The Last Princess (40 page)

If relations between Beatrice and Bertie were strained by Bertie's decision over Osborne, they did not break down completely. Brother and sister were not close. The Queen's confidence in Beatrice and, for a time, Liko, in marked contrast to her behaviour towards her heir, erected for Bertie an insuperable barrier of long standing, and Beatrice would never be admitted to the King's inner circle (unlike her sister Louise). But throughout Bertie's reign, despite the fiasco of the coronation when, at one
of the most solemn moments in the service, Beatrice noisily dropped her service book from the princesses’ balcony on to a table of gold plate below, Beatrice remained a presence at court (although from the moment of the Queen's death, her position descended further in the royal order of precedence). When Lord Esher visited the King at Windsor to discuss illustrations for his edition of the first series of Queen Victoria's letters, he found in the library not only Bertie but ‘the Queen, the King and Queen of Norway [the latter the King's youngest daughter Maud], Princess Henry and Princess Louise.’
⁴
Beatrice joined the King and Queen for yachting trips in the Royal Yacht
Victoria and Albert,
and on the yacht belonging to the Portuguese ambassador and court favourite the Marques de Soveral. When the King died in May 1910, he was alone with his wife and doctors; in an adjoining room waited his daughters Louise and Victoria, his son and daughter-in-law the Prince and Princess of Wales, his sister and brother-in-law Helena and Christian—and Beatrice.
⁵
Bertie's avuncular kindness, which played such an important role in Ena's marriage, was in part a product of the relationship that, though built on uncertain foundations, he enjoyed with Beatrice.

Ena came out in London, in November 1904, at a court at Buckingham Palace, at Bertie's invitation, ‘a charming gesture,’ she afterwards remembered, ‘[which] touched my mother greatly’.
⁶
In February of the same year, as a gesture of rapprochement, Bertie invested Beatrice with the King Edward VII Royal Family Order (Second Class). Mother and daughter were henceforth jointly included in the official life of Bertie's court. The highlight of the following season was the state visit to Britain of the King of Spain in June 1905.

Alfonso XIII, the posthumous son of a short-lived father, was nineteen: he had been king since birth of one of Europe's most unstable thrones. He was eager to marry a member of the British Royal Family, his choice having fallen on Beatrice's niece, Arthur's daughter Patricia of Connaught. His visit to London lasted a week, characterized by glittering parties and appalling weather. Over the course of that rain-drenched week, Alfonso lost Patricia of Connaught and won the affections of her cousin Ena of
Battenberg. Nine months later, on 7 March 1906, their engage-ment was announced.

The course of true love had run relatively smoothly, Alfonso declaring himself in an eight-month barrage of postcards, Ena receiving his ardour with placid good humour. Beatrice, for one, did not doubt their love. ‘Please God the young couple may be very happy,’ she wrote to Louisa Antrim on 16 February 1906, ‘as they are absolutely devoted to one another, and I have every confidence in the King making her the best of husbands. H e has such a charming nature, that to know him is to love him.’
⁷
Thanking Lady Bathurst for her wedding present for Ena, Beatrice wrote in May, ‘Many thanks for all your good wishes for her future happiness, which I hope is assured, as she and the young King are so devoted to one another.’
⁸
The exchange of mutual affection, however, was the only simple element in a tortuous and controversial wedding contract involving religious conversion.

It was inconceivable that a king styled ‘His Most Catholic Majesty’ should marry a non-Catholic. For Ena, conversion to Catholicism was a
sine qua non
of her marriage. Beatrice began making enquiries into the delicate matter as soon as Ena told her of Alfonso's transferral of affections from Patricia of Connaught. On 30 July 1905 she received a reply from the Archbishop of Canterbury Randall Davidson that did not mince words:

To marry a Roman Catholic would in any case be an extraordinary breach with all the teaching of our Church… But the mere phrase ‘Roman Catholicism’ conveys… comparatively little of what is meant by the sort of Roman Catholicism which characterizes the Spanish Court. It is the most blind and bigoted form of unintelligent ultramontanism… The circle is honeycombed with corruption and bigotry of a sort hardly to be found elsewhere in Europe… It is of course possible for a pure and high-minded lady… to preserve a high tone of faith and life even in such a hotbed of… corruption. But for a young Princess, or Queen to do so, after an upbringing so entirely different in every respect, would seem… to be almost an impossibility.
⁹

