beatrice's case, however, the Queen took a touching degree of pride in her appointment. ‘When Princess Beatrice became Governor of the Isle of Wight, a great deal was made of it, but of course it really meant nothing,’ wrote the bachelor Fritz Ponsonby, with no sympathy with an ageing mother's delight in her favourite child. ‘Arthur Balfour came down to stay at Osborne and during dinner the Queen said to him, “Did you see in the newspapers about the Governor of the Isle of Wight?” He replied that he had not, and added, “I never knew there was such a post, and I have not the foggiest idea who is the Governor.”’
³
The Queen dropped the subject. Despite Balfour's lack of enthusiasm, Beatrice discharged the limited functions of the office with dignity and seriousness, as had Liko before her. For almost half a century she remained the island's governor. The position provided her with a fixed purpose and an enduring interest when, after the Queen's death, she found herself increasingly marginalized from the centre of royal affairs. It also formalized the bonds of affection that bound Beatrice to the Isle of Wight, effectively her home, since she felt little fondness for Balmoral, the house which, with Osborne, had formed the principal dwelling place of the widowed Queen and her youngest daughter. The governorship brought with it an official residence on the island—an apartment in Carisbrooke Castle. It would provide a note of constancy and a shelter from the storm in years to come.

‘Had a shocking night and no draught could make me sleep as pain kept me awake. Felt very tired and unwell when I got up,’ the Queen recorded in her Journal on 11 November 1900. ‘Had again not a good night and slept on rather late. My lack of appetite worse than ever. It is very trying,’ she added the following day. Six weeks later, she was still prey to ‘the same unfortunate
alterations of sleep and restlessness, so that I again did not get up when I wished to, which spoilt my morning and day'.
⁴

With the end in sight, Beatrice's task grew daily more arduous. The Queen recognized the certain erosion of her faculties. Her frustration, added to her very real discomfort and her continuing unhappiness over the war in South Africa, made her irritable and fretful. Beatrice devoted irregular days to her comfort, writing the letters the Queen continued to dictate to her, accompanying her on the cold and cheerless drives she would shortly be forced to abandon and ministering to her physical needs in a way that, once again, suggests an inversion of the roles of mother and child. When, in November 1899, Beatrice accompanied Helena and Louise to a wedding in London, the Queen had asked, ‘And who shall bring me my tea?’
⁵
The answer, of course, was Beatrice, who attended only the wedding, missing the reception afterwards in order that she could return to Windsor and prevent her mother from being alone. In the terrible summer of 1871 illness had incapacitated the Queen to the extent that she could not feed herself or even blow her nose. She was not so helpless now, but her feeling of dependence was the same. Once again her neediness focused on the daughter who gave her the greatest compliance. After the Queen's death, Beatrice wrote that she had been ‘the centre of everything'
⁶
and that she missed her mother's ‘daily tender care'.
⁷
Given no choice, in the Queen's final weeks she placed her, as she always had, at the centre of her existence. But it was the daughter not the mother who in real terms administered daily tender care. In return she received continuing reaffirmation of her
raison d'etre
and her mother's love, selfish but sincere.

It was ironic that Beatrice, who had so often played the role of mother in relation to the Queen (except in any matter of control) should be prevented by this occupation from providing her children with any similar permanent loving presence. As the children grew up, problems emerged. In the years following Liko's death, when – as his father had wished and willed – Drino was dispatched to Wellington College, his academic performance was consistently mediocre, characterized by an ‘extraordinary want of attention’
⁸
and a reluctance to take up a book in his
leisure hours. Ena developed what Beatrice, apparently powerless to control it, described as a ‘very difficult’ nature, and Leopold was often ill. All three older children were lazy and unfocused. To Drino's headmaster, Beatrice wrote, ‘He… seems not to have quite enough self reliance, and this, odd enough to say, his brother Leopold and his sister, are also rather deficient in.’
⁹
Without her husband to support her, Beatrice called on Bishop Taylor Smith. Almost the same age as Liko, he appears to have got on well with the children, with a particular talent for talking to them in a manner that won their confidence and elicited good intentions: ‘Anything you say', Beatrice told him, ‘carries such weight with it, and the boy [Drino] has such entire confidence in you.’
¹⁰
‘Drino has disappointed me very much by telling some most unwarrantable untruths, for which I have to punish him severely,’ she wrote to the Bishop on 21 September 1897.

I am sure you will kindly say a word to him on the subject, for it naturally distresses me very much. I have such a horror of untruthfulness and it can lead to such trouble in the future. Poor Ena is still at times very troublesome and rebellious, always thinking that she is in the right and that everybody is ill using her. Leopold I am very sorry to say has had to lay up ever since we have been here, which depresses him very much and he said quite sadly ‘I am sure it is God punishing me for my sins.’
¹¹

Only Maurice, the son who from infancy most closely resembled Liko, was too young to give trouble.

The problem was that Beatrice's absorption in the Queen prevented her from devoting to her children the attention they badly needed. As time went on, the situation became not better but worse. Beatrice refused to countenance the possibility of the Queen's death. Like everyone else at court, she experienced the strange, unsettling sensation of treading water, awaiting something too great to comprehend and living in the meantime from day to day, assuming that if she behaved as she had always done, things would continue as they had always done. Dr Reid's wife Susan wrote to her mother-in-law on 19 January, three days before the Queen died, ‘Jamie is privately astonished at Princess
Beatrice not being more concerned and upset about her mother's condition. She takes it all very calmly, and was
out
yesterday when the Queen sent to say she would see her!… She has shut her eyes willfully to the truth for so long, that now it is a shock.”
¹²
‘I love these darling children so, almost as much as their own parent,’ the Queen had written in her Journal on 10 February 1894
¹³
about her Battenberg grandchildren. Sadly for the children in question, so long as she continued to minister to the Queen, their mother did not have the time or energy to love them as actively as they needed. To Bishop Taylor Smith, Beatrice wrote early in 1900,