If this unflinching assessment were not enough, the prospect of
Ena's conversion – distant from the throne though she was in the line of succession – provoked an outcry at home and in Spain, disaffected parties in both countries vocal in their determined antiecumenicalism. The Bishop of London appealed directly to Beatrice, begging that as a devout churchwoman she reconsider her daughter's alliance. Even the usually effusive
Sphere
recorded after the marriage, ‘When the project of an English alliance… was first mooted it was received in this country with doubt and then with dislike, and some leaders of the Church of England even dared to enter a public protest.’
¹⁰
Conversion could not be avoided, however – the Spanish would not formally announce or indeed countenance the engagement without it – and the challenge for Beatrice and Ena was to accomplish it as unobtrusively as possible.

To Bertie, Beatrice telegraphed in cipher in February, ‘What do you think of asking the Empress Eugenie to have us quietly at Cap Martin for the change’
¹¹
, but the King rejected the idea, possibly mindful that, with emotions running high, this was not the moment to remind people that Ena's godmother was herself Catholic. Instead Ena received instruction on neutral territory, at Versailles, from the Catholic Bishop of Nottingham, Monsignor Robert Brindle. She was received into the Church on 7 March at a service in the private chapel of her soon-to-be mother-in-law Queen Maria Christina. The service itself, though described as private, was attended by the Spanish royal family, twenty-three leading courtiers, and the Prime Minister and his family, with only Ena's own family not represented. Beatrice rejoined the couple once the service was over. Later she telegraphed again to Bertie for his guidance on how to proceed with the announcement of the engagement, which could now, at last, formally be made. Her message reveals not only the delicacy of the situation but Beatrice's sense of indebtedness to her brother for supporting her in an increasingly unpopular match at home. ‘Alphonso
[sic]
wishes to know if he should make official announcement tomorrow whilst we are still here or await your coming on Saturday. Wish to do what seems to you best.’
¹²
Spanish and British authorities complied with Bertie's reply – ‘It would be better if King made announcement at once’ – and Ena and Alfonso's
engagement was made public the day of her reception into the Catholic Church. The nature of the response to the news in Britain can be judged from a letter written by the Prince of Wales to his wife Mary: ‘Beatrice is advised on her return to England to keep Ena quiet somewhere, at Osborne, and not to bring her to London as the feeling is so strong.’
¹³

For Beatrice, however, the deed was accomplished, as she had not doubted it would be. Her concern was less for public reaction to Ena's change of religion – two decades earlier, she had not allowed negative public reaction to spoil her own engagement -than with the prospect of losing her only daughter to married life abroad. In her letter to Louisa Antrim written during Ena's period of religious instruction, she had confessed, ‘Though the thought of my child going so far from me, is a real trial, I feel I have really gained a son, who does everything to make things easy.’
¹⁴
In the carefree days of Ena and Alfonso's engagement, that ‘everything’ included fitting up an Anglican chapel for Beatrice in the palace in Madrid.

On the Spanish side, two further objections remained, both questions of blood, both insuperable: Ena's partly morganatic status, inherited from Liko; and the possibility that she was a carrier of haemophilia, inherited from her mother and grandmother. ‘So Ena is to become Spanish Queen! a Battenberg, good gracious!’ Queen Victoria's reactionary cousin Augusta, Grand Duchess of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, wrote to her niece, the Princess of Wales.’
¹⁵
Her dismissal echoed the opinion of prominent Spanish courtiers – a feeling Bertie tried to quash by raising Ena from the style of ‘Highness’ to ‘Royal Highness’. Concerning the potentially more serious issue of haemophilia, Bertie, his foreign secretary Lord Lansdowne, Beatrice and Ena herself all spoke to Alfonso. He made light of their warnings. Although he dismissed their fears, they would be realized in full, the afflictions of Ena and Alfonso's children later becoming a significant factor in the long-term failure of their marriage.

Ena's wedding to Alfonso is remembered chiefly for the bomb thrown at the royal couple's carriage. The culprit was an
anarchist, Mateo Morral. He had stationed himself on the fourth-floor balcony of a house on the Calle Mayor, a street close to the end of the long processional route, and spent the morning of the wedding throwing oranges into the street, practising his timing. This highly questionable behaviour having failed to arouse police suspicion, Morral was free to throw his bomb – disguised as a bouquet of flowers – at the royal coach. Narrowly, it missed. It killed horses, decapitated an outrider, blew away the legs of one of the coachmen. The King and Queen, though shaken, were unhurt. Ena's dress was dark with blood. Back in the palace, numb but dignified, she repeated over and over, ‘I saw a man without any legs.’ The newlyweds’ was the last carriage in the procession. When they returned to the palace, few ahead of them suspected what had happened, the sound of the bomb having been mistaken for the firing of a salute. Only when Beatrice arrived, minutes earlier in the penultimate carriage with Alfonso's mother, was the truth known. Her sister-in-law Marie of ErbachSchonberg rushed to congratulate her on Ena's great day. Beatrice ‘looked agitated’, the latter remembered afterwards, ‘and said in a level tone: “Someone threw a bomb, but they are both alive.’”
¹⁶

This ‘diabolical act’
¹⁷
distracted Beatrice's attention from the lesser slights of what should have been a mother's day of triumph. So often had the princess, who was first in her mother's affections but the last of nine in the strict royal order of precedence, been banished to a subsidiary position in the great royal pageants of the previous reign. In both the Golden and the Diamond Jubilees it was Beatrice who watched over and upheld the Queen, but Beatrice who rode in a distant carriage, sat at a remove in church or banqueting hall. So, too, at Ena's wedding. Beatrice followed Ena into the narrow Gothic Church of San Jeronimo, but while Ena advanced towards the altar, Beatrice sat, as Marie of ErbachSchonberg remembered, ‘half-way down the aisle’,
¹⁸
separated from her daughter by the rows of princes attending the wedding as representatives of Europe's crowned heads (no sovereigns had been invited to the wedding in order that no one distract attention from Alfonso and Ena). Behind them sat their wives and princesses. Behind them Beatrice. She did not complain.

Writing to the Bishop of Ripon afterwards, her thoughts were all of Ena and Alfonso:

It does seem so sad, that a day which had begun so bright for the young couple, and where they were just returning with such thankful happiness, at belonging at last entirely to one another, should have been overclouded by such a fearful disaster. God has indeed [been] merciful to have preserved them so miraculously, and this has only if possible deepened their love for one another, and rendered the devotion of their people still more marked.
¹⁹

Within less than a year Beatrice would rejoin her daughter and son-in-law in Madrid for an extended visit. Ena was expecting a baby. Still unable to speak Spanish fluently – no one at the Spanish court had considered it necessary to provide her with a tutor – she felt isolated and afraid in Alfonso's vast palace. Beatrice travelled to Spain for the last tremester of Ena's pregnancy, which ended on 10 May 1907 in an event that provoked nationwide rejoicing among Spaniards: the birth of a male heir to the throne. Nine pounds in weight and blond like his mother, baby Alfonso (called ‘Alfonsito’) appeared strong and robust. ‘No words can say the intense joy that this happy event causes the dear young Parents, and all classes in the country here,’ wrote Beatrice, a grandmother for the first time within weeks of her fiftieth birthday. ‘My dear daughter passed through her hours of great suffering most bravely and is a very tender mother, hardly liking to have the child out of her arms. He is a splendid strong boy and thank God both he and my daughter are doing as well as possible. I shall find it hard to tear myself away from them … I have had such a delightfully undisturbed three months, with my dear child…’
²⁰
On 14 September the
Illustrated London News
published a formal photograph of Ena, Alfonso and Alfonsito. ‘The Prince’, it claimed, ‘is making great progress and is reported to be a particularly fine child.